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+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76097 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+                        _Sherwin Cody’s Works_
+
+
+         THE ART OF WRITING AND SPEAKING THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
+
+  Vol. I.--Word-Study.
+
+  Vol. II.--Grammar and Punctuation.
+
+  Vol. III.--Composition and Rhetoric.
+
+  Vol. IV.--Constructive Rhetoric: Part I. Literary Journalism; Part II.
+  Short Story Writing; Part III. Creative Composition.
+
+  Four volumes in a box, $2; single volumes, 75c.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  STORY-WRITING AND JOURNALISM (same as
+  Constructive Rhetoric).
+
+  DICTIONARY OF ERRORS (Grammar, Letter Writing,
+  Words Mispronounced, Words Misspelled,
+  Words Misused). Uniform with above. Price, 75c.
+
+  GOOD ENGLISH FORM BOOK IN BUSINESS LETTER
+  WRITING, with Exercises consisting of facsimile
+  letters in two colors. 12mo, cloth. Price, $1.
+
+  HOW TO READ AND WHAT TO READ (Vol. I.
+  of the Nutshell Library). Price, 75c.
+
+  THE TOUCHSTONE: Monthly humorous magazine,
+  edited by Sherwin Cody. Price, 20c. a year.
+
+         *       *       *       *       *
+
+  COMPLETE TRAINING COURSE IN BUSINESS
+  CORRESPONDENCE: 48 special lessons on How
+  to Write Letters that Pull (the Cody System).
+
+  COMPLETE TRAINING COURSE IN WRITING
+  FOR PUBLICATION: Analytic lecture, 20 letters
+  on Human Nature and Making Money by the Pen, etc.
+
+  COMPLETE TRAINING COURSE IN CORRECT
+  ENGLISH, based on Mr. Cody’s books, with special
+  Quiz drills on Word-Study, Grammar, Letter Writing
+  for Beginners, and Composition and Rhetoric.
+
+
+ _NOTE._--_The chapter on Business Letter Writing, which was
+ formerly Part I. of Constructive Rhetoric, is no longer contained in
+ Mr. Cody’s books, but is printed in pamphlet form, and will be sent
+ free on request to owners of sets. Drop a postal card to School of
+ English, Opera House Building, Chicago._
+
+
+
+
+                             THE ART _of_
+                          WRITING & SPEAKING
+                             _The_ ENGLISH
+                               LANGUAGE
+
+                             SHERWIN CODY
+
+                              HOW TO READ
+                                  AND
+                             WHAT TO READ
+
+                       _Literary Digest Edition_
+
+
+                             The Old Greek
+                           Press · _Chicago_
+                         _New York_ · _Boston_
+
+
+
+
+                           _Copyright, 1905_
+                           BY SHERWIN CODY.
+
+
+
+
+                               CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                             PAGE
+
+ Preface                                                        7
+
+ General Introduction to the Study of Literature               11
+
+ Chapter I. What Constitutes a Good Poem?                      16
+
+ Chapter II. What Constitutes a Good Essay?                    25
+
+ Chapter III. What Constitutes a Good Novel?                   31
+
+ Chapter IV. Landmarks in Modern Literature                    42
+
+ Chapter V. The Best Poetry and How to
+         Read It                                               51
+
+ Chapter VI. How to Study Shakspere                            65
+
+ Chapter VII. The Best English Essays                          73
+
+ Chapter VIII. Old Novels that Are Good                        81
+
+ Chapter IX. The Romantic Novelists--Scott,
+         Hugo, Dumas                                           88
+
+ Chapter X. The Realistic Novelists--Dickens,
+         Thackeray, Balzac                                    102
+
+ Chapter XI. The Short Story--Poe, Hawthorne,
+         Maupassant                                           117
+
+ Chapter XII. Classic Stories for Young People                122
+
+
+
+
+                                PREFACE
+
+
+There are plenty of books telling what we should read if we were wise
+and judicious scholars, with all the time in the world; and there are
+lists of the Hundred Best Books, as if there were some magic in the
+figures 100.
+
+This little book is for the average man who reads the newspaper more
+than he ought, and would like to know the really interesting books in
+standard literature which he might take pleasure in reading and which
+might be of some practical benefit to him.
+
+I have begun by leaving out nearly all the ancient classics.
+Demosthenes’s For the Crown is a great oration, but it is utterly dry
+and uninteresting to the ordinary modern. Even the great Goethe, while
+he may be the best of reading for a German, is not precisely adapted
+to the needs of the average American or Englishman. His novels are too
+sentimental; and his great poem Faust, like all poems, loses too much
+in the translation.
+
+And then to come down to our own literature, I must admit that I know
+that all the conservative professors of English will be shocked at the
+omission of Chaucer (but his language is too antiquated to be easily
+understood), Pope (who is more quoted than any other English poet
+except Shakspere, but ought to be read only in a book of quotations),
+Samuel Richardson (who is important historically, but whose novels are
+as dead as a door-nail), and some others.
+
+Literature is not great absolutely, but it is useful and inspiring to
+those who read it. What has been inspiring once may have served its
+purpose, and when it is no longer inspiring it ought to be put away on
+the library shelves.
+
+But of the good and interesting books there are a great many more than
+any one person can ever hope to read. We have but a little time in this
+life, and in reading we ought to make the best of it. So what shall we
+choose?
+
+First of all a book must be interesting if it is going to help us; but
+at the same time if it is a great book and can inspire us, our time is
+spent to double or treble the advantage that it would be if it were
+only a good book. If we can read the _best_ books and not merely
+good books, we have actually added some years to our life, measuring
+life by what we crowd into it.
+
+But no man can be another’s sole guide and do his thinking for him.
+Every man must have standards and principles, and be able to judge for
+himself. Such standards for judgment I have tried in this book first of
+all to give by simple illustrations.
+
+So far as I know nearly every one who has written about books has
+recommended volumes in the lump, as Wordsworth’s Poems, Lamb’s Essays,
+Scott’s novels, etc., as if every collection between covers were good
+all the way through.
+
+The fact is, great books need to be sifted in themselves, as well
+as great collections of books. Only a few poems of Wordsworth’s or
+Coleridge’s or Keats’ or Shelley’s or Tennyson’s or Longfellow’s are
+first rate, and all the others in their complete works would better
+be left out as far as the average man I have in mind is concerned.
+Even the great novels have to be skimmed, and it is not every one who
+knows how to do that. I am therefore desirous of giving assistance not
+only in the selection of volumes, but of the contents of each volume
+recommended.
+
+I have tried my hand already with some success as far as the public is
+concerned in selecting “The Greatest Short Stories”, “The Best English
+Essays”, “The World’s Great Orations” and the work of “The Great
+English Poets.” It is now my hope to offer the public in convenient,
+well printed, prettily bound volumes a Nutshell Library of the World’s
+Best Literature for English Readers. Unlike other compilations of
+this kind it will not be a collection of fragments and patchwork, so
+comprehensive that it includes thousands of things one doesn’t care
+for, and so selective that it leaves out four fifths of the things one
+does want especially. In my library I shall make each volume complete
+in itself and an interesting evening’s reading. The reader will be
+pleasantly introduced to the author as man and man-of-letters, so that
+he will know him the next time he meets him, and will get on terms of
+something like familiarity with him.
+
+It is now almost impossible for the ordinary business man or even the
+busy woman of the house to read many books. Sometimes we get started on
+the latest novel, recommended by a friend, and sacrifice enough time
+to finish it; then we are usually sorry we did it. And yet we know that
+the delicate enjoyment of life is in our cultivation of leisure in a
+refined and noble way. For all of us life would be better worth living,
+would be fuller of satisfaction and more complete in accomplishment, if
+we could spend a certain amount of time every day or every week with
+the world’s best society. This I hope to make it practically possible
+for many to do.
+
+This little volume lays down the principles and maps out the field. It
+is entirely complete in itself; but at the same time it introduces an
+undertaking which I hope may develop into wide usefulness.
+
+I may add that only books that may properly be called “literature” are
+here referred to, and even orations are omitted, because they are meant
+to be heard and not read in a closet and most people will not find
+them inspiring reading. Neither have I ventured into history, science,
+philosophy, or economics.
+
+I desire to thank Dr. E. Benj. Andrews, Chancellor of the University of
+Nebraska, Mr. Fred. H. Hild, Librarian of the Chicago Public Library,
+and Mr. W. I. Fletcher, editor of the American Library Association’s
+Index to General Literature and Librarian of Amherst College, for
+valuable assistance in preparing the list of books recommended.
+
+                                                          SHERWIN CODY.
+
+
+
+
+                     HOW TO READ AND WHAT TO READ
+
+
+
+
+          _GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF LITERATURE._
+
+
+The best modern usage restricts the word _literature_ to that
+which deals with the human heart and emotion, including intellectual
+emotion. That into which no feeling can enter is not literature. So
+a pure scientific treatise is not literature; neither is a simple
+historical record literature, as for example the news in a newspaper.
+Indeed, all histories, treatises, philosophical works, and textbooks
+and handbooks are literature only in such cases as an appeal is made to
+the universal heart or the emotions common to mankind.
+
+A little psychology will help us to understand the matter better. The
+mind has three aspects: the intellectual, which gives us truth; the
+ethical, which gives us nobility; and the esthetic, which gives us
+beauty. It is really impossible to separate one of these things from
+the other entirely; but we may say that in science we have nothing but
+the intellectual, or truth; in religion nothing but the ethical, or
+nobility; and in art nothing but the esthetic, or beauty. But as a
+religion without truth or beauty would be a very poor affair, so art
+without truth or nobility would be almost inconceivable.
+
+Literature is far more than art. Of course literature must be artistic:
+it must have the esthetic element of beauty; but it must also have both
+nobility and truth; and it must make its appeal through the emotions,
+that is, its appeal must be human. Possibly we must admit that all
+art is human, that its appeal is emotional; but this is not true of
+all beauty, for a mathematical hyperbola or parabola is perfectly
+beautiful, and it has its part in all drawing of artistic beauty; but
+the parabola or hyperbola does not become art except when executed by
+the human hand in making an appeal to human emotions.
+
+Distinctions between truth, nobility, and beauty are merely for the
+sake of helping our thought. That which is noble must be true and it
+must be beautiful. That which is lacking in truth is lacking also in
+beauty. This, however, we are not always able to discover without
+analysing. Something may seem beautiful while we are thinking of beauty
+alone; but let us test its nobility or its truth, and if these are
+wanting we suddenly discover defects in the beauty we had not perceived
+before.
+
+Who of us has not seen a woman who seemed at first to be perfectly
+beautiful, but whom we afterward found to be lacking in intellect
+or character. On re-examining the beauty we discover a weak mouth,
+inexpressive eyes, and other defects which may in time quite spoil the
+perfection of form we had admired so much at first, and we wonder
+how we could overlook these defects. The fact is, one supreme quality
+is likely to blind us to all defects until we cease to gaze upon that
+quality and hunt for others.
+
+If we are literary critics, the first quality of literature that is
+likely to attract our attention is that of artistic beauty, which
+usually shows itself especially in the style. The musical flow of the
+words, the aptness and grace of the images, the refinement in the
+choice of words, make style, which, like charity, is a garment which
+covers a multitude of sins. If we are students, we look at the truth of
+the statements, their accuracy, their real significance, and talk about
+the poem’s or the story’s “depth” or lack of depth. But the common
+reader is more likely to judge the literary work by its nobility; in a
+novel such a reader wants characters he can admire and imitate, in a
+poem he wants thoughts that will inspire. Often to such a reader the
+lack of truth and of beauty are not even perceived. We see that which
+we look for, and fail to see that in which we have no interest.
+
+But what part does amusement play in real literature? We hear that
+the “star of the public amuser is in the ascendant.” Is the novel any
+the less literature for being amusing? or may it amuse without being
+literature?
+
+But let us see what amusement is. An alternative term is
+_recreation_, which means literally “being created anew.” Any
+escape from the routine of life into an atmosphere which is harmonious
+with our faculties for enjoyment is recreation. Amusement is the
+antithesis of work. A book the reading of which contains no suggestion
+of labour is a perfect recreation, since it allows our overworked
+faculties to rest and calls into play those faculties which otherwise
+would lie fallow and ultimately become stunted and dead. When we
+speak of a book as “amusing” we mean that it affords a complete
+relaxation to our faculties; but such complete relaxation is not
+altogether necessary to perfect recreation, for we may exercise one
+set of faculties while relaxing another. Literature is and should be
+relaxing to those faculties that are worn out by the dull routine of
+life; but any statement that a novel should be _merely_ amusing,
+_merely_ relaxing, is decidedly untrue to the facts in the case.
+The public does want recreation; we all want it; we all need it; it is
+one of the highest offices of literature to give it; but _mere_
+relaxation of wearied faculties will never create us anew. For true
+re-creation we must have that in literature which has been named
+_creative_,--something positive, vital, strong, and human. It
+is the duty of all great literature to be interesting. That which
+has ceased to be interesting is dead, and the quicker it is buried
+the better. The fact is, however, that no efforts at embalming or
+preservation on the part of critics will keep before the public that
+which the public chooses to bury.
+
+And this brings us to another question. What part has popularity in
+true literature? Some swear only by that which is very popular; and
+others curse the masses of the people, declaring that they like
+that which is bad for its very badness, wallowing in filth and the
+commonplace, loving sentimentality in preference to true sentiment,
+and seeking in fiction only excitement of their passions. Such a view
+is libellous. As Lincoln once said in regard to other matters, You can
+deceive all the people part of the time and part of the people all
+the time, but you cannot deceive all the people all the time. We must
+confess that the public is always wandering after a will-o’-the-wisp;
+but at all times the public as a whole, we must believe, is seeking
+the good. It does not love the bad merely because it is bad; but it
+swallows the bad because it wants the grain of good it can get in no
+other way. And with the element of time added, it is the public that
+makes “the verdict of posterity” which all reverence. We must not
+forget, however, the element in the equation called Time; for that Time
+may reduce the equation to zero and prove that our unknown quantity is
+nothing.
+
+And now let us ask what relation any work of literary art ought to have
+to our lives of toil. If it merely gives us a picture of our actual
+lives it cannot be interesting or amusing, since we want to get away
+from ourselves and exercise new faculties and have new experiences. On
+the other hand, we understand only what we live, and if we get too far
+away from our own experiences we are equally at a loss. The fact is, a
+work of literature should give us ourselves idealized and in a dream,
+all we wished to be but could not be, all we hoped for but missed.
+True literature rounds out our lives, gives us consolation for our
+failures, rebuke for our vices, suggestions for our ambition, hope, and
+love, and appreciation. To do that it should have truth, nobility, and
+beauty in a high degree, and our first test of a work of literature
+should be to ask the three questions, Is it beautiful? Is it true? Is
+it noble?
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER I.
+
+                    _WHAT CONSTITUTES A GOOD POEM?_
+
+
+We may consider literature under three heads--Pure Poetry, the Prose
+Essay, and Fiction.
+
+Poetry is unquestionably the oldest form of literature. Matthew Arnold
+once queried whether a people ought not to be barbarous to be really
+poetic. Perhaps it originated in the chant of the priests as they
+offered sacrifices to their gods; but the chanted tale recounting the
+deeds of glorious war must have come very soon after.
+
+Mechanically, poetry consists in words arranged in measured feet and
+lines, corresponding almost exactly to the time element in music. Rhyme
+is a modern invention and in no way essential to poetry. Originally
+anything that could be chanted or sung was regarded as poetry. Now the
+song element has largely disappeared, but the requirement of measured
+feet and lines remains, and we may almost say that no poetry can be
+fully appreciated till it is read aloud.
+
+Poetry was invented to express lofty sentiments, sentiments of
+religion and the noble sentiments of patriotism and brave deeds, and
+finally the sentiments of passionate love. It is still the loftiest
+form of literature, and if we would seize at a grasp all the length and
+breadth of the highest literary art, we should begin with the study of
+poetry.
+
+True literature should express equally Truth, Nobility, and Beauty, the
+intellectual, the ethical, and the esthetic. Of course one poem will be
+pre-eminent for its beauty, another for its nobility, a third for its
+truth. Let us examine various types, that we may see with our own eyes
+and feel with our own hearts what these words mean.
+
+Read aloud this lullaby from Tennyson’s _Princess_:
+
+    Sweet and low, sweet and low,
+      Wind of the western sea,
+    Low, low, breathe and blow,
+      Wind of the western sea!
+    Over the rolling waters go,
+    Come from the dying moon, and blow,
+      Blow him again to me;
+    While my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps.
+
+    Sleep and rest, sleep and rest,
+      Father will come to thee soon;
+    Rest, rest, on mother’s breast,
+      Father will come to thee soon;
+    Father will come to his babe in the nest,
+    Silver sails all out of the west
+      Under the silver moon;
+    Sleep, my little one, sleep, my pretty one, sleep.
+
+The first thing we notice, besides the pleasing rhythm, is the musical
+quality of the words. There can be no melody, as melody is known in
+music, but in the repetition of sounds and their enchanting variations
+we find something that very strongly suggests musical melody.
+
+Then we are attracted by the beauty of the images. The words come
+tripping like fairy forms, and we feel a picture growing out of the
+_camera obscura_ of our minds.
+
+The appeal is almost wholly to our feelings; for if we stop to analyse
+the words and interpret their strict sense, we seem to see nothing but
+nonsense. The poem exists for the soothing, enchanting, dreamy beauty
+that seems rather to breathe in the words than to be expressed by them
+as words express thoughts in prose.
+
+If there is any truth or any nobility in this poem of Tennyson’s, it
+would be hard to say just what they are. There is nothing ignoble;
+there is nothing untrue. But it seems as if we had a perfect type of
+beauty pure and simple.
+
+Now let us read this little thing from Shelley:
+
+
+                          LOVE’S PHILOSOPHY.
+
+    The fountains mingle with the river,
+      And the rivers with the ocean;
+    The winds of heaven mix forever
+      With a sweet emotion;
+    Nothing in the world is single;
+      All things by a law divine
+    In one another’s being mingle;--
+      Why not I with thine?
+
+    See the mountains kiss high heaven,
+      And the waves clasp one another;
+    No sister flower would be forgiven,
+      If it disdained its brother;
+    And the sunlight clasps the earth,
+      And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
+    What are all these kissings worth,
+      If thou kiss not me?
+
+Once more we observe the rhythm and the music, though not so perfect or
+real as in Tennyson’s song; and we see the beauty of images, almost as
+beautiful as the images in Sweet and Low; but we observe that there is
+a new element: a thought is expressed. Beauty has come to the aid of
+truth; and while we are uncertain whether we care most for the beauty
+or for the truth, we cannot but perceive how they aid each other.
+
+But we have not yet found the moral or ethical element. Neither
+Tennyson nor Shelley inspires in us nobler sentiments, or gives us
+courage to do and dare loftier deeds.
+
+For the purely ethical type we might turn to the psalms of David, or
+that noble poem Job. But we find the same element in a simple and
+modern form in a poem of Longfellow’s.
+
+
+                           A PSALM OF LIFE.
+
+         WHAT THE HEART OF THE YOUNG MAN SAID TO THE PSALMIST.
+
+    Tell me not in mournful numbers,
+      “Life is but an empty dream!”
+    For the soul is dead that slumbers,
+      And things are not what they seem.
+
+    Life is real, life is earnest!
+      And the grave is not its goal;
+    “Dust thou art, to dust returnest,”
+      Was not spoken of the soul.
+
+    Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
+      Is our destined end or way;
+    But to act, that each to-morrow
+      Find us farther than to-day.
+
+    Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
+      And our hearts, though stout and brave,
+    Still, like muffled drums, are beating
+      Funeral marches to the grave.
+
+    In the world’s broad field of battle,
+      In the bivouac of Life,
+    Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
+      Be a hero in the strife!
+
+    Trust no future, howe’er pleasant!
+      Let the dead Past bury its dead!
+    Act,--act in the living Present,
+      Heart within and God o’er head.
+
+    Lives of great men all remind us
+      We can make our lives sublime,
+    And, departing, leave behind us
+      Footprints on the sands of time;
+
+    Footprints, that perhaps another
+      Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
+    A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
+      Seeing, shall take heart again.
+
+    Let us, then, be up and doing,
+      With a heart for any fate;
+    Still achieving, still pursuing,
+      Learn to labour and to wait.
+
+Once more we observe how the musical flow of the language charms our
+ear, and how the poem makes us _feel_ that which it would teach.
+We miss the vibrating melody of words which we found in Tennyson and
+even in Shelley; and the rarely beautiful images of both the preceding
+poems are almost entirely absent. There is another element, however,
+which we could not perceive at all in those verses, and that is the
+element of nobility, of moral inspiration. The poem does not teach us
+any moral truth with which we were before unfamiliar, as a treatise on
+philosophy might; but it makes us _feel_ as nothing else ever has
+the reality of that which we know already. It actually breathes courage
+into us,--not the courage for heroic deeds in battle, but the heroism
+of living nobly the common life that is ours.
+
+It is not fair to condemn this almost perfect poem, as some critics do,
+because it is lacking in the Beauty and fresh Truth that make the poems
+of other poets immortal; for in the whole range of poetic literature
+it will be difficult to find a more perfect example of nobility and
+heroic courage.
+
+It will be interesting now to turn to Browning’s _Rabbi Ben Ezra_
+and find the philosophy, the Truth that corresponds to this Nobility.
+
+
+                                  VI.
+
+    Then, welcome each rebuff
+    That turns earth’s smoothness rough,
+      Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go!
+    Be our joy three parts pain!
+    Strive, and hold cheap the strain;
+      Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!
+
+
+                                 VII.
+
+    For thence,--a paradox
+    Which comforts while it mocks,--
+      Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail:
+    What I aspired to be,
+    And was not, comforts me:
+      A brute I might have been, but would not sink i’ the scale.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+                                XXIII.
+
+    Not on the vulgar mass
+    Called “work,” must sentence pass,
+      Things done that took the eye and had the price;
+    O’er which, from level stand,
+    The low world laid its hand,
+      Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice:
+
+
+                                 XXIV.
+
+    But all the world’s coarse thumb
+    And finger failed to plumb,
+      So passed in making up the main account:
+    All instincts immature,
+    All purposes unsure,
+      That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man’s amount:
+
+
+                                 XXV.
+
+    Thoughts hardly to be packed
+    Into a narrow act,
+      Fancies that broke through language and escaped;
+    All I could never be,
+    All men ignored in me,
+      This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.
+
+The subject is almost precisely that of Longfellow’s Psalm of Life, but
+the object is not so much to give us courage as to confirm our courage
+by philosophy. The appeal is intellectual, not ethical.
+
+Yet this is very different from a treatise by Kant or Hegel. Browning
+the poet makes us _feel_ the truth. It is emotion that his
+philosophy, his Truth, arouses in us--an intellectual emotion, but none
+the less an emotion. We find the measured rhythm of poetry, but it
+is as far as possible from the songlike music of Tennyson’s lullaby.
+The mechanical limits and restrictions seem an excuse for unusual and
+almost strained images, but images that nevertheless carry conviction
+to our minds. There is, too, a beauty in the conception. This poetry is
+philosophy, but impassioned and inspired philosophy.
+
+Let us now read a poem still more lofty, a poem in which rare beauty,
+lofty nobility, and profound philosophy are mingled in almost equal
+proportions. I refer to Wordsworth’s Lines Written a Few Miles Above
+Tintern Abbey:
+
+              These beauteous forms,
+    Through a long absence, have not been to me
+    As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
+    But oft in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din
+    Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
+    In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
+    Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
+    And passing even unto my purer mind,
+    With tranquil restoration....
+              ... that serene and blessed mood,
+    In which the affections gently lead us on,--
+    Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
+    And even the motion of our human blood
+    Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
+    In body, and become a living soul;
+    While with an eye made quiet by the power
+    Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
+    We see into the life of things....
+                          And I have felt
+    A presence that disturbs me with the joy
+    Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
+    Of something far more deeply interfused,
+    Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
+    And the round ocean, and the living air,
+    And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
+    A motion and a spirit, that impels
+    All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
+    And rolls through all things.
+
+The sweet melody of Tennyson’s lullaby has here given away to a deep,
+organ-like harmony, that swells and reverberates, while the words
+seem to be making the simplest and most direct of statements. Image
+and plain statement so mingle that we cannot distinguish them, Truth
+suddenly seems radiant with a rare and angelic Beauty, and the very
+atmosphere breathes the loftiness of Noble Purity. Unexpectedly almost
+we find ourselves in the presence of Divinity itself, and the humblest
+meets the loftiest on common ground.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER II.
+
+                   _WHAT CONSTITUTES A GOOD ESSAY?_
+
+
+Prose has a bad name. We think of it and speak of it as including
+everything in language that is _not_ poetry. In former times art
+in literature meant poetry,--or, at a stretch, it included in addition
+only oratory.
+
+The beginning of art in the use of _unmeasured_ language (if we
+may use that term to designate language that does not have the metrical
+form) was undoubtedly oratory,--the impassioned appeal of a speaker to
+his fellow men. The language was rhythmical, but not measured, that
+is, not susceptible of division into lines, corresponding to bars of
+music; and the element of beauty was distinctly subordinate to the
+elements of nobility and truth. In modern times poetry has come to be
+more and more the mere aggregation of images of beauty, without much
+reference to the intellectual, and still less to the ethical; and prose
+has been the recognized medium for the intellectual and the moral.
+
+Of course, modern times have not given us any oratory superior to
+that of Demosthenes and Cicero; nor any plain statement of historical
+fact superior to that of Herodotus, Thucydides, or Tacitus. But art
+in conversational prose, reduced to writing and made literature,
+may fairly be said to date from the essayists of Queen Anne’s
+time--Addison, Swift, Goldsmith, and their fellows; and it was brought
+to perfection by Lamb, De Quincey, Macaulay, Thackeray, Irving, and
+others of their day.
+
+In most of this prose we find a new element--humour. The original,
+characteristic, typical essay is whimsical, sympathetic, kindly,
+amusing, suggestive, and close to reality. The impassioned appeal of
+oratory has been adapted to the requirements of reading prose by such
+writers as De Quincey and Macaulay; but the humorous essay has been by
+far the more popular.
+
+And what is humour? It would be hard to say that it is either beauty,
+nobility, or truth. The fact is poetry, with its lofty atmosphere,
+rarefied, artificial, and emotional, is in danger of becoming morbid,
+unhealthy, and impractical. Humour is the sanitary sea salt that
+purifies and saves. No one with a sense of humour can get very far
+away from elemental and obvious facts. Humour is the corrective,
+the freshener, the health-giver. Its danger is the trivial, the
+commonplace, and the inconsequent.
+
+The primary object of prose is to represent the truth, but in so far
+as prose is true literature, it must make its appeal to the emotions.
+The humorous essay must make us feel healthier and more sprightly,
+the impassioned oratorical picture must fire us with desires and
+inspire us with courage of a practical and specific kind. Mere
+logical demonstration, or argumentative appeal, are not in themselves
+literature because their appeal is not emotional, and so not a part
+of the vibrating electric fluid of humanity; and beauty plays the
+subordinate part of furnishing suggestive and illustrative images for
+the illumination of what is called “the style.”
+
+Gradually prose has absorbed all the powers and useful qualities of
+poetry not inconsistent with its practical and unartificial character.
+So the characteristics of a good prose style are in many respects not
+unlike the characteristics of a good poetic style.
+
+First, good prose should be rhythmical and musical, though never
+measured. As prose is never to be sung, the artificial characteristics
+of music should never be present in any degree; but as poetry in its
+more highly developed forms has lost its qualities of simple melody
+and attained characteristics of a more beautiful harmony, so prose,
+starting with mere absence of roughness and harshness of sound,
+gradually has attained to something very near akin to the musical
+harmony of the more refined poetry. Almost the only difference lies
+in the presence or absence of measure; but this forms a clear dividing
+line between poetry (reaching down from above) and prose (rising up
+from below).
+
+Second, the more suggestive prose is, the better it is. It is true
+that images should not be used merely for their own sake, as they may
+be in poetry; but their possibilities in the way of illustration and
+illumination is infinite, and it is this office that they perform in
+the highest forms of poetry. To paraphrase Browning, it enables the
+genius to express “thoughts hardly to be packed into a narrow” word.
+And so that whole side of life that cannot possibly be expressed in
+the definite formulæ of science finds its body and incarnation in
+literature.
+
+Third, good prose will never be very far from easily perceived facts
+and realities of life. The saving salt of humour will prevent wandering
+very far; and this same humour will make reading easier, and will
+induce that relaxation of labour-strained faculties which alone permits
+the exercise and enjoyment of our higher powers. We shall never get
+into heaven if we are forever working, and humour causes us to cease
+work and lie free and open for the inspiration from above.
+
+It would be hard to find either nobility, truth, or beauty as
+distinguishing characteristics in the following letter of Charles
+Lamb’s; but it is certain that it is admirable prose. If it does not
+give us that which we seek, it most certainly puts us into the mood in
+which we are most likely to find it in other and loftier writers:
+
+“March 9, 1822.
+
+“Dear Coleridge--It gives me great satisfaction to hear that the pig
+turned out so well: they are interesting creatures at a certain age.
+What a pity that such buds should blow out into the maturity of rank
+bacon! You had all some of the crackling and brain sauce. Did you
+remember to rub it with butter, and gently dredge it a little, just
+before the crisis? Did the eyes come away kindly, with no Œdipean
+avulsion? Was the crackling the colour of ripe pomegranate? Had you no
+complement of boiled neck of mutton before it, to blunt the edge of
+delicate desire. Did you flesh maiden teeth in it?
+
+“Not that I sent the pig, or can form the remotest guess what part Owen
+could play in the business. I never knew him give anything away in his
+life. He would not begin with strangers. I suspect the pig after all
+was meant for me; but at the unlucky juncture of time being absent,
+the present somehow went round to Highgate. To confess an honest
+truth, a pig is one of those things I could never think of sending
+away. Teal, widgeons, snipes, barn-door fowls, ducks, geese--your tame
+villatic things--Welsh mutton, collars of brawn, sturgeon, fresh or
+pickled; your potted char, Swiss cheeses, French pies, early grapes,
+muscadines, I impart as freely unto my friends as to myself. They are
+but self-extended; but pardon me if I stop somewhere. Where the fine
+feeling of benevolence giveth a higher smack than the sensual rarity,
+there my friends (or any good man) may command me; but pigs are pigs,
+and I myself therein am nearest to myself. Nay, I should think it an
+affront, an undervaluing done to Nature who bestowed such a boon upon
+me, if in a churlish mood I parted with the precious gift. One of the
+bitterest pangs of remorse I ever felt was when a child--when my kind
+old aunt had strained her pocket-strings to bestow a sixpenny whole
+plum-cake upon me. In my way home through the Borough I met a venerable
+old man, not a mendicant, but thereabouts; a look-beggar, not a verbal
+petitionist; and in the coxcombry of taught charity, I gave away the
+cake to him. I walked on a little in all the pride of an Evangelical
+peacock, when of a sudden my old aunt’s kindness crossed me; the sum it
+was to her; the pleasure that she had a right to expect that I--not the
+old impostor--should take in eating her cake--the ingratitude by which,
+under the colour of a Christian virtue, I had frustrated her cherished
+purpose. I sobbed, wept, and took it to heart so grievously, that I
+think I never suffered the like; and I was right. It was a piece of
+unfeeling hypocrisy, and it proved a lesson to me ever after. The cake
+has long been masticated, consigned to the dunghill with the ashes of
+that unseasonable pauper.
+
+“But when Providence, who is better to us all than our aunts, gives me
+a pig, remembering my temptation and my fall, I shall endeavour to act
+towards it more in the spirit of the donor’s purpose.
+
+“Yours (short of pig) to command in everything,
+
+                                                                 C. L.”
+
+When we have finished reading this, we wonder if we have not mistaken
+our standards of life; if the senses are not as truly divine as our
+dreams, and certainly far more within the reach of our realization.
+We think, we feel happy, we are certainly no worse. Whatever strange
+thing this humour may have done to us, we are more truly _men_ for
+having experienced it.
+
+And it is this that prose can do that poetry, even of the best, can
+never accomplish.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER III.
+
+                   _WHAT CONSTITUTES A GOOD NOVEL?_
+
+
+From the beginning of literature the most interesting thing which a
+writer can write has been the life history of a MAN. We are like boats
+borne on the swift current of the rushing river of Time. Whether our
+boat sink or swim, or turn to the right or to the left, is the matter
+of intensest interest--indeed, our interest is usually so intense in
+this subject that we can think of nothing else with any zest. And as we
+study our own problem of navigation on the waters of life, we watch all
+our neighbours to see how they succeed or fail, and why. Their problem
+is our problem and ours is theirs. Hence it is that stories of human
+life have formed the substance of the world’s greatest literature since
+the days of Homer.
+
+Before outlining the history of the literary form which the universal
+human story has taken, let us explain the meaning of “the dramatic.”
+Drama deals with the crises in individual lives. While our boats on
+the current of Time sail smoothly and straight on their way, there
+is no drama, nothing that can be called dramatic, and so no material
+for an interesting story; but the moment that any obstacle or force
+of any kind, exterior or interior, causes the steady onward course
+of the life to cease or turn aside, however little, that moment we
+have the dramatic. So for the elements of a drama we must have a
+_collision_ of life forces, one of which forces is the onward
+movement of some individual human life. The other force may be
+circumstances, or “Fate,” as we call it; or it may be another human
+life. When but two forces meet, we have the simplest form of the drama,
+such as we may see in any short story or a one-act play. In a novel
+or a drama in acts we shall find a collision of several and various
+forces, usually different human lives meeting and influencing each
+other.
+
+While the human story has been the same, and the principles of dramatic
+construction have been but little changed in several thousand years,
+the artistic form has changed with changing conditions, and the history
+of its development is intensely interesting.
+
+The first form in which the story of life was told was the epic poem,
+as for example Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. The Iliad was the tale of
+the “wrath of Achilles, Peleus’s son.” That force, coming straight
+athwart the current of the warlike lives of all the Greek and Trojan
+heroes, could not but be dramatic, for there was not one of them whose
+onward movement was not changed in some way, and of course the changes
+were interesting in proportion to the importance of the lives of the
+subjects--the greater the subject the greater the drama (if adequately
+executed) in the world’s literary history.
+
+The next form which the human story took was that of the stage drama.
+Mechanical necessity required that the collision and life changes
+should be represented in the speeches of the characters, as in the epic
+poem they had been narrated in the song of the minstrel. We have our
+finest examples of the stage drama in Shakespeare, and we find that the
+poetic language uttered by the various characters on the stage is not
+very different from the language uttered by the single minstrel when
+he was the only performer. Moreover, we find a new element which the
+minstrel could not very easily represent, and that is humour. In the
+humorous portions the poetic drama begins to be prose.
+
+The discovery of the printing press, which makes books that every man
+may read in his closet, has given birth to the third form of the great
+human story--the novel.
+
+While there can be no doubt that the novel is the form above all others
+in which the world to-day chooses to receive the human story, the epic
+poem no longer being written and the poetic drama but rarely, still we
+should make a mistake if we suppose that the novel is the direct child
+and heir of the poetic stage drama even to the same extent that the
+drama was the direct child and heir of epic poetry.
+
+Both the epic poem and the poetic drama have a dignity and loftiness
+that much more adequately represent the nobler and loftier
+characteristics of the human personality than the often trivial and
+even base and ignoble fictitious tale in the novel. The truth is,
+the modern novel is directly descended from the tavern tale, the
+amusing and entertaining narrative of the chance traveller coming
+unpretentiously and unexpectedly into the quiet country village. Such
+tavern tales we find in their purest form in the Arabian Nights and
+in Boccaccio’s Decameron. The stories of Sindbad the Sailor and the
+lovers of Boccaccio had unquestionably been told again and again by the
+wayfarer eager for the applause of his little audience, and had again
+and again been listened to by common folk whose only glimpse of the
+life of the outer world came through these same tavern yarns. Boccaccio
+collected his stories from the taverns of Italy, and wrote them out in
+the choicest Italian for the entertainment of his king and queen (A.
+D. 1348). The stories of the Arabian Nights were collected in Egypt at
+about the same time by some person or persons unknown, and reached the
+European world through the French version of Galland at the beginning
+of the eighteenth century. In the Arabian Nights we may find the origin
+of the modern romance, and in the Decameron the beginning of the modern
+love-story or novel.
+
+The bond of union between the tavern tale and the story of modern
+fiction is not difficult to detect. The tavern tale is the
+confidential narrative of the unpretentious traveller to his handful
+of uncritical common people whose instincts are primitive and whose
+primary desire is for amusement: the story of modern fiction is the
+confidential narrative of the author to a single ordinary or average
+reader, who sits down in the privacy of his closet to be amused and
+instructed--chiefly amused. The style required in both cases is
+personal, familiar, and conversational. Formality is thrown aside, and
+unrestrained by any critical audience or the presence of a judge of
+mature mind and high appreciation, both tale-teller and story-writer
+speak freely of the privacy of life, and of its most sacred secrets as
+well as its most hidden vices. Such a medium is very far from the lofty
+dignity of poetry; yet it is perhaps the only truly democratic form of
+literary art.
+
+As we have seen, the modern novel was at first nothing more than an
+almost verbatim report of the tavern tale-teller’s narrative. Then,
+in Richardson and Fielding, we find the same kind of gossip invented
+by the author and set forth with a trifle more fancy and imagination,
+as it is done in letters. The powers of the prose essay invented by
+Addison and his fellows were soon added to the style of the novel,
+an early illustration of which we may find in Goldsmith’s _Vicar
+of Wakefield_. Scott gave the novel the dignity and romantic
+interest of history--history made human and therefore turned into true
+literature. Dickens added the sentimental, poetic style of the ballad,
+and Thackeray the teaching of the familiar homily.[1] In the stories
+of Hawthorne we see what the ancient fable and allegory contributed to
+the modern fictitious phantasy.
+
+In Balzac for the first time we discover any attempt to make fiction
+the vehicle for the broad national drama which Homer gave us in his
+epic poems. In Poe we find the beginnings of an application of dramatic
+principles to the construction of the short story, and in this very
+small field Maupassant brought the art of dramatic construction well
+nigh to perfection. We may imagine that a novel ought to be as complete
+and perfectly constructed a drama as one of Shakspere’s plays; but the
+fact that we find no such novels suggests that fiction as an art is yet
+incomplete and not fully matured.
+
+The origin of fiction was very low; but it was an origin very near to
+the common people, and so to the simple and natural instincts of all
+of us. With this broad foundation the possibilities of development are
+enormous, and we may reasonably hope that some day the novel will take
+a place in literary art that is much above that of the epic poem or
+even the poetic drama. It is not hampered by the mechanical limitations
+of either of these, and the variety and literary opportunity which
+characterize it are the possession of fiction alone.
+
+And now let us ask, What are the characteristics of a good novel? And,
+How may we judge a novel?
+
+We may think of the novel in two ways--as the tavern tale and as
+poetry--as prose, with its characteristic humour and conversational
+style, and the imaginative and lofty dream of the human soul, otherwise
+expressible only in verse.
+
+As a tavern tale we may test a novel by fancying that the author is
+sitting down in person with us in our dressing-gown before the fire.
+He talks to us and tells us a tale. If he were there in person, what
+characteristics should he have to make him attractive to us? Why, of
+course, he should be polite and engaging. Too great familiarity even in
+the privacy of home spoils friendship, and so does vulgarity. And yet
+with a certain reserve of manner he may enter upon almost any topic of
+human thought, and even discuss with us our own secret sins. The good
+conversationalist will make us think and talk ourselves, and so will a
+good novel-writer. Of course we cannot talk to the author; but we can
+find in our friends a good substitute for him.
+
+Another quality we shall demand is sincerity. While we may like to
+listen for a time to the brilliant conversation of a witty talker whom
+we cannot trust, the sincere friend will hold our affections long after
+the brilliant talker is forgotten. The brilliant and insincere friend
+and the brilliant and insincere novelist or writer are alike left
+deserted in their old age, with not a friend in the world. (What better
+example of this could we have than Oscar Wilde? When the insincerity of
+his character was found out, how quickly the world dropped him!)
+
+The novelist above all other writers stands to the reader in the
+attitude of a personal friend. At first we turn to such a friend merely
+because he is agreeable as a companion; but the time comes when we
+wish to consult him as to the solution of our personal difficulties,
+and ask him to share in our personal joys. In somewhat the same way a
+novel writer may become the friend and adviser of his reader. In the
+stories he tells he deals frankly and sincerely with just such problems
+of life and emotion as those which confront the reader; and through
+his characters he declares what he thinks the best thing to do. If you
+would test the greatness of any novelist, ask the question, Would you
+be willing to follow the advice which he gives his characters?
+
+We have spoken of the author as the friend of the reader. This
+figure of speech has been chosen for the purpose of making apparent
+the intimate relations between the substance of the story and the
+personality of the reader. As a matter of fact, however, it is only
+the personality of the _reader_ which is in any way alive and
+consciously perceived: the writer is so entirely impersonal (or should
+be) that he becomes completely merged in his characters. His spirit is
+felt in every line of description and every touch of character; but, as
+we might say, his own form should never be seen. With no suggestion of
+sacrilege we might even say that he is to the creations in the novel
+what God is to nature: the eye sees nature in all its beauty, but only
+the heart can perceive by a hidden vision of its own the presence of
+the divine. Such is the ideal part which an artist should play in his
+story.
+
+But, though the artist as a personality is or should be entirely
+unseen, he is only the more truly present; and the greater his soul and
+the nobler his life and the broader his imagination and the more poetic
+his fancy, the more truly does his book become a treasure to the reader.
+
+All dramatic writers, whether epic poets, poetic dramatists, or
+novelists, are known by the characters they create. It is not important
+that those characters should ever have really existed in the world:
+what is demanded is that they be natural and possible and true to
+the principles of life. The creative writer will of course create
+characters never seen before. He will never be a mere copyist; or if
+he is he becomes a biographer, and ceases to be a dramatic artist. Of
+course, also, these characters must have their collisions with other
+characters or with the forces of fate. That is necessary to give
+dramatic interest, the interest of plot. And characters are known by
+what they do; so unless they really meet adequate dramatic situations
+they cannot be said to exist at all, even though the author has
+described them minutely and told us that they have an endless variety
+of noble and beautiful qualities: for us only those qualities exist
+which we see in action. So in brief we may say that a great novelist
+(or other dramatic writer) is known by the great deeds of his great
+characters.
+
+From this point of view Shakspere is our greatest author. His Lear,
+Othello, Desdemona, Portia, Macbeth, Hamlet, Caesar, Brutus,
+Cleopatra, and the rest form a noble company of great men and women.
+Instinctively we compare these fictitious characters with the
+characters of history. Many of them are taken from history; but by art
+and imagination they are created anew in shapes that live before our
+eyes as the characters of history (often quite different personages)
+really lived before the eyes of their contemporaries, but could not
+live before our eyes.
+
+No novelist gives us such a company of _great_ men and women--very
+few give us even one great man. In some ways we may compare with
+Shakspere’s characters those of Balzac. The great French novelist set
+out to represent typical characters of all classes of the society he
+knew. He has as varied a company as Shakspere, and it is typical of
+society as Shakspere’s is not; but none of Balzac’s characters can
+for a moment be considered as great as Shakspere’s. Even the Country
+Doctor, perhaps Balzac’s noblest creation, has no such depth of
+interest as Hamlet, for example, though we might possibly compare him
+with Prospero; and what a creature is the Duchesse de Langeais beside
+Portia!
+
+But a novelist who gives us no characters which we can take an interest
+in even if we do not love them or admire them is not much of a
+novelist. The name of Thackeray suggests Becky Sharpe and Henry Esmond
+and Colonel Newcome. The fine substance of Thackeray’s men and women,
+both good and bad, their refinement and delicacy and intelligence
+and sensibility, mark them as personalities far above the ordinary
+in fiction; and so they give Thackeray a rank that the variety of
+his characters and the range of his sympathies would not otherwise
+entitle him to. Dickens is to us but a name for the little dream world
+in which we make the acquaintance of David Copperfield and Micawber
+and Peggotty and Agnes and Dora, of the father of the Marshalsea and
+Little Dorrit and their friends of the prison, of Little Nell and her
+friends, of Oliver Twist and his thievish but interesting companions.
+Dickens’s characters are not examples for admiration; but they are
+intensely interesting because so intensely human, coming so near to us
+ourselves as they often do even when we are least ready to admit it.
+And unquestionably their number is great. The number and variety of an
+author’s characters are always to be taken into account in estimating
+his greatness, or even his value to us individually.
+
+Scott’s characters are very different from any of these. They seem
+made especially to wear picturesque historic costumes, and in their
+almost limitless multitude they form a pageantry which is splendid and
+entrancing in the extreme. The thing of value is that the pageantry
+is alive; and if Scott’s characters were created to wear costumes,
+they were created living all of them; and (as the reader of _Sartor
+Resartus_ well knows) the wearing of costumes is, in its figurative
+sense, one of the most important duties of life, with many people
+becoming nearly a religion. In Scott we may find out to what extent
+this universal passion is legitimate and what great-souled love there
+may be in the heart beating beneath the costume.
+
+Such are some of the principles by which we should test and judge
+all works of dramatic art, whether plays on the stage or novels. We
+need not, however, in all cases wholly condemn a book professing to
+be a novel which falls short by this criterion: it may be good as an
+essay or a history or a treatise, and its author may have mistaken its
+character in calling it a novel.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 1: We should not overlook the important part the pulpit has
+had in the development of English literature.]
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER IV.
+
+                   _LANDMARKS IN MODERN LITERATURE._
+
+
+Most people read in such a desultory way that they never know whether
+they are really familiar with standard literature or not. All the books
+of one author are read because they are liked; and none of the books of
+another are known because the reader never managed to get interested,
+or never happened to have his or her attention called to that author’s
+books. A very simple working system is needed, with landmarks, as it
+were, set up here and there to guide the choice of books at all times
+and make it intelligent and just.
+
+
+                           SHAKSPERE--1600.
+
+English literature practically begins with Shakspere, who did his best
+work about 1600 A. D., three hundred years ago. Two important poets
+come before him--Spenser, who was still living when he began to be
+known as a successful dramatist, and Chaucer, who was a contemporary
+of Boccaccio and the first noteworthy writer in the then new English
+tongue, that tongue in which Norman-French had mingled with Anglo-Saxon
+in the common patois of the people, though pure French and Latin
+remained the languages of the court and of scholarship.
+
+The language in which Chaucer wrote is now so antiquated that it is
+not easy for the ordinary person to read it. His “Canterbury Tales”
+are pleasant and cheerful, for he was an eminently sane man; but what
+he wrote has been often rewritten since his time till we are quite
+familiar with most of his stories and ideas through other channels.
+
+Spenser, whose best work is the Faerie Queen, though he wrote so
+near the time of Shakspere, seems decidedly more antiquated; yet, as
+compared with Chaucer, he is easy reading. The Faerie Queen is one long
+series of beautiful and sensuous images, a mingling of fair women,
+brave knights, and ugly dragons which in his hands attain a dreamy
+charm. Says Taine, “He was pre-eminently a creator and a dreamer, and
+that most naturally, instinctively, and unceasingly. We might go on
+forever describing this inward condition of all great artists.... A
+character appears to them, then an action, then a landscape, then a
+succession of actions, characters, landscapes, producing, completing,
+arranging themselves before our eyes. This fount of living and changing
+forms is inexhaustible in Spenser. He has but to close his eyes and
+apparitions arise; they abound in him, crowd, overflow; in vain he
+pours them forth; they continually float up, more copious and more
+dense.” And we may add that the language in which he describes these
+dreams is as musical as the fancy of his imagery is rich. If one
+likes that sort of thing one can soon learn to read Spenser with ease
+and enjoyment, and in the whole range of English literature we shall
+find nothing so sensuously sweet as his poetry, in his own musical
+“Spenserian” stanza.
+
+As we have said, for the ordinary reader English literature begins
+with Shakspere. He was the central figure of the brilliant era of
+Queen Elizabeth; but none of his fellow dramatists, not even “rare Ben
+Jonson” or Marlowe, are read today. For us they are dead, and Shakspere
+alone remains as the representative of the “Golden Age,” though perhaps
+we must include in it Bacon and Milton, writers who stand somewhat
+apart.
+
+
+                        ROBINSON CRUSOE--1719.
+
+The next principal epoch is just one hundred years later, when the
+reign of Queen Anne was adorned by the essayists, headed by Addison;
+by the “classic” poets, foremost among whom are Dryden and Pope; and
+by the first of the novel-writers, Defoe, the author of Robinson
+Crusoe. Here we find three different kinds of authors equally eminent.
+This “age” continued for seventy-five years,--indeed, we may say a
+hundred, expiring on the appearance of the poets Burns, Wordsworth, and
+Coleridge. It is called the “Classic Age,” because the leading writers,
+especially the poets (Dryden, Pope, etc.), tried to follow the classic
+models of Greece and Rome, and so produced work most highly polished
+and theoretically correct; but of course it was artificial and wanting
+in the instinctive and spontaneous elements of poetry as we know it
+in the nineteenth century poets. The term “classic,” however, does
+not apply to the novelists--Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Smollett,
+and Goldsmith following Defoe and Bunyan. These novel writers were
+looked on as too low for critical attention; but the prose of Addison,
+Steel, Swift Johnson, and Goldsmith[2] was admired as prose had never
+been admired before, and our later age has accepted this prose as the
+greatest literary achievement of the eighteenth century.
+
+The modern reader will find his chief interest in the literature of
+the nineteenth century. And now there are a few dates that we should
+remember.
+
+
+                             BURNS--1786.
+
+Burns prepared the way for the new poetry--a poetry simple,
+spontaneous, tender, and true, as the poetry of Pope was artificial,
+clever, and “elegant.” The Kilmarnock edition of Burns’s poems appeared
+in 1786. It was a country print of the immortal work of a rude country
+poet.
+
+
+                        LYRICAL BALLADS--1798.
+
+The “romantic movement” in poetry, as it was called, was really
+inaugurated in 1798--a date always to be remembered--by the little
+volume of Lyrical Ballads published jointly by Wordsworth and
+Coleridge. This volume contained “The Rime of the Ancient Marinere”
+(Coleridge’s best poem) and “Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey” (the
+best work of Wordsworth). No one paid much attention to the book, and
+but a limited number of copies were sold or given away. A few poets,
+however, read it and felt its spirit.
+
+The first of these to take up the new poetic movement was Scott, in
+his Lay of the Last Minstrel, which at once became popular. For ten
+years Scott was the popular poet, but then he was succeeded by Byron,
+the poet of the dark and cynical. Close on the heels of Byron came
+Shelley and Keats. Last of all came Tennyson and Browning. Tennyson’s
+reputation was made by his two volumes of poems published in 1842; and
+Browning published some of his best work in the same year, though his
+fame did not come to him till many years later.
+
+
+                              LAMB--1825.
+
+So much for poetry. The prose essay lay dormant from the time of
+Goldsmith until Charles Lamb and De Quincey appeared. Lamb’s Essays
+of Elia began in the London Magazine in 1825; and that is a good date
+to remember as the beginning of the revival of the essay. At almost
+the same time we have De Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater, with
+brilliant, impassioned prose; and during the next twenty-five years
+came Macaulay, the writer of oratorical prose, the splendid rhetorician
+and rhetorical painter of word pictures, and Carlyle, the apostle of
+work, the philosopher, the lecturer through the printed page, and last
+of all, Matthew Arnold and Ruskin, both critics--Ruskin by far the
+more brilliant and varied.
+
+
+                            WAVERLEY--1814.
+
+In the novel the first great date to remember in the nineteenth century
+is 1814--the year of the publication of Waverley. Between the Vicar of
+Wakefield and Waverley no great work of fiction appeared, though Jane
+Austen was writing her artistic little stories. But when Waverley was
+published every one felt that a new era was at hand. The book at once
+became immensely popular. It did for the novel what the Lay of the Last
+Minstrel and Marmion had done for poetry--it introduced the romantic
+era in fiction.
+
+
+                      HUGO, DUMAS, BALZAC--1830.
+
+Scott held the field almost entirely to himself until 1830. In that
+year Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas, and Balzac, all three acknowledging
+the genius and power of Scott, appeared in France. Hugo and Dumas were
+professed romanticists; but Balzac was a realist, and advocated ideas
+that were not generally accepted by the critics till many years later,
+though the common people bought his books freely.
+
+It was Dickens who really made the realistic novel popular. The date
+to remember is 1835, the year in which Sketches by Boz appeared and
+Pickwick was begun. Vanity Fair, Thackeray’s first masterpiece, was
+published in 1848, and in 1858 George Eliot’s Adam Bede.
+
+Since 1860 the forward movement in English literature seems to have
+stopped, and such writers as George Meredith and Thomas Hardy appear
+rather as belated members of the older group than representatives of
+any new type. With these we must include Tolstoi, Turgenev, and Ibsen.
+
+In Stevenson, Kipling, and Barrie we undoubtedly have the beginning of
+a new literary movement, the importance of which it is impossible yet
+to estimate.
+
+
+                         AMERICAN LITERATURE.
+
+We have purposely omitted mention of the American authors, since they
+do not seem to fit into the movement of literary ideas in England. They
+are more simply and obviously artists, giving to the people what they
+can that they think the people will like, and each in his own way.
+
+
+                             IRVING--1820.
+
+Our first writer of importance was Irving, whose Sketchbook was
+published in 1820. Irving has been called the “American Addison.” He
+might almost as well be called the American Lamb, though Lamb’s essays
+did not begin to appear till five years later: and he was more of a
+story-teller than Lamb.
+
+James Fenimore Cooper began his literary career as a professed imitator
+of Scott in 1820; but he soon developed a purely American romantic
+novel, the novel of the Indian. He is no very great novelist; but his
+books are still popular.
+
+The first American poet was William Cullen Bryant, whose best poem,
+Thanatopsis, was written when he was eighteen, in 1812.
+
+Between 1830 and 1840 appeared some of the best work of Poe,
+Longfellow, and Emerson; but they were as utterly distinct in their
+spirit and purposes as if they had belonged to different ages. Poe was
+the poetic inventor, the discoverer of the dramatic principles of plot
+in story-writing, and the original literary critic; Longfellow was
+the sweet singer of the people, the home poet, unoriginal but beloved
+by all; Emerson was the philosopher and man of letters combined,
+the serious essay writer and interpreter to the people of the new
+discoveries of the great students of philosophy.
+
+Following Longfellow were the poets Lowell, Whittier, and Holmes, all
+of whose best work just preceded or just followed the Civil War.
+
+
+                         SCARLET LETTER--1851.
+
+The one great American novelist is Hawthorne, whose Scarlet Letter
+appeared in 1851--his first great novel--and whose best work was all
+completed prior to 1861, the year of his return from his consulship at
+Liverpool.
+
+Many of our political leaders have been great writers, too. The first
+was Benjamin Franklin, whose Poor Richard’s Almanac and Autobiography
+must certainly be included among the great works of American letters.
+Then Daniel Webster, who stands among the first of great orators in the
+English language, was the author (between 1830 and 1860) of a series of
+speeches, many of which have been accepted as an important part of our
+literature. And among short masterpieces there is none greater than the
+Gettysburg speech of Abraham Lincoln, though it would not be proper to
+speak of him as a man of letters.
+
+It will be seen that practically all of our great American literature
+appeared between the War of 1812 and the Civil War. Since the Civil War
+there has been a new era; but it is not our present purpose to estimate
+current writers.
+
+
+                               SUMMARY.
+
+To summarize the whole field, English and American, we may say that the
+literature that we call standard began with Shakspere, three hundred
+years ago. The first work in that period was Spenser’s Faerie Queen,
+the second Shakspere’s plays. Chaucer, who wrote two hundred years
+earlier, we may look on as the forerunner, who prepared the way for the
+epoch which opened so brilliantly with Spenser and Shakspere. Passing
+over the names of Bacon and Milton, who belong to the seventeenth
+century, but stand apart from the literary movement or merely suggested
+what was to come long after, we find the Queen Anne essayists as the
+characteristic literary workers at the beginning of the eighteenth
+century; and on either side of them the poets of the Classic Age, of
+whom Pope was high priest, and the author of Robinson Crusoe, the
+despised teller of tales who was to be the forerunner of a literary
+movement greater than any we have yet seen. The Classic Age ended with
+Goldsmith, and the Romantic movement, first perceived in Burns, really
+took definite form as a movement in the Lyrical Ballads of 1798. Scott
+was the popularizer of the Romantic movement in both verse and prose.
+That movement reached its climax in 1830 in Hugo and Dumas. In that
+year Balzac inaugurated the realistic movement, whose forerunner was
+Jane Austen; but it is Dickens who, beginning in 1835, really made it
+as popular as Scott had made the Romantic movement by the Waverley
+novels. And while the Romantic movement was aristocratic, the Realistic
+movement, going back to the despised Robinson Crusoe, was highly
+democratic.
+
+In Tennyson we find a poet who made the romantic thought into works of
+art that the people could appreciate; and in Longfellow we see much the
+same thing done for the realistic poetry, though Walt Whitman, a very
+imperfect artist, is the high priest of the democratic idea in poetry.
+
+If we can only fix these dates and periods and dominant eras of thought
+in our minds, we shall have a framework in which we can fit all the
+varying phases of modern English literature.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 2: Goldsmith is a sort of link between the essayist and the
+novelist. He was almost equally eminent as novelist, essayist, and
+poet.]
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER V.
+
+                 _THE BEST POETRY AND HOW TO READ IT._
+
+
+The reading and enjoyment of poetry may be said to be a fine art.
+Certainly no one is likely to have a taste for poetry who does not
+cultivate it. Yet nothing is so characteristic of the person of
+culture, and nothing is so likely to produce true culture, as the
+reading and study of the best poetry.
+
+It is probably a fact that of all the volumes of poetry in the world,
+not one in a hundred is read. It would be almost impossible to read
+through from beginning to end the complete works of any well known
+poet, and nothing could be more foolish than to attempt to do so. Yet
+the average owner of a volume of poetry cannot think of anything else
+to do with it except let it alone, and generally chooses the latter
+alternative.
+
+A poem is not like a story. One reads a story, enjoys it, and lays it
+aside. Few would care to read even the best novel more than once, or
+at most two or three times at widely separated intervals. A poem, on
+the other hand, cannot be understood or truly enjoyed even by the most
+cultivated until it has been read several times. In fact one reads a
+poem for quite a different purpose from that which leads one to read
+a story. A poem is more like a piece of music: one reads it when one
+wishes to be put into the mood which the poem or the music is intended
+to produce. The favourite mood produces happiness, and when we wish
+that kind of happiness we turn to the work of art which is able to
+produce it in us.
+
+Now, evidently it is not every poet whose moods are like our own. It is
+true that we may wish to cultivate moods not natural to us; but there
+is a distinct limit even to these. It follows, therefore, that there
+are not many poets we will wish to study, or even to read more than
+once; and there are but few poems even of the poets we like which will
+have that perfect effect on us which will make us wish to repeat it
+often.
+
+If one were asked to suggest the surest way to acquire a liking for
+poetry and a knowledge of it, the following would probably be the
+method suggested:
+
+First, find one good poem that one could really like and read more than
+once with pleasure. There are few of us who could not name such a poem
+at once; but many of us go no farther.
+
+Having chosen the first poem, one has thereby made choice of the first
+poet, a poet whose moods are in accord with one’s own and whom one is
+likely to be able to learn to like. Unless we can start with a liking,
+and proceed to another liking, we are not likely to go very far.
+
+While one likes a poet rather than poems, when one’s taste is fully
+trained, the most successful readers of poetry know a poet by
+relatively few poems. One cannot read many poems many times, and as
+we cannot appreciate any poetry fully that we do not read many times,
+we must make a selection. Indeed we shall find that there are but few
+poems of any poet that produce in us the desired mood. For us, all the
+other poems are more or less failures, at least more or less imperfect.
+So the first principle in the successful reading of poetry is to select
+most rigidly.
+
+While the special student of poetry may read the entire work of a poet,
+weigh each poem, and select judiciously those which he will reread and
+finally make a part of his inner circle of friends, the general reader
+must depend upon the selection of some one else to some extent, or at
+least he will read first those recommended to him, afterward dipping
+casually into others in the hope that he will find one he will wish to
+study more carefully. Such a selection, and one of the best ever made,
+is Matthew Arnold’s selection from the poems of Wordsworth. But even
+Matthew Arnold does not tell you what poem of Wordsworth’s to begin
+with. Another admirable selection of the “best poems” is Palgrave’s
+“Golden Treasury.” Yet even in that most lovers of poetry will miss
+many that have been excluded because they are not lyric, or because
+they are too long, or for some other reason which is not an essential
+one with the reader. Other selecters of poems have not been so
+fortunate, and when one can have a tolerably complete edition of a poet
+in his library, he will wish to make his own selection with the aid of
+such adviser as he may choose.
+
+One of the easiest poets to begin with is Longfellow. We have already
+read the Psalm of Life. Let us read it again, and yet again.
+
+Longfellow very aptly describes himself as a poet in that beautiful
+song of his “The Day is Done.”
+
+    Come, read to me some poem,
+      Some simple and heartfelt lay,
+    That shall sooth that restless feeling,
+      And banish the thoughts of day.
+
+    Not from the grand old masters,
+      Not from the bards sublime,
+    Whose distant footsteps echo
+      Through the corridors of Time.
+
+    For, like strains of martial music,
+      Their mighty thoughts suggest
+    Life’s endless toil and endeavour:
+      And to-night I long for rest.
+
+    Read from some humbler poet,
+      Whose songs gushed from his heart,
+    As rain from the clouds of summer,
+      Or tears from the eyelids start.
+
+    Who, through long days of labour,
+      And nights devoid of ease,
+    Still heard in his soul the music
+      Of wonderful melodies.
+
+    Such songs have power to quiet
+      The restless pulse of care,
+    And come like the benediction
+      That follows after prayer.
+
+And there is no better way to enjoy poetry than to read it aloud:
+
+    Then read from the treasured volume
+      The poem of thy choice,
+    And lend to the rhyme of the poet
+      The beauty of thy voice.
+
+    And the night shall be filled with music,
+      And the cares that infest the day
+    Shall fold their tents like the Arabs,
+      And as silently steal away.
+
+Turning over the leaves of your volume of Longfellow, mark these few
+poems to read first, and if you find one that you like, read it again.
+Perhaps you will be quite familiar with some, if not most in this
+list; but if there are some that you do not know, but that attract
+you on reading once, study those till you have learned to love them;
+in so doing you will have made a real beginning toward the culture
+that comes from a systematic study of poetry: “A Psalm of Life,” “The
+Reaper and the Flowers,” “Footsteps of Angels,” “Flowers,” “The Wreck
+of the Hesperus,” “The Skeleton in Armour,” “The Village Blacksmith,”
+“The Rainy Day,” “God’s Acre,” “To the River Charles,” “Maidenhood,”
+“Excelsior,” “The Belfry at Bruges,” “The Arsenal at Springfield,” “The
+Norman Baron,” “The Bridge,” “Curfew,” “The Building of the Ship,” “The
+Builders,” “Pegasus in Pound,” “Beware,” “The Day is Done,” “The Old
+Clock on the Stairs,” “The Arrow and the Song,” “My Lost Youth,” “Paul
+Revere’s Ride” (Tales of a Wayside Inn), “The Birds of Killingworth,”
+“The Bell of Atri,” “The Children’s Hour,” “Hanging of the Crane,” and
+“Keramos.” These are not all the good poems, and some of these are not
+even the best; but they are a good list to choose from. Besides these
+you will perhaps like to read “Hiawatha” first, then “The Courtship of
+Miles Standish,” and finally “Evangeline”; but these longer poems are
+tales rather than poems, and one does not care to return to them as to
+the shorter gems.
+
+Longfellow is a “humbler poet,” as he himself has expressed it, but
+he is none the less a poet; and in all literature you will not find a
+simpler poet, nor one easier to read and like.
+
+Next to Longfellow, perhaps the most generally liked modern poet is
+Tennyson. Tennyson was not a great thinker, like Browning; he was
+rather the interpreter of the thinker poets, for the reader who could
+not read Wordsworth and the rest for himself. Tennyson set out in early
+life to master poetic technique, and he could write more different
+styles than any other great modern poet. Besides, his poems often
+have a swing (quite unlike the sweet melody of Longfellow’s) which
+fascinates many. And he was peculiarly and distinctly the poet of
+moods. “Break, Break, Break” is little more than a haunting melody in
+words; and the same may be said of most of the songs in “The Princess,”
+beautiful as they are.
+
+It will take much more time to learn to like Tennyson than it required
+for Longfellow, for Tennyson is so various, and we must come at him in
+so many different ways.
+
+Perhaps we might begin with such mere pretty rhythms as “Airy, Fairy
+Lilian” and “Claribel”; how much better than these shall we find “The
+Lady of Shallott,” “Break, Break, Break,” and all the songs in “The
+Princess.” “The Princess” itself is rather a tedious poem, certainly
+one which we would not care to read twice in succession; but the songs
+scattered through it are as nearly perfect as that sort of poetry well
+could be. “The May Queen” is a pretty and fascinating simple story that
+may touch us more deeply than we would own; and a poem of a different
+kind which might appeal particularly to our mood is “Locksley Hall,”
+following it with “Locksley Hall Twenty Years After,” which we may not
+like so well. Some will like to puzzle over the philosophy of “The Two
+Voices,” others the pretty story of “The Miller’s Daughter” or “The
+Talking Oak,” or the poetic “Ulysses” and “Lotus-Eaters,” while others
+will wish to pass on to “Maud” with its varied rhythms. In “Maud”
+there is one often quoted passage which may be all that one will care
+to reread--the passage beginning, “Come into the garden, Maud, For
+the black bat, night, has flown.” Nothing could be more perfectly and
+exquisitely rhythmical. And yet of all Tennyson’s poem, it is probably
+the shortest that we shall like best, such as “The Flower in the
+Crannied Wall” and “Crossing the Bar,” or such a stirring war poem as
+“Charge of the Light Brigade.”
+
+Nearly all of Tennyson’s poems that he has retained in his complete
+works are well written and worth reading once; but if you ever come to
+like the higher poets you will find his best thinking expressed there
+better, and will turn to Tennyson more and more for the swinging music
+of his shorter songs, with their mood-making rhythms and haunting
+images.
+
+And now let us turn to one of the great poets--to Browning. Most of us
+will be entirely unable to read the greater part of his poetry at all,
+and whether it is good or bad we must leave it to the critics to say.
+It will be best to buy him in a volume of selections, such as that he
+made himself from his own poems and published in two volumes. We may
+make our selection from that, though in other collections we may find
+other poems we shall like quite as much as any of these.
+
+First of all, let us say that it will probably take many days to learn
+to like even a few of Browning’s poems; but once we have learned to
+like them they will be dearer to us than all the other poets. We
+measure his greatness by the intensity of the liking we have for what
+we do like.
+
+Perhaps we have read “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to
+Aix” and found nothing very wonderful in it. If we ever come to love
+Browning, it will be because he was himself a lover, and we shall
+admire him because he was a fighter against the discouragements and
+littlenesses of the world.
+
+Let us begin with his love poems--such a simple poem as “A Woman’s Last
+Word.” We shall not understand all of it; but no matter--we shall like
+it none the less on that account, and we shall like it the better the
+more we read it. Then let us read “Love Among the Ruins.” We shall not
+understand all of that, either, but some we shall understand, and there
+will be new things to discover each time we reread, which should be
+many times. Possibly we shall never get tired of reading it over. And
+then we may read at pleasure such poems as “The Last Ride Together,”
+“Any Wife to Any Husband,” “In a Year,” “Misconceptions,” “Two in the
+Campagna,” and “Evelyn Hope.” There will be others which in time we
+shall be drawn to read, such as “In a Gondola” and “The Statue and the
+Bust”; but the important thing is to learn to love, and to like to read
+and reread, two or three.
+
+And now let us turn to that other side of Browning, his philosophy as
+a fighter and a struggler in the world. Begin with “Rabbi Ben Ezra.”
+In a week, or a month, or a year, we may not have mastered it--indeed
+probably we shall never master it. So much the better; then we shall
+go on reading it and rereading it, and getting help and inspiration
+from it. There will be certain stanzas that will seem meant for us,
+and these we will mark, and in the margin we will make notes none will
+understand but ourselves.
+
+Once master this one poem, and enough is accomplished--or at least
+the rest will take care of itself. We shall then read “Saul,” and the
+haunting “Abt Vogler,” “Andrea del Sarto,” “A Toccata of Galuppi’s,”
+“Prospice” and “A Grammarian’s Funeral.”
+
+There are other poems--yes, a good many others; but if you once come to
+love two or three, so that you like to turn to them, and find comfort
+in reading them, you will find the others for yourself, and if you do
+not find them, you will probably get all the more good out of the old
+ones.
+
+We have perhaps said enough as to the manner of studying poetry,
+illustrating by the three poets we have considered. The reader will now
+be able to take up the following for himself, upon the hints given with
+each.
+
+If you like Longfellow, read some of the best poems of the other
+New England poets--Whittier’s “Barefoot Boy,” “Barbara Frietchie,”
+“Maud Muller,” “Skipper Ireson’s Ride,” and “Snow-Bound”; Holmes’s
+“The Chambered Nautilus,” “The One Hoss Shay,” “The Last Leaf,” and
+“Old Ironsides”; Lowell’s “Vision of Sir Launfal,” and “The First
+Snow-Fall”; and Bryant’s “Thanatopsis.” “To a Water Fowl,” and “The
+Death of the Flowers.”
+
+Some may trace a likeness between the three great poems of Poe, “The
+Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” and “The Bells,” and Tennyson; but Poe will be
+found unique in his weird mood and rhythmic use of words.
+
+From the lyric poems of Tennyson, turn to Shelley’s “The Skylark” (one
+of the most beautiful poems in our language), and his “The Cloud,”
+and “Ode to the West Wind”; and after picking up such little gems as
+“Love’s Philosophy,” we may learn to like “Alastor” and “The Sensitive
+Plant.”
+
+Once Byron was almost worshiped, while today we hardly do him justice.
+He is the poet of the “dark mood,” and we shall probably find this mood
+in its greatest purity in his dramatic poems “Manfred” and “Cain,” of
+each of which he is himself the hero. Rather than read entire such long
+poems as “Childe Harold,” “The Giaour,” “The Corsair,” and “Don Juan,”
+it will be better to read the striking passages--at least at first. We
+must judge from our taste for Byron how much we shall read of him.
+
+No one should fail to read Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” If we would
+read further, we may perhaps choose first “St Agnes’ Eve,” “Ode to
+Autumn” and “Endymion.” It takes a fine poetic taste to appreciate
+Keats, for he is a poet “all of beauty,” rich, fragrant, sensuous
+beauty, such beauty as we shall find nowhere else; but his thoughts and
+emotions of love and conquest over life are not very great.
+
+Next to Browning, perhaps the greatest poet of the nineteenth century
+is Wordsworth. He is the very opposite of Browning standing to Nature
+as Browning does to humanity. We shall find his creed stated in a poem
+which is one of the greatest in the English language, called simply
+“Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey”; and much the same thought we shall
+find expressed in more lyric form in his famous “Ode on Intimations
+of Immortality.” Unquestionably the best of Wordsworth is to be found
+in Matthew Arnold’s selections in the “Golden Treasury” series, and
+this is better to possess than the bulky complete works, much of which
+we shall find exceedingly dull and almost fatal to our liking for any
+poetry whatever. But there are also many beautiful simple poems of
+Wordsworth’s which we should easily learn to like, among them, “We Are
+Seven,” “Lucy Gray,” “She Was a Phantom of Delight,” “Three Years She
+Grew,” “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (Daffodils), and many of his
+sonnets, such as that to “Milton,” “On Westminster Bridge,” “To the
+River Duddon--Afterthought,” “The World Is too Much With Us,” etc.
+
+Of the older poets, Burns stands by himself, one of the most popular
+of all poets who wrote in the English language. Best of all his poems
+are his simple love songs, such as “My Luve is Like the Red, Red
+Rose,” “Jean,” “Highland Mary,” and “To Mary in Heaven.” Who can forget
+“Bannockburn,” “Ye Banks and Braes of Bonnie Doon,” and “John Anderson
+my Jo?” “The Man’s the Gowd for a’ That,” and that beautiful little
+poem, “To a Mouse,” are unique, because they show us the simple heart
+of a man in all its struggling simplicity. Some, too, will like to read
+and reread “The Cotter’s Saturday Night.” In the reading of Burns one
+can hardly go wrong; yet after all there is much even in Burns that we
+might well spare, and many and many a line of his poetry has no such
+charm as the poems we have mentioned; yet the reader who has learned
+to like these will, on reading any other poem, know and discover the
+difference almost at the first line.
+
+If one wishes to find in poetry comfort for a weary mood, one will
+not look for it in such poets as Pope and Dryden, with their clever
+lines. Pope has more quotable lines than almost any other poet except
+Shakspere; and his “Essay on Man” is interesting, and perhaps we may
+even find some charm in “The Rape of the Lock”; but on the whole one
+will miss little by reading him in a book of quotations.
+
+Milton is different. He is the one noble and lofty poet of the English
+language. We shall not find any modern philosophy in him; but what is
+finer in its imagery and rhythm than his “Hymn to the Nativity”! And
+such lyrical poems as “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” will be found to
+possess an easy and surprising charm. “Paradise Lost” we should never
+read more than a page or two at a time, for it is too great, too lofty
+for the common mind to bear it long; but who would miss the pleasure of
+reading this single page or two once a month or once a year?
+
+There are certain single poems which no student of poetry will fail
+to read and reread as he does the poems of the great poets whom we
+study as men as well as the author of certain poems. One of these is
+Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” another is Coleridge’s
+“Ancient Mariner” and his “Christabel”; Hood’s “Bridge of Sighs” and
+the “Song of the Shirt”; Wolfe’s “Burial of Sir John Moore”; Cowper’s
+“Alexander Selkirk”; Campbell’s “Hohenlinden”; and such bits as Ben
+Jonson’s “Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes,” and Goldsmith’s “When
+Lovely Woman Stoops to Folly.”
+
+There are other poems by less known poets, which only the individual
+reader will find and make his own. For myself, I know no poems I
+like better to read than Matthew Arnold’s “Tristram and Iseult,”
+“Switzerland,” and “Dover Beach”; while many admire poems by Emerson
+and George Eliot and Dickens in the same way, though we are not
+accustomed to think of these writers as among the great poets. Though
+Edward FitzGerald’s “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” is a translation, it is
+one of the most popular poems in the English language, and considered
+also one of the greatest.
+
+Note: Many of the poems here mentioned may be found in “A Selection
+from the Great English Poets,” edited by Sherwin Cody.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VI.
+
+                       _HOW TO STUDY SHAKSPERE._
+
+
+The best way to study Shakspere is to go to see his plays at the
+theatre, especially when they are presented as Edwin Booth or Henry
+Irving have played them. What a change from the way in which they were
+presented in Shakspere’s own time! Then the scenery was so crude that
+they had to put out a sign on the stage saying, “This is a Forest,”
+etc. And all the women’s parts were played by boys or young men. There
+were no Mrs. Siddonses or Ellen Terrys in those days. It is said that
+Beethoven himself was not a very good piano player, and probably never
+heard some of his most beautiful sonatas played as Paderewski plays
+them today. Shakspere probably never saw his plays acted so well as
+they have been acted many times since his day.
+
+The first great actor to make Shakspere classic was David Garrick, a
+friend of Sam Johnson. He was graceful, light, airy, and gay, yet made
+an instant success by the naturalness with which he played Richard
+III, and then Lear, and then Macbeth. Garrick was not an ideal Hamlet,
+but he gave good support to the famous Peg Woffington, who made her
+fame in Ophelia on the same stage with Garrick. The most seductive of
+Woffington’s characters was Rosalind in As You Like It, and she played
+Portia in the Merchant of Venice with only less charm.
+
+The stage mantle of Garrick fell on John Philip Kemble, who brought to
+Shakspere’s plays accurate and truthful scenery and costumes. Hamlet
+was his favourite part--and as he was a meditative and scholarly rather
+than a fiery actor, he made a deep impression with it. Sarah Siddons
+was his sister. She was called the Queen of Tragedy, and was indeed an
+ideal Roman matron in her impassioned acting of great parts, coupled
+with a dignified, almost commonplace everyday life. In a famous picture
+Sir Joshua Reynolds painted her as the tragic muse. She played Lady
+Macbeth as probably no one else has ever played it, indeed it is said
+when she was studying the part she became so frightened at her own
+impersonation that she rushed up stairs and jumped into bed with her
+clothes on. In Queen Katharine (Henry VIII), she played the part so
+realistically that the Surveyor, to whom she had said, “You were the
+Duke’s Surveyor, and lost your office on complaint of the tenants,”
+came off the stage perspiring with emotion and said, “That woman plays
+as if the thing were in earnest. She looked me so through and through
+with her black eyes that I would not for the world meet her on the
+stage again!”
+
+Edmund Kean was a little man, but he played Shylock in the Merchant
+of Venice and Richard III as they had never been played before. Iago,
+too, was a famous character of his. He was admired by the aged widow of
+David Garrick, who called him David’s successor, and he was praised by
+Byron.
+
+Each age seems to have had its actor. Garrick was Johnson’s friend.
+Kean belonged to Byron’s day, and the actor of Dickens’s time was
+Macready. The great American actor was Edwin Booth, who made us
+familiar with the whole line of Shaksperean tragic characters during
+nearly the whole of the last half of the nineteenth century. Who that
+has seen him slip on to the stage as the hunchback Richard III, or walk
+in the calm dignity of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, attired all in black
+velvet, can ever imagine those characters in any other personation!
+
+The great tragedies seem to be the plays in which great actors have
+become most famous; but no play of Shakspere’s, not even the Merchant
+of Venice, has been more popular than Romeo and Juliet. In the time of
+Garrick a certain Barry Spanger was said to be the ideal Romeo. Charles
+Kemble, son of Philip, played it with great success. And his daughter
+Fanny Kemble was brought out as Juliet, much against her wish, to save
+her father’s fortunes. She had had no training for the stage; but the
+play ran for one hundred and twenty nights with the greatest success.
+
+There have been other great actors and actresses, all of whom (if
+English) have been famous in Shaksperean roles--Adelaide Neilson,
+Charlotte Cushman, and the American Edwin Forrest--and even many
+foreigners have tried Shakspere. Salvini was the greatest of Othellos,
+and Adelaide Ristori was famous as Lady Macbeth. Even Bernhardt has
+taken the part of Hamlet. In our own time Henry Irving and Ellen Terry
+have been the best known performers of Shakspere’s characters; but it
+would seem that all talented actors and actresses sooner or later test
+their greatness by attempting these roles.
+
+The true way to study Shakspere is by becoming fond of his characters;
+and this can be done most successfully only by seeing them on the
+stage. But we can learn to picture in our minds the parts they played
+in the great human drama, fashioning from imagination the scenes and
+personalities.
+
+Children should be introduced to Shakspere in the delightful “Tales
+from Shakspere” by Charles and Mary Lamb. The first thing is to get the
+stories and the great characters, and the poetic antique language of
+Shakspere himself may make this a little difficult at first.
+
+Then we may read such a book as Mrs. Jameson’s “Heroines of Shakspere,”
+in which we find the women of Shakspere’s plays described in simple
+modern language.
+
+Then let us read the plays themselves, without thought of notes or
+comments, for the mere human interest of the story and the characters.
+
+Probably the best play to begin with is the Merchant of Venice. Read
+it rapidly, passing lightly over the more commonplace portions. First
+you will come to the scene at Portia’s house, when the wooers are
+opening the caskets in the hope that they may be lucky enough to win
+the wealthy lady. But Portia really loves Bassanio and wants him to
+choose aright, as he does, and she is charmingly happy because he is
+successful.
+
+But the great scene of the play is in the fourth act, when Shylock
+brings Antonio before the court, demanding his pound of flesh. Portia,
+disguised as a lawyer, appears to save his life. How graciously she
+does it! How much a man and woman too she is! How beautiful her speech
+about mercy, “dropping as the rain from heaven”!
+
+Once having read the play through like this, for the story and the
+characters, lay it aside and at some future time read it again more
+thoroughly, stopping to enjoy Launcelot Gobbo, the clown, and the
+talkative Gratiano.
+
+So with each rereading the interest in the play will grow, till you
+have become very fond not only of Portia and her friends, but of
+Shakspere, too.
+
+Next to the Merchant of Venice the most popular of Shakspere’s plays
+is Romeo and Juliet. In this the balcony scene is the most famous, in
+which Romeo comes to woo Juliet; but among the characters the most
+interesting will perhaps be Mercutio, Romeo’s talkative and jolly
+friend, and Juliet’s queer old nurse.
+
+Of the tragedies, Hamlet is undoubtedly the greatest, but it is the
+hardest to read, and must be read many times to be fully appreciated.
+We are struck in the very first scene by the personality of the ghost,
+and of Hamlet’s friend, Horatio, that quiet, calm gentleman who looks
+sympathetically on throughout the play, and lives to tell the story of
+Hamlet’s infirm will. Polonius is a conventional old fool, but full of
+worldly wisdom, and the father of the brave Laertes and the sweet and
+pathetic Ophelia. How unhappy a girl she is! She is not very strong,
+not very brave; but we are sorry indeed for her, and in mere reading
+really shed tears when she sings her sweetly crazy songs. How strange
+and interesting, too, is Hamlet’s mother, and his scene with her
+toward the end of the play! And who can forget the conversation with
+the grave-diggers! Throughout we feel the atmosphere of philosophy and
+thought. Hamlet is indeed a very great and interesting play, but one
+requiring much time and leisurely thought. It is impossible to hurry in
+reading Hamlet.
+
+Next in greatness to Hamlet is, perhaps, Lear. In the very first act
+we are struck with the beautiful nature of Cordelia, though she utters
+very few words. She does not appear again until the end; yet the poor
+interesting Fool is always talking about her to Lear. We detest the two
+ungrateful daughters, Goneril and Regan, and sympathize with Edgar,
+the outcast son of Gloucester. How strange it seems that this fool,
+this insane old man, this homeless son pretending to be crazy, and this
+absent daughter, should hold our interest so perfectly!
+
+More romantic, more polished, more correct in stage-craft, so that many
+call it Shakspere’s greatest play, is Othello. Yet we have no such
+love for the beautiful Desdemona as we had for Cordelia, or Juliet,
+or Portia. Iago is a masterpiece of scheming treachery, and we are
+somewhat sorry for the handsome and abused Moor Othello; but we can
+never like him quite as well as some of the others.
+
+Macbeth is another great tragedy, and Lady Macbeth is a marvellous
+portrayal of a bad woman. We are interested in the witches and their
+prophecies, and we know how true is Macbeth’s ambition, and the greater
+ambition of his wife who drives him on. But in Macbeth there is no one
+to love, as there is in others of the plays.
+
+In Julius Caesar it is the patriotic fervour of Brutus, mistaken though
+it may be, that interests us most, though we like to declaim the speech
+of Antony at Caesar’s funeral.
+
+Antony and Cleopatra makes an excellent play to read, for Cleopatra
+is so well known as a character that we already have a point of
+familiarity to start with. We feel that we are reading history, and
+these great Roman plays of Shakspere’s are probably the best history we
+shall ever get. With Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra we should
+also include Coriolanus, to be studied third in the series.
+
+If we do not care for tragedy we shall have passed from Romeo and
+Juliet or the Merchant of Venice to As You Like It, one of the best of
+Shakspere’s lighter comedies. It is less deep, but not less charming
+than the heavier plays. The delightful Rosalind, disguised as a
+young man in the woods, the melancholy Jaques, and the amusing clown
+Touchstone, create an atmosphere of refinement which we will find
+nowhere else.
+
+I myself like Much Ado About Nothing as well as any of the comedies.
+It tells the story of Benedick and Beatrice, who were never going to
+marry, they were such wits both of them! Yet they were tricked into it,
+and apparently enjoyed it after all. Where else will you find a woman
+joker?
+
+The Taming of the Shrew is an interesting play if you admire a wilful,
+stubborn, pretty woman such as Kate was, and would like to know how
+her husband brought her into charming subjection. It is a very pretty
+play, and not less interesting for being somewhat out of date among our
+modern ideas of women.
+
+But of all Shakspere’s comic characters, none is more original or
+famous than Falstaff. We meet him first in Henry V, perhaps the best of
+Shakspere’s historical plays. He is a wit, a coward, and a blow-hard,
+but Shakspere never makes him overdo any of these traits, and so we
+cannot but find him intensely amusing. He reappears in the Merry Wives
+of Windsor, which Shakspere is said to have written in order to please
+Queen Elizabeth.
+
+The most intensely dramatic of the histories, and the first to read is
+Richard III. Richard is a scheming, daring fellow; and our love for the
+little princes put to death in the tower gives us a point of affection.
+Besides, this is the drama all the great tragic actors have been
+especially fond of playing.
+
+Next to Richard III is Henry VIII, which is said to be only partly
+Shakspere’s. In it is Henry’s great minister Wolsey, whose fall from
+power we witness as an event more tragic than death.
+
+Last of all let us read the Tempest, that romantic play which Shakspere
+probably wrote at the end of his career, as a sort of calm retrospect;
+for we may think of Prospero as Shakspere himself.
+
+There are other good plays of Shakspere’s; but if we have not time to
+read all, these are the best to begin with.
+
+The two poems, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, are not the best of
+reading; but the sonnets are the very highest form of lyric poetry.
+They are entirely different from the plays, and those who like the
+plays often do not care at all for the sonnets, while many not familiar
+with the plays read the sonnets with admiration. Many believe they
+tell Shakspere’s own story of love for a man friend, and, in the last
+division from No. 126 on, for a dark woman. The sonnets to the man are
+the better, and if one reads them over a few times and feels the poet’s
+reflection on change, time, and human love, he will certainly not doubt
+that here we really do come face to face with Shakspere in his own
+proper character. These sonnets help us to a knowledge of the man and a
+personal liking for him such as we get for his characters when we read
+his plays.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER VII.
+
+                      _THE BEST ENGLISH ESSAYS._
+
+
+Many people fancy that essays are not popular or easy reading; but when
+Addison published his Spectator, this little sheet of essays came out
+every morning, as a daily paper, and was immensely successful. Today
+there are not many standard novels that sell better than Lamb’s Essays.
+Macaulay was read in his day from one end of the English-speaking
+world to the other, and so was Carlyle. Ruskin, who was essentially
+an essayist, though of a peculiar type, received a hundred thousand
+dollars a year as profits on his books, which he published himself
+through George Allen, a printer in a small country town. And in our own
+country Emerson is a sort of bible to many people.
+
+Those who learn to like essays become very fond of them, and it is only
+to people who never have read them much that they seem dry. The fact
+is, there are only certain writers and certain of their works that we
+shall care for.
+
+If you like epigram, one of the best books to read is Bacon’s Essays.
+Each essay is very short; the subjects are of everyday interest; and
+the sentences are short and sharp. One does not care to read much of
+such a book at a time--only a few pages. But Bacon’s Essays is a book
+to own and take up for half an hour now and then through a number of
+years. We read these essays much as we do favourite poems.
+
+Bacon belongs to the time of Shakspere, and his language is a little
+antiquated. Much less so is that of Addison, who wrote over a hundred
+years later. There is a certain story-like character in his essays that
+makes them especially interesting. He tells us about Will Honeycomb
+and Sir Roger de Coverley. Sir Roger, of whom he writes in a series of
+essays, is especially interesting. Then Addison has humorous little
+papers on Advice in Love, the art of flirting the fan, etc., etc.
+
+Swift, who wrote about the same time as Addison, is still more of a
+story teller. Gulliver’s Travels is often classed as a novel, though
+as a matter of fact it was written as a satirical essay on the foibles
+of England in Swift’s day. Next to Gulliver’s Travels we are likely to
+be most interested in A Tale of a Tub, and The Battle of the Books,
+which are more regular essays than Gulliver.
+
+But the greatest of all the old essayists is Lamb. His most famous
+essay is that On Roast Pig, in which he tells the story of the origin
+of roast pig as a dish. Only less interesting is Mrs. Battle’s Opinions
+on Whist, and the essay on Poor Relations.
+
+The charm of Lamb is his humour, his good nature, his kindly heart,
+his quaint way of saying things. We learn to love him. No one has ever
+equalled him or imitated him. And when we have read his essays, we
+want to read his life--how he gave up the woman he loved to care for
+his poor sister who had killed her mother in a fit of insanity and had
+often to go to the asylum through all her life. Lamb was fond of his
+glass, and fond of the city, and fond of his friends. When we know him
+we must love him, and nothing else matters.
+
+If we have a taste for the curious and lofty in description, we shall
+like De Quincey, the opium-eater. In the Confessions of an English
+Opium Eater we have an account of himself and his opium-eating, which
+is rather dry; but his wonderful dreams fascinate us. These we find at
+their best in his masterpieces Suspiria de Profundis and The English
+Stage Coach, which are indeed the height of impassioned prose, lofty
+poetry without meter, splendid dreams and fancies.
+
+De Quincey wrote a great deal, and much that is merely dry and
+scholarly. But often he has something quaint and curious, such as his
+“Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” and wonderful stories such
+as the Flight of the Tartars and the Spanish Nun.
+
+Carlyle wrote in such a jagged, queer, hard style that nowadays few
+people can get used to a book like Sartor Resartus. The philosophy
+of Sartor will be found in a delightfully simple essay entitled
+Characteristics, the point of view in which is deeply interesting.
+Another simple and readable essay is that on Burns, and the essay on
+Goethe is worth reading, and that on Jean Paul Richter. Perhaps when
+one gets used to him one will wish to read Heroes and Hero-Worship,
+The French Revolution (or a part of it), and last of all that queer
+philosophy of clothes, Sartor Resartus.
+
+If one cares for philosophy he should certainly read Emerson’s original
+essays, beginning with those on Compensation, Self-Reliance, Love, the
+Over-Soul, Friendship, Circles, and Nature.
+
+Emerson’s essays have no beginning or end, and one might as well begin
+in the middle as anywhere else. He does simply one thing and that is
+interpret man in the light of modern transcendental philosophy. He had
+caught the great philosophic idea that God, man, and nature are but
+one substance, governed by the same laws, reaching out to infinity,
+and kin to everything within the bounds of infinity. Every common
+thing in life he views again from this new point of view; and the
+revelation is wonderful. Emerson does not discuss this philosophy or
+tell us anything about it; but he makes us see the whole world in the
+transforming light of it.
+
+In his two original volumes of essays he does this supremely well; and
+then in many later volumes he does it over and over. Such volumes, good
+in their way but less original than the first, are Representative Men,
+Society and Solitude, and Conduct of Life.
+
+Macaulay is not read nearly as much nowadays as he was in his own time.
+His style is oratorical, and highflown oratory, especially in essays,
+is not popular today. For all that, one cannot well afford to miss
+reading the famous descriptive essays on the Trial of Warren Hastings,
+Lord Clive, Milton (in which will be found the famous description of
+the Puritans), and the essay on History. There are two first rate
+essays on Samuel Johnson, the best one being a review of Croker’s
+edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, beginning at the point at which
+Macaulay finishes with Croker and takes up Boswell. Another good essay
+is that on Frances Burney or Madame D’Arblay. Those who have time will
+even wish to read Macaulay’s History of England, with its wonderful and
+gorgeous descriptions, that make the scene live before the eyes.
+
+Of splendid modern prose writers, Ruskin is one of the greatest. It
+takes a little effort and a little choosing to learn to like him; but
+those who will take the pains to study him will be richly rewarded.
+
+About the simplest thing he wrote was Ethics of the Dust, a series of
+conversations with some young girls about nature and everyday life.
+Children of ten are said to have read this book and liked it; yet it is
+by no means childish, and anyone might enjoy it.
+
+Next in general interest and simplicity is Sesame and Lilies--a queer
+title. The first chapter is “Of King’s Treasuries”--meaning books; and
+the second “Of Queens’ Gardens,” meaning the dominion over nature and
+society which culture gives a woman. This is one of the very best books
+ever written on How and What to Read, though written in a very symbolic
+style that will require more than one reading fully to understand it.
+
+Another book of quite a different kind is called in Ruskin’s odd
+fashion Crown of Wild Olives. It is a series of essays on work and the
+things in life worth working for.
+
+These three books are short, and perhaps at first many will not like
+them very much; but liking will grow with time.
+
+There is a book, however, that will well repay getting and reading in
+part, from time to time, for many years. That is Modern Painters. It
+is in four large volumes, and from the title one might suppose it was
+a technical history of modern painting. This is not the fact, however.
+It is a popular study of the noblest element in art, and throughout the
+four volumes one will find marvellous pictures of word-painting, such
+as Ruskin’s description of Turner’s Slave Ship, when he is discussing
+sea-painting. He talks of art and nature, always looking at art from
+the point of view of nature; and the volumes are so well divided into
+chapters and sections, each with its title and sub-title, that one can
+pick out an interesting subject here, and another there. It will be
+of especial interest and value to any one who cares at all about art.
+Ruskin wrote the first volume of this work before he was twenty-four,
+and it is perhaps the most brilliant thing he ever did. It is full of
+life and colour and splendid word-painting.
+
+The reader who believes in culture and wishes to cultivate the esthetic
+and refined should certainly read Matthew Arnold’s book Culture and
+Anarchy. It requires a close and logical mind to appreciate and
+understand him, and to read and like him is not easy, but a liking for
+his chapter on Sweetness and Light is an excellent test of one’s real
+success in the cultivation of culture.
+
+It will be seen that there are good essays of many types. There is the
+epigrammatic discussion of everyday matters, such as we find in Bacon,
+and in quite a different way in Emerson; and there is the quaint and
+playful humour of Addison and Lamb; there is the splendid rhetoric of
+De Quincey and of Macaulay, and the splendid word-painting of Ruskin;
+there is the preaching of Carlyle, and the literary lecturing of
+Matthew Arnold. If we cannot know all, we must choose our bent and
+follow the lines we like best.
+
+The most popular form of the essay is that of Addison and Lamb, the
+quaint, amusing, human badinage on familiar topics, full of love,
+and full of sense. Along this line there are a few good modern
+books--Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, Ik
+Marvel’s Reveries of a Bachelor, Charles Dudley Warner’s Backlog
+Studies, and Barrie’s My Lady Nicotine and When a Man’s Single.[3]
+
+The essay can never be read in a hurry, nor by one who feels himself
+rushed. The great essayists wrote in the most leisurely manner
+possible, a very little at a time, and only when in precisely the right
+mood. In the same way must they be read--alone, before an open fire, of
+a long winter evening. The woman who delights in these things will sit
+curled up in a great easychair, her head tipped against the back, the
+light well shaded over her shoulder. The man will, if he is a smoker,
+inevitably want his pipe. No modern cigar will do, and the vulgarity
+of chewing is utterly inconsistent with a taste for reading essays. It
+is the refined, the imaginative, and the dreamy who will especially
+delight in this form of literature.
+
+Note: Most of the essays mentioned in this chapter will be found in a
+volume entitled “The Best English Essays,” edited by Sherwin Cody.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 3: Barrie’s great novel is The Little Minister.]
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER VIII.
+
+                      _OLD NOVELS THAT ARE GOOD._
+
+
+At the top of the ladder of literature is poetry, to which only a few
+succeed in climbing. Next is the essay, a large comfortable niche cut
+in the side of the rock of ages, which is never crowded, and so is all
+the more grateful to those who frequent it. And down at the bottom is
+the novel, which we all read.
+
+Novels are read for various reasons, which are not often truthfully set
+down by the professional critic. Truth, however, is always best, and no
+one need be ashamed of it.
+
+Most of us read novels for the same reason that we go to the
+theatre--for amusement. We want to get away from the weary commonplace
+things about us, and get some refreshment by dipping into another
+world. Perhaps our social world is narrow; but in a good novel we may
+move in the best society. Possibly we are ambitious, and wish to read
+of the things we would like to have if we could. Reading about them is
+next best to having them. Or possibly our world is so unexciting and
+dreary that we need the excitement of an exciting novel to keep us from
+dying of decay. Excitement is a good thing, really necessary to life,
+however bad it may be when carried to extremes. Some people become
+feverish in their chase for excitement and in their constant reading of
+exciting novels; but we must not condemn the healthy for the excesses
+of the mentally sick.
+
+The excitement afforded by novels is of several different kinds. There
+is the excitement of love and passion--perhaps the most deeply grained
+sentiment of the human heart, and apparently the most necessary to
+health of the heart, especially in these days when our spontaneous
+emotions are constantly being repressed. Then there is the excitement
+of travel and adventure. Finally we have the novel of intellectual
+piquancy, the book full of epigrams and smart sayings such as Oscar
+Wilde might have written. The novel of love and passion may be
+the lascivious and dirty book, or sin equally by being the weakly
+sentimental Sunday school story. The abuse of the novel of travel and
+adventure is the cheap dime novel, or the high-priced dime novel called
+the historical romance. And the extreme of the epigrammatic story is
+the snobby smart novel, which tends to make prigs of us. This last
+novel is largely a modern development.
+
+In any of these lines a novel is good if it gives us real men and
+women, acting naturally and truly, and is written with sufficient
+rapidity and lightness. The great sin in a novel is ignorance of human
+nature; and the next sin is dullness. Either is fatal.
+
+The oldest examples of modern fiction are two great collections of
+tavern tales--Boccaccio’s Decameron and the Arabian Nights. These
+stories were told to amuse; because they amused those who listened to
+them, they have well succeeded in amusing English readers for several
+hundred years since. The Decameron is largely a series of stories of
+love and passion. They are many of them exceedingly amusing even to
+the modern reader; but according to modern standards so many of them
+are actually indecent that a translation of this book is hardly to be
+obtained in a respectable bookstore, and should never be allowed in the
+hands of a person under twenty-five.
+
+For the young the great book of exciting adventure is the Arabian
+Nights. All the indecent stories have been omitted in the modern
+translations, and the excitement stops short of the point at which
+it can do any serious harm in over-stimulation. The best story to
+begin with is that of Aladdin, or the Wonderful Lamp--a story every
+one ought to be familiar with; and next to that the series of tales
+of the adventures of Sinbad the Sailor. After reading these, turn
+to Poe’s clever “Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherezade,” which
+closely follows the adventures of Sinbad, but bases every wonder on a
+scientific fact stated in a note. This modern tale of wonder is much
+more marvellous than the imaginary wonder stories of the ancients,
+though its wonders are in reality strict truths. Mr. H. G. Wells, the
+modern novelist, has followed out the same line successfully in his
+pseudo-scientific stories. By comparative study of this kind one will
+find fresh interest in an old book.
+
+The Decameron and the Arabian Nights are not properly novels, but
+rather collections of short stories. The oldest readable novel is Don
+Quixote. It is an excellent book to read aloud in a mixed company, and
+is still as funny as any modern book. Don Quixote is a gentleman of
+kind heart and a certain innate refinement, in spite of the crack in
+his brain and his tilting at windmills. Sancho Panza is the thoroughly
+practical, faithful clown; and Sancho Panza’s mule and Don Quixote’s
+warhorse are characters in themselves. The book was written as a satire
+on chivalry; but its humanity has made it live long since the death of
+knight-errantry. Gulliver, too, was a satire, but now we read it merely
+as an amusing story; and Fielding’s Joseph Andrews was commenced as a
+satire on Richardson’s Pamela, but became so interesting as a story
+that even in its own day readers forgot all about the parody.
+
+Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress was written in the seventeenth century, by
+a tinker, in prison; and it is a distinctly religious book. But even
+the non-religious will admit that it is a good human story. Intended
+originally as an allegory, we read it now for its own story interest.
+
+Along with the Arabian Nights young people should, without exception,
+read Robinson Crusoe. Nearly every one has read it; but there are
+parts of it that will bear reading again and again and many times. The
+introduction may be skipped; but beginning with Crusoe’s shipwreck on
+the island we are deeply fascinated by all he does to care for himself
+and find some amusement. He is an intensely practical man, and never
+gets sentimental, because he is always at work, a good thing for some
+of us moderns who are inclined to bemoan our lot. For about a hundred
+pages this account of the life on the island continues, but when Crusoe
+is rescued the interest grows less, and we may very well omit the last
+half of the book.
+
+The first modern novel was begun by Richardson somewhat over a hundred
+and fifty years ago as a book of instruction on correct letter writing.
+Richardson was a printer fifty years old. In his youth he had often
+helped young ladies write love letters. So it was thought he could
+write a good book of model letters. He put a story into them to make
+them more lifelike and interesting, and the story turned out to be the
+beginning of modern fiction as an established form of literature, for
+the good novels that had gone before had not led the way for others as
+Richardson’s books did.
+
+All Richardson’s novels are written in the form of letters, and to
+modern readers are decidedly tedious.
+
+Clarissa Harlowe is the best of them; but it is much too long, and
+often dull. Clarissa is beset by Lovelace, spirited away, made to
+quarrel with her family, and outwardly compromised in every possible
+fashion; but through it all she maintains her maiden purity, and
+finally compels the man to marry her. We would like her better if she
+were a little more human and spontaneous--in short, if she had been a
+little more of a sinner.
+
+But there is one novel of that day and time which is first rate reading
+even to-day, and that is Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. Fielding was a
+rake and a joker. He started as a novelist by making fun of the good
+Richardson. But his characters are certainly natural, even if a little
+spicy. Tom came into the world in an irregular way, and led a very
+irregular life. He is by no means a model for the young, and Fielding
+tells of his sins in a way that to-day would be considered positively
+indecent. And yet we cannot help liking Tom, and he comes out all right
+at the end. Sophia Western forgives him for his faults, and loves and
+marries him. Old Squire Western is one of the most famous characters
+in the book, and a mixture of shrewdness, drollery, roughness and
+good-heartedness he certainly is.
+
+Other books of this period which have been often spoken of are
+Smollett’s Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Humphrey Clinker, and
+Stern’s Tristram Shandy; but they are a little tedious to the modern
+reader, and like Richardson’s novels must probably be left on the
+library shelves.
+
+The last of the good novels of this period is Goldsmith’s Vicar
+of Wakefield. The perfect simplicity of this story is its eternal
+recommendation. The Vicar is a simple-minded man, and somebody is
+always “doing him” or his simple son or his vain wife and daughters.
+We cannot help liking the old man for his unquenchable cheerfulness
+under all misfortunes, and the women, though old-fashioned, are not yet
+out of date in their feminine weaknesses. It is the very shortest of
+old-time novels. Some may not like so very simple a story, but if one
+has a sense of sly humour, the Vicar will be found good reading.
+
+There is also a French novel of this period which deserves to be read
+much more than it is. It is hard to tell just why it has somehow fallen
+into obscurity, unless it is the fact that it is French, and as unlike
+any other French novel as possible. It is Le Sage’s Gil Blas, and the
+scene is Spain. Gil is not unlike Tom Jones, though more of a wanderer,
+and goes from one adventure to another. Though some of his experiences
+are risqué, not one of them is offensive or even approaching indecency.
+The most innocent person will not be offended by anything in Gil Blas,
+for evidently Le Sage was a pure-minded man. The adventures are both
+exciting and amusing; and there is a fine string of them.
+
+There is nothing subtle about the old-time novels. They are excellent
+amusing stories, and that is all. Originally no more than tavern yarns,
+they have lived because they give us real men and women, and tell the
+truth about human nature. They are not very refined, and there is
+nothing aristocratic about them. They come from the people, and have
+something of the vulgarity of the people about them. But time has
+softened away the objectionable points. While we may be offended by
+present-day vulgarity, we probably will not even recognize that of a
+former age.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER IX.
+
+             _THE ROMANTIC NOVELISTS--SCOTT, HUGO, DUMAS._
+
+
+After the publication of the Vicar of Wakefield in 1766, for nearly
+fifty years no great novel appeared. True, Frances Burney’s Evalina
+appeared, but it is dry reading to-day. It is also true that some of
+Jane Austen’s best novels were written, but they were not published.
+The long silence was broken by the anonymous publication of Waverley in
+1814.
+
+Scott had got into the printing business with James Ballantyne, and
+then into the publishing business. His Lay of the Last Minstrel,
+Marmion, and Lady of the Lake--story poems as they were--were read like
+novels, and had brought him thousands of pounds. But his popularity
+was waning, and he needed some book to make good the losses of bad
+business investments. Waverley had been begun several years before, but
+as Ballantyne did not like what had been written, it was thrown into
+a drawer and forgotten. Scott now pulled it out and finished it. It
+was published, and made an instant success. The name of the author was
+withheld at first, because Scott was somewhat ashamed of being known
+as a novelist--he who was famous as a poet; and afterwards because of
+Scott’s humour, as he called it. Perhaps the mystery of the “Great
+Unknown” added some commercial value to the publications.
+
+Waverley is not one of Scott’s best. The hero is rather a disagreeable
+fellow, and the scenes are neither great nor memorable. But the book is
+noteworthy because it is the first of one of the most successful series
+of novels ever produced.
+
+The best of the Waverley novels is usually considered to be Ivanhoe,
+though many like Kenilworth, Old Mortality, or Quentin Durward better.
+
+Ivanhoe is a tale of the time of Richard I, called the Lion-hearted.
+Richard has been imprisoned on the continent of Europe, whither he had
+gone to take part in the Crusades. His brother is on the throne in his
+absence, and now is preparing to make himself king.
+
+The story opens with preparations for a grand tournament. Ivanhoe, the
+son of a Saxon lord, has secretly returned from the Holy Land, where
+he has served with Richard, and takes part in the tourney, winning
+the crown on the first day and choosing Rowena, his cousin, the Queen
+of Love. But he has seen and been fascinated by Rebecca, a beautiful
+Jewess, whose father had lent him armour. On the second day Ivanhoe is
+overcome, but he is saved by the entrance of a strange black knight, in
+reality Richard himself returned. The Black Knight wins the crown, but
+instantly disappears and leaves Ivanhoe to be adjudged the victor of
+the day.
+
+One of the most amusing scenes is that in the woods when the king
+feasts with Friar Tuck, the confessor of Robin Hood’s men, for Robin
+Hood and his outlaws play an important part in this story. One of the
+most dramatic scenes is the burning of the castle in which De Bracy has
+imprisoned the beautiful Rowena, the Jewess Rebecca, and the wounded
+Ivanhoe.
+
+Scott’s novels are filled with splendid descriptions, his characters
+are noble gentlemen and ladies, and he tells of historic events worth
+chronicling. They are sometimes too long; but it is easy to skip the
+less interesting passages. Scott can never be said to be tiresome.
+
+Kenilworth is a story of Leicester, Queen Elizabeth’s lover. He has
+married Amy Robsart; but that there may be no barrier to his marriage
+with the Queen, he causes Amy to be made away with. In the course of
+the story Queen Elizabeth visits the castle of Kenilworth, and we have
+a splendid description of the historic shows and games, as we had of
+the tournament in Ivanhoe. Our sympathies are with Amy Robsart, and the
+story of her death is intensely dramatic.
+
+Quite different is the story of Quentin Durward--a young Englishman
+in France in the days of Louis XI. Quentin was sent to escort a
+certain beautiful Isabelle and her aunt to the Bishop of Liege, on an
+understanding that a certain outlaw was to capture the girl and marry
+her. Quentin Durward succeeded in defending his charge, and after many
+adventures and escapes, was given the girl in marriage.
+
+To many the best of Scott’s novels are his Scottish stories. The
+best of these is Old Mortality, a strictly historical tale of the
+seventeenth century. But to many a more fascinating tale is the Bride
+of Lammermoor, with its pathetic story of Effie and Jeanie Deans. Other
+good Scotch novels of Scott’s are The Monastery, Redgauntlet and The
+Antiquary. Guy Mannering is an English historical story, in which Scott
+himself is said to figure as Alan Fairford. Other good novels are Robin
+Hood, Woodstock, The Abbot, The Heart of Midlothian, and The Pirate.
+The only poor stories he ever wrote are Count Robert of Paris and
+Castle Dangerous, both written when he was declining to his death and
+kept on writing merely in the hope that he might finish paying off his
+debts before he died.
+
+In all there are thirty-two of these books. No other English novelist
+has written so many that continue popular. Dumas is said to have
+written or attached his name to twelve hundred; but only three or four
+are considered very well worth reading to-day. Victor Hugo wrote one
+great novel, Les Miserables, but his next greatest, The Toilers of the
+Sea, is far below the first one. Balzac and Dickens alone have lists to
+compare with Scott’s.
+
+Scott’s novels are romantic and interesting. They are on the whole
+excellent history,--indeed their history is as good as that of
+Shakspere. Scott was a noble, generous, lovable man, and his books are
+as pure and great as he is. There is no fine character-drawing, no
+sentimental studies of women, no philosophy, no moralizing. But we
+see a splendid and varied company of gentlemen and ladies of historic
+Britain, dressed in all the picturesqueness, of their age, and passing
+through a series of scenes as romantic and exciting as gentlemen and
+ladies could ever participate in. There is nothing to be ashamed of,
+nothing to be wary of in Scott, and there is nothing that suggests
+vulgarity. No one can help loving, admiring, and respecting the man, or
+enjoying his novels.
+
+Scott’s own life is almost as romantic in a way as his novels. His
+father was a lawyer, and he entered that profession, but did little
+more than hold a number of salaried positions. His first book was a
+volume of old ballads which he had collected and partly rewritten. Then
+came the wonderfully successful poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel,
+and after that Marmion and The Lady of the Lake. He was only less
+popular as a narrative poet than Byron. But he became entangled in
+business investments with the brothers Ballentyne, old school friends
+of his, and saved himself and them from bankruptcy only by the lucky
+venture of Waverley, which immediately carried him to world-wide and
+lasting fame, and put him in the way of earning a million dollars by
+his writings. “Novelist, critic, historian, poet, the favorite of his
+age, read over the whole of Europe,” says Taine, “he was compared and
+almost equalled to Shakspere, had more popularity than Voltaire, made
+dressmakers and duchesses weep, and earned about £200,000.” It was
+his ambition to found a sort of feudal family, and on land which he
+purchased at Abbotsford he built a castle in imitation of the ancient
+knights, “with a tall tower at either end ... sundry zig-zag gables
+... a myriad of indentations and parapets and machiolated eaves; most
+fantistic waterspouts; labelled windows, not a few of them painted
+glass ... stones carved with innumerable heraldries.” Here he kept open
+house. But in 1825 his publisher, Constable, failed, carrying down the
+printing firm of James Ballantyne & Co., and Scott, because of his
+partnership interest, found himself liable for debts amounting to over
+half a million dollars. He immediately set about paying these off by
+his pen. For a Life of Napoleon he got $90,000, and for the novel of
+Woodstock he got $40,000. He exhausted himself in the effort, and died
+seven years later, owing only £30,000, which a publisher advanced on
+all his copyrights.
+
+He did not begin to write novels until he was forty-two, and then he
+turned them out with incredible speed. Waverley was written in three
+weeks, and another was written in “six weeks at Christmas.” He wrote
+thirty-two novels in sixteen years, besides doing various other work
+such as his Life of Napoleon.
+
+Taine summarizes his style as a novelist thus: “In history as in
+architecture he was bent on arranging points of view and Gothic
+halls. He had neither talent nor leisure to reach the depths of his
+characters.” And again, “After all, his characters, to whatever age he
+transfers them, are his neighbours, cannie farmers, vain lords, gloved
+gentlemen, young marriageable ladies, all more or less commonplace.”
+
+
+But the romantic novel was carried to its greatest heights of interest
+and excitement by Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo--especially Dumas.
+These two young Frenchmen had heard of Scott’s fame, and had read his
+novels, and they made up their minds that this was the popular line
+to follow. So each brought out a romantic play in Paris, which was
+successful. Thus the romantic movement was started in France; and it
+was not long before the novels began to appear, and were so popular
+that Dumas set up a sort of novel factory, where he had many people
+working for him writing novels for which he had orders. In all he
+turned out over twelve hundred.
+
+Next to Scott, Dumas is the great original historic novelist. His
+books are not such good history as Scott’s, but they are much more
+interesting. Yet there are comparatively few of the twelve hundred
+bearing the name of Dumas that one cares to read to-day.
+
+Of these the most characteristic is The Three Musketeers and its two
+sequels, Twenty Years After, and The Vicomte de Bragelonne.
+
+The three novels cover the period in France from 1625 to 1665, and
+every page is alive with duels, escapes, intrigues, and all sorts of
+French adventures. A country lad from Gascony named D’Artagnan comes up
+to Paris in search of adventure. He is riding a raw-boned yellow pony,
+and has three crowns in his pocket. The first day he gets into three
+duels, and in each case makes a friend of his antagonist. These three
+friends, called Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, follow him through all his
+adventures. All become great and powerful men in France. This is the
+point in which the great novelists differ from the less. They give us
+great men, while the little ones give us only common men.
+
+Dumas’s success with The Three Musketeers has led to many modern books
+of the same sort, the best of which are probably Stanley Weyman’s House
+of the Wolf, Under the Red Robe, and Gentleman of France, and Anthony
+Hope’s Prisoner of Zenda.
+
+But Dumas wrote one modern, semi-historical novel which has not been
+imitated so successfully, and if anything it is more famous than The
+Three Musketeers. It is The Count of Monte Cristo. (It really appeared
+before The Three Musketeers.)
+
+The hero is a mate of a ship, of which he hopes soon to become captain,
+and lover of a beautiful girl, whom he hopes soon to marry. The story
+opens in 1815. The hero is accused by his two rivals (one of whom
+wants the ship and the other the girl), of being engaged in carrying
+dangerous information to Napoleon, who is in exile on the island of
+Elba. He is thrown into prison, where he remains for twenty years.
+
+Among the prisoners is a fellow thought to be mad, who tells of a
+wonderful treasure hidden on the island of Monte Cristo, off the coast
+of Italy.
+
+Our hero escapes from prison, finds the treasure, and appears in the
+fashionable world as the rich and mysterious Count of Monte Cristo.
+
+His motive in life now is revenge upon those who had put him in prison.
+One is a rich banker. Another is a distinguished general. A third is an
+influential magistrate.
+
+The story is exciting and romantic in the extreme, and ends in tragic
+and dramatic pathos. Some think the gloomy ending spoils it; but if
+it has any fault it is that of being, like most of Dumas’s novels, a
+little too long.
+
+The stories already mentioned will give most persons reading enough
+of this kind; but if more is wanted, we might recommend The Queen’s
+Necklace and the three connected novels, Queen Margot (or Marguerite of
+Valois), The Lady of Monsoreau, and The Forty-five. Less interesting
+is The Memoirs of a Physician, for which Dumas made a study of
+hypnotism. Also Thackeray recommends a simple little story called The
+Black Tulip--which is so innocent any schoolgirl might read it without
+offense. The truth is, Dumas is seldom immoral, never indecent. To
+these add his two accounts of himself, his Memoirs and the story of the
+animals he loved, My Pets.
+
+Dumas’s father was the son of a marquis, who had gone to Hayti and
+married a negress. The novelist was therefore a quadroon. The young
+fellow came to Paris with nothing, made his fortune as a playwright
+(his income in one year was $200,000, it is said), became even more
+successful as a novelist, built a theatre and a chateau which he called
+Monte Cristo, contracted for forty novels in one year, ruined himself
+by his recklessness and gaieties, was reduced to poverty, and died with
+less than he began life with. Throughout his novels we find the same
+reckless gaiety, and this is the element which makes them so popular.
+At one extreme is Scott, the honest, the honourable, the faithful; at
+the other is Dumas, an adventurer, reckless, irresponsible, but good at
+heart and as much a genius as Scott.
+
+
+Victor Hugo is undoubtedly a far greater figure in French literature
+than Dumas. In France he is honoured as one of the greatest, if not the
+greatest, of French poets. He was an accomplished artist, and a man of
+strong and admirable character. Victor Hugo is a large figure in the
+French history of the nineteenth century, and his one great novel is
+a colossal monument to his fame that all may understand and read with
+intense interest.
+
+Born of a noble family in 1802, he went to Paris and at twenty
+published a volume of poems that laid the foundation of his literary
+and artistic reputation. In 1830 he, like Dumas, produced a successful
+play, and found himself established in French literature. The next
+year--long before Dumas thought of writing a story--he published Notre
+Dame de Paris, his first great novel. It is a many-sided story of Fate,
+centred about the famous old cathedral of Notre Dame, the “book” of
+the middle ages.
+
+Many years passed before Victor Hugo was again to appear as a novelist.
+He wrote plays and poems, and took part in politics. As a result of
+the revolution which brought Napoleon III. to the throne, Victor Hugo
+was forced into exile, and lived for a number of years in the British
+island of Guernsey. Here he wrote his one great, monumental novel, Les
+Miserables, which is as fascinating and romantic as it is great as a
+work of literary art and a portrayal of social conditions and a study
+of universal human nature. When it appeared in 1862 Dumas had made his
+fame and fortune and had fallen into poverty, Thackeray was dead, and
+Dickens had but a few years to live. Balzac and Poe were already gone
+some years, and Hawthorne had but two more years to live. In a way Les
+Miserables is a summary of all these.
+
+The principal character is Jean Valjean, a criminal who again and
+again builds up his little social position, only to see it crumble in
+an hour when his prison record is revealed. He wanders through Paris,
+and into the provinces of France, and stops on the battlefield of
+Waterloo. Everywhere he finds tragedy, human joy and suffering, and
+incidents that hold the attention breathless. Nothing seems forced or
+strange or unusual, yet everything is as dramatic as the most fanciful
+imaginations of Scott or Dumas. And like Dickens, he gave us a long
+role of notable characters.
+
+Les Miserables is an immense book, extending into six large volumes,
+and would require two or three months to read through carefully. It
+is a sort of library of fiction, to be compared to Balzac’s Comedie
+Humaine, or Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series of novels. Few will read it
+from preface to finis, but it does not need to be read as a whole, for
+every book, nearly every chapter, is fairly complete in itself.
+
+Hugo wrote only three other novels, Toilers of the Sea, which has some
+fine descriptions of life at the bottom of the ocean, Ninety-three, his
+last, and the Man Who Laughs, an inferior work.
+
+
+Though Eugene Sue is not reckoned a great novelist, two of his books
+which appeared when the fame of Dumas was at its height have continued
+to be read. They are the Wandering Jew and the Mysteries of Paris.
+The story of the Wandering Jew is based on the legend of the man at
+whose door the Saviour asked to rest His cross only to receive the
+reply “Go on!” “Thou shalt go on forever!” answered the Saviour, and
+the Jew became an eternal wanderer. One of his descendants turned
+Catholic to save his fortune, but his secret was discovered and his
+estate confiscated, all but a hundred and fifty thousand francs, which
+was left to accumulate for a hundred and fifty years, when it might be
+claimed by certain of his heirs. The story is largely concerned with
+the various ways in which the Jesuits hunt down all the heirs but a
+young priest who has made over to the society all his fortune. But
+they are defeated in the end. The book is written from the extreme
+Protestant point of view, and is a series of episodes and exciting
+adventures.
+
+
+In the romantic and historical school of Scott an important writer is
+the American James Fenimore Cooper. He first tried an English domestic
+novel, which he published at his own expense; but Scott, whose novels
+were then at the height of their popularity (1820) inspired him with
+different ambitions, and he wrote The Pilot to correct the nautical
+errors of Scott’s Pirate.
+
+Cooper wrote a large number of novels, but the only ones read to-day
+are those which describe American pioneer life. His characters are less
+real and individual than Scott’s even; but his fine pictures of the
+woods, the Indians, and the adventures of the early pioneers have never
+been surpassed.
+
+His first readable novel is The Spy, in which appears his one good
+character, Harvey Birch. The others of special interest are in the
+so-called Leatherstocking series, and are--
+
+The Pioneer, 1823.
+
+The Pilot, 1823.
+
+The Last of the Mohicans, 1826 (called his best).
+
+The Prairie, 1827.
+
+The Pathfinder, 1840.
+
+The Deerslayer, 1841.
+
+Wyandotte, 1843.
+
+The Redskins, 1846 (the least notable).
+
+
+Bulwer-Lytton was a prolific novelist, but only one of his stories
+remains to us as indisputably great. That is The Last Days of Pompeii,
+which we read for its history quite as much as for its fascinating
+story.
+
+Charles Kingsley a little later produced two good novels, Hypatia and
+Westward, Ho. Hypatia is an historical account of Egypt in the days
+when Alexandria was the flourishing city, and Hypatia is truly and
+learnedly drawn. The narrative is by no means so exciting as most other
+famous historical novels.
+
+Captain Frederick Marryat was popular in his day, but he seems to
+be little read in the present age. His most popular novel was Mr.
+Midshipman Easy, and The Phantom Ship is said to be the best sea novel
+ever written. The Pacha of Many Tales is a collection of most romantic
+and exciting short stories, told by one man, and probably the best
+worth reading of anything Marryat has left.
+
+The last of the great historical novelists was Charles Reade, whose
+Cloister and the Hearth is considered by many one of the greatest
+novels of this kind ever written. But the fame of this is shared by his
+Dickenesque stories Never Too Late to Mend, Hard Cash, and Put Yourself
+in His Place.
+
+Among modern historical novelists Gen. Lew Wallace with his Ben-Hur, a
+Tale of the Christ, and the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz with his
+Quo Vadis and other novels, are most likely to become classic.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER X.
+
+        _THE REALISTIC NOVELISTS--DICKENS, THACKERAY, BALZAC._
+
+
+The pendulum of human interest swings quickly from one side to the
+other. Within five years of the appearance of the last of the Waverley
+novels there appeared in England a novelist as great as Scott and in
+every way his direct antithesis. Scott was a splendid story-teller.
+With a swift brush he painted large scenes and large characters. His
+brilliant pageantry moved easily and steadily from the beginning to the
+end of more than thirty novels, most of which were published in three
+stately volumes. In 1835 came Dickens, with his disconnected sketches
+of ordinary types of Englishmen. His first great success, Pickwick, was
+written from week to week as it was published. The author never knew
+three chapters ahead what would happen to his characters; nor did it
+matter. He had his characters, he had Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller and
+the rest; what mattered anything else? As the story went on something
+would happen to them, and that was enough.
+
+And with Dickens we have an entirely different style of writing.
+The Waverley novels are written with more or less fine language,
+large words, sweeping phrases; Pickwick was a great bubbling mass
+of sentiment and emotion, pathos, humour, the cold feeling, the hot
+feeling, the shaky feeling, the melancholy feeling, the riotous
+feeling--one might go on forever. With every turn of his pen this new
+magician plays upon our heart-strings, possesses us, fills us, makes
+us laugh or cry at will. The very collocation of his words causes our
+flesh to quiver and the blood to leap in our veins, and holds our
+attention spell-bound. What Jane Austen did in her fine way, to the
+despair of Scott, Dickens did in his big, coarse, splashing way, and
+with ten times the genius.
+
+Dickens’s father was a poor man in the navy-pay office, at first with
+a yearly salary of £80. Micawber in David Copperfield was drawn from
+him. Even when he got as much as £350 a year he was always in debt, and
+finally landed in the Marshalsea, which Dickens so vividly describes in
+Little Dorrit.
+
+While still a child, Charles was sent to work in a blacking
+warehouse, described as the establishment of Murdstone & Grinby in
+David Copperfield. He had a terribly hard life of it. But after a
+while he was taken away and sent to school for a short time, finally
+studying shorthand and becoming a newspaper reporter of the debates in
+Parliament at a time when these were taken down verbatim.
+
+By the time he was twenty-four he was getting about thirty-five dollars
+a week. He tried a few sketches in a magazine (Sketches by Boz) which
+were successful in their way, and finally was asked by Chapman & Hall
+to write the text for some sporting pictures by a noted artist of the
+day. This turned out to be Pickwick, became instantly popular, and
+Dickens was a famous novelist before he was twenty-five. He wrote
+about twenty novels, and earned as much money as Scott (a million
+dollars), though many more copies of his novels have been published. He
+may be considered the most popular English novelist that ever wrote.
+
+Pickwick, Dickens’s first novel, is undoubtedly also his most humorous.
+It tells of the doings of a farcical club headed by Mr. Pickwick. But
+Pickwick’s servant, Sam Weller, is the most amusing character in it,
+and as a character probably the most famous in all Dickens’s works.
+
+Next to Pickwick in popularity, and by many liked much better, is David
+Copperfield. This is nothing less than a pathetic and intensely human
+autobiography of Dickens himself, with certain fictitious additions.
+David Copperfield is Charles Dickens (notice the reversed initials),
+Micawber is Dickens’s own father, and Dora was Dickens’s first love.
+Only a passionately sympathetic heart could have conceived this story,
+and only a man with an overflowing genius for work could have written
+it in the spontaneous and natural way that Dickens did.
+
+Third in the list of popularity is probably The Old Curiosity Shop, in
+which appears Little Nell, the description of whose pathetic death is
+found in every school reader. This volume also tells the story of Mr.
+Quilp, the dwarf, the Marchioness, and Dick Swiveller. Oliver Twist was
+written partly as an attack on workhouses in Dickens’s day. It tells
+us the story of a poor waif, and takes us among thieves, introducing
+us to the famous Fagin, Bill Sikes and Nancy. Little Dorrit is the
+story of the Marshalsea, the great debtors’ prison in which Dickens’s
+own father at one time resided. Dombey & Son tells the pathetic story
+of little Paul Dombey, the boy mate to Little Nell; Martin Chuzzlewit
+introduces us to the inimitable Pecksniff and family. Barnaby Rudge is
+a sort of detective story, telling of a murder and how it was found
+out. Bleak House and Nicholas Nickleby are also considered to be among
+the best of Dickens’s novels.
+
+By many his greatest is thought to be A Tale of Two Cities, an
+intensely dramatic historical novel of the French Revolution. It is
+entirely different from anything else Dickens ever wrote, yet the
+pathetic and sympathetic character-drawing makes it entirely unlike the
+historical novels of Scott or Dumas.
+
+His short Christmas stories are also among his best work, especially
+A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, and The Cricket on the Hearth. Either
+may be read in an hour or two. W. E. Henley considers Barbox Bros., a
+beautiful and simple story of a lame girl, a little child, and a man
+running away from his birthday, even better; but it is not found in
+most complete editions and only recently has been published in separate
+form.
+
+
+When the name of Dickens is mentioned that of Thackeray is also always
+on the tongue, yet there are large numbers even of the most refined
+people who do not find Thackeray as good reading as Dickens. It takes
+a quiet person, with a sense for the intellectual, the sarcastic and
+the ironical as opposed to the sentimental and humorous, a person
+with gentlemanly or ladylike instincts, to fall quite into sympathy
+with Thackeray. But those who love him, love him with an intensity
+surpassing their feeling for any other author. Thackeray penetrates
+life with his keen shafts. He is strong because of his reserves,
+Dickens because of his lack of reserve. Thackeray has polish and
+elegance of style, he is a master of the best English, and handles it
+with the ease and grace of inborn, hereditary skill. He could not have
+made such personal confessions as David Copperfield or Little Dorrit,
+he could not have laid the colour on with the indiscriminate profusion
+of Pickwick or the scenes describing Little Nell. He was in no sense
+a great emotional artist, for only now and then does he lose himself.
+Such passages as the death of Colonel Newcome are few in Thackeray.
+He is more often ridiculing foibles than gaining our sympathy for
+admirable sinners. He bites and stings; and unless we have a fine heart
+to perceive it we never become aware that he is winning too, that under
+his cynical perception of the truth of things in this world, especially
+in the aristocratic society which alone he knew and of which alone he
+wrote, he has a great and loving heart, a heart tender and forgiving,
+sympathetic even when he ridicules most unmercifully. It is this great
+loving heart, so hidden that it can be seen only by those who are truly
+his friends, that makes Thackeray, the belated exponent of a class in
+itself repulsive to the average democrat of to-day, in some respects
+the greatest writer of fiction in the English language. He has grave
+faults: he is always preaching; he is seldom very hopeful; he had no
+great belief in himself or his mission in the world. But language in
+his hands is almost a living and breathing entity, a polished, perfect
+instrument. And Thackeray teaches the great lessons of restraint,
+of patience and thoughtful study of life, of the little, nameless
+compensations which after all to most of us alone make life really
+worth living.
+
+Thackeray was born and brought up as an English gentleman. His parents
+were married and lived in India, belonging to the great British civil
+service there. But his father died when he was young, and his mother
+married again and took him to England. He had his small fortune, and
+little thought of worrying about money till in middle life he found
+his substance gone through injudicious speculation, and his pen the
+principal means by which he could earn a living. He married and had
+several daughters, but his wife became insane. This was the only cloud
+on his domestic life.
+
+Thackeray’s early books are not remarkable. Samuel Titmarsh and even
+Barry Lyndon are not and never have been popular. It was not until
+1848, a dozen years after Dickens (a year the younger man) had become
+famous with Pickwick, that Thackeray really took his place among the
+great English novelists on the publication of Vanity Fair. Thackeray’s
+novels never attained the sale that Dickens’s did, and never yielded
+anything like as much money.
+
+The sub-title of Vanity Fair was “A Novel Without a Hero.” The heroine,
+Becky Sharpe, however, was hero and heroine in one. It is said
+that Thackeray’s women are weak; but no finer portrayal of feminine
+character is to be found in modern literature than that of Becky Sharpe
+in Vanity Fair.
+
+The Newcomes is considered a greater novel by some. It presents much
+more lovable characters. Colonel Newcome being one of the most lovable
+in fiction; and Clive Newcome, and Ethel Newcome whom he loves, are of
+the same stuff as the well bred, educated people we see about us and
+number as our friends and most cherished companions.
+
+Pendennis is in the same vein as The Newcomes, and involves some of the
+same characters, but it is not so strong a novel by any means, though
+perhaps more sentimental.
+
+Henry Esmond is an historical novel, and may perhaps be considered the
+highest type of historical novel ever written. It never has had the
+popularity of Scott’s, but its characters are undoubtedly much stronger
+and more carefully drawn than any of his. Lady Castlewood and Beatrix
+are as real as if they had lived in the flesh, and yet as interesting
+as any a romancer ever imagined.
+
+His fifth great novel is The Virginians, a sort of sequel to Esmond.
+
+Only five novels! but they are of a kind to do for Thackeray what
+Les Miserables did for Victor Hugo as compared with the popular and
+productive Dumas. Thackeray and Hugo are both most admired, and rank
+highest in the literary firmament, in spite of the perennial popularity
+of Dickens and Dumas.
+
+We have now considered the great romantic artists, who cared for point
+of view, Gothic castles, and the events of history; and likewise the
+great domestic story tellers, who, like Dickens, have sacrificed plot
+and scene to character portrayal.
+
+We have reserved until the present a novelist of France who may
+ultimately be counted the greatest master of modern fiction. He was a
+contemporary of Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, but he took no part in
+the romantic movement. Indeed, the critics of his own day would have
+nothing to do with him. His works, far more numerous than Scott’s and
+almost as bulky, sold in sufficient numbers to enable him to pay the
+debts his lack of business experience caused him to contract in various
+speculations; but even his own fellow citizens of Tours snubbed him so
+unmercifully that in sorrow he decided not to give to that town his
+large and valuable library, as he had intended to do. Only recently
+have his books been adequately translated into English, and now only a
+portion are accessible. He is the last great classic to come upon the
+stage; and the most thoughtful young writers of to-day whisper among
+themselves that the Master is Balzac.
+
+Victor Hugo, Dumas, George Sand, the representatives of the romantic
+movement, are fascinating story-tellers, but they are not true to human
+nature. Their works abound in glaring faults in the grammar of human
+life. They were so wrapped up in the thrills their tales were to excite
+that they had small time to think seriously about the minuter facts.
+They have never analysed the principles of life. What observation
+chanced to bring them they used in the most effective way; and as we
+read Les Miserables and Consuelo we are shocked at every point by the
+inconsistency of the characters, the false ring of the speeches they
+make and the acts they perform. The colour has been laid on thick and
+hot, and flames with overpowering brilliancy; but the drawing will not
+bear close inspection.
+
+In Scott we find no such inaccuracies of characterization, however
+many faults of grammar there may be. The Englishman is a master at
+characterization, and in no great English novelists do we find the
+inaccuracies of thought and feeling which characterized the French
+romancers. But in all Scott’s pageantry, with his hundreds of figures,
+we find but relatively few types, and even they are not very profound
+or wonderful. They are the common, everyday men Scott knew, dressed up
+in the clothes of history and romance. And though they are all true
+enough as far as they go, the same type appears again and again with
+a different feather in his cap and a fresh name to be hailed by. And
+Dickens and Thackeray have drawn but a few types, those they themselves
+had come personally in contact with and known by habit and instinct.
+These they have immortalized, and repeated often enough for us to
+understand them in all their phases. The types in their books are drawn
+unconsciously. They were no deep students of the varieties of human
+nature, nor of the underlying principles of life. Their time and effort
+were devoted to the art of representation, in which, each in his own
+peculiar line, they excelled all other men.
+
+But Balzac essayed to write the whole Comedy of Humanity (he called
+his books the Comedie Humaine). He takes his characters one after the
+other, beginning with Parisian life, and then taking up the life of
+the provinces, political life, military life, and in each presenting a
+series of characters that accurately represent the historical types of
+his own age in France. He is a Frenchman, his characters and his ideals
+are French, and he omits the innocent lovely rose of English purity:
+he writes no idylls. But a person with broad mind and catholic tastes
+cannot help feeling the masterly touch.
+
+His personal history is that of a worker. Before he was thirty he had
+published a dozen novels to which he did not attach his name. They were
+for practice. Then he came out with The Chouans, which attracted some
+attention. In the next few years he wrote and gave to the world some
+ninety compositions long and short, mostly full-fledged books.
+
+His friends had told him he had no talent, and his native town never
+honoured him; but by industry alone he overcame all difficulties, and
+by sheer force of character took his place among the great novelists
+of his age. Most of the money he earned was devoted to paying off his
+debts; and when that was accomplished and he had married the lady he
+loved, he died.
+
+Not all of Balzac’s novels will be liked by the English reader, and
+they differ immensely in subject, character, and interest.
+
+The most popular of his stories, perhaps, because it treats of the
+rotten though dramatic life of Paris, is Père Goriot, the story of
+a simple old man whose daughters become fashionable, and to whose
+passions he is made to minister, while his own comforts in life are
+heartlessly sacrificed.
+
+Rivaling Père Goriot as Balzac’s masterpiece is Eugenie Grandet, a
+story of country life utterly devoid of the excitement with which the
+Parisian story abounds. Eugenie is the daughter of a rich miser, who
+deprives her and her mother almost of the necessities of life. She
+meets and learns to love her cousin, Charles Grandet. He goes to the
+West Indies where he begins to build his fortunes with the savings
+Eugenie has given him. But the girl’s mother dies, and then her father,
+and she is left a rich heiress. Not knowing this, Charles writes asking
+her to release him that he may marry an heiress. Eugenie never thinks
+of her own sacrifice, but gives him his liberty, and even secretly pays
+his father’s debts lest they hamper him in his career. She ends her
+life in works of philanthropy.
+
+It is a simple story, but told with the hard exactness of fate and
+truth, and it is this profound truth that makes it appeal to us so
+powerfully.
+
+Many are very fond of The Country Doctor. The first half of the book
+tells the simple life and good works of this remarkable man; but the
+intense interest of the story is in the recital of the romantic early
+life of this strange man--his own story of himself which fills the
+second half of the book.
+
+Cousin Pons tells the story of a collector of curios, for whose
+property various relatives are intriguing. Cousine Bette teaches us
+the lengths to which a Parisian middle-class family will go to get
+the money to maintain their respectability, and the catastrophes
+which are likely to follow when character is rotten at the bottom.
+Madame de Langeais is one of the shorter and more exciting stories of
+Parisian love. César Birroteau portrays the typical life of a Parisian
+lawyer, and The House of Nucingen that of a Parisian banker, while in
+The Illustrious Gaudissart we have the French drummer or travelling
+salesman.
+
+In still another series of novels, much less generally read, Balzac
+goes into philosophy and even the mysticism of Swedenborg. The most
+philosophic of these novels is Louis Lambert, the most mystical and
+Swedenborgian is Seraphita, the story of an angel, so to speak. The
+Magic Skin is symbolistic, and The Search for the Absolute gives us
+most realistically the mystic and self-sacrificing life of an inventor.
+
+
+Zola has attempted to do for his time what Balzac did for his, and in
+stories of the Rougon-Macquart family tells us the life histories of
+as varied a series of characters. The thing that made Balzac great,
+however, is his profound knowledge of human nature and the laws of
+human life, while Zola is bent on telling the thrilling stories he has
+found in different classes of society which, as a journalist, he has
+investigated.
+
+Balzac and Zola handle contemporary life in much the same spirit that
+the romantic novelists handle the life of a past age; but Balzac
+is also a realistic student of character, and the interest in his
+characters predominates over the interest in his subjects and scenes.
+He is as much a master of description, however, as Scott or Victor
+Hugo. But much of Balzac’s and Zola’s realism is distasteful to the
+English or American reader. To be appreciated they must be read
+intellectually and not emotionally.
+
+
+Among the great realists, or novelists of character and domestic life,
+we must include the women who have written fiction. Of these the
+greatest is George Eliot, whose novels rank below those of Dickens and
+Thackeray only because they are lacking in humour and fun. They are
+very serious, but they give us women as they really are in heart and
+soul and emotion. The best of George Eliot’s novels is Middlemarch, the
+story of an English country village and especially of an interesting
+educated young woman, Dorothea Casaubon. But there are other and almost
+equally interesting quiet English characterizations. More dramatic
+in its plot is Adam Bede, which tells the story of a girl who had an
+illegitimate child which she destroyed. The Mill on the Floss begins
+by realistically describing the everyday life of two children, a boy
+and a girl, and many will find the first half of the book very dull and
+commonplace. The last half is dramatic enough, however, to make up
+for the dullness of the first part. Daniel Deronda is considered less
+successful, though Silas Marner is a classic. It is a shorter story,
+of a certain phase of English country life. These are practically all
+of George Eliot’s works, the two or three other books being hardly
+fascinating enough to hold the modern reader.
+
+To many Jane Austen is greater even than George Eliot. She wrote in the
+early part of the century, even before the appearance of the Waverley
+novels; but her stories are read as much to-day as they ever were.
+They are fine and exceedingly true portrayals of the uneventful but
+interesting heart life of a number of different young women in English
+country villages. Some consider Emma her greatest story; but it is
+less interesting than Sense and Sensibility (a study of two girls, one
+representing sense and the other sensibility) and Pride and Prejudice
+(the story of the marrying off of five daughters, one of whom is
+especially interesting and is the heroine). Jane Austen is notable in
+that she has a lively though quiet sense of humour that runs through
+all her work.
+
+Another charming, simple, and rather amusing study of English village
+life is Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford, a book well worth reading if one is
+interested in the unheroic struggles and devotions of women.
+
+Of modern writers in this style, Mary Wilkins is probably the best, her
+short stories being superior to her novels.
+
+There are two women’s novels entirely different from any that had gone
+before or that have come after. They are Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
+and Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.
+
+The lives of these girls was sad and unfortunate. They belonged to a
+respectable family, and throughout maintained their respectability
+shut in by conventionality and suffering from poverty. Jane Eyre is
+a girl whose mind and not her face was her fortune. The story is in
+reality the autobiography of the inner tempestuous life of Charlotte
+Bronte herself. Jane is governess in the family of an eccentric man
+named Rochester, who was at one time the hero of half the women of
+England. He loved Jane and asked her to marry him, but at the altar it
+is discovered that he has a wife living, whom he had looked on as dead
+because she was insane. So the lovers are parted to be united only in a
+tragedy.
+
+Wuthering Heights is a story of love and revenge within the
+conventionalities of English higher-class life, and extends over two
+generations. As a study of love and the far-reaching effects of its
+disappointment, it is a powerful though gloomy story, and by no means
+so finely artistic as Jane Eyre.
+
+Another woman’s work in a class by itself is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
+Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which to this day is found in the list of half dozen
+best selling books, equaling the sales of the latest current novel.
+It is a wonderfully humorous, pathetic, and sympathetic picture of
+Southern life before the war, and probably as exact as most historical
+fiction, though many Southerners violently resent its claim to
+truthfulness.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XI.
+
+            _THE SHORT STORY--POE, HAWTHORNE, MAUPASSANT._
+
+
+As we have seen, the original form of modern fiction was that of the
+short story--the tavern tale rendered in classic language by Boccaccio
+in The Decameron and by the unknown author of The Arabian Nights.
+
+All the great novelists wrote more or less short stories. Irving’s
+“Rip Van Winkle” and “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” are classics. Balzac
+was a master of the short story, and in “A Passion in the Desert” and
+“La Grande Bretèche” we have two of the most powerful stories ever
+written. Dickens and Thackeray are also short story tellers of rare
+accomplishments. “A Christmas Carol,” “The Chimes,” and “The Cricket on
+the Hearth” are among Dickens’s best work; and scattered through his
+novels we will find such complete narratives as “The Five Sisters of
+York” in Nicholas Nickleby. “The Princess’s Tragedy” is a chapter in
+Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon.
+
+But Edgar Allan Poe is the father of the modern short story, the short
+story as a refined work of art rather than merely a simple short
+narrative.
+
+There is an impression that all of Poe’s stories are gruesome, but
+this is not true. The most famous of his narratives are his three
+great detective stories, “The Gold-Bug,” “The Murders in the Rue
+Morgue,” and “The Purloined Letter.” Only the second has the elements
+of terror in it. “The Gold-Bug” is the original treasure-finding and
+cipher-reading story. “The Purloined Letter” and “The Murders in the
+Rue Morgue” introduce Dupin, the French amateur detective, father of
+Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes (who by the way is an excellent son).
+That Poe was a real and not a sham detective he demonstrated in
+his analysis of the real case of Marie Roget, in which he used the
+newspaper reports of a New York mystery and came to conclusions that
+were afterward verified.
+
+Another kind of story which Poe originated was the tale of imaginary
+science. His stories of this kind are none of them gruesome, with the
+single exception of “The Case of M. Valdemar.” The first story he wrote
+of this kind was “Ms. Found in a Bottle.” This was followed by “Hans
+Pfaal’s Voyage to the Moon,” “A Descent into the Maëlstrom,” “Mellonta
+Tauta,” and “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherezade.”
+
+A still different type of story is his prose poems such as the
+beautiful “Eleonora,” and his studies in landscape such as “The Island
+of the Fay,” “The Domain of Arnheim,” and “Landor’s Cottage.”
+
+His terrible and thrilling stories, by which he is best known, have
+never been surpassed. The best is “William Wilson,” the story of a
+double; but still more gruesome are “The Black Cat,” “Berenice,” “The
+Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Cask of Amontillado.” Less horrible and
+unnatural, but curious and interesting, are “The Man of the Crowd,”
+“Hop-Frog,” and “The Pit and the Pendulum.” His “Fall of the House of
+Usher” is unique.
+
+Poe’s life was one of hardship and unhappiness, and he was terribly
+libelled by his biographer Griswold, who hated him for the scathing
+reviews Poe had written of his books. So the great poet and
+story-writer has been painted in the popular mind much blacker than he
+really is, according to the latest and most authentic evidence. But
+he was certainly the most original genius America has produced. When
+he had made a success in one kind of story he did not care to go on
+writing more stories of that kind, but originated another type.
+
+Hawthorne is better known as a novelist, the author of The Scarlet
+Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, Blithedale Romance, and Marble
+Faun, than as a short-story writer; but he alone among Americans has
+approached Poe as a teller of tales. His reputation was first made
+by two volumes of short stories called Twice-Told Tales, among which
+are the deeply interesting “Gray Champion,” “The Great Carbuncle,”
+“David Swan,” “Howe’s Masquerade,” “The Ambitious Guest,” and “The
+Three-fold Destiny.” Many like the Mosses from an Old Manse better,
+considering “The Birthmark” his masterpiece. “Drowne’s Wooden Image”
+is a remarkable tale, and “Rapaccini’s Daughter” (the girl who was
+brought up on poisons and whose kiss was poison) is most weird. The
+most popular story for children is “The Snow Image,” and “The Great
+Stone Face” (which I like best of all) appeals alike to young and old.
+“Ethan Brand” is another good story in this volume, and children will
+be fascinated by “Little Daffydowndilly.”
+
+Hawthorne’s stories are all more or less fantastic allegories, written
+in unexceptionably beautiful and perfect English. The author was a
+recluse, and his stories are stories of loneliness in one form or
+another. Those who like solitude will be very fond of him; those who
+like gaiety, liveliness, and society, will find him depressing.
+
+The other great American short story writers include Bret Harte, author
+of “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat”; Edward
+Everett Hale, author of “The Man Without a Country”; Frank Stockton,
+author of “The Lady or the Tiger?” and Mary E. Wilkins. With these may
+be included Thomas Hardy’s “Life’s Little Ironies,” which are full of
+fun.
+
+More perfect in his art than either Poe or Hawthorne is the modern
+writer Guy de Maupassant. His stories are most of them very short; but
+not a word is wasted, and they tell as much as stories much longer.
+His most perfect tales are not accessible in English because they
+are slightly improper. The two best are said to be “Boule de Suif”
+(Butter-Ball) and “La Maison Tellier” (Madame Tellier’s Girls, or The
+Tellier Establishment). The thirteen tales translated by Jonathan
+Sturgis in “The Odd Number” are unexceptionable, however, and intensely
+interesting.
+
+The French have perfected the artistic short story or _conte_ as
+they call it, and there are many good tales in that language. One of
+the most famous is the old-fashioned “Paul and Virginia,” a simple
+rustic love story, and Prosper Mérimée, the contemporary of Balzac,
+wrote some excellent tales. One might mention also Daudet with his
+“Pope’s Mule,” Gauthier, and Zola’s “Attack on the Mill.”
+
+But far stronger stories than those just mentioned are the great
+Russian tales of Tolstoi and Turgenev. Tolstoi is better known by his
+great novels, “The Cossacks,” “War and Peace,” and “Anna Karénina.”
+But “The Long Exile,” “What Men Live By,” and other short tales are
+unsurpassed for dramatic force. Turgenev’s “First Love” is a rather
+long short story, but an intensely interesting one. “A Lear of the
+Steppes” is regarded as his classic. But there are others equally good.
+
+Of modern writers of short stories Kipling is doubtless the greatest;
+but his early books such as “Plain Tales from the Hills,” “Soldiers
+Three,” “Phantom Rickshaw,” “Wee Willie Winkie,” etc., are probably
+better than the later ones, though in the later books a strong story
+will be found here and there.
+
+No greater short story has been published in modern times than
+Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” and Gilbert Parker has published
+some excellent short stories in “Pierre and His People.”
+
+NOTE.--Many of the stories here referred to may be found in “A
+Selection from the World’s Greatest Short Stories,” edited by Sherwin
+Cody.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XII.
+
+                  _CLASSIC STORIES FOR YOUNG PEOPLE._
+
+
+The boy or girl who has grown up without reading Robinson Crusoe, the
+Arabian Nights and Gulliver’s Travels is to be pitied; but it is to be
+presumed that there are few such. These books are good alike for young
+and old.
+
+For young children fairy tales are usually considered the first to
+become familiar with, and of these the best are Grimm’s and Hans
+Christian Andersen’s. There are many volumes variously edited, and
+all are fairly good. A modern fairy tale that is also a classic is
+Kingsley’s Water Babies, and even better are Lewis Carroll’s Alice in
+Wonderland and Kipling’s Jungle Book.
+
+There are also Æsop’s Fables.
+
+But when boys and girls get a little older they want to find what is
+to them a really good book. I know none better than Louisa M. Alcott’s
+Little Women. It is the story of four girls and a boy; but boys will
+like it almost as well as the girls will.
+
+Boys will be especially interested in the lives of great men, and of
+these none is better than Franklin’s Autobiography. He tells just how
+he worked, and what he did, and how he succeeded, and tells it in
+simple, natural English. And next to this one will like a good life of
+Washington or Lincoln, of which there are many.
+
+Hawthorne wrote many good stories for young people, and of these the
+simplest are his Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales from the ancient
+Greek, and his Biographical Stories of Great Men. But readers a little
+older will like even better such stories as “The Snow-Image,” “The
+Great Stone Face,” etc.
+
+There is a remarkable book not very much known, entitled Moby-Dick, or
+the Great White Whale, by Herman Melville. It is not all as interesting
+as the last part, in which this giant whale named Moby-Dick is hunted
+down and killed, though not until he has sunk the ship and boats of the
+men who have pursued him and taken his life.
+
+For adventure there are no more classic books than Kingsley’s Hereward
+the Wake, and Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and David
+Balfour, and some will wish to read his beautiful Child’s Garden of
+Verse. Not quite so literary but equally interesting are The Boys of
+Seventy-Six, Green Mountain Boys, Scottish Chiefs, Thaddeus of Warsaw,
+Dana’s Two Years before the Mast, and The Swiss Family Robinson.
+
+Last of all we must mention Tom Brown’s Schooldays, which, though very
+English, is very interesting. John Halifax, Gentleman, by Miss Mulock,
+is also a fine English story.
+
+Though not stories precisely, Lamb’s Tales from Shakspere and Dickens’s
+Child’s History of England are quite as fascinating as if they were
+genuine stories.
+
+In these days the Bible seems to be neglected somewhat, and not all
+children are familiar with the fine stories for young people with
+which the Old Testament is filled. There are, to be sure, uninteresting
+genealogies and other things mixed in with the stories; but there is
+nothing in Grimm or Andersen to equal the stories of Adam and Eve, of
+Cain and Abel, of Noah and the Flood, of David and Goliath, of Daniel
+in the Lion’s Den, and of Jonah and the Whale.
+
+
+
+
+                      INDEX OF RECOMMENDED BOOKS
+
+                             (With Dates)
+
+
+The following are the books the author would choose for a small public
+or private library for general reading. Of course this list should be
+supplemented by a judicious selection of books on history, science, and
+economics, as well as works of reference:
+
+               Books for young people are marked “juv.”
+
+
+  Joseph Addison (1672-1719), 74
+    Essays from the Spectator.
+
+  Louise M. Alcott (1833-1888), 122
+    Little Women (juv.)
+
+  Alice in Wonderland, (juv.), by Lewis Carroll, 122
+
+  Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875), 122
+    Fairy Tales (juv.)
+
+  Æsop’s Fables (75 B. C.) (juv.), 122
+
+  Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), 64, 79
+    Culture and Anarchy.
+    Poems.
+
+  Arabian Nights (1450-1704-’07) (juv.), 88
+
+  Jane Austen (1775-1817), 115
+    Sense and Sensibility.
+    Pride and Prejudice.
+    Emma.
+
+  Francis Bacon (1561-1626), 74
+    Essays.
+
+  Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), 100
+    The Country Doctor.
+    Eugenie Grandet.
+    Père Goriot.
+    The Duchess de Langeais.
+    The Alkahest.
+    César Birotteau.
+    Cousin Pons.
+
+  J. M. Barrie (1860- ), 80
+    The Little Minister.
+    A Window In Thrums.
+    Sentimental Tommy.
+    Tommy and Grizel.
+
+  Bible, 123
+
+  R. D. Blackmore (1825-1900)
+    Lorna Doone.
+
+  Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1792)
+
+  Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855), 115
+    Jane Eyre
+
+  Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)
+    Poems
+
+  Robert Browning (1812-1889), 58
+    Poems
+
+  William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), 61
+    Poems
+
+  Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), 100
+    The Last Days of Pompeii.
+
+  John Bunyan (1628-1688), 84
+    Pilgrim’s Progress.
+
+  Robert Burns (1759-1796), 62
+    Poems.
+
+  George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), 61
+    Poems
+
+  Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), 76
+    Essays.
+
+  Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616), 84
+    Don Quixote.
+
+  Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain) (1835- )
+    Innocents Abroad
+    Huckleberry Finn (juv.)
+    Joan of Arc (juv.)
+
+  S. T. Coleridge (1772-1834), 64
+    Poems
+
+  James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), 100
+    The Spy (juv.)
+    The Last of the Mohicans.
+    The Prairie.
+    The Pathfinder.
+    The Deerslayer.
+
+  Dinah Maria Craik (Miss Mulock) (1826-1887), 123
+    John Halifax, Gentleman (juv.)
+
+  Richard Henry Dana (1815-1882), 123
+    Two Years Before the Mast (juv.)
+
+  Daniel Defoe (1661-1731), 84
+    Robinson Crusoe (juv.)
+
+  Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859), 75
+    Confessions of an English Opium Eater.
+    The English Mail Coach.
+
+  Charles Dickens (1812-1870), 102
+    Pickwick.
+    Oliver Twist.
+    Old Curiosity Shop.
+    A Christmas Carol.
+    The Cricket on the Hearth (juv.)
+    Dombey & Son.
+    David Copperfield (juv.)
+    Little Dorrit.
+    A Tale of Two Cities.
+
+  Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)
+    Vivian Grey.
+
+  Sir A. Conan Doyle (1859- ), 118
+    Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
+
+  Alexandre Dumas (1808-1870), 94
+    The Count of Monte Cristo.
+    The Three Musketeers.
+    Twenty Years After.
+    The Vicomte de Bragelonne.
+    The Black Tulip.
+
+  George Eliot (pseud.) (1819-1880), 114
+    Adam Bede.
+    Middlemarch.
+    Mill on the Floss.
+    Romola.
+    Silas Marner.
+
+  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), 76
+    Essays.
+
+  Henry Fielding (1707-1754), 85
+    Tom Jones.
+
+  Edward FitzGerald (1809-1883), 64
+    Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
+
+  Benj. Franklin (1706-1790)
+    Autobiography (juv.)
+    Poor Richard’s Almanac.
+
+  Mrs. Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810-1865), 115
+    Cranford.
+
+  Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774), 86
+    Vicar of Wakefield.
+    The Deserted Village.
+    She stoops to Conquer (play).
+
+  Green Mountain Boys.
+    By Elisa F. Pollard (juv.)
+
+  Grimm Brothers (1785-1863, 1786-1859), 122
+    Fairy Tales (juv.)
+
+  Edward Everett Hale (1822- ), 120
+    A Man Without a Country (juv.)
+
+  Thomas Hardy (1840- )
+    Far From the Madding Crowd.
+    Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
+
+  Bret Harte (1839-1902), 120
+    The Luck of Roaring Camp.
+    The Outcasts of Poker Flat.
+
+  Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), 119, 122
+    Twice-Told Tales.
+    House of the Seven Gables.
+    The Scarlet Letter.
+    Blithedale Romance.
+    Mosses from an Old Manse.
+    Wonder Stories (juv.)
+    Tanglewood Tales (juv.)
+
+  Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894), 61, 80
+    Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.
+    Poems.
+
+  Thomas Hughes (1828-1896), 123
+    Tom Brown’s Schooldays (juv.)
+
+  Victor Hugo (1802-1885), 97
+    Notre Dame.
+    Les Miserables.
+    Toilers of the Sea.
+
+  Washington Irving (1783-1859), 117
+    The Sketch-Book.
+    The Alhambra.
+    Knickerbocker’s History of New York.
+
+  John Keats (1795-1821), 61
+    Poems.
+
+  Rudyard Kipling (1865- ), 121
+    Soldiers Three, etc.
+    Jungle Book (juv.)
+    Kim.
+    Captains Courageous.
+
+  Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), 101, 122
+    Hypatia.
+    Westward, Ho!
+    Hereward the Wake (juv.)
+    Water Babies (juv.)
+
+  Charles Lamb (1775-1834), 75
+    Essays.
+    Tales from Shakspere (with Mary Lamb) (juv.)
+
+  Alain René Le Sage (1668-1747), 87
+    Gil Blas.
+
+  Charles Lever (1806-1872)
+    Charles O’Malley.
+
+  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), 54
+    Poems (juv.)
+    Evangeline.
+    Hiawatha (juv.)
+    Courtship of Miles Standish.
+
+  James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)
+    Poems.
+
+  Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), 77
+    Essays.
+    Lays of Ancient Rome (juv.)
+
+  Frederick Marryat (1792-1848)
+    Pacha of Many Tales.
+    The Phantom Ship.
+
+  Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893), 120
+    The Odd Number.
+
+  Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (121-180 A. D.).
+
+  Herman Melville (1819-1891), 123
+    Moby-Dick (juv.)
+
+  George Meredith (1828- )
+    The Ordeal of Richard Feveral.
+    Diana of the Crossways.
+
+  John Milton (1608-1674), 63
+    Poems.
+    Paradise Lost.
+
+  Donald Grant Mitchell (1822- ), 80
+    Reveries of a Bachelor, by Ik Marvel.
+
+  Gilbert Parker (1862- ), 121
+    Pierre and His People.
+    Seats of the Mighty.
+    Right of Way.
+
+  Paul and Virginia. By Bernardin de St. Pierre (1788)
+
+  Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), 61, 117
+    Best Tales.
+    Best Poems and Essays.
+
+  Plutarch’s Lives (about 80 A. D.) (juv.)
+
+  Charles Reade (1814-1884), 101
+    Cloister and the Hearth.
+    It’s Never Too Late to Mend.
+
+  John Ruskin (1819-1900), 77
+    Sesame and Lilies.
+    Crown of Wild Olive.
+    Modern Painters.
+
+  Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), 88
+    Guy Mannering.
+    Old Mortality.
+    The Antiquary.
+    Rob Roy.
+    The Heart of Midlothian.
+    The Bride of Lammermoor.
+    Ivanhoe.
+    The Monastery.
+    Kenilworth.
+    Quentin Durward.
+
+  William Shakspere (1564-1616), 65
+    Plays and Sonnets.
+
+  Scottish Chiefs, by Jane Porter.
+
+  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), 61
+    Poems.
+
+  Henry Sienkiewicz (1845- ), 101
+    Quo Vadis.
+
+  Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), 121
+    Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
+    Treasure Island (juv.)
+    Prince Otto (juv.)
+
+  Frank Stockton (1834-1902), 120
+    The Lady or the Tiger?
+
+  Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), 116
+    Uncle Tom’s Cabin (juv.)
+
+  Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), 74
+    Gulliver’s Travels (juv.)
+
+  The Swiss Family Robinson (juv.), by J. R. Wyss.
+
+  Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), 57
+    Poems.
+
+  Wm. Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), 105
+    Vanity Fair.
+    Pendennis.
+    Henry Esmond.
+    The Newcomes.
+
+  Count Leo Tolstoi (1828- ), 121
+    War and Peace.
+    Anna Karénina.
+    The Long Exile and other stories.
+
+  Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883), 121
+    Short Stories.
+
+  Lew Wallace (1827-1905), 101
+    Ben-Hur.
+
+  Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
+    Poems.
+
+  John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892), 61
+    Poems.
+
+  Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman (1862- ), 115, 120
+    A New England Nun.
+    A Humble Romance and other short stories.
+
+  William Wordsworth (1770-1850), 62
+    Poems.
+
+  Emile Zola (1840-1902), 113
+    The Downfall.
+    Money.
+    Drink.
+
+
+
+
+                          SUPPLEMENTARY LIST
+
+
+Of titles suggested partly by Mr. Fred H. Hild, of the Chicago Public
+Library, and partly by Mr. W. I. Fletcher, editor of the American
+Library Association’s Index to General Literature and Librarian of
+Amherst College.
+
+               Books for young people are marked “juv.”
+
+  Aldrich, T. B.
+    Story of a Bad Boy (juv.)
+
+  Barrie, J. M.
+    Margaret Ogilvie.
+
+  Bellamy, Edward
+    Looking Backward.
+
+  Besant, Walter
+    All Sorts and Conditions of Men.
+
+  Bjornson
+    Arne; and The Fisher Lassie.
+
+  Black
+    The Princess of Thule.
+
+  Bowker, R. R.
+    The Arts of Life.
+
+  Brace, C. L.
+    Gesta Christi.
+
+  Brown, John
+    Rab and his friends, and Other Dogs and Men (juv.)
+
+  Bullfinch, Thos.
+    The Age of Chivalry (juv.)
+    The Age of Fable (juv.)
+
+  Bulwer-Lytton
+    My Novel.
+    Rienzi.
+    Eugene Aram.
+    The Caxtons.
+
+  Burroughs, John
+    Fresh Fields (juv.)
+    Locusts and Wild Honey.
+
+  Carlyle
+    Sartor Resartus.
+    Heroes and Hero-Worship.
+
+  Clemens (Mark Twain)
+    The Prince and the Pauper.
+    Tom Sawyer (juv.)
+
+  Collins, Wilkie
+    The Moonstone.
+
+  Emerson, R. W.
+    Representative Men.
+
+  Creasy, Edward S., Sir
+    Fifteen Decisive Battles.
+
+  Curtis, George W.
+    Prue and I.
+
+  Daudet
+    Tartarin of Tarascon.
+
+  Doyle
+    The White Company.
+
+  Dumas
+    The Queen’s Necklace.
+
+  Eggleston, Edward
+    The Hoosier School-Master (juv.)
+
+  Field, Eugene
+    A Little Book of Profitable Tales.
+    A Little Book Western Verse.
+
+
+
+
+                         =TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES=
+
+Simple typographical errors have been silently corrected; unbalanced
+quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and
+otherwise left unbalanced.
+
+Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant
+preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not
+changed.
+
+Inconsistent hyphens left as printed.
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76097 ***
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+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76097 ***</div>
+
+
+<figure class="figcenter width500" id="cover" style="width: 1856px;">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" width="1856" height="2560" alt="This books is  is a guide to purposeful reading, stressing classic literature, moral development, and self-education for personal growth and cultural refinement.">
+</figure>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="Sherwin_Codys_Works"><i>Sherwin Cody’s Works</i></h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="nindc">THE ART OF WRITING AND SPEAKING THE<br>
+ ENGLISH LANGUAGE</p>
+
+<div class="flex-center">
+<ul><li><span style="margin-left: 2em;">Vol. I.—Word-Study.</span></li>
+
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;">Vol. II.—Grammar and Punctuation.</span></li>
+
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;">Vol. III.—Composition and Rhetoric.</span></li>
+
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;">Vol. IV.—Constructive Rhetoric: Part I. Literary</span></li>
+<li>Journalism; Part II. Short Story Writing; Part III.</li>
+<li>Creative Composition.</li>
+
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;">Four volumes in a box, $2; single volumes, 75c.</span></li>
+
+<li>  STORY-WRITING AND JOURNALISM (same as</li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;">Constructive Rhetoric).</span></li>
+
+<li>  DICTIONARY OF ERRORS (Grammar, Letter Writing,</li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;">Words Mispronounced, Words Misspelled,</span></li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;">Words Misused). Uniform with above. Price, 75c.</span></li>
+
+<li>  GOOD ENGLISH FORM BOOK IN BUSINESS LETTER</li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;">WRITING, with Exercises consisting of facsimile</span></li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;">letters in two colors. 12mo, cloth. Price, $1.</span></li>
+
+<li>  HOW TO READ AND WHAT TO READ (Vol. I.</li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;">of the Nutshell Library). Price, 75c.</span></li>
+
+<li>  THE TOUCHSTONE: Monthly humorous magazine,</li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;">edited by Sherwin Cody. Price, 20c. a year.</span></li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="r5">
+
+<div class="flex-center">
+<ul><li>  COMPLETE TRAINING COURSE IN BUSINESS</li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;">CORRESPONDENCE: 48 special lessons on How</span></li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;">to Write Letters that Pull (the Cody System).</span></li>
+
+<li>  COMPLETE TRAINING COURSE IN WRITING</li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;">FOR PUBLICATION: Analytic lecture, 20 letters</span></li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;">on Human Nature and Making Money by the Pen, etc.</span></li>
+
+<li>  COMPLETE TRAINING COURSE IN CORRECT</li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;">ENGLISH, based on Mr. Cody’s books, with special</span></li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;">Quiz drills on Word-Study, Grammar, Letter Writing</span></li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;">for Beginners, and Composition and Rhetoric.</span></li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p class="hanging">
+<i>NOTE.</i>—<i>The chapter on Business Letter Writing, which was
+formerly Part I. of Constructive Rhetoric, is no longer contained in
+Mr. Cody’s books, but is printed in pamphlet form, and will be sent
+free on request to owners of sets. Drop a postal card to School of
+English, Opera House Building, Chicago.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<figure class="figcenter width500" id="title" style="width: 1200px;">
+  <img src="images/title.jpg" width="1200" height="1653" alt="Title page of the book How to Read and What to Read.">
+</figure>
+
+
+<p class="nindc space-above2 space-below2">
+THE ART <i>of</i><br>
+WRITING &amp; SPEAKING<br>
+<i>The</i> ENGLISH<br>
+LANGUAGE</p>
+
+
+<p class="nindc space-above2 space-below2">
+<span class="large">SHERWIN CODY</span></p>
+
+
+<h1>HOW TO READ<br>
+AND<br>
+WHAT TO READ</h1>
+
+
+<p class="nindc space-above2 space-below2">
+<i>Literary Digest Edition</i></p>
+
+
+<figure class="figcenter width500" id="logo" style="width: 200px;">
+<img src="images/logo.jpg" width="200" height="64" alt="decorative">
+</figure>
+
+
+<p class="nindc space-above2 space-below2">The Old Greek<br>
+Press · <i>Chicago</i><br>
+<i>New York</i> · <i>Boston</i></p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="nindc space-above2 space-below2">
+<i>Copyright, 1905</i><br>
+<span class="allsmcap">BY SHERWIN CODY</span>.<br>
+</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CONTENTS">CONTENTS</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<table class="autotable">
+<tbody><tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdr">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="allsmcap">PAGE</span></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tdl">Preface</td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_7">7</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tdl">General Introduction to the Study of Literature</td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_11">11</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tdl">Chapter I. What Constitutes a Good Poem?</td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_16">16</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tdl">Chapter II. What Constitutes a Good Essay?</td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_25">25</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tdl">Chapter III. What Constitutes a Good Novel?</td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_31">31</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tdl">Chapter IV. Landmarks in Modern Literature</td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_42">42</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tdl">Chapter V. The Best Poetry and How to<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Read It</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_51">51</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tdl">Chapter VI. How to Study Shakspere</td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_65">65</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tdl">Chapter VII. The Best English Essays</td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_73">73</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tdl">Chapter VIII. Old Novels that Are Good</td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_81">81</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tdl">Chapter IX. The Romantic Novelists—Scott,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Hugo, Dumas</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_88">88</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tdl">Chapter X. The Realistic Novelists—Dickens,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Thackeray, Balzac</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_102">102</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tdl">Chapter XI. The Short Story—Poe, Hawthorne,<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Maupassant</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_117">117</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tdl">Chapter XII. Classic Stories for Young People</td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_122">122</a></td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="PREFACE">PREFACE</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>There are plenty of books telling what we should read if we were wise
+and judicious scholars, with all the time in the world; and there are
+lists of the Hundred Best Books, as if there were some magic in the
+figures 100.</p>
+
+<p>This little book is for the average man who reads the newspaper more
+than he ought, and would like to know the really interesting books in
+standard literature which he might take pleasure in reading and which
+might be of some practical benefit to him.</p>
+
+<p>I have begun by leaving out nearly all the ancient classics.
+Demosthenes’s For the Crown is a great oration, but it is utterly dry
+and uninteresting to the ordinary modern. Even the great Goethe, while
+he may be the best of reading for a German, is not precisely adapted
+to the needs of the average American or Englishman. His novels are too
+sentimental; and his great poem Faust, like all poems, loses too much
+in the translation.</p>
+
+<p>And then to come down to our own literature, I must admit that I know
+that all the conservative professors of English will be shocked at the
+omission of Chaucer (but his language is too antiquated to be easily
+understood), Pope (who is more quoted than any other English poet
+except Shakspere, but ought to be read only in a book of quotations),
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</span>
+Samuel Richardson (who is important historically, but whose novels are
+as dead as a door-nail), and some others.</p>
+
+<p>Literature is not great absolutely, but it is useful and inspiring to
+those who read it. What has been inspiring once may have served its
+purpose, and when it is no longer inspiring it ought to be put away on
+the library shelves.</p>
+
+<p>But of the good and interesting books there are a great many more than
+any one person can ever hope to read. We have but a little time in this
+life, and in reading we ought to make the best of it. So what shall we
+choose?</p>
+
+<p>First of all a book must be interesting if it is going to help us; but
+at the same time if it is a great book and can inspire us, our time is
+spent to double or treble the advantage that it would be if it were
+only a good book. If we can read the <i>best</i> books and not merely
+good books, we have actually added some years to our life, measuring
+life by what we crowd into it.</p>
+
+<p>But no man can be another’s sole guide and do his thinking for him.
+Every man must have standards and principles, and be able to judge for
+himself. Such standards for judgment I have tried in this book first of
+all to give by simple illustrations.</p>
+
+<p>So far as I know nearly every one who has written about books has
+recommended volumes in the lump, as Wordsworth’s Poems, Lamb’s Essays,
+Scott’s novels, etc., as if every collection between covers were good
+all the way through.</p>
+
+<p>The fact is, great books need to be sifted in themselves, as well
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</span>
+as great collections of books. Only a few poems of Wordsworth’s or
+Coleridge’s or Keats’ or Shelley’s or Tennyson’s or Longfellow’s are
+first rate, and all the others in their complete works would better
+be left out as far as the average man I have in mind is concerned.
+Even the great novels have to be skimmed, and it is not every one who
+knows how to do that. I am therefore desirous of giving assistance not
+only in the selection of volumes, but of the contents of each volume
+recommended.</p>
+
+<p>I have tried my hand already with some success as far as the public is
+concerned in selecting “The Greatest Short Stories”, “The Best English
+Essays”, “The World’s Great Orations” and the work of “The Great
+English Poets.” It is now my hope to offer the public in convenient,
+well printed, prettily bound volumes a Nutshell Library of the World’s
+Best Literature for English Readers. Unlike other compilations of
+this kind it will not be a collection of fragments and patchwork, so
+comprehensive that it includes thousands of things one doesn’t care
+for, and so selective that it leaves out four fifths of the things one
+does want especially. In my library I shall make each volume complete
+in itself and an interesting evening’s reading. The reader will be
+pleasantly introduced to the author as man and man-of-letters, so that
+he will know him the next time he meets him, and will get on terms of
+something like familiarity with him.</p>
+
+<p>It is now almost impossible for the ordinary business man or even the
+busy woman of the house to read many books. Sometimes we get started on
+the latest novel, recommended by a friend, and sacrifice enough time
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</span>
+to finish it; then we are usually sorry we did it. And yet we know that
+the delicate enjoyment of life is in our cultivation of leisure in a
+refined and noble way. For all of us life would be better worth living,
+would be fuller of satisfaction and more complete in accomplishment, if
+we could spend a certain amount of time every day or every week with
+the world’s best society. This I hope to make it practically possible
+for many to do.</p>
+
+<p>This little volume lays down the principles and maps out the field. It
+is entirely complete in itself; but at the same time it introduces an
+undertaking which I hope may develop into wide usefulness.</p>
+
+<p>I may add that only books that may properly be called “literature” are
+here referred to, and even orations are omitted, because they are meant
+to be heard and not read in a closet and most people will not find
+them inspiring reading. Neither have I ventured into history, science,
+philosophy, or economics.</p>
+
+<p>I desire to thank Dr. E. Benj. Andrews, Chancellor of the University of
+Nebraska, Mr. Fred. H. Hild, Librarian of the Chicago Public Library,
+and Mr. W. I. Fletcher, editor of the American Library Association’s
+Index to General Literature and Librarian of Amherst College, for
+valuable assistance in preparing the list of books recommended.</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+<span class="allsmcap">SHERWIN CODY.</span><br>
+</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="HOW_TO_READ_AND_WHAT_TO_READ">HOW TO READ AND WHAT TO READ</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</span></p>
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="GENERAL_INTRODUCTION"><i>GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF LITERATURE.</i></h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>The best modern usage restricts the word <i>literature</i> to that
+which deals with the human heart and emotion, including intellectual
+emotion. That into which no feeling can enter is not literature. So
+a pure scientific treatise is not literature; neither is a simple
+historical record literature, as for example the news in a newspaper.
+Indeed, all histories, treatises, philosophical works, and textbooks
+and handbooks are literature only in such cases as an appeal is made to
+the universal heart or the emotions common to mankind.</p>
+
+<p>A little psychology will help us to understand the matter better. The
+mind has three aspects: the intellectual, which gives us truth; the
+ethical, which gives us nobility; and the esthetic, which gives us
+beauty. It is really impossible to separate one of these things from
+the other entirely; but we may say that in science we have nothing but
+the intellectual, or truth; in religion nothing but the ethical, or
+nobility; and in art nothing but the esthetic, or beauty. But as a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</span>
+religion without truth or beauty would be a very poor affair, so art
+without truth or nobility would be almost inconceivable.</p>
+
+<p>Literature is far more than art. Of course literature must be artistic:
+it must have the esthetic element of beauty; but it must also have both
+nobility and truth; and it must make its appeal through the emotions,
+that is, its appeal must be human. Possibly we must admit that all
+art is human, that its appeal is emotional; but this is not true of
+all beauty, for a mathematical hyperbola or parabola is perfectly
+beautiful, and it has its part in all drawing of artistic beauty; but
+the parabola or hyperbola does not become art except when executed by
+the human hand in making an appeal to human emotions.</p>
+
+<p>Distinctions between truth, nobility, and beauty are merely for the
+sake of helping our thought. That which is noble must be true and it
+must be beautiful. That which is lacking in truth is lacking also in
+beauty. This, however, we are not always able to discover without
+analysing. Something may seem beautiful while we are thinking of beauty
+alone; but let us test its nobility or its truth, and if these are
+wanting we suddenly discover defects in the beauty we had not perceived
+before.</p>
+
+<p>Who of us has not seen a woman who seemed at first to be perfectly
+beautiful, but whom we afterward found to be lacking in intellect
+or character. On re-examining the beauty we discover a weak mouth,
+inexpressive eyes, and other defects which may in time quite spoil the
+perfection of form we had admired so much at first, and we wonder
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</span>
+how we could overlook these defects. The fact is, one supreme quality
+is likely to blind us to all defects until we cease to gaze upon that
+quality and hunt for others.</p>
+
+<p>If we are literary critics, the first quality of literature that is
+likely to attract our attention is that of artistic beauty, which
+usually shows itself especially in the style. The musical flow of the
+words, the aptness and grace of the images, the refinement in the
+choice of words, make style, which, like charity, is a garment which
+covers a multitude of sins. If we are students, we look at the truth of
+the statements, their accuracy, their real significance, and talk about
+the poem’s or the story’s “depth” or lack of depth. But the common
+reader is more likely to judge the literary work by its nobility; in a
+novel such a reader wants characters he can admire and imitate, in a
+poem he wants thoughts that will inspire. Often to such a reader the
+lack of truth and of beauty are not even perceived. We see that which
+we look for, and fail to see that in which we have no interest.</p>
+
+<p>But what part does amusement play in real literature? We hear that
+the “star of the public amuser is in the ascendant.” Is the novel any
+the less literature for being amusing? or may it amuse without being
+literature?</p>
+
+<p>But let us see what amusement is. An alternative term is
+<i>recreation</i>, which means literally “being created anew.” Any
+escape from the routine of life into an atmosphere which is harmonious
+with our faculties for enjoyment is recreation. Amusement is the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</span>
+antithesis of work. A book the reading of which contains no suggestion
+of labour is a perfect recreation, since it allows our overworked
+faculties to rest and calls into play those faculties which otherwise
+would lie fallow and ultimately become stunted and dead. When we
+speak of a book as “amusing” we mean that it affords a complete
+relaxation to our faculties; but such complete relaxation is not
+altogether necessary to perfect recreation, for we may exercise one
+set of faculties while relaxing another. Literature is and should be
+relaxing to those faculties that are worn out by the dull routine of
+life; but any statement that a novel should be <i>merely</i> amusing,
+<i>merely</i> relaxing, is decidedly untrue to the facts in the case.
+The public does want recreation; we all want it; we all need it; it is
+one of the highest offices of literature to give it; but <i>mere</i>
+relaxation of wearied faculties will never create us anew. For true
+re-creation we must have that in literature which has been named
+<i>creative</i>,—something positive, vital, strong, and human. It
+is the duty of all great literature to be interesting. That which
+has ceased to be interesting is dead, and the quicker it is buried
+the better. The fact is, however, that no efforts at embalming or
+preservation on the part of critics will keep before the public that
+which the public chooses to bury.</p>
+
+<p>And this brings us to another question. What part has popularity in
+true literature? Some swear only by that which is very popular; and
+others curse the masses of the people, declaring that they like
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</span>
+that which is bad for its very badness, wallowing in filth and the
+commonplace, loving sentimentality in preference to true sentiment,
+and seeking in fiction only excitement of their passions. Such a view
+is libellous. As Lincoln once said in regard to other matters, You can
+deceive all the people part of the time and part of the people all
+the time, but you cannot deceive all the people all the time. We must
+confess that the public is always wandering after a will-o’-the-wisp;
+but at all times the public as a whole, we must believe, is seeking
+the good. It does not love the bad merely because it is bad; but it
+swallows the bad because it wants the grain of good it can get in no
+other way. And with the element of time added, it is the public that
+makes “the verdict of posterity” which all reverence. We must not
+forget, however, the element in the equation called Time; for that Time
+may reduce the equation to zero and prove that our unknown quantity is
+nothing.</p>
+
+<p>And now let us ask what relation any work of literary art ought to have
+to our lives of toil. If it merely gives us a picture of our actual
+lives it cannot be interesting or amusing, since we want to get away
+from ourselves and exercise new faculties and have new experiences. On
+the other hand, we understand only what we live, and if we get too far
+away from our own experiences we are equally at a loss. The fact is, a
+work of literature should give us ourselves idealized and in a dream,
+all we wished to be but could not be, all we hoped for but missed.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</span>
+True literature rounds out our lives, gives us consolation for our
+failures, rebuke for our vices, suggestions for our ambition, hope, and
+love, and appreciation. To do that it should have truth, nobility, and
+beauty in a high degree, and our first test of a work of literature
+should be to ask the three questions, Is it beautiful? Is it true? Is
+it noble?</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I.<br>
+<i>WHAT CONSTITUTES A GOOD POEM?</i></h2>
+
+
+<p>We may consider literature under three heads—Pure Poetry, the Prose
+Essay, and Fiction.</p>
+
+<p>Poetry is unquestionably the oldest form of literature. Matthew Arnold
+once queried whether a people ought not to be barbarous to be really
+poetic. Perhaps it originated in the chant of the priests as they
+offered sacrifices to their gods; but the chanted tale recounting the
+deeds of glorious war must have come very soon after.</p>
+
+<p>Mechanically, poetry consists in words arranged in measured feet and
+lines, corresponding almost exactly to the time element in music. Rhyme
+is a modern invention and in no way essential to poetry. Originally
+anything that could be chanted or sung was regarded as poetry. Now the
+song element has largely disappeared, but the requirement of measured
+feet and lines remains, and we may almost say that no poetry can be
+fully appreciated till it is read aloud.</p>
+
+<p>Poetry was invented to express lofty sentiments, sentiments of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</span>
+religion and the noble sentiments of patriotism and brave deeds, and
+finally the sentiments of passionate love. It is still the loftiest
+form of literature, and if we would seize at a grasp all the length and
+breadth of the highest literary art, we should begin with the study of
+poetry.</p>
+
+<p>True literature should express equally Truth, Nobility, and Beauty, the
+intellectual, the ethical, and the esthetic. Of course one poem will be
+pre-eminent for its beauty, another for its nobility, a third for its
+truth. Let us examine various types, that we may see with our own eyes
+and feel with our own hearts what these words mean.</p>
+
+<p>Read aloud this lullaby from Tennyson’s <i>Princess</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">Sweet and low, sweet and low,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Wind of the western sea,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Low, low, breathe and blow,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Wind of the western sea!</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Over the rolling waters go,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Come from the dying moon, and blow,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Blow him again to me;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">While my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps.</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">Sleep and rest, sleep and rest,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Father will come to thee soon;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Rest, rest, on mother’s breast,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Father will come to thee soon;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Father will come to his babe in the nest,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Silver sails all out of the west</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Under the silver moon;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Sleep, my little one, sleep, my pretty one, sleep.</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</span></p>
+
+<p>The first thing we notice, besides the pleasing rhythm, is the musical
+quality of the words. There can be no melody, as melody is known in
+music, but in the repetition of sounds and their enchanting variations
+we find something that very strongly suggests musical melody.</p>
+
+<p>Then we are attracted by the beauty of the images. The words come
+tripping like fairy forms, and we feel a picture growing out of the
+<i>camera obscura</i> of our minds.</p>
+
+<p>The appeal is almost wholly to our feelings; for if we stop to analyse
+the words and interpret their strict sense, we seem to see nothing but
+nonsense. The poem exists for the soothing, enchanting, dreamy beauty
+that seems rather to breathe in the words than to be expressed by them
+as words express thoughts in prose.</p>
+
+<p>If there is any truth or any nobility in this poem of Tennyson’s, it
+would be hard to say just what they are. There is nothing ignoble;
+there is nothing untrue. But it seems as if we had a perfect type of
+beauty pure and simple.</p>
+
+<p>Now let us read this little thing from Shelley:</p>
+
+<p class="nindc space-above2">LOVE’S PHILOSOPHY.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">The fountains mingle with the river,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">And the rivers with the ocean;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">The winds of heaven mix forever</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">With a sweet emotion;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Nothing in the world is single;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">All things by a law divine</div><span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</span>
+    <div class="verse indent0">In one another’s being mingle;—</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Why not I with thine?</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">See the mountains kiss high heaven,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">And the waves clasp one another;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">No sister flower would be forgiven,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">If it disdained its brother;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">And the sunlight clasps the earth,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">And the moonbeams kiss the sea:</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">What are all these kissings worth,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">If thou kiss not me?</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Once more we observe the rhythm and the music, though not so perfect or
+real as in Tennyson’s song; and we see the beauty of images, almost as
+beautiful as the images in Sweet and Low; but we observe that there is
+a new element: a thought is expressed. Beauty has come to the aid of
+truth; and while we are uncertain whether we care most for the beauty
+or for the truth, we cannot but perceive how they aid each other.</p>
+
+<p>But we have not yet found the moral or ethical element. Neither
+Tennyson nor Shelley inspires in us nobler sentiments, or gives us
+courage to do and dare loftier deeds.</p>
+
+<p>For the purely ethical type we might turn to the psalms of David, or
+that noble poem Job. But we find the same element in a simple and
+modern form in a poem of Longfellow’s.</p>
+
+<p class="nindc space-above2">A PSALM OF LIFE.</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</span></p>
+
+<p class="nindc"><span class="allsmcap">
+WHAT THE HEART OF THE YOUNG MAN SAID TO THE PSALMIST.</span></p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">Tell me not in mournful numbers,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">“Life is but an empty dream!”</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">For the soul is dead that slumbers,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">And things are not what they seem.</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">Life is real, life is earnest!</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">And the grave is not its goal;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">“Dust thou art, to dust returnest,”</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Was not spoken of the soul.</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Is our destined end or way;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">But to act, that each to-morrow</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Find us farther than to-day.</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">Art is long, and Time is fleeting,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">And our hearts, though stout and brave,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Still, like muffled drums, are beating</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Funeral marches to the grave.</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">In the world’s broad field of battle,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">In the bivouac of Life,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Be not like dumb, driven cattle!</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Be a hero in the strife!</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">Trust no future, howe’er pleasant!</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Let the dead Past bury its dead!</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Act,—act in the living Present,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Heart within and God o’er head.</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">Lives of great men all remind us</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">We can make our lives sublime,</div><span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</span>
+    <div class="verse indent0">And, departing, leave behind us</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Footprints on the sands of time;</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">Footprints, that perhaps another</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Seeing, shall take heart again.</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">Let us, then, be up and doing,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">With a heart for any fate;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Still achieving, still pursuing,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Learn to labour and to wait.</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Once more we observe how the musical flow of the language charms our
+ear, and how the poem makes us <i>feel</i> that which it would teach.
+We miss the vibrating melody of words which we found in Tennyson and
+even in Shelley; and the rarely beautiful images of both the preceding
+poems are almost entirely absent. There is another element, however,
+which we could not perceive at all in those verses, and that is the
+element of nobility, of moral inspiration. The poem does not teach us
+any moral truth with which we were before unfamiliar, as a treatise on
+philosophy might; but it makes us <i>feel</i> as nothing else ever has
+the reality of that which we know already. It actually breathes courage
+into us,—not the courage for heroic deeds in battle, but the heroism
+of living nobly the common life that is ours.</p>
+
+<p>It is not fair to condemn this almost perfect poem, as some critics do,
+because it is lacking in the Beauty and fresh Truth that make the poems
+of other poets immortal; for in the whole range of poetic literature
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</span>
+it will be difficult to find a more perfect example of nobility and
+heroic courage.</p>
+
+<p>It will be interesting now to turn to Browning’s <i>Rabbi Ben Ezra</i>
+and find the philosophy, the Truth that corresponds to this Nobility.</p>
+
+
+<p class="nindc space-above2">VI.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">Then, welcome each rebuff</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">That turns earth’s smoothness rough,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go!</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Be our joy three parts pain!</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Strive, and hold cheap the strain;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="nindc">VII.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">For thence,—a paradox</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Which comforts while it mocks,—</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail:</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">What I aspired to be,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">And was not, comforts me:</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">A brute I might have been, but would not sink i’ the scale.</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+<div class="tb">* * * * * </div>
+
+
+<p class="nindc">XXIII.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">Not on the vulgar mass</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Called “work,” must sentence pass,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Things done that took the eye and had the price;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">O’er which, from level stand,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">The low world laid its hand,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice:</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</span></p>
+
+<p class="nindc">XXIV.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">But all the world’s coarse thumb</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">And finger failed to plumb,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">So passed in making up the main account:</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">All instincts immature,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">All purposes unsure,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man’s amount:</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="nindc">XXV.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">Thoughts hardly to be packed</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Into a narrow act,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Fancies that broke through language and escaped;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">All I could never be,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">All men ignored in me,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The subject is almost precisely that of Longfellow’s Psalm of Life, but
+the object is not so much to give us courage as to confirm our courage
+by philosophy. The appeal is intellectual, not ethical.</p>
+
+<p>Yet this is very different from a treatise by Kant or Hegel. Browning
+the poet makes us <i>feel</i> the truth. It is emotion that his
+philosophy, his Truth, arouses in us—an intellectual emotion, but none
+the less an emotion. We find the measured rhythm of poetry, but it
+is as far as possible from the songlike music of Tennyson’s lullaby.
+The mechanical limits and restrictions seem an excuse for unusual and
+almost strained images, but images that nevertheless carry conviction
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</span>
+to our minds. There is, too, a beauty in the conception. This poetry is
+philosophy, but impassioned and inspired philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>Let us now read a poem still more lofty, a poem in which rare beauty,
+lofty nobility, and profound philosophy are mingled in almost equal
+proportions. I refer to Wordsworth’s Lines Written a Few Miles Above
+Tintern Abbey:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent10">These beauteous forms,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Through a long absence, have not been to me</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">But oft in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">And passing even unto my purer mind,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">With tranquil restoration....</div>
+    <div class="verse indent10">... that serene and blessed mood,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">In which the affections gently lead us on,—</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Until, the breath of this corporeal frame</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">And even the motion of our human blood</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Almost suspended, we are laid asleep</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">In body, and become a living soul;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">While with an eye made quiet by the power</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">We see into the life of things....</div>
+    <div class="verse indent22">And I have felt</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">A presence that disturbs me with the joy</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Of something far more deeply interfused,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,</div><span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</span>
+    <div class="verse indent0">And the round ocean, and the living air,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">A motion and a spirit, that impels</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">All thinking things, all objects of all thought,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">And rolls through all things.</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The sweet melody of Tennyson’s lullaby has here given away to a deep,
+organ-like harmony, that swells and reverberates, while the words
+seem to be making the simplest and most direct of statements. Image
+and plain statement so mingle that we cannot distinguish them, Truth
+suddenly seems radiant with a rare and angelic Beauty, and the very
+atmosphere breathes the loftiness of Noble Purity. Unexpectedly almost
+we find ourselves in the presence of Divinity itself, and the humblest
+meets the loftiest on common ground.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II.<br>
+<i>WHAT CONSTITUTES A GOOD ESSAY?</i></h2>
+
+
+<p>Prose has a bad name. We think of it and speak of it as including
+everything in language that is <i>not</i> poetry. In former times art
+in literature meant poetry,—or, at a stretch, it included in addition
+only oratory.</p>
+
+<p>The beginning of art in the use of <i>unmeasured</i> language (if we
+may use that term to designate language that does not have the metrical
+form) was undoubtedly oratory,—the impassioned appeal of a speaker to
+his fellow men. The language was rhythmical, but not measured, that
+is, not susceptible of division into lines, corresponding to bars of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</span>
+music; and the element of beauty was distinctly subordinate to the
+elements of nobility and truth. In modern times poetry has come to be
+more and more the mere aggregation of images of beauty, without much
+reference to the intellectual, and still less to the ethical; and prose
+has been the recognized medium for the intellectual and the moral.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, modern times have not given us any oratory superior to
+that of Demosthenes and Cicero; nor any plain statement of historical
+fact superior to that of Herodotus, Thucydides, or Tacitus. But art
+in conversational prose, reduced to writing and made literature,
+may fairly be said to date from the essayists of Queen Anne’s
+time—Addison, Swift, Goldsmith, and their fellows; and it was brought
+to perfection by Lamb, De Quincey, Macaulay, Thackeray, Irving, and
+others of their day.</p>
+
+<p>In most of this prose we find a new element—humour. The original,
+characteristic, typical essay is whimsical, sympathetic, kindly,
+amusing, suggestive, and close to reality. The impassioned appeal of
+oratory has been adapted to the requirements of reading prose by such
+writers as De Quincey and Macaulay; but the humorous essay has been by
+far the more popular.</p>
+
+<p>And what is humour? It would be hard to say that it is either beauty,
+nobility, or truth. The fact is poetry, with its lofty atmosphere,
+rarefied, artificial, and emotional, is in danger of becoming morbid,
+unhealthy, and impractical. Humour is the sanitary sea salt that
+purifies and saves. No one with a sense of humour can get very far
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</span>
+away from elemental and obvious facts. Humour is the corrective,
+the freshener, the health-giver. Its danger is the trivial, the
+commonplace, and the inconsequent.</p>
+
+<p>The primary object of prose is to represent the truth, but in so far
+as prose is true literature, it must make its appeal to the emotions.
+The humorous essay must make us feel healthier and more sprightly,
+the impassioned oratorical picture must fire us with desires and
+inspire us with courage of a practical and specific kind. Mere
+logical demonstration, or argumentative appeal, are not in themselves
+literature because their appeal is not emotional, and so not a part
+of the vibrating electric fluid of humanity; and beauty plays the
+subordinate part of furnishing suggestive and illustrative images for
+the illumination of what is called “the style.”</p>
+
+<p>Gradually prose has absorbed all the powers and useful qualities of
+poetry not inconsistent with its practical and unartificial character.
+So the characteristics of a good prose style are in many respects not
+unlike the characteristics of a good poetic style.</p>
+
+<p>First, good prose should be rhythmical and musical, though never
+measured. As prose is never to be sung, the artificial characteristics
+of music should never be present in any degree; but as poetry in its
+more highly developed forms has lost its qualities of simple melody
+and attained characteristics of a more beautiful harmony, so prose,
+starting with mere absence of roughness and harshness of sound,
+gradually has attained to something very near akin to the musical
+harmony of the more refined poetry. Almost the only difference lies
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</span>
+in the presence or absence of measure; but this forms a clear dividing
+line between poetry (reaching down from above) and prose (rising up
+from below).</p>
+
+<p>Second, the more suggestive prose is, the better it is. It is true
+that images should not be used merely for their own sake, as they may
+be in poetry; but their possibilities in the way of illustration and
+illumination is infinite, and it is this office that they perform in
+the highest forms of poetry. To paraphrase Browning, it enables the
+genius to express “thoughts hardly to be packed into a narrow” word.
+And so that whole side of life that cannot possibly be expressed in
+the definite formulæ of science finds its body and incarnation in
+literature.</p>
+
+<p>Third, good prose will never be very far from easily perceived facts
+and realities of life. The saving salt of humour will prevent wandering
+very far; and this same humour will make reading easier, and will
+induce that relaxation of labour-strained faculties which alone permits
+the exercise and enjoyment of our higher powers. We shall never get
+into heaven if we are forever working, and humour causes us to cease
+work and lie free and open for the inspiration from above.</p>
+
+<p>It would be hard to find either nobility, truth, or beauty as
+distinguishing characteristics in the following letter of Charles
+Lamb’s; but it is certain that it is admirable prose. If it does not
+give us that which we seek, it most certainly puts us into the mood in
+which we are most likely to find it in other and loftier writers:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</span></p>
+
+<p class="right">
+“March 9, 1822.</p>
+
+<p>“Dear Coleridge—It gives me great satisfaction to hear that the pig
+turned out so well: they are interesting creatures at a certain age.
+What a pity that such buds should blow out into the maturity of rank
+bacon! You had all some of the crackling and brain sauce. Did you
+remember to rub it with butter, and gently dredge it a little, just
+before the crisis? Did the eyes come away kindly, with no Œdipean
+avulsion? Was the crackling the colour of ripe pomegranate? Had you no
+complement of boiled neck of mutton before it, to blunt the edge of
+delicate desire. Did you flesh maiden teeth in it?</p>
+
+<p>“Not that I sent the pig, or can form the remotest guess what part Owen
+could play in the business. I never knew him give anything away in his
+life. He would not begin with strangers. I suspect the pig after all
+was meant for me; but at the unlucky juncture of time being absent,
+the present somehow went round to Highgate. To confess an honest
+truth, a pig is one of those things I could never think of sending
+away. Teal, widgeons, snipes, barn-door fowls, ducks, geese—your tame
+villatic things—Welsh mutton, collars of brawn, sturgeon, fresh or
+pickled; your potted char, Swiss cheeses, French pies, early grapes,
+muscadines, I impart as freely unto my friends as to myself. They are
+but self-extended; but pardon me if I stop somewhere. Where the fine
+feeling of benevolence giveth a higher smack than the sensual rarity,
+there my friends (or any good man) may command me; but pigs are pigs,
+and I myself therein am nearest to myself. Nay, I should think it an
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</span>
+affront, an undervaluing done to Nature who bestowed such a boon upon
+me, if in a churlish mood I parted with the precious gift. One of the
+bitterest pangs of remorse I ever felt was when a child—when my kind
+old aunt had strained her pocket-strings to bestow a sixpenny whole
+plum-cake upon me. In my way home through the Borough I met a venerable
+old man, not a mendicant, but thereabouts; a look-beggar, not a verbal
+petitionist; and in the coxcombry of taught charity, I gave away the
+cake to him. I walked on a little in all the pride of an Evangelical
+peacock, when of a sudden my old aunt’s kindness crossed me; the sum it
+was to her; the pleasure that she had a right to expect that I—not the
+old impostor—should take in eating her cake—the ingratitude by which,
+under the colour of a Christian virtue, I had frustrated her cherished
+purpose. I sobbed, wept, and took it to heart so grievously, that I
+think I never suffered the like; and I was right. It was a piece of
+unfeeling hypocrisy, and it proved a lesson to me ever after. The cake
+has long been masticated, consigned to the dunghill with the ashes of
+that unseasonable pauper.</p>
+
+<p>“But when Providence, who is better to us all than our aunts, gives me
+a pig, remembering my temptation and my fall, I shall endeavour to act
+towards it more in the spirit of the donor’s purpose.</p>
+
+<p>“Yours (short of pig) to command in everything,</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+C. L.”</p>
+
+<p>When we have finished reading this, we wonder if we have not mistaken
+our standards of life; if the senses are not as truly divine as our
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</span>
+dreams, and certainly far more within the reach of our realization.
+We think, we feel happy, we are certainly no worse. Whatever strange
+thing this humour may have done to us, we are more truly <i>men</i> for
+having experienced it.</p>
+
+<p>And it is this that prose can do that poetry, even of the best, can
+never accomplish.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III.<br>
+<i>WHAT CONSTITUTES A GOOD NOVEL?</i></h2>
+
+
+<p>From the beginning of literature the most interesting thing which a
+writer can write has been the life history of a MAN. We are like boats
+borne on the swift current of the rushing river of Time. Whether our
+boat sink or swim, or turn to the right or to the left, is the matter
+of intensest interest—indeed, our interest is usually so intense in
+this subject that we can think of nothing else with any zest. And as we
+study our own problem of navigation on the waters of life, we watch all
+our neighbours to see how they succeed or fail, and why. Their problem
+is our problem and ours is theirs. Hence it is that stories of human
+life have formed the substance of the world’s greatest literature since
+the days of Homer.</p>
+
+<p>Before outlining the history of the literary form which the universal
+human story has taken, let us explain the meaning of “the dramatic.”
+Drama deals with the crises in individual lives. While our boats on
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</span>
+the current of Time sail smoothly and straight on their way, there
+is no drama, nothing that can be called dramatic, and so no material
+for an interesting story; but the moment that any obstacle or force
+of any kind, exterior or interior, causes the steady onward course
+of the life to cease or turn aside, however little, that moment we
+have the dramatic. So for the elements of a drama we must have a
+<i>collision</i> of life forces, one of which forces is the onward
+movement of some individual human life. The other force may be
+circumstances, or “Fate,” as we call it; or it may be another human
+life. When but two forces meet, we have the simplest form of the drama,
+such as we may see in any short story or a one-act play. In a novel
+or a drama in acts we shall find a collision of several and various
+forces, usually different human lives meeting and influencing each
+other.</p>
+
+<p>While the human story has been the same, and the principles of dramatic
+construction have been but little changed in several thousand years,
+the artistic form has changed with changing conditions, and the history
+of its development is intensely interesting.</p>
+
+<p>The first form in which the story of life was told was the epic poem,
+as for example Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. The Iliad was the tale of
+the “wrath of Achilles, Peleus’s son.” That force, coming straight
+athwart the current of the warlike lives of all the Greek and Trojan
+heroes, could not but be dramatic, for there was not one of them whose
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</span>
+onward movement was not changed in some way, and of course the changes
+were interesting in proportion to the importance of the lives of the
+subjects—the greater the subject the greater the drama (if adequately
+executed) in the world’s literary history.</p>
+
+<p>The next form which the human story took was that of the stage drama.
+Mechanical necessity required that the collision and life changes
+should be represented in the speeches of the characters, as in the epic
+poem they had been narrated in the song of the minstrel. We have our
+finest examples of the stage drama in Shakespeare, and we find that the
+poetic language uttered by the various characters on the stage is not
+very different from the language uttered by the single minstrel when
+he was the only performer. Moreover, we find a new element which the
+minstrel could not very easily represent, and that is humour. In the
+humorous portions the poetic drama begins to be prose.</p>
+
+<p>The discovery of the printing press, which makes books that every man
+may read in his closet, has given birth to the third form of the great
+human story—the novel.</p>
+
+<p>While there can be no doubt that the novel is the form above all others
+in which the world to-day chooses to receive the human story, the epic
+poem no longer being written and the poetic drama but rarely, still we
+should make a mistake if we suppose that the novel is the direct child
+and heir of the poetic stage drama even to the same extent that the
+drama was the direct child and heir of epic poetry.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</span></p>
+
+<p>Both the epic poem and the poetic drama have a dignity and loftiness
+that much more adequately represent the nobler and loftier
+characteristics of the human personality than the often trivial and
+even base and ignoble fictitious tale in the novel. The truth is,
+the modern novel is directly descended from the tavern tale, the
+amusing and entertaining narrative of the chance traveller coming
+unpretentiously and unexpectedly into the quiet country village. Such
+tavern tales we find in their purest form in the Arabian Nights and
+in Boccaccio’s Decameron. The stories of Sindbad the Sailor and the
+lovers of Boccaccio had unquestionably been told again and again by the
+wayfarer eager for the applause of his little audience, and had again
+and again been listened to by common folk whose only glimpse of the
+life of the outer world came through these same tavern yarns. Boccaccio
+collected his stories from the taverns of Italy, and wrote them out in
+the choicest Italian for the entertainment of his king and queen (A.
+D. 1348). The stories of the Arabian Nights were collected in Egypt at
+about the same time by some person or persons unknown, and reached the
+European world through the French version of Galland at the beginning
+of the eighteenth century. In the Arabian Nights we may find the origin
+of the modern romance, and in the Decameron the beginning of the modern
+love-story or novel.</p>
+
+<p>The bond of union between the tavern tale and the story of modern
+fiction is not difficult to detect. The tavern tale is the
+confidential narrative of the unpretentious traveller to his handful
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</span>
+of uncritical common people whose instincts are primitive and whose
+primary desire is for amusement: the story of modern fiction is the
+confidential narrative of the author to a single ordinary or average
+reader, who sits down in the privacy of his closet to be amused and
+instructed—chiefly amused. The style required in both cases is
+personal, familiar, and conversational. Formality is thrown aside, and
+unrestrained by any critical audience or the presence of a judge of
+mature mind and high appreciation, both tale-teller and story-writer
+speak freely of the privacy of life, and of its most sacred secrets as
+well as its most hidden vices. Such a medium is very far from the lofty
+dignity of poetry; yet it is perhaps the only truly democratic form of
+literary art.</p>
+
+<p>As we have seen, the modern novel was at first nothing more than an
+almost verbatim report of the tavern tale-teller’s narrative. Then,
+in Richardson and Fielding, we find the same kind of gossip invented
+by the author and set forth with a trifle more fancy and imagination,
+as it is done in letters. The powers of the prose essay invented by
+Addison and his fellows were soon added to the style of the novel,
+an early illustration of which we may find in Goldsmith’s <i>Vicar
+of Wakefield</i>. Scott gave the novel the dignity and romantic
+interest of history—history made human and therefore turned into true
+literature. Dickens added the sentimental, poetic style of the ballad,
+and Thackeray the teaching of the familiar homily.<a id="FNanchor_1" href="#Footnote_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> In the stories
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</span>
+of Hawthorne we see what the ancient fable and allegory contributed to
+the modern fictitious phantasy.</p>
+
+<p>In Balzac for the first time we discover any attempt to make fiction
+the vehicle for the broad national drama which Homer gave us in his
+epic poems. In Poe we find the beginnings of an application of dramatic
+principles to the construction of the short story, and in this very
+small field Maupassant brought the art of dramatic construction well
+nigh to perfection. We may imagine that a novel ought to be as complete
+and perfectly constructed a drama as one of Shakspere’s plays; but the
+fact that we find no such novels suggests that fiction as an art is yet
+incomplete and not fully matured.</p>
+
+<p>The origin of fiction was very low; but it was an origin very near to
+the common people, and so to the simple and natural instincts of all
+of us. With this broad foundation the possibilities of development are
+enormous, and we may reasonably hope that some day the novel will take
+a place in literary art that is much above that of the epic poem or
+even the poetic drama. It is not hampered by the mechanical limitations
+of either of these, and the variety and literary opportunity which
+characterize it are the possession of fiction alone.</p>
+
+<p>And now let us ask, What are the characteristics of a good novel? And,
+How may we judge a novel?</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</span></p>
+
+<p>We may think of the novel in two ways—as the tavern tale and as
+poetry—as prose, with its characteristic humour and conversational
+style, and the imaginative and lofty dream of the human soul, otherwise
+expressible only in verse.</p>
+
+<p>As a tavern tale we may test a novel by fancying that the author is
+sitting down in person with us in our dressing-gown before the fire.
+He talks to us and tells us a tale. If he were there in person, what
+characteristics should he have to make him attractive to us? Why, of
+course, he should be polite and engaging. Too great familiarity even in
+the privacy of home spoils friendship, and so does vulgarity. And yet
+with a certain reserve of manner he may enter upon almost any topic of
+human thought, and even discuss with us our own secret sins. The good
+conversationalist will make us think and talk ourselves, and so will a
+good novel-writer. Of course we cannot talk to the author; but we can
+find in our friends a good substitute for him.</p>
+
+<p>Another quality we shall demand is sincerity. While we may like to
+listen for a time to the brilliant conversation of a witty talker whom
+we cannot trust, the sincere friend will hold our affections long after
+the brilliant talker is forgotten. The brilliant and insincere friend
+and the brilliant and insincere novelist or writer are alike left
+deserted in their old age, with not a friend in the world. (What better
+example of this could we have than Oscar Wilde? When the insincerity of
+his character was found out, how quickly the world dropped him!)</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</span></p>
+
+<p>The novelist above all other writers stands to the reader in the
+attitude of a personal friend. At first we turn to such a friend merely
+because he is agreeable as a companion; but the time comes when we
+wish to consult him as to the solution of our personal difficulties,
+and ask him to share in our personal joys. In somewhat the same way a
+novel writer may become the friend and adviser of his reader. In the
+stories he tells he deals frankly and sincerely with just such problems
+of life and emotion as those which confront the reader; and through
+his characters he declares what he thinks the best thing to do. If you
+would test the greatness of any novelist, ask the question, Would you
+be willing to follow the advice which he gives his characters?</p>
+
+<p>We have spoken of the author as the friend of the reader. This
+figure of speech has been chosen for the purpose of making apparent
+the intimate relations between the substance of the story and the
+personality of the reader. As a matter of fact, however, it is only
+the personality of the <i>reader</i> which is in any way alive and
+consciously perceived: the writer is so entirely impersonal (or should
+be) that he becomes completely merged in his characters. His spirit is
+felt in every line of description and every touch of character; but, as
+we might say, his own form should never be seen. With no suggestion of
+sacrilege we might even say that he is to the creations in the novel
+what God is to nature: the eye sees nature in all its beauty, but only
+the heart can perceive by a hidden vision of its own the presence of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</span>
+the divine. Such is the ideal part which an artist should play in his
+story.</p>
+
+<p>But, though the artist as a personality is or should be entirely
+unseen, he is only the more truly present; and the greater his soul and
+the nobler his life and the broader his imagination and the more poetic
+his fancy, the more truly does his book become a treasure to the reader.</p>
+
+<p>All dramatic writers, whether epic poets, poetic dramatists, or
+novelists, are known by the characters they create. It is not important
+that those characters should ever have really existed in the world:
+what is demanded is that they be natural and possible and true to
+the principles of life. The creative writer will of course create
+characters never seen before. He will never be a mere copyist; or if
+he is he becomes a biographer, and ceases to be a dramatic artist. Of
+course, also, these characters must have their collisions with other
+characters or with the forces of fate. That is necessary to give
+dramatic interest, the interest of plot. And characters are known by
+what they do; so unless they really meet adequate dramatic situations
+they cannot be said to exist at all, even though the author has
+described them minutely and told us that they have an endless variety
+of noble and beautiful qualities: for us only those qualities exist
+which we see in action. So in brief we may say that a great novelist
+(or other dramatic writer) is known by the great deeds of his great
+characters.</p>
+
+<p>From this point of view Shakspere is our greatest author. His Lear,
+Othello, Desdemona, Portia, Macbeth, Hamlet, Caesar, Brutus,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</span>
+Cleopatra, and the rest form a noble company of great men and women.
+Instinctively we compare these fictitious characters with the
+characters of history. Many of them are taken from history; but by art
+and imagination they are created anew in shapes that live before our
+eyes as the characters of history (often quite different personages)
+really lived before the eyes of their contemporaries, but could not
+live before our eyes.</p>
+
+<p>No novelist gives us such a company of <i>great</i> men and women—very
+few give us even one great man. In some ways we may compare with
+Shakspere’s characters those of Balzac. The great French novelist set
+out to represent typical characters of all classes of the society he
+knew. He has as varied a company as Shakspere, and it is typical of
+society as Shakspere’s is not; but none of Balzac’s characters can
+for a moment be considered as great as Shakspere’s. Even the Country
+Doctor, perhaps Balzac’s noblest creation, has no such depth of
+interest as Hamlet, for example, though we might possibly compare him
+with Prospero; and what a creature is the Duchesse de Langeais beside
+Portia!</p>
+
+<p>But a novelist who gives us no characters which we can take an interest
+in even if we do not love them or admire them is not much of a
+novelist. The name of Thackeray suggests Becky Sharpe and Henry Esmond
+and Colonel Newcome. The fine substance of Thackeray’s men and women,
+both good and bad, their refinement and delicacy and intelligence
+and sensibility, mark them as personalities far above the ordinary
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</span>
+in fiction; and so they give Thackeray a rank that the variety of
+his characters and the range of his sympathies would not otherwise
+entitle him to. Dickens is to us but a name for the little dream world
+in which we make the acquaintance of David Copperfield and Micawber
+and Peggotty and Agnes and Dora, of the father of the Marshalsea and
+Little Dorrit and their friends of the prison, of Little Nell and her
+friends, of Oliver Twist and his thievish but interesting companions.
+Dickens’s characters are not examples for admiration; but they are
+intensely interesting because so intensely human, coming so near to us
+ourselves as they often do even when we are least ready to admit it.
+And unquestionably their number is great. The number and variety of an
+author’s characters are always to be taken into account in estimating
+his greatness, or even his value to us individually.</p>
+
+<p>Scott’s characters are very different from any of these. They seem
+made especially to wear picturesque historic costumes, and in their
+almost limitless multitude they form a pageantry which is splendid and
+entrancing in the extreme. The thing of value is that the pageantry
+is alive; and if Scott’s characters were created to wear costumes,
+they were created living all of them; and (as the reader of <i>Sartor
+Resartus</i> well knows) the wearing of costumes is, in its figurative
+sense, one of the most important duties of life, with many people
+becoming nearly a religion. In Scott we may find out to what extent
+this universal passion is legitimate and what great-souled love there
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</span>
+may be in the heart beating beneath the costume.</p>
+
+<p>Such are some of the principles by which we should test and judge
+all works of dramatic art, whether plays on the stage or novels. We
+need not, however, in all cases wholly condemn a book professing to
+be a novel which falls short by this criterion: it may be good as an
+essay or a history or a treatise, and its author may have mistaken its
+character in calling it a novel.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+<p class="nind"><a id="Footnote_1" href="#FNanchor_1" class="label">[1]</a>
+We should not overlook the important part the pulpit has had in the
+development of English literature.</p>
+
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV.<br>
+<i>LANDMARKS IN MODERN LITERATURE.</i></h2>
+
+
+<p>Most people read in such a desultory way that they never know whether
+they are really familiar with standard literature or not. All the books
+of one author are read because they are liked; and none of the books of
+another are known because the reader never managed to get interested,
+or never happened to have his or her attention called to that author’s
+books. A very simple working system is needed, with landmarks, as it
+were, set up here and there to guide the choice of books at all times
+and make it intelligent and just.</p>
+
+
+<p class="nindc"><span class="allsmcap">SHAKSPERE</span>—1600.</p>
+
+<p>English literature practically begins with Shakspere, who did his best
+work about 1600 A. D., three hundred years ago. Two important poets
+come before him—Spenser, who was still living when he began to be
+known as a successful dramatist, and Chaucer, who was a contemporary
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</span>
+of Boccaccio and the first noteworthy writer in the then new English
+tongue, that tongue in which Norman-French had mingled with Anglo-Saxon
+in the common patois of the people, though pure French and Latin
+remained the languages of the court and of scholarship.</p>
+
+<p>The language in which Chaucer wrote is now so antiquated that it is
+not easy for the ordinary person to read it. His “Canterbury Tales”
+are pleasant and cheerful, for he was an eminently sane man; but what
+he wrote has been often rewritten since his time till we are quite
+familiar with most of his stories and ideas through other channels.</p>
+
+<p>Spenser, whose best work is the Faerie Queen, though he wrote so
+near the time of Shakspere, seems decidedly more antiquated; yet, as
+compared with Chaucer, he is easy reading. The Faerie Queen is one long
+series of beautiful and sensuous images, a mingling of fair women,
+brave knights, and ugly dragons which in his hands attain a dreamy
+charm. Says Taine, “He was pre-eminently a creator and a dreamer, and
+that most naturally, instinctively, and unceasingly. We might go on
+forever describing this inward condition of all great artists.... A
+character appears to them, then an action, then a landscape, then a
+succession of actions, characters, landscapes, producing, completing,
+arranging themselves before our eyes. This fount of living and changing
+forms is inexhaustible in Spenser. He has but to close his eyes and
+apparitions arise; they abound in him, crowd, overflow; in vain he
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</span>
+pours them forth; they continually float up, more copious and more
+dense.” And we may add that the language in which he describes these
+dreams is as musical as the fancy of his imagery is rich. If one
+likes that sort of thing one can soon learn to read Spenser with ease
+and enjoyment, and in the whole range of English literature we shall
+find nothing so sensuously sweet as his poetry, in his own musical
+“Spenserian” stanza.</p>
+
+<p>As we have said, for the ordinary reader English literature begins
+with Shakspere. He was the central figure of the brilliant era of
+Queen Elizabeth; but none of his fellow dramatists, not even “rare Ben
+Jonson” or Marlowe, are read today. For us they are dead, and Shakspere
+alone remains as the representative of the “Golden Age,” though perhaps
+we must include in it Bacon and Milton, writers who stand somewhat
+apart.</p>
+
+
+<p class="nindc"><span class="allsmcap">ROBINSON CRUSOE</span>—1719.</p>
+
+<p>The next principal epoch is just one hundred years later, when the
+reign of Queen Anne was adorned by the essayists, headed by Addison;
+by the “classic” poets, foremost among whom are Dryden and Pope; and
+by the first of the novel-writers, Defoe, the author of Robinson
+Crusoe. Here we find three different kinds of authors equally eminent.
+This “age” continued for seventy-five years,—indeed, we may say a
+hundred, expiring on the appearance of the poets Burns, Wordsworth, and
+Coleridge. It is called the “Classic Age,” because the leading writers,
+especially the poets (Dryden, Pope, etc.), tried to follow the classic
+models of Greece and Rome, and so produced work most highly polished
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</span>
+and theoretically correct; but of course it was artificial and wanting
+in the instinctive and spontaneous elements of poetry as we know it
+in the nineteenth century poets. The term “classic,” however, does
+not apply to the novelists—Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Smollett,
+and Goldsmith following Defoe and Bunyan. These novel writers were
+looked on as too low for critical attention; but the prose of Addison,
+Steel, Swift Johnson, and Goldsmith<a id="FNanchor_2" href="#Footnote_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> was admired as prose had never
+been admired before, and our later age has accepted this prose as the
+greatest literary achievement of the eighteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>The modern reader will find his chief interest in the literature of
+the nineteenth century. And now there are a few dates that we should
+remember.</p>
+
+
+<p class="nindc"><span class="allsmcap">BURNS</span>—1786.</p>
+
+<p>Burns prepared the way for the new poetry—a poetry simple,
+spontaneous, tender, and true, as the poetry of Pope was artificial,
+clever, and “elegant.” The Kilmarnock edition of Burns’s poems appeared
+in 1786. It was a country print of the immortal work of a rude country
+poet.</p>
+
+
+<p class="nindc"><span class="allsmcap">LYRICAL BALLADS</span>—1798.</p>
+
+<p>The “romantic movement” in poetry, as it was called, was really
+inaugurated in 1798—a date always to be remembered—by the little
+volume of Lyrical Ballads published jointly by Wordsworth and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</span>
+Coleridge. This volume contained “The Rime of the Ancient Marinere”
+(Coleridge’s best poem) and “Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey” (the
+best work of Wordsworth). No one paid much attention to the book, and
+but a limited number of copies were sold or given away. A few poets,
+however, read it and felt its spirit.</p>
+
+<p>The first of these to take up the new poetic movement was Scott, in
+his Lay of the Last Minstrel, which at once became popular. For ten
+years Scott was the popular poet, but then he was succeeded by Byron,
+the poet of the dark and cynical. Close on the heels of Byron came
+Shelley and Keats. Last of all came Tennyson and Browning. Tennyson’s
+reputation was made by his two volumes of poems published in 1842; and
+Browning published some of his best work in the same year, though his
+fame did not come to him till many years later.</p>
+
+
+<p class="nindc"><span class="allsmcap">LAMB</span>—1825.</p>
+
+<p>So much for poetry. The prose essay lay dormant from the time of
+Goldsmith until Charles Lamb and De Quincey appeared. Lamb’s Essays
+of Elia began in the London Magazine in 1825; and that is a good date
+to remember as the beginning of the revival of the essay. At almost
+the same time we have De Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater, with
+brilliant, impassioned prose; and during the next twenty-five years
+came Macaulay, the writer of oratorical prose, the splendid rhetorician
+and rhetorical painter of word pictures, and Carlyle, the apostle of
+work, the philosopher, the lecturer through the printed page, and last
+of all, Matthew Arnold and Ruskin, both critics—Ruskin by far the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</span>
+more brilliant and varied.</p>
+
+
+<p class="nindc"><span class="allsmcap">WAVERLEY</span>—1814.</p>
+
+<p>In the novel the first great date to remember in the nineteenth century
+is 1814—the year of the publication of Waverley. Between the Vicar of
+Wakefield and Waverley no great work of fiction appeared, though Jane
+Austen was writing her artistic little stories. But when Waverley was
+published every one felt that a new era was at hand. The book at once
+became immensely popular. It did for the novel what the Lay of the Last
+Minstrel and Marmion had done for poetry—it introduced the romantic
+era in fiction.</p>
+
+
+<p class="nindc"><span class="allsmcap">HUGO, DUMAS, BALZAC</span>—1830.</p>
+
+<p>Scott held the field almost entirely to himself until 1830. In that
+year Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas, and Balzac, all three acknowledging
+the genius and power of Scott, appeared in France. Hugo and Dumas were
+professed romanticists; but Balzac was a realist, and advocated ideas
+that were not generally accepted by the critics till many years later,
+though the common people bought his books freely.</p>
+
+<p>It was Dickens who really made the realistic novel popular. The date
+to remember is 1835, the year in which Sketches by Boz appeared and
+Pickwick was begun. Vanity Fair, Thackeray’s first masterpiece, was
+published in 1848, and in 1858 George Eliot’s Adam Bede.</p>
+
+<p>Since 1860 the forward movement in English literature seems to have
+stopped, and such writers as George Meredith and Thomas Hardy appear
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</span>
+rather as belated members of the older group than representatives of
+any new type. With these we must include Tolstoi, Turgenev, and Ibsen.</p>
+
+<p>In Stevenson, Kipling, and Barrie we undoubtedly have the beginning of
+a new literary movement, the importance of which it is impossible yet
+to estimate.</p>
+
+
+<p class="nindc space-above2">AMERICAN LITERATURE.</p>
+
+<p>We have purposely omitted mention of the American authors, since they
+do not seem to fit into the movement of literary ideas in England. They
+are more simply and obviously artists, giving to the people what they
+can that they think the people will like, and each in his own way.</p>
+
+
+<p class="nindc"><span class="allsmcap">IRVING</span>—1820.</p>
+
+<p>Our first writer of importance was Irving, whose Sketchbook was
+published in 1820. Irving has been called the “American Addison.” He
+might almost as well be called the American Lamb, though Lamb’s essays
+did not begin to appear till five years later: and he was more of a
+story-teller than Lamb.</p>
+
+<p>James Fenimore Cooper began his literary career as a professed imitator
+of Scott in 1820; but he soon developed a purely American romantic
+novel, the novel of the Indian. He is no very great novelist; but his
+books are still popular.</p>
+
+<p>The first American poet was William Cullen Bryant, whose best poem,
+Thanatopsis, was written when he was eighteen, in 1812.</p>
+
+<p>Between 1830 and 1840 appeared some of the best work of Poe,
+Longfellow, and Emerson; but they were as utterly distinct in their
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</span>
+spirit and purposes as if they had belonged to different ages. Poe was
+the poetic inventor, the discoverer of the dramatic principles of plot
+in story-writing, and the original literary critic; Longfellow was
+the sweet singer of the people, the home poet, unoriginal but beloved
+by all; Emerson was the philosopher and man of letters combined,
+the serious essay writer and interpreter to the people of the new
+discoveries of the great students of philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>Following Longfellow were the poets Lowell, Whittier, and Holmes, all
+of whose best work just preceded or just followed the Civil War.</p>
+
+
+<p class="nindc"><span class="allsmcap">SCARLET LETTER</span>—1851.</p>
+
+<p>The one great American novelist is Hawthorne, whose Scarlet Letter
+appeared in 1851—his first great novel—and whose best work was all
+completed prior to 1861, the year of his return from his consulship at
+Liverpool.</p>
+
+<p>Many of our political leaders have been great writers, too. The first
+was Benjamin Franklin, whose Poor Richard’s Almanac and Autobiography
+must certainly be included among the great works of American letters.
+Then Daniel Webster, who stands among the first of great orators in the
+English language, was the author (between 1830 and 1860) of a series of
+speeches, many of which have been accepted as an important part of our
+literature. And among short masterpieces there is none greater than the
+Gettysburg speech of Abraham Lincoln, though it would not be proper to
+speak of him as a man of letters.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</span></p>
+
+<p>It will be seen that practically all of our great American literature
+appeared between the War of 1812 and the Civil War. Since the Civil War
+there has been a new era; but it is not our present purpose to estimate
+current writers.</p>
+
+
+<p class="nindc"><span class="allsmcap">SUMMARY.</span></p>
+
+<p>To summarize the whole field, English and American, we may say that the
+literature that we call standard began with Shakspere, three hundred
+years ago. The first work in that period was Spenser’s Faerie Queen,
+the second Shakspere’s plays. Chaucer, who wrote two hundred years
+earlier, we may look on as the forerunner, who prepared the way for the
+epoch which opened so brilliantly with Spenser and Shakspere. Passing
+over the names of Bacon and Milton, who belong to the seventeenth
+century, but stand apart from the literary movement or merely suggested
+what was to come long after, we find the Queen Anne essayists as the
+characteristic literary workers at the beginning of the eighteenth
+century; and on either side of them the poets of the Classic Age, of
+whom Pope was high priest, and the author of Robinson Crusoe, the
+despised teller of tales who was to be the forerunner of a literary
+movement greater than any we have yet seen. The Classic Age ended with
+Goldsmith, and the Romantic movement, first perceived in Burns, really
+took definite form as a movement in the Lyrical Ballads of 1798. Scott
+was the popularizer of the Romantic movement in both verse and prose.
+That movement reached its climax in 1830 in Hugo and Dumas. In that
+year Balzac inaugurated the realistic movement, whose forerunner was
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</span>
+Jane Austen; but it is Dickens who, beginning in 1835, really made it
+as popular as Scott had made the Romantic movement by the Waverley
+novels. And while the Romantic movement was aristocratic, the Realistic
+movement, going back to the despised Robinson Crusoe, was highly
+democratic.</p>
+
+<p>In Tennyson we find a poet who made the romantic thought into works of
+art that the people could appreciate; and in Longfellow we see much the
+same thing done for the realistic poetry, though Walt Whitman, a very
+imperfect artist, is the high priest of the democratic idea in poetry.</p>
+
+<p>If we can only fix these dates and periods and dominant eras of thought
+in our minds, we shall have a framework in which we can fit all the
+varying phases of modern English literature.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+<p class="nind"><a id="Footnote_2" href="#FNanchor_2" class="label">[2]</a>
+Goldsmith is a sort of link between the essayist and the novelist. He
+was almost equally eminent as novelist, essayist, and poet.</p>
+
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V.<br>
+<i>THE BEST POETRY AND HOW TO READ IT.</i></h2>
+
+
+<p>The reading and enjoyment of poetry may be said to be a fine art.
+Certainly no one is likely to have a taste for poetry who does not
+cultivate it. Yet nothing is so characteristic of the person of
+culture, and nothing is so likely to produce true culture, as the
+reading and study of the best poetry.</p>
+
+<p>It is probably a fact that of all the volumes of poetry in the world,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</span>
+not one in a hundred is read. It would be almost impossible to read
+through from beginning to end the complete works of any well known
+poet, and nothing could be more foolish than to attempt to do so. Yet
+the average owner of a volume of poetry cannot think of anything else
+to do with it except let it alone, and generally chooses the latter
+alternative.</p>
+
+<p>A poem is not like a story. One reads a story, enjoys it, and lays it
+aside. Few would care to read even the best novel more than once, or
+at most two or three times at widely separated intervals. A poem, on
+the other hand, cannot be understood or truly enjoyed even by the most
+cultivated until it has been read several times. In fact one reads a
+poem for quite a different purpose from that which leads one to read
+a story. A poem is more like a piece of music: one reads it when one
+wishes to be put into the mood which the poem or the music is intended
+to produce. The favourite mood produces happiness, and when we wish
+that kind of happiness we turn to the work of art which is able to
+produce it in us.</p>
+
+<p>Now, evidently it is not every poet whose moods are like our own. It is
+true that we may wish to cultivate moods not natural to us; but there
+is a distinct limit even to these. It follows, therefore, that there
+are not many poets we will wish to study, or even to read more than
+once; and there are but few poems even of the poets we like which will
+have that perfect effect on us which will make us wish to repeat it
+often.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</span></p>
+
+<p>If one were asked to suggest the surest way to acquire a liking for
+poetry and a knowledge of it, the following would probably be the
+method suggested:</p>
+
+<p>First, find one good poem that one could really like and read more than
+once with pleasure. There are few of us who could not name such a poem
+at once; but many of us go no farther.</p>
+
+<p>Having chosen the first poem, one has thereby made choice of the first
+poet, a poet whose moods are in accord with one’s own and whom one is
+likely to be able to learn to like. Unless we can start with a liking,
+and proceed to another liking, we are not likely to go very far.</p>
+
+<p>While one likes a poet rather than poems, when one’s taste is fully
+trained, the most successful readers of poetry know a poet by
+relatively few poems. One cannot read many poems many times, and as
+we cannot appreciate any poetry fully that we do not read many times,
+we must make a selection. Indeed we shall find that there are but few
+poems of any poet that produce in us the desired mood. For us, all the
+other poems are more or less failures, at least more or less imperfect.
+So the first principle in the successful reading of poetry is to select
+most rigidly.</p>
+
+<p>While the special student of poetry may read the entire work of a poet,
+weigh each poem, and select judiciously those which he will reread and
+finally make a part of his inner circle of friends, the general reader
+must depend upon the selection of some one else to some extent, or at
+least he will read first those recommended to him, afterward dipping
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</span>
+casually into others in the hope that he will find one he will wish to
+study more carefully. Such a selection, and one of the best ever made,
+is Matthew Arnold’s selection from the poems of Wordsworth. But even
+Matthew Arnold does not tell you what poem of Wordsworth’s to begin
+with. Another admirable selection of the “best poems” is Palgrave’s
+“Golden Treasury.” Yet even in that most lovers of poetry will miss
+many that have been excluded because they are not lyric, or because
+they are too long, or for some other reason which is not an essential
+one with the reader. Other selecters of poems have not been so
+fortunate, and when one can have a tolerably complete edition of a poet
+in his library, he will wish to make his own selection with the aid of
+such adviser as he may choose.</p>
+
+<p>One of the easiest poets to begin with is Longfellow. We have already
+read the Psalm of Life. Let us read it again, and yet again.</p>
+
+<p>Longfellow very aptly describes himself as a poet in that beautiful
+song of his “The Day is Done.”</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">Come, read to me some poem,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Some simple and heartfelt lay,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">That shall sooth that restless feeling,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">And banish the thoughts of day.</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">Not from the grand old masters,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Not from the bards sublime,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Whose distant footsteps echo</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Through the corridors of Time.</div><span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</span>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">For, like strains of martial music,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Their mighty thoughts suggest</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Life’s endless toil and endeavour:</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">And to-night I long for rest.</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">Read from some humbler poet,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Whose songs gushed from his heart,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">As rain from the clouds of summer,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Or tears from the eyelids start.</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">Who, through long days of labour,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">And nights devoid of ease,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Still heard in his soul the music</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Of wonderful melodies.</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">Such songs have power to quiet</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">The restless pulse of care,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">And come like the benediction</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">That follows after prayer.</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>And there is no better way to enjoy poetry than to read it aloud:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">Then read from the treasured volume</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">The poem of thy choice,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">And lend to the rhyme of the poet</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">The beauty of thy voice.</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">And the night shall be filled with music,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">And the cares that infest the day</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Shall fold their tents like the Arabs,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">And as silently steal away.</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</span></p>
+
+<p>Turning over the leaves of your volume of Longfellow, mark these few
+poems to read first, and if you find one that you like, read it again.
+Perhaps you will be quite familiar with some, if not most in this
+list; but if there are some that you do not know, but that attract
+you on reading once, study those till you have learned to love them;
+in so doing you will have made a real beginning toward the culture
+that comes from a systematic study of poetry: “A Psalm of Life,” “The
+Reaper and the Flowers,” “Footsteps of Angels,” “Flowers,” “The Wreck
+of the Hesperus,” “The Skeleton in Armour,” “The Village Blacksmith,”
+“The Rainy Day,” “God’s Acre,” “To the River Charles,” “Maidenhood,”
+“Excelsior,” “The Belfry at Bruges,” “The Arsenal at Springfield,” “The
+Norman Baron,” “The Bridge,” “Curfew,” “The Building of the Ship,” “The
+Builders,” “Pegasus in Pound,” “Beware,” “The Day is Done,” “The Old
+Clock on the Stairs,” “The Arrow and the Song,” “My Lost Youth,” “Paul
+Revere’s Ride” (Tales of a Wayside Inn), “The Birds of Killingworth,”
+“The Bell of Atri,” “The Children’s Hour,” “Hanging of the Crane,” and
+“Keramos.” These are not all the good poems, and some of these are not
+even the best; but they are a good list to choose from. Besides these
+you will perhaps like to read “Hiawatha” first, then “The Courtship of
+Miles Standish,” and finally “Evangeline”; but these longer poems are
+tales rather than poems, and one does not care to return to them as to
+the shorter gems.</p>
+
+<p>Longfellow is a “humbler poet,” as he himself has expressed it, but
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</span>
+he is none the less a poet; and in all literature you will not find a
+simpler poet, nor one easier to read and like.</p>
+
+<p>Next to Longfellow, perhaps the most generally liked modern poet is
+Tennyson. Tennyson was not a great thinker, like Browning; he was
+rather the interpreter of the thinker poets, for the reader who could
+not read Wordsworth and the rest for himself. Tennyson set out in early
+life to master poetic technique, and he could write more different
+styles than any other great modern poet. Besides, his poems often
+have a swing (quite unlike the sweet melody of Longfellow’s) which
+fascinates many. And he was peculiarly and distinctly the poet of
+moods. “Break, Break, Break” is little more than a haunting melody in
+words; and the same may be said of most of the songs in “The Princess,”
+beautiful as they are.</p>
+
+<p>It will take much more time to learn to like Tennyson than it required
+for Longfellow, for Tennyson is so various, and we must come at him in
+so many different ways.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps we might begin with such mere pretty rhythms as “Airy, Fairy
+Lilian” and “Claribel”; how much better than these shall we find “The
+Lady of Shallott,” “Break, Break, Break,” and all the songs in “The
+Princess.” “The Princess” itself is rather a tedious poem, certainly
+one which we would not care to read twice in succession; but the songs
+scattered through it are as nearly perfect as that sort of poetry well
+could be. “The May Queen” is a pretty and fascinating simple story that
+may touch us more deeply than we would own; and a poem of a different
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</span>
+kind which might appeal particularly to our mood is “Locksley Hall,”
+following it with “Locksley Hall Twenty Years After,” which we may not
+like so well. Some will like to puzzle over the philosophy of “The Two
+Voices,” others the pretty story of “The Miller’s Daughter” or “The
+Talking Oak,” or the poetic “Ulysses” and “Lotus-Eaters,” while others
+will wish to pass on to “Maud” with its varied rhythms. In “Maud”
+there is one often quoted passage which may be all that one will care
+to reread—the passage beginning, “Come into the garden, Maud, For
+the black bat, night, has flown.” Nothing could be more perfectly and
+exquisitely rhythmical. And yet of all Tennyson’s poem, it is probably
+the shortest that we shall like best, such as “The Flower in the
+Crannied Wall” and “Crossing the Bar,” or such a stirring war poem as
+“Charge of the Light Brigade.”</p>
+
+<p>Nearly all of Tennyson’s poems that he has retained in his complete
+works are well written and worth reading once; but if you ever come to
+like the higher poets you will find his best thinking expressed there
+better, and will turn to Tennyson more and more for the swinging music
+of his shorter songs, with their mood-making rhythms and haunting
+images.</p>
+
+<p>And now let us turn to one of the great poets—to Browning. Most of us
+will be entirely unable to read the greater part of his poetry at all,
+and whether it is good or bad we must leave it to the critics to say.
+It will be best to buy him in a volume of selections, such as that he
+made himself from his own poems and published in two volumes. We may
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</span>
+make our selection from that, though in other collections we may find
+other poems we shall like quite as much as any of these.</p>
+
+<p>First of all, let us say that it will probably take many days to learn
+to like even a few of Browning’s poems; but once we have learned to
+like them they will be dearer to us than all the other poets. We
+measure his greatness by the intensity of the liking we have for what
+we do like.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps we have read “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to
+Aix” and found nothing very wonderful in it. If we ever come to love
+Browning, it will be because he was himself a lover, and we shall
+admire him because he was a fighter against the discouragements and
+littlenesses of the world.</p>
+
+<p>Let us begin with his love poems—such a simple poem as “A Woman’s Last
+Word.” We shall not understand all of it; but no matter—we shall like
+it none the less on that account, and we shall like it the better the
+more we read it. Then let us read “Love Among the Ruins.” We shall not
+understand all of that, either, but some we shall understand, and there
+will be new things to discover each time we reread, which should be
+many times. Possibly we shall never get tired of reading it over. And
+then we may read at pleasure such poems as “The Last Ride Together,”
+“Any Wife to Any Husband,” “In a Year,” “Misconceptions,” “Two in the
+Campagna,” and “Evelyn Hope.” There will be others which in time we
+shall be drawn to read, such as “In a Gondola” and “The Statue and the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</span>
+Bust”; but the important thing is to learn to love, and to like to read
+and reread, two or three.</p>
+
+<p>And now let us turn to that other side of Browning, his philosophy as
+a fighter and a struggler in the world. Begin with “Rabbi Ben Ezra.”
+In a week, or a month, or a year, we may not have mastered it—indeed
+probably we shall never master it. So much the better; then we shall
+go on reading it and rereading it, and getting help and inspiration
+from it. There will be certain stanzas that will seem meant for us,
+and these we will mark, and in the margin we will make notes none will
+understand but ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>Once master this one poem, and enough is accomplished—or at least
+the rest will take care of itself. We shall then read “Saul,” and the
+haunting “Abt Vogler,” “Andrea del Sarto,” “A Toccata of Galuppi’s,”
+“Prospice” and “A Grammarian’s Funeral.”</p>
+
+<p>There are other poems—yes, a good many others; but if you once come to
+love two or three, so that you like to turn to them, and find comfort
+in reading them, you will find the others for yourself, and if you do
+not find them, you will probably get all the more good out of the old
+ones.</p>
+
+<p>We have perhaps said enough as to the manner of studying poetry,
+illustrating by the three poets we have considered. The reader will now
+be able to take up the following for himself, upon the hints given with
+each.</p>
+
+<p>If you like Longfellow, read some of the best poems of the other
+New England poets—Whittier’s “Barefoot Boy,” “Barbara Frietchie,”
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</span>
+“Maud Muller,” “Skipper Ireson’s Ride,” and “Snow-Bound”; Holmes’s
+“The Chambered Nautilus,” “The One Hoss Shay,” “The Last Leaf,” and
+“Old Ironsides”; Lowell’s “Vision of Sir Launfal,” and “The First
+Snow-Fall”; and Bryant’s “Thanatopsis.” “To a Water Fowl,” and “The
+Death of the Flowers.”</p>
+
+<p>Some may trace a likeness between the three great poems of Poe, “The
+Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” and “The Bells,” and Tennyson; but Poe will be
+found unique in his weird mood and rhythmic use of words.</p>
+
+<p>From the lyric poems of Tennyson, turn to Shelley’s “The Skylark” (one
+of the most beautiful poems in our language), and his “The Cloud,”
+and “Ode to the West Wind”; and after picking up such little gems as
+“Love’s Philosophy,” we may learn to like “Alastor” and “The Sensitive
+Plant.”</p>
+
+<p>Once Byron was almost worshiped, while today we hardly do him justice.
+He is the poet of the “dark mood,” and we shall probably find this mood
+in its greatest purity in his dramatic poems “Manfred” and “Cain,” of
+each of which he is himself the hero. Rather than read entire such long
+poems as “Childe Harold,” “The Giaour,” “The Corsair,” and “Don Juan,”
+it will be better to read the striking passages—at least at first. We
+must judge from our taste for Byron how much we shall read of him.</p>
+
+<p>No one should fail to read Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” If we would
+read further, we may perhaps choose first “St Agnes’ Eve,” “Ode to
+Autumn” and “Endymion.” It takes a fine poetic taste to appreciate
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</span>
+Keats, for he is a poet “all of beauty,” rich, fragrant, sensuous
+beauty, such beauty as we shall find nowhere else; but his thoughts and
+emotions of love and conquest over life are not very great.</p>
+
+<p>Next to Browning, perhaps the greatest poet of the nineteenth century
+is Wordsworth. He is the very opposite of Browning standing to Nature
+as Browning does to humanity. We shall find his creed stated in a poem
+which is one of the greatest in the English language, called simply
+“Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey”; and much the same thought we shall
+find expressed in more lyric form in his famous “Ode on Intimations
+of Immortality.” Unquestionably the best of Wordsworth is to be found
+in Matthew Arnold’s selections in the “Golden Treasury” series, and
+this is better to possess than the bulky complete works, much of which
+we shall find exceedingly dull and almost fatal to our liking for any
+poetry whatever. But there are also many beautiful simple poems of
+Wordsworth’s which we should easily learn to like, among them, “We Are
+Seven,” “Lucy Gray,” “She Was a Phantom of Delight,” “Three Years She
+Grew,” “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (Daffodils), and many of his
+sonnets, such as that to “Milton,” “On Westminster Bridge,” “To the
+River Duddon—Afterthought,” “The World Is too Much With Us,” etc.</p>
+
+<p>Of the older poets, Burns stands by himself, one of the most popular
+of all poets who wrote in the English language. Best of all his poems
+are his simple love songs, such as “My Luve is Like the Red, Red
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</span>
+Rose,” “Jean,” “Highland Mary,” and “To Mary in Heaven.” Who can forget
+“Bannockburn,” “Ye Banks and Braes of Bonnie Doon,” and “John Anderson
+my Jo?” “The Man’s the Gowd for a’ That,” and that beautiful little
+poem, “To a Mouse,” are unique, because they show us the simple heart
+of a man in all its struggling simplicity. Some, too, will like to read
+and reread “The Cotter’s Saturday Night.” In the reading of Burns one
+can hardly go wrong; yet after all there is much even in Burns that we
+might well spare, and many and many a line of his poetry has no such
+charm as the poems we have mentioned; yet the reader who has learned
+to like these will, on reading any other poem, know and discover the
+difference almost at the first line.</p>
+
+<p>If one wishes to find in poetry comfort for a weary mood, one will
+not look for it in such poets as Pope and Dryden, with their clever
+lines. Pope has more quotable lines than almost any other poet except
+Shakspere; and his “Essay on Man” is interesting, and perhaps we may
+even find some charm in “The Rape of the Lock”; but on the whole one
+will miss little by reading him in a book of quotations.</p>
+
+<p>Milton is different. He is the one noble and lofty poet of the English
+language. We shall not find any modern philosophy in him; but what is
+finer in its imagery and rhythm than his “Hymn to the Nativity”! And
+such lyrical poems as “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” will be found to
+possess an easy and surprising charm. “Paradise Lost” we should never
+read more than a page or two at a time, for it is too great, too lofty
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</span>
+for the common mind to bear it long; but who would miss the pleasure of
+reading this single page or two once a month or once a year?</p>
+
+<p>There are certain single poems which no student of poetry will fail
+to read and reread as he does the poems of the great poets whom we
+study as men as well as the author of certain poems. One of these is
+Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” another is Coleridge’s
+“Ancient Mariner” and his “Christabel”; Hood’s “Bridge of Sighs” and
+the “Song of the Shirt”; Wolfe’s “Burial of Sir John Moore”; Cowper’s
+“Alexander Selkirk”; Campbell’s “Hohenlinden”; and such bits as Ben
+Jonson’s “Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes,” and Goldsmith’s “When
+Lovely Woman Stoops to Folly.”</p>
+
+<p>There are other poems by less known poets, which only the individual
+reader will find and make his own. For myself, I know no poems I
+like better to read than Matthew Arnold’s “Tristram and Iseult,”
+“Switzerland,” and “Dover Beach”; while many admire poems by Emerson
+and George Eliot and Dickens in the same way, though we are not
+accustomed to think of these writers as among the great poets. Though
+Edward FitzGerald’s “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” is a translation, it is
+one of the most popular poems in the English language, and considered
+also one of the greatest.</p>
+
+<p>Note: Many of the poems here mentioned may be found in “A Selection
+from the Great English Poets,” edited by Sherwin Cody.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</span></p>
+
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI.<br>
+<i>HOW TO STUDY SHAKSPERE.</i></h2>
+
+
+<p>The best way to study Shakspere is to go to see his plays at the
+theatre, especially when they are presented as Edwin Booth or Henry
+Irving have played them. What a change from the way in which they were
+presented in Shakspere’s own time! Then the scenery was so crude that
+they had to put out a sign on the stage saying, “This is a Forest,”
+etc. And all the women’s parts were played by boys or young men. There
+were no Mrs. Siddonses or Ellen Terrys in those days. It is said that
+Beethoven himself was not a very good piano player, and probably never
+heard some of his most beautiful sonatas played as Paderewski plays
+them today. Shakspere probably never saw his plays acted so well as
+they have been acted many times since his day.</p>
+
+<p>The first great actor to make Shakspere classic was David Garrick, a
+friend of Sam Johnson. He was graceful, light, airy, and gay, yet made
+an instant success by the naturalness with which he played Richard
+III, and then Lear, and then Macbeth. Garrick was not an ideal Hamlet,
+but he gave good support to the famous Peg Woffington, who made her
+fame in Ophelia on the same stage with Garrick. The most seductive of
+Woffington’s characters was Rosalind in As You Like It, and she played
+Portia in the Merchant of Venice with only less charm.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</span></p>
+
+<p>The stage mantle of Garrick fell on John Philip Kemble, who brought to
+Shakspere’s plays accurate and truthful scenery and costumes. Hamlet
+was his favourite part—and as he was a meditative and scholarly rather
+than a fiery actor, he made a deep impression with it. Sarah Siddons
+was his sister. She was called the Queen of Tragedy, and was indeed an
+ideal Roman matron in her impassioned acting of great parts, coupled
+with a dignified, almost commonplace everyday life. In a famous picture
+Sir Joshua Reynolds painted her as the tragic muse. She played Lady
+Macbeth as probably no one else has ever played it, indeed it is said
+when she was studying the part she became so frightened at her own
+impersonation that she rushed up stairs and jumped into bed with her
+clothes on. In Queen Katharine (Henry VIII), she played the part so
+realistically that the Surveyor, to whom she had said, “You were the
+Duke’s Surveyor, and lost your office on complaint of the tenants,”
+came off the stage perspiring with emotion and said, “That woman plays
+as if the thing were in earnest. She looked me so through and through
+with her black eyes that I would not for the world meet her on the
+stage again!”</p>
+
+<p>Edmund Kean was a little man, but he played Shylock in the Merchant
+of Venice and Richard III as they had never been played before. Iago,
+too, was a famous character of his. He was admired by the aged widow of
+David Garrick, who called him David’s successor, and he was praised by
+Byron.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</span></p>
+
+<p>Each age seems to have had its actor. Garrick was Johnson’s friend.
+Kean belonged to Byron’s day, and the actor of Dickens’s time was
+Macready. The great American actor was Edwin Booth, who made us
+familiar with the whole line of Shaksperean tragic characters during
+nearly the whole of the last half of the nineteenth century. Who that
+has seen him slip on to the stage as the hunchback Richard III, or walk
+in the calm dignity of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, attired all in black
+velvet, can ever imagine those characters in any other personation!</p>
+
+<p>The great tragedies seem to be the plays in which great actors have
+become most famous; but no play of Shakspere’s, not even the Merchant
+of Venice, has been more popular than Romeo and Juliet. In the time of
+Garrick a certain Barry Spanger was said to be the ideal Romeo. Charles
+Kemble, son of Philip, played it with great success. And his daughter
+Fanny Kemble was brought out as Juliet, much against her wish, to save
+her father’s fortunes. She had had no training for the stage; but the
+play ran for one hundred and twenty nights with the greatest success.</p>
+
+<p>There have been other great actors and actresses, all of whom (if
+English) have been famous in Shaksperean roles—Adelaide Neilson,
+Charlotte Cushman, and the American Edwin Forrest—and even many
+foreigners have tried Shakspere. Salvini was the greatest of Othellos,
+and Adelaide Ristori was famous as Lady Macbeth. Even Bernhardt has
+taken the part of Hamlet. In our own time Henry Irving and Ellen Terry
+have been the best known performers of Shakspere’s characters; but it
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</span>
+would seem that all talented actors and actresses sooner or later test
+their greatness by attempting these roles.</p>
+
+<p>The true way to study Shakspere is by becoming fond of his characters;
+and this can be done most successfully only by seeing them on the
+stage. But we can learn to picture in our minds the parts they played
+in the great human drama, fashioning from imagination the scenes and
+personalities.</p>
+
+<p>Children should be introduced to Shakspere in the delightful “Tales
+from Shakspere” by Charles and Mary Lamb. The first thing is to get the
+stories and the great characters, and the poetic antique language of
+Shakspere himself may make this a little difficult at first.</p>
+
+<p>Then we may read such a book as Mrs. Jameson’s “Heroines of Shakspere,”
+in which we find the women of Shakspere’s plays described in simple
+modern language.</p>
+
+<p>Then let us read the plays themselves, without thought of notes or
+comments, for the mere human interest of the story and the characters.</p>
+
+<p>Probably the best play to begin with is the Merchant of Venice. Read
+it rapidly, passing lightly over the more commonplace portions. First
+you will come to the scene at Portia’s house, when the wooers are
+opening the caskets in the hope that they may be lucky enough to win
+the wealthy lady. But Portia really loves Bassanio and wants him to
+choose aright, as he does, and she is charmingly happy because he is
+successful.</p>
+
+<p>But the great scene of the play is in the fourth act, when Shylock
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</span>
+brings Antonio before the court, demanding his pound of flesh. Portia,
+disguised as a lawyer, appears to save his life. How graciously she
+does it! How much a man and woman too she is! How beautiful her speech
+about mercy, “dropping as the rain from heaven”!</p>
+
+<p>Once having read the play through like this, for the story and the
+characters, lay it aside and at some future time read it again more
+thoroughly, stopping to enjoy Launcelot Gobbo, the clown, and the
+talkative Gratiano.</p>
+
+<p>So with each rereading the interest in the play will grow, till you
+have become very fond not only of Portia and her friends, but of
+Shakspere, too.</p>
+
+<p>Next to the Merchant of Venice the most popular of Shakspere’s plays
+is Romeo and Juliet. In this the balcony scene is the most famous, in
+which Romeo comes to woo Juliet; but among the characters the most
+interesting will perhaps be Mercutio, Romeo’s talkative and jolly
+friend, and Juliet’s queer old nurse.</p>
+
+<p>Of the tragedies, Hamlet is undoubtedly the greatest, but it is the
+hardest to read, and must be read many times to be fully appreciated.
+We are struck in the very first scene by the personality of the ghost,
+and of Hamlet’s friend, Horatio, that quiet, calm gentleman who looks
+sympathetically on throughout the play, and lives to tell the story of
+Hamlet’s infirm will. Polonius is a conventional old fool, but full of
+worldly wisdom, and the father of the brave Laertes and the sweet and
+pathetic Ophelia. How unhappy a girl she is! She is not very strong,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</span>
+not very brave; but we are sorry indeed for her, and in mere reading
+really shed tears when she sings her sweetly crazy songs. How strange
+and interesting, too, is Hamlet’s mother, and his scene with her
+toward the end of the play! And who can forget the conversation with
+the grave-diggers! Throughout we feel the atmosphere of philosophy and
+thought. Hamlet is indeed a very great and interesting play, but one
+requiring much time and leisurely thought. It is impossible to hurry in
+reading Hamlet.</p>
+
+<p>Next in greatness to Hamlet is, perhaps, Lear. In the very first act
+we are struck with the beautiful nature of Cordelia, though she utters
+very few words. She does not appear again until the end; yet the poor
+interesting Fool is always talking about her to Lear. We detest the two
+ungrateful daughters, Goneril and Regan, and sympathize with Edgar,
+the outcast son of Gloucester. How strange it seems that this fool,
+this insane old man, this homeless son pretending to be crazy, and this
+absent daughter, should hold our interest so perfectly!</p>
+
+<p>More romantic, more polished, more correct in stage-craft, so that many
+call it Shakspere’s greatest play, is Othello. Yet we have no such
+love for the beautiful Desdemona as we had for Cordelia, or Juliet,
+or Portia. Iago is a masterpiece of scheming treachery, and we are
+somewhat sorry for the handsome and abused Moor Othello; but we can
+never like him quite as well as some of the others.</p>
+
+<p>Macbeth is another great tragedy, and Lady Macbeth is a marvellous
+portrayal of a bad woman. We are interested in the witches and their
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</span>
+prophecies, and we know how true is Macbeth’s ambition, and the greater
+ambition of his wife who drives him on. But in Macbeth there is no one
+to love, as there is in others of the plays.</p>
+
+<p>In Julius Caesar it is the patriotic fervour of Brutus, mistaken though
+it may be, that interests us most, though we like to declaim the speech
+of Antony at Caesar’s funeral.</p>
+
+<p>Antony and Cleopatra makes an excellent play to read, for Cleopatra
+is so well known as a character that we already have a point of
+familiarity to start with. We feel that we are reading history, and
+these great Roman plays of Shakspere’s are probably the best history we
+shall ever get. With Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra we should
+also include Coriolanus, to be studied third in the series.</p>
+
+<p>If we do not care for tragedy we shall have passed from Romeo and
+Juliet or the Merchant of Venice to As You Like It, one of the best of
+Shakspere’s lighter comedies. It is less deep, but not less charming
+than the heavier plays. The delightful Rosalind, disguised as a
+young man in the woods, the melancholy Jaques, and the amusing clown
+Touchstone, create an atmosphere of refinement which we will find
+nowhere else.</p>
+
+<p>I myself like Much Ado About Nothing as well as any of the comedies.
+It tells the story of Benedick and Beatrice, who were never going to
+marry, they were such wits both of them! Yet they were tricked into it,
+and apparently enjoyed it after all. Where else will you find a woman
+joker?</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</span></p>
+
+<p>The Taming of the Shrew is an interesting play if you admire a wilful,
+stubborn, pretty woman such as Kate was, and would like to know how
+her husband brought her into charming subjection. It is a very pretty
+play, and not less interesting for being somewhat out of date among our
+modern ideas of women.</p>
+
+<p>But of all Shakspere’s comic characters, none is more original or
+famous than Falstaff. We meet him first in Henry V, perhaps the best of
+Shakspere’s historical plays. He is a wit, a coward, and a blow-hard,
+but Shakspere never makes him overdo any of these traits, and so we
+cannot but find him intensely amusing. He reappears in the Merry Wives
+of Windsor, which Shakspere is said to have written in order to please
+Queen Elizabeth.</p>
+
+<p>The most intensely dramatic of the histories, and the first to read is
+Richard III. Richard is a scheming, daring fellow; and our love for the
+little princes put to death in the tower gives us a point of affection.
+Besides, this is the drama all the great tragic actors have been
+especially fond of playing.</p>
+
+<p>Next to Richard III is Henry VIII, which is said to be only partly
+Shakspere’s. In it is Henry’s great minister Wolsey, whose fall from
+power we witness as an event more tragic than death.</p>
+
+<p>Last of all let us read the Tempest, that romantic play which Shakspere
+probably wrote at the end of his career, as a sort of calm retrospect;
+for we may think of Prospero as Shakspere himself.</p>
+
+<p>There are other good plays of Shakspere’s; but if we have not time to
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</span>
+read all, these are the best to begin with.</p>
+
+<p>The two poems, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, are not the best of
+reading; but the sonnets are the very highest form of lyric poetry.
+They are entirely different from the plays, and those who like the
+plays often do not care at all for the sonnets, while many not familiar
+with the plays read the sonnets with admiration. Many believe they
+tell Shakspere’s own story of love for a man friend, and, in the last
+division from No. 126 on, for a dark woman. The sonnets to the man are
+the better, and if one reads them over a few times and feels the poet’s
+reflection on change, time, and human love, he will certainly not doubt
+that here we really do come face to face with Shakspere in his own
+proper character. These sonnets help us to a knowledge of the man and a
+personal liking for him such as we get for his characters when we read
+his plays.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII.<br>
+<i>THE BEST ENGLISH ESSAYS.</i></h2>
+
+
+<p>Many people fancy that essays are not popular or easy reading; but when
+Addison published his Spectator, this little sheet of essays came out
+every morning, as a daily paper, and was immensely successful. Today
+there are not many standard novels that sell better than Lamb’s Essays.
+Macaulay was read in his day from one end of the English-speaking
+world to the other, and so was Carlyle. Ruskin, who was essentially
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</span>
+an essayist, though of a peculiar type, received a hundred thousand
+dollars a year as profits on his books, which he published himself
+through George Allen, a printer in a small country town. And in our own
+country Emerson is a sort of bible to many people.</p>
+
+<p>Those who learn to like essays become very fond of them, and it is only
+to people who never have read them much that they seem dry. The fact
+is, there are only certain writers and certain of their works that we
+shall care for.</p>
+
+<p>If you like epigram, one of the best books to read is Bacon’s Essays.
+Each essay is very short; the subjects are of everyday interest; and
+the sentences are short and sharp. One does not care to read much of
+such a book at a time—only a few pages. But Bacon’s Essays is a book
+to own and take up for half an hour now and then through a number of
+years. We read these essays much as we do favourite poems.</p>
+
+<p>Bacon belongs to the time of Shakspere, and his language is a little
+antiquated. Much less so is that of Addison, who wrote over a hundred
+years later. There is a certain story-like character in his essays that
+makes them especially interesting. He tells us about Will Honeycomb
+and Sir Roger de Coverley. Sir Roger, of whom he writes in a series of
+essays, is especially interesting. Then Addison has humorous little
+papers on Advice in Love, the art of flirting the fan, etc., etc.</p>
+
+<p>Swift, who wrote about the same time as Addison, is still more of a
+story teller. Gulliver’s Travels is often classed as a novel, though
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</span>
+as a matter of fact it was written as a satirical essay on the foibles
+of England in Swift’s day. Next to Gulliver’s Travels we are likely to
+be most interested in A Tale of a Tub, and The Battle of the Books,
+which are more regular essays than Gulliver.</p>
+
+<p>But the greatest of all the old essayists is Lamb. His most famous
+essay is that On Roast Pig, in which he tells the story of the origin
+of roast pig as a dish. Only less interesting is Mrs. Battle’s Opinions
+on Whist, and the essay on Poor Relations.</p>
+
+<p>The charm of Lamb is his humour, his good nature, his kindly heart,
+his quaint way of saying things. We learn to love him. No one has ever
+equalled him or imitated him. And when we have read his essays, we
+want to read his life—how he gave up the woman he loved to care for
+his poor sister who had killed her mother in a fit of insanity and had
+often to go to the asylum through all her life. Lamb was fond of his
+glass, and fond of the city, and fond of his friends. When we know him
+we must love him, and nothing else matters.</p>
+
+<p>If we have a taste for the curious and lofty in description, we shall
+like De Quincey, the opium-eater. In the Confessions of an English
+Opium Eater we have an account of himself and his opium-eating, which
+is rather dry; but his wonderful dreams fascinate us. These we find at
+their best in his masterpieces Suspiria de Profundis and The English
+Stage Coach, which are indeed the height of impassioned prose, lofty
+poetry without meter, splendid dreams and fancies.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</span></p>
+
+<p>De Quincey wrote a great deal, and much that is merely dry and
+scholarly. But often he has something quaint and curious, such as his
+“Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” and wonderful stories such
+as the Flight of the Tartars and the Spanish Nun.</p>
+
+<p>Carlyle wrote in such a jagged, queer, hard style that nowadays few
+people can get used to a book like Sartor Resartus. The philosophy
+of Sartor will be found in a delightfully simple essay entitled
+Characteristics, the point of view in which is deeply interesting.
+Another simple and readable essay is that on Burns, and the essay on
+Goethe is worth reading, and that on Jean Paul Richter. Perhaps when
+one gets used to him one will wish to read Heroes and Hero-Worship,
+The French Revolution (or a part of it), and last of all that queer
+philosophy of clothes, Sartor Resartus.</p>
+
+<p>If one cares for philosophy he should certainly read Emerson’s original
+essays, beginning with those on Compensation, Self-Reliance, Love, the
+Over-Soul, Friendship, Circles, and Nature.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson’s essays have no beginning or end, and one might as well begin
+in the middle as anywhere else. He does simply one thing and that is
+interpret man in the light of modern transcendental philosophy. He had
+caught the great philosophic idea that God, man, and nature are but
+one substance, governed by the same laws, reaching out to infinity,
+and kin to everything within the bounds of infinity. Every common
+thing in life he views again from this new point of view; and the
+revelation is wonderful. Emerson does not discuss this philosophy or
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</span>
+tell us anything about it; but he makes us see the whole world in the
+transforming light of it.</p>
+
+<p>In his two original volumes of essays he does this supremely well; and
+then in many later volumes he does it over and over. Such volumes, good
+in their way but less original than the first, are Representative Men,
+Society and Solitude, and Conduct of Life.</p>
+
+<p>Macaulay is not read nearly as much nowadays as he was in his own time.
+His style is oratorical, and highflown oratory, especially in essays,
+is not popular today. For all that, one cannot well afford to miss
+reading the famous descriptive essays on the Trial of Warren Hastings,
+Lord Clive, Milton (in which will be found the famous description of
+the Puritans), and the essay on History. There are two first rate
+essays on Samuel Johnson, the best one being a review of Croker’s
+edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, beginning at the point at which
+Macaulay finishes with Croker and takes up Boswell. Another good essay
+is that on Frances Burney or Madame D’Arblay. Those who have time will
+even wish to read Macaulay’s History of England, with its wonderful and
+gorgeous descriptions, that make the scene live before the eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Of splendid modern prose writers, Ruskin is one of the greatest. It
+takes a little effort and a little choosing to learn to like him; but
+those who will take the pains to study him will be richly rewarded.</p>
+
+<p>About the simplest thing he wrote was Ethics of the Dust, a series of
+conversations with some young girls about nature and everyday life.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</span>
+Children of ten are said to have read this book and liked it; yet it is
+by no means childish, and anyone might enjoy it.</p>
+
+<p>Next in general interest and simplicity is Sesame and Lilies—a queer
+title. The first chapter is “Of King’s Treasuries”—meaning books; and
+the second “Of Queens’ Gardens,” meaning the dominion over nature and
+society which culture gives a woman. This is one of the very best books
+ever written on How and What to Read, though written in a very symbolic
+style that will require more than one reading fully to understand it.</p>
+
+<p>Another book of quite a different kind is called in Ruskin’s odd
+fashion Crown of Wild Olives. It is a series of essays on work and the
+things in life worth working for.</p>
+
+<p>These three books are short, and perhaps at first many will not like
+them very much; but liking will grow with time.</p>
+
+<p>There is a book, however, that will well repay getting and reading in
+part, from time to time, for many years. That is Modern Painters. It
+is in four large volumes, and from the title one might suppose it was
+a technical history of modern painting. This is not the fact, however.
+It is a popular study of the noblest element in art, and throughout the
+four volumes one will find marvellous pictures of word-painting, such
+as Ruskin’s description of Turner’s Slave Ship, when he is discussing
+sea-painting. He talks of art and nature, always looking at art from
+the point of view of nature; and the volumes are so well divided into
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</span>
+chapters and sections, each with its title and sub-title, that one can
+pick out an interesting subject here, and another there. It will be
+of especial interest and value to any one who cares at all about art.
+Ruskin wrote the first volume of this work before he was twenty-four,
+and it is perhaps the most brilliant thing he ever did. It is full of
+life and colour and splendid word-painting.</p>
+
+<p>The reader who believes in culture and wishes to cultivate the esthetic
+and refined should certainly read Matthew Arnold’s book Culture and
+Anarchy. It requires a close and logical mind to appreciate and
+understand him, and to read and like him is not easy, but a liking for
+his chapter on Sweetness and Light is an excellent test of one’s real
+success in the cultivation of culture.</p>
+
+<p>It will be seen that there are good essays of many types. There is the
+epigrammatic discussion of everyday matters, such as we find in Bacon,
+and in quite a different way in Emerson; and there is the quaint and
+playful humour of Addison and Lamb; there is the splendid rhetoric of
+De Quincey and of Macaulay, and the splendid word-painting of Ruskin;
+there is the preaching of Carlyle, and the literary lecturing of
+Matthew Arnold. If we cannot know all, we must choose our bent and
+follow the lines we like best.</p>
+
+<p>The most popular form of the essay is that of Addison and Lamb, the
+quaint, amusing, human badinage on familiar topics, full of love,
+and full of sense. Along this line there are a few good modern
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</span>
+books—Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, Ik
+Marvel’s Reveries of a Bachelor, Charles Dudley Warner’s Backlog
+Studies, and Barrie’s My Lady Nicotine and When a Man’s Single.<a id="FNanchor_3" href="#Footnote_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a></p>
+
+<p>The essay can never be read in a hurry, nor by one who feels himself
+rushed. The great essayists wrote in the most leisurely manner
+possible, a very little at a time, and only when in precisely the right
+mood. In the same way must they be read—alone, before an open fire, of
+a long winter evening. The woman who delights in these things will sit
+curled up in a great easychair, her head tipped against the back, the
+light well shaded over her shoulder. The man will, if he is a smoker,
+inevitably want his pipe. No modern cigar will do, and the vulgarity
+of chewing is utterly inconsistent with a taste for reading essays. It
+is the refined, the imaginative, and the dreamy who will especially
+delight in this form of literature.</p>
+
+<p>Note: Most of the essays mentioned in this chapter will be found in a
+volume entitled “The Best English Essays,” edited by Sherwin Cody.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+<p class="nind"><a id="Footnote_3" href="#FNanchor_3" class="label">[3]</a>
+Barrie’s great novel is The Little Minister.</p>
+
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</span></p>
+
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_VIII">CHAPTER VIII.<br>
+<i>OLD NOVELS THAT ARE GOOD.</i></h2>
+
+
+<p>At the top of the ladder of literature is poetry, to which only a few
+succeed in climbing. Next is the essay, a large comfortable niche cut
+in the side of the rock of ages, which is never crowded, and so is all
+the more grateful to those who frequent it. And down at the bottom is
+the novel, which we all read.</p>
+
+<p>Novels are read for various reasons, which are not often truthfully set
+down by the professional critic. Truth, however, is always best, and no
+one need be ashamed of it.</p>
+
+<p>Most of us read novels for the same reason that we go to the
+theatre—for amusement. We want to get away from the weary commonplace
+things about us, and get some refreshment by dipping into another
+world. Perhaps our social world is narrow; but in a good novel we may
+move in the best society. Possibly we are ambitious, and wish to read
+of the things we would like to have if we could. Reading about them is
+next best to having them. Or possibly our world is so unexciting and
+dreary that we need the excitement of an exciting novel to keep us from
+dying of decay. Excitement is a good thing, really necessary to life,
+however bad it may be when carried to extremes. Some people become
+feverish in their chase for excitement and in their constant reading of
+exciting novels; but we must not condemn the healthy for the excesses
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</span>
+of the mentally sick.</p>
+
+<p>The excitement afforded by novels is of several different kinds. There
+is the excitement of love and passion—perhaps the most deeply grained
+sentiment of the human heart, and apparently the most necessary to
+health of the heart, especially in these days when our spontaneous
+emotions are constantly being repressed. Then there is the excitement
+of travel and adventure. Finally we have the novel of intellectual
+piquancy, the book full of epigrams and smart sayings such as Oscar
+Wilde might have written. The novel of love and passion may be
+the lascivious and dirty book, or sin equally by being the weakly
+sentimental Sunday school story. The abuse of the novel of travel and
+adventure is the cheap dime novel, or the high-priced dime novel called
+the historical romance. And the extreme of the epigrammatic story is
+the snobby smart novel, which tends to make prigs of us. This last
+novel is largely a modern development.</p>
+
+<p>In any of these lines a novel is good if it gives us real men and
+women, acting naturally and truly, and is written with sufficient
+rapidity and lightness. The great sin in a novel is ignorance of human
+nature; and the next sin is dullness. Either is fatal.</p>
+
+<p>The oldest examples of modern fiction are two great collections of
+tavern tales—Boccaccio’s Decameron and the Arabian Nights. These
+stories were told to amuse; because they amused those who listened to
+them, they have well succeeded in amusing English readers for several
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</span>
+hundred years since. The Decameron is largely a series of stories of
+love and passion. They are many of them exceedingly amusing even to
+the modern reader; but according to modern standards so many of them
+are actually indecent that a translation of this book is hardly to be
+obtained in a respectable bookstore, and should never be allowed in the
+hands of a person under twenty-five.</p>
+
+<p>For the young the great book of exciting adventure is the Arabian
+Nights. All the indecent stories have been omitted in the modern
+translations, and the excitement stops short of the point at which
+it can do any serious harm in over-stimulation. The best story to
+begin with is that of Aladdin, or the Wonderful Lamp—a story every
+one ought to be familiar with; and next to that the series of tales
+of the adventures of Sinbad the Sailor. After reading these, turn
+to Poe’s clever “Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherezade,” which
+closely follows the adventures of Sinbad, but bases every wonder on a
+scientific fact stated in a note. This modern tale of wonder is much
+more marvellous than the imaginary wonder stories of the ancients,
+though its wonders are in reality strict truths. Mr. H. G. Wells, the
+modern novelist, has followed out the same line successfully in his
+pseudo-scientific stories. By comparative study of this kind one will
+find fresh interest in an old book.</p>
+
+<p>The Decameron and the Arabian Nights are not properly novels, but
+rather collections of short stories. The oldest readable novel is Don
+Quixote. It is an excellent book to read aloud in a mixed company, and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</span>
+is still as funny as any modern book. Don Quixote is a gentleman of
+kind heart and a certain innate refinement, in spite of the crack in
+his brain and his tilting at windmills. Sancho Panza is the thoroughly
+practical, faithful clown; and Sancho Panza’s mule and Don Quixote’s
+warhorse are characters in themselves. The book was written as a satire
+on chivalry; but its humanity has made it live long since the death of
+knight-errantry. Gulliver, too, was a satire, but now we read it merely
+as an amusing story; and Fielding’s Joseph Andrews was commenced as a
+satire on Richardson’s Pamela, but became so interesting as a story
+that even in its own day readers forgot all about the parody.</p>
+
+<p>Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress was written in the seventeenth century, by
+a tinker, in prison; and it is a distinctly religious book. But even
+the non-religious will admit that it is a good human story. Intended
+originally as an allegory, we read it now for its own story interest.</p>
+
+<p>Along with the Arabian Nights young people should, without exception,
+read Robinson Crusoe. Nearly every one has read it; but there are
+parts of it that will bear reading again and again and many times. The
+introduction may be skipped; but beginning with Crusoe’s shipwreck on
+the island we are deeply fascinated by all he does to care for himself
+and find some amusement. He is an intensely practical man, and never
+gets sentimental, because he is always at work, a good thing for some
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</span>
+of us moderns who are inclined to bemoan our lot. For about a hundred
+pages this account of the life on the island continues, but when Crusoe
+is rescued the interest grows less, and we may very well omit the last
+half of the book.</p>
+
+<p>The first modern novel was begun by Richardson somewhat over a hundred
+and fifty years ago as a book of instruction on correct letter writing.
+Richardson was a printer fifty years old. In his youth he had often
+helped young ladies write love letters. So it was thought he could
+write a good book of model letters. He put a story into them to make
+them more lifelike and interesting, and the story turned out to be the
+beginning of modern fiction as an established form of literature, for
+the good novels that had gone before had not led the way for others as
+Richardson’s books did.</p>
+
+<p>All Richardson’s novels are written in the form of letters, and to
+modern readers are decidedly tedious.</p>
+
+<p>Clarissa Harlowe is the best of them; but it is much too long, and
+often dull. Clarissa is beset by Lovelace, spirited away, made to
+quarrel with her family, and outwardly compromised in every possible
+fashion; but through it all she maintains her maiden purity, and
+finally compels the man to marry her. We would like her better if she
+were a little more human and spontaneous—in short, if she had been a
+little more of a sinner.</p>
+
+<p>But there is one novel of that day and time which is first rate reading
+even to-day, and that is Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. Fielding was a
+rake and a joker. He started as a novelist by making fun of the good
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</span>
+Richardson. But his characters are certainly natural, even if a little
+spicy. Tom came into the world in an irregular way, and led a very
+irregular life. He is by no means a model for the young, and Fielding
+tells of his sins in a way that to-day would be considered positively
+indecent. And yet we cannot help liking Tom, and he comes out all right
+at the end. Sophia Western forgives him for his faults, and loves and
+marries him. Old Squire Western is one of the most famous characters
+in the book, and a mixture of shrewdness, drollery, roughness and
+good-heartedness he certainly is.</p>
+
+<p>Other books of this period which have been often spoken of are
+Smollett’s Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Humphrey Clinker, and
+Stern’s Tristram Shandy; but they are a little tedious to the modern
+reader, and like Richardson’s novels must probably be left on the
+library shelves.</p>
+
+<p>The last of the good novels of this period is Goldsmith’s Vicar
+of Wakefield. The perfect simplicity of this story is its eternal
+recommendation. The Vicar is a simple-minded man, and somebody is
+always “doing him” or his simple son or his vain wife and daughters.
+We cannot help liking the old man for his unquenchable cheerfulness
+under all misfortunes, and the women, though old-fashioned, are not yet
+out of date in their feminine weaknesses. It is the very shortest of
+old-time novels. Some may not like so very simple a story, but if one
+has a sense of sly humour, the Vicar will be found good reading.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</span></p>
+
+<p>There is also a French novel of this period which deserves to be read
+much more than it is. It is hard to tell just why it has somehow fallen
+into obscurity, unless it is the fact that it is French, and as unlike
+any other French novel as possible. It is Le Sage’s Gil Blas, and the
+scene is Spain. Gil is not unlike Tom Jones, though more of a wanderer,
+and goes from one adventure to another. Though some of his experiences
+are risqué, not one of them is offensive or even approaching indecency.
+The most innocent person will not be offended by anything in Gil Blas,
+for evidently Le Sage was a pure-minded man. The adventures are both
+exciting and amusing; and there is a fine string of them.</p>
+
+<p>There is nothing subtle about the old-time novels. They are excellent
+amusing stories, and that is all. Originally no more than tavern yarns,
+they have lived because they give us real men and women, and tell the
+truth about human nature. They are not very refined, and there is
+nothing aristocratic about them. They come from the people, and have
+something of the vulgarity of the people about them. But time has
+softened away the objectionable points. While we may be offended by
+present-day vulgarity, we probably will not even recognize that of a
+former age.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</span></p>
+
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_IX">CHAPTER IX.<br>
+<i>THE ROMANTIC NOVELISTS—SCOTT, HUGO, DUMAS.</i></h2>
+
+
+<p>After the publication of the Vicar of Wakefield in 1766, for nearly
+fifty years no great novel appeared. True, Frances Burney’s Evalina
+appeared, but it is dry reading to-day. It is also true that some of
+Jane Austen’s best novels were written, but they were not published.
+The long silence was broken by the anonymous publication of Waverley in
+1814.</p>
+
+<p>Scott had got into the printing business with James Ballantyne, and
+then into the publishing business. His Lay of the Last Minstrel,
+Marmion, and Lady of the Lake—story poems as they were—were read like
+novels, and had brought him thousands of pounds. But his popularity
+was waning, and he needed some book to make good the losses of bad
+business investments. Waverley had been begun several years before, but
+as Ballantyne did not like what had been written, it was thrown into
+a drawer and forgotten. Scott now pulled it out and finished it. It
+was published, and made an instant success. The name of the author was
+withheld at first, because Scott was somewhat ashamed of being known
+as a novelist—he who was famous as a poet; and afterwards because of
+Scott’s humour, as he called it. Perhaps the mystery of the “Great
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</span>
+Unknown” added some commercial value to the publications.</p>
+
+<p>Waverley is not one of Scott’s best. The hero is rather a disagreeable
+fellow, and the scenes are neither great nor memorable. But the book is
+noteworthy because it is the first of one of the most successful series
+of novels ever produced.</p>
+
+<p>The best of the Waverley novels is usually considered to be Ivanhoe,
+though many like Kenilworth, Old Mortality, or Quentin Durward better.</p>
+
+<p>Ivanhoe is a tale of the time of Richard I, called the Lion-hearted.
+Richard has been imprisoned on the continent of Europe, whither he had
+gone to take part in the Crusades. His brother is on the throne in his
+absence, and now is preparing to make himself king.</p>
+
+<p>The story opens with preparations for a grand tournament. Ivanhoe, the
+son of a Saxon lord, has secretly returned from the Holy Land, where
+he has served with Richard, and takes part in the tourney, winning
+the crown on the first day and choosing Rowena, his cousin, the Queen
+of Love. But he has seen and been fascinated by Rebecca, a beautiful
+Jewess, whose father had lent him armour. On the second day Ivanhoe is
+overcome, but he is saved by the entrance of a strange black knight, in
+reality Richard himself returned. The Black Knight wins the crown, but
+instantly disappears and leaves Ivanhoe to be adjudged the victor of
+the day.</p>
+
+<p>One of the most amusing scenes is that in the woods when the king
+feasts with Friar Tuck, the confessor of Robin Hood’s men, for Robin
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</span>
+Hood and his outlaws play an important part in this story. One of the
+most dramatic scenes is the burning of the castle in which De Bracy has
+imprisoned the beautiful Rowena, the Jewess Rebecca, and the wounded
+Ivanhoe.</p>
+
+<p>Scott’s novels are filled with splendid descriptions, his characters
+are noble gentlemen and ladies, and he tells of historic events worth
+chronicling. They are sometimes too long; but it is easy to skip the
+less interesting passages. Scott can never be said to be tiresome.</p>
+
+<p>Kenilworth is a story of Leicester, Queen Elizabeth’s lover. He has
+married Amy Robsart; but that there may be no barrier to his marriage
+with the Queen, he causes Amy to be made away with. In the course of
+the story Queen Elizabeth visits the castle of Kenilworth, and we have
+a splendid description of the historic shows and games, as we had of
+the tournament in Ivanhoe. Our sympathies are with Amy Robsart, and the
+story of her death is intensely dramatic.</p>
+
+<p>Quite different is the story of Quentin Durward—a young Englishman
+in France in the days of Louis XI. Quentin was sent to escort a
+certain beautiful Isabelle and her aunt to the Bishop of Liege, on an
+understanding that a certain outlaw was to capture the girl and marry
+her. Quentin Durward succeeded in defending his charge, and after many
+adventures and escapes, was given the girl in marriage.</p>
+
+<p>To many the best of Scott’s novels are his Scottish stories. The
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</span>
+best of these is Old Mortality, a strictly historical tale of the
+seventeenth century. But to many a more fascinating tale is the Bride
+of Lammermoor, with its pathetic story of Effie and Jeanie Deans. Other
+good Scotch novels of Scott’s are The Monastery, Redgauntlet and The
+Antiquary. Guy Mannering is an English historical story, in which Scott
+himself is said to figure as Alan Fairford. Other good novels are Robin
+Hood, Woodstock, The Abbot, The Heart of Midlothian, and The Pirate.
+The only poor stories he ever wrote are Count Robert of Paris and
+Castle Dangerous, both written when he was declining to his death and
+kept on writing merely in the hope that he might finish paying off his
+debts before he died.</p>
+
+<p>In all there are thirty-two of these books. No other English novelist
+has written so many that continue popular. Dumas is said to have
+written or attached his name to twelve hundred; but only three or four
+are considered very well worth reading to-day. Victor Hugo wrote one
+great novel, Les Miserables, but his next greatest, The Toilers of the
+Sea, is far below the first one. Balzac and Dickens alone have lists to
+compare with Scott’s.</p>
+
+<p>Scott’s novels are romantic and interesting. They are on the whole
+excellent history,—indeed their history is as good as that of
+Shakspere. Scott was a noble, generous, lovable man, and his books are
+as pure and great as he is. There is no fine character-drawing, no
+sentimental studies of women, no philosophy, no moralizing. But we
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</span>
+see a splendid and varied company of gentlemen and ladies of historic
+Britain, dressed in all the picturesqueness, of their age, and passing
+through a series of scenes as romantic and exciting as gentlemen and
+ladies could ever participate in. There is nothing to be ashamed of,
+nothing to be wary of in Scott, and there is nothing that suggests
+vulgarity. No one can help loving, admiring, and respecting the man, or
+enjoying his novels.</p>
+
+<p>Scott’s own life is almost as romantic in a way as his novels. His
+father was a lawyer, and he entered that profession, but did little
+more than hold a number of salaried positions. His first book was a
+volume of old ballads which he had collected and partly rewritten. Then
+came the wonderfully successful poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel,
+and after that Marmion and The Lady of the Lake. He was only less
+popular as a narrative poet than Byron. But he became entangled in
+business investments with the brothers Ballentyne, old school friends
+of his, and saved himself and them from bankruptcy only by the lucky
+venture of Waverley, which immediately carried him to world-wide and
+lasting fame, and put him in the way of earning a million dollars by
+his writings. “Novelist, critic, historian, poet, the favorite of his
+age, read over the whole of Europe,” says Taine, “he was compared and
+almost equalled to Shakspere, had more popularity than Voltaire, made
+dressmakers and duchesses weep, and earned about £200,000.” It was
+his ambition to found a sort of feudal family, and on land which he
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</span>
+purchased at Abbotsford he built a castle in imitation of the ancient
+knights, “with a tall tower at either end ... sundry zig-zag gables
+... a myriad of indentations and parapets and machiolated eaves; most
+fantistic waterspouts; labelled windows, not a few of them painted
+glass ... stones carved with innumerable heraldries.” Here he kept open
+house. But in 1825 his publisher, Constable, failed, carrying down the
+printing firm of James Ballantyne &amp; Co., and Scott, because of his
+partnership interest, found himself liable for debts amounting to over
+half a million dollars. He immediately set about paying these off by
+his pen. For a Life of Napoleon he got $90,000, and for the novel of
+Woodstock he got $40,000. He exhausted himself in the effort, and died
+seven years later, owing only £30,000, which a publisher advanced on
+all his copyrights.</p>
+
+<p>He did not begin to write novels until he was forty-two, and then he
+turned them out with incredible speed. Waverley was written in three
+weeks, and another was written in “six weeks at Christmas.” He wrote
+thirty-two novels in sixteen years, besides doing various other work
+such as his Life of Napoleon.</p>
+
+<p>Taine summarizes his style as a novelist thus: “In history as in
+architecture he was bent on arranging points of view and Gothic
+halls. He had neither talent nor leisure to reach the depths of his
+characters.” And again, “After all, his characters, to whatever age he
+transfers them, are his neighbours, cannie farmers, vain lords, gloved
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</span>
+gentlemen, young marriageable ladies, all more or less commonplace.”</p>
+
+<p class="space-above2">
+But the romantic novel was carried to its greatest heights of interest
+and excitement by Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo—especially Dumas.
+These two young Frenchmen had heard of Scott’s fame, and had read his
+novels, and they made up their minds that this was the popular line
+to follow. So each brought out a romantic play in Paris, which was
+successful. Thus the romantic movement was started in France; and it
+was not long before the novels began to appear, and were so popular
+that Dumas set up a sort of novel factory, where he had many people
+working for him writing novels for which he had orders. In all he
+turned out over twelve hundred.</p>
+
+<p>Next to Scott, Dumas is the great original historic novelist. His
+books are not such good history as Scott’s, but they are much more
+interesting. Yet there are comparatively few of the twelve hundred
+bearing the name of Dumas that one cares to read to-day.</p>
+
+<p>Of these the most characteristic is The Three Musketeers and its two
+sequels, Twenty Years After, and The Vicomte de Bragelonne.</p>
+
+<p>The three novels cover the period in France from 1625 to 1665, and
+every page is alive with duels, escapes, intrigues, and all sorts of
+French adventures. A country lad from Gascony named D’Artagnan comes up
+to Paris in search of adventure. He is riding a raw-boned yellow pony,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</span>
+and has three crowns in his pocket. The first day he gets into three
+duels, and in each case makes a friend of his antagonist. These three
+friends, called Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, follow him through all his
+adventures. All become great and powerful men in France. This is the
+point in which the great novelists differ from the less. They give us
+great men, while the little ones give us only common men.</p>
+
+<p>Dumas’s success with The Three Musketeers has led to many modern books
+of the same sort, the best of which are probably Stanley Weyman’s House
+of the Wolf, Under the Red Robe, and Gentleman of France, and Anthony
+Hope’s Prisoner of Zenda.</p>
+
+<p>But Dumas wrote one modern, semi-historical novel which has not been
+imitated so successfully, and if anything it is more famous than The
+Three Musketeers. It is The Count of Monte Cristo. (It really appeared
+before The Three Musketeers.)</p>
+
+<p>The hero is a mate of a ship, of which he hopes soon to become captain,
+and lover of a beautiful girl, whom he hopes soon to marry. The story
+opens in 1815. The hero is accused by his two rivals (one of whom
+wants the ship and the other the girl), of being engaged in carrying
+dangerous information to Napoleon, who is in exile on the island of
+Elba. He is thrown into prison, where he remains for twenty years.</p>
+
+<p>Among the prisoners is a fellow thought to be mad, who tells of a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</span>
+wonderful treasure hidden on the island of Monte Cristo, off the coast
+of Italy.</p>
+
+<p>Our hero escapes from prison, finds the treasure, and appears in the
+fashionable world as the rich and mysterious Count of Monte Cristo.</p>
+
+<p>His motive in life now is revenge upon those who had put him in prison.
+One is a rich banker. Another is a distinguished general. A third is an
+influential magistrate.</p>
+
+<p>The story is exciting and romantic in the extreme, and ends in tragic
+and dramatic pathos. Some think the gloomy ending spoils it; but if
+it has any fault it is that of being, like most of Dumas’s novels, a
+little too long.</p>
+
+<p>The stories already mentioned will give most persons reading enough
+of this kind; but if more is wanted, we might recommend The Queen’s
+Necklace and the three connected novels, Queen Margot (or Marguerite of
+Valois), The Lady of Monsoreau, and The Forty-five. Less interesting
+is The Memoirs of a Physician, for which Dumas made a study of
+hypnotism. Also Thackeray recommends a simple little story called The
+Black Tulip—which is so innocent any schoolgirl might read it without
+offense. The truth is, Dumas is seldom immoral, never indecent. To
+these add his two accounts of himself, his Memoirs and the story of the
+animals he loved, My Pets.</p>
+
+<p>Dumas’s father was the son of a marquis, who had gone to Hayti and
+married a negress. The novelist was therefore a quadroon. The young
+fellow came to Paris with nothing, made his fortune as a playwright
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</span>
+(his income in one year was $200,000, it is said), became even more
+successful as a novelist, built a theatre and a chateau which he called
+Monte Cristo, contracted for forty novels in one year, ruined himself
+by his recklessness and gaieties, was reduced to poverty, and died with
+less than he began life with. Throughout his novels we find the same
+reckless gaiety, and this is the element which makes them so popular.
+At one extreme is Scott, the honest, the honourable, the faithful; at
+the other is Dumas, an adventurer, reckless, irresponsible, but good at
+heart and as much a genius as Scott.</p>
+
+<p class="space-above2">
+Victor Hugo is undoubtedly a far greater figure in French literature
+than Dumas. In France he is honoured as one of the greatest, if not the
+greatest, of French poets. He was an accomplished artist, and a man of
+strong and admirable character. Victor Hugo is a large figure in the
+French history of the nineteenth century, and his one great novel is
+a colossal monument to his fame that all may understand and read with
+intense interest.</p>
+
+<p>Born of a noble family in 1802, he went to Paris and at twenty
+published a volume of poems that laid the foundation of his literary
+and artistic reputation. In 1830 he, like Dumas, produced a successful
+play, and found himself established in French literature. The next
+year—long before Dumas thought of writing a story—he published Notre
+Dame de Paris, his first great novel. It is a many-sided story of Fate,
+centred about the famous old cathedral of Notre Dame, the “book” of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</span>
+the middle ages.</p>
+
+<p>Many years passed before Victor Hugo was again to appear as a novelist.
+He wrote plays and poems, and took part in politics. As a result of
+the revolution which brought Napoleon III. to the throne, Victor Hugo
+was forced into exile, and lived for a number of years in the British
+island of Guernsey. Here he wrote his one great, monumental novel, Les
+Miserables, which is as fascinating and romantic as it is great as a
+work of literary art and a portrayal of social conditions and a study
+of universal human nature. When it appeared in 1862 Dumas had made his
+fame and fortune and had fallen into poverty, Thackeray was dead, and
+Dickens had but a few years to live. Balzac and Poe were already gone
+some years, and Hawthorne had but two more years to live. In a way Les
+Miserables is a summary of all these.</p>
+
+<p>The principal character is Jean Valjean, a criminal who again and
+again builds up his little social position, only to see it crumble in
+an hour when his prison record is revealed. He wanders through Paris,
+and into the provinces of France, and stops on the battlefield of
+Waterloo. Everywhere he finds tragedy, human joy and suffering, and
+incidents that hold the attention breathless. Nothing seems forced or
+strange or unusual, yet everything is as dramatic as the most fanciful
+imaginations of Scott or Dumas. And like Dickens, he gave us a long
+role of notable characters.</p>
+
+<p>Les Miserables is an immense book, extending into six large volumes,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</span>
+and would require two or three months to read through carefully. It
+is a sort of library of fiction, to be compared to Balzac’s Comedie
+Humaine, or Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series of novels. Few will read it
+from preface to finis, but it does not need to be read as a whole, for
+every book, nearly every chapter, is fairly complete in itself.</p>
+
+<p>Hugo wrote only three other novels, Toilers of the Sea, which has some
+fine descriptions of life at the bottom of the ocean, Ninety-three, his
+last, and the Man Who Laughs, an inferior work.</p>
+
+<p class="space-above2">
+Though Eugene Sue is not reckoned a great novelist, two of his books
+which appeared when the fame of Dumas was at its height have continued
+to be read. They are the Wandering Jew and the Mysteries of Paris.
+The story of the Wandering Jew is based on the legend of the man at
+whose door the Saviour asked to rest His cross only to receive the
+reply “Go on!” “Thou shalt go on forever!” answered the Saviour, and
+the Jew became an eternal wanderer. One of his descendants turned
+Catholic to save his fortune, but his secret was discovered and his
+estate confiscated, all but a hundred and fifty thousand francs, which
+was left to accumulate for a hundred and fifty years, when it might be
+claimed by certain of his heirs. The story is largely concerned with
+the various ways in which the Jesuits hunt down all the heirs but a
+young priest who has made over to the society all his fortune. But
+they are defeated in the end. The book is written from the extreme
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</span>
+Protestant point of view, and is a series of episodes and exciting
+adventures.</p>
+
+<p class="space-above2">
+In the romantic and historical school of Scott an important writer is
+the American James Fenimore Cooper. He first tried an English domestic
+novel, which he published at his own expense; but Scott, whose novels
+were then at the height of their popularity (1820) inspired him with
+different ambitions, and he wrote The Pilot to correct the nautical
+errors of Scott’s Pirate.</p>
+
+<p>Cooper wrote a large number of novels, but the only ones read to-day
+are those which describe American pioneer life. His characters are less
+real and individual than Scott’s even; but his fine pictures of the
+woods, the Indians, and the adventures of the early pioneers have never
+been surpassed.</p>
+
+<p>His first readable novel is The Spy, in which appears his one good
+character, Harvey Birch. The others of special interest are in the
+so-called Leatherstocking series, and are—</p>
+
+<p>The Pioneer, 1823.</p>
+
+<p>The Pilot, 1823.</p>
+
+<p>The Last of the Mohicans, 1826 (called his best).</p>
+
+<p>The Prairie, 1827.</p>
+
+<p>The Pathfinder, 1840.</p>
+
+<p>The Deerslayer, 1841.</p>
+
+<p>Wyandotte, 1843.</p>
+
+<p>The Redskins, 1846 (the least notable).</p>
+
+
+<p class="space-above2">
+Bulwer-Lytton was a prolific novelist, but only one of his stories
+remains to us as indisputably great. That is The Last Days of Pompeii,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</span>
+which we read for its history quite as much as for its fascinating
+story.</p>
+
+<p>Charles Kingsley a little later produced two good novels, Hypatia and
+Westward, Ho. Hypatia is an historical account of Egypt in the days
+when Alexandria was the flourishing city, and Hypatia is truly and
+learnedly drawn. The narrative is by no means so exciting as most other
+famous historical novels.</p>
+
+<p>Captain Frederick Marryat was popular in his day, but he seems to
+be little read in the present age. His most popular novel was Mr.
+Midshipman Easy, and The Phantom Ship is said to be the best sea novel
+ever written. The Pacha of Many Tales is a collection of most romantic
+and exciting short stories, told by one man, and probably the best
+worth reading of anything Marryat has left.</p>
+
+<p>The last of the great historical novelists was Charles Reade, whose
+Cloister and the Hearth is considered by many one of the greatest
+novels of this kind ever written. But the fame of this is shared by his
+Dickenesque stories Never Too Late to Mend, Hard Cash, and Put Yourself
+in His Place.</p>
+
+<p>Among modern historical novelists Gen. Lew Wallace with his Ben-Hur, a
+Tale of the Christ, and the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz with his
+Quo Vadis and other novels, are most likely to become classic.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_X">CHAPTER X.<br>
+<i>THE REALISTIC NOVELISTS—DICKENS, THACKERAY, BALZAC.</i></h2>
+
+
+<p>The pendulum of human interest swings quickly from one side to the
+other. Within five years of the appearance of the last of the Waverley
+novels there appeared in England a novelist as great as Scott and in
+every way his direct antithesis. Scott was a splendid story-teller.
+With a swift brush he painted large scenes and large characters. His
+brilliant pageantry moved easily and steadily from the beginning to the
+end of more than thirty novels, most of which were published in three
+stately volumes. In 1835 came Dickens, with his disconnected sketches
+of ordinary types of Englishmen. His first great success, Pickwick, was
+written from week to week as it was published. The author never knew
+three chapters ahead what would happen to his characters; nor did it
+matter. He had his characters, he had Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller and
+the rest; what mattered anything else? As the story went on something
+would happen to them, and that was enough.</p>
+
+<p>And with Dickens we have an entirely different style of writing.
+The Waverley novels are written with more or less fine language,
+large words, sweeping phrases; Pickwick was a great bubbling mass
+of sentiment and emotion, pathos, humour, the cold feeling, the hot
+feeling, the shaky feeling, the melancholy feeling, the riotous
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</span>
+feeling—one might go on forever. With every turn of his pen this new
+magician plays upon our heart-strings, possesses us, fills us, makes
+us laugh or cry at will. The very collocation of his words causes our
+flesh to quiver and the blood to leap in our veins, and holds our
+attention spell-bound. What Jane Austen did in her fine way, to the
+despair of Scott, Dickens did in his big, coarse, splashing way, and
+with ten times the genius.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens’s father was a poor man in the navy-pay office, at first with
+a yearly salary of £80. Micawber in David Copperfield was drawn from
+him. Even when he got as much as £350 a year he was always in debt, and
+finally landed in the Marshalsea, which Dickens so vividly describes in
+Little Dorrit.</p>
+
+<p>While still a child, Charles was sent to work in a blacking
+warehouse, described as the establishment of Murdstone &amp; Grinby in
+David Copperfield. He had a terribly hard life of it. But after a
+while he was taken away and sent to school for a short time, finally
+studying shorthand and becoming a newspaper reporter of the debates in
+Parliament at a time when these were taken down verbatim.</p>
+
+<p>By the time he was twenty-four he was getting about thirty-five dollars
+a week. He tried a few sketches in a magazine (Sketches by Boz) which
+were successful in their way, and finally was asked by Chapman &amp; Hall
+to write the text for some sporting pictures by a noted artist of the
+day. This turned out to be Pickwick, became instantly popular, and
+Dickens was a famous novelist before he was twenty-five. He wrote
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</span>
+about twenty novels, and earned as much money as Scott (a million
+dollars), though many more copies of his novels have been published. He
+may be considered the most popular English novelist that ever wrote.</p>
+
+<p>Pickwick, Dickens’s first novel, is undoubtedly also his most humorous.
+It tells of the doings of a farcical club headed by Mr. Pickwick. But
+Pickwick’s servant, Sam Weller, is the most amusing character in it,
+and as a character probably the most famous in all Dickens’s works.</p>
+
+<p>Next to Pickwick in popularity, and by many liked much better, is David
+Copperfield. This is nothing less than a pathetic and intensely human
+autobiography of Dickens himself, with certain fictitious additions.
+David Copperfield is Charles Dickens (notice the reversed initials),
+Micawber is Dickens’s own father, and Dora was Dickens’s first love.
+Only a passionately sympathetic heart could have conceived this story,
+and only a man with an overflowing genius for work could have written
+it in the spontaneous and natural way that Dickens did.</p>
+
+<p>Third in the list of popularity is probably The Old Curiosity Shop, in
+which appears Little Nell, the description of whose pathetic death is
+found in every school reader. This volume also tells the story of Mr.
+Quilp, the dwarf, the Marchioness, and Dick Swiveller. Oliver Twist was
+written partly as an attack on workhouses in Dickens’s day. It tells
+us the story of a poor waif, and takes us among thieves, introducing
+us to the famous Fagin, Bill Sikes and Nancy. Little Dorrit is the
+story of the Marshalsea, the great debtors’ prison in which Dickens’s
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</span>
+own father at one time resided. Dombey &amp; Son tells the pathetic story
+of little Paul Dombey, the boy mate to Little Nell; Martin Chuzzlewit
+introduces us to the inimitable Pecksniff and family. Barnaby Rudge is
+a sort of detective story, telling of a murder and how it was found
+out. Bleak House and Nicholas Nickleby are also considered to be among
+the best of Dickens’s novels.</p>
+
+<p>By many his greatest is thought to be A Tale of Two Cities, an
+intensely dramatic historical novel of the French Revolution. It is
+entirely different from anything else Dickens ever wrote, yet the
+pathetic and sympathetic character-drawing makes it entirely unlike the
+historical novels of Scott or Dumas.</p>
+
+<p>His short Christmas stories are also among his best work, especially
+A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, and The Cricket on the Hearth. Either
+may be read in an hour or two. W. E. Henley considers Barbox Bros., a
+beautiful and simple story of a lame girl, a little child, and a man
+running away from his birthday, even better; but it is not found in
+most complete editions and only recently has been published in separate
+form.</p>
+
+<p class="space-above2">
+When the name of Dickens is mentioned that of Thackeray is also always
+on the tongue, yet there are large numbers even of the most refined
+people who do not find Thackeray as good reading as Dickens. It takes
+a quiet person, with a sense for the intellectual, the sarcastic and
+the ironical as opposed to the sentimental and humorous, a person
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</span>
+with gentlemanly or ladylike instincts, to fall quite into sympathy
+with Thackeray. But those who love him, love him with an intensity
+surpassing their feeling for any other author. Thackeray penetrates
+life with his keen shafts. He is strong because of his reserves,
+Dickens because of his lack of reserve. Thackeray has polish and
+elegance of style, he is a master of the best English, and handles it
+with the ease and grace of inborn, hereditary skill. He could not have
+made such personal confessions as David Copperfield or Little Dorrit,
+he could not have laid the colour on with the indiscriminate profusion
+of Pickwick or the scenes describing Little Nell. He was in no sense
+a great emotional artist, for only now and then does he lose himself.
+Such passages as the death of Colonel Newcome are few in Thackeray.
+He is more often ridiculing foibles than gaining our sympathy for
+admirable sinners. He bites and stings; and unless we have a fine heart
+to perceive it we never become aware that he is winning too, that under
+his cynical perception of the truth of things in this world, especially
+in the aristocratic society which alone he knew and of which alone he
+wrote, he has a great and loving heart, a heart tender and forgiving,
+sympathetic even when he ridicules most unmercifully. It is this great
+loving heart, so hidden that it can be seen only by those who are truly
+his friends, that makes Thackeray, the belated exponent of a class in
+itself repulsive to the average democrat of to-day, in some respects
+the greatest writer of fiction in the English language. He has grave
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</span>
+faults: he is always preaching; he is seldom very hopeful; he had no
+great belief in himself or his mission in the world. But language in
+his hands is almost a living and breathing entity, a polished, perfect
+instrument. And Thackeray teaches the great lessons of restraint,
+of patience and thoughtful study of life, of the little, nameless
+compensations which after all to most of us alone make life really
+worth living.</p>
+
+<p>Thackeray was born and brought up as an English gentleman. His parents
+were married and lived in India, belonging to the great British civil
+service there. But his father died when he was young, and his mother
+married again and took him to England. He had his small fortune, and
+little thought of worrying about money till in middle life he found
+his substance gone through injudicious speculation, and his pen the
+principal means by which he could earn a living. He married and had
+several daughters, but his wife became insane. This was the only cloud
+on his domestic life.</p>
+
+<p>Thackeray’s early books are not remarkable. Samuel Titmarsh and even
+Barry Lyndon are not and never have been popular. It was not until
+1848, a dozen years after Dickens (a year the younger man) had become
+famous with Pickwick, that Thackeray really took his place among the
+great English novelists on the publication of Vanity Fair. Thackeray’s
+novels never attained the sale that Dickens’s did, and never yielded
+anything like as much money.</p>
+
+<p>The sub-title of Vanity Fair was “A Novel Without a Hero.” The heroine,
+Becky Sharpe, however, was hero and heroine in one. It is said
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</span>
+that Thackeray’s women are weak; but no finer portrayal of feminine
+character is to be found in modern literature than that of Becky Sharpe
+in Vanity Fair.</p>
+
+<p>The Newcomes is considered a greater novel by some. It presents much
+more lovable characters. Colonel Newcome being one of the most lovable
+in fiction; and Clive Newcome, and Ethel Newcome whom he loves, are of
+the same stuff as the well bred, educated people we see about us and
+number as our friends and most cherished companions.</p>
+
+<p>Pendennis is in the same vein as The Newcomes, and involves some of the
+same characters, but it is not so strong a novel by any means, though
+perhaps more sentimental.</p>
+
+<p>Henry Esmond is an historical novel, and may perhaps be considered the
+highest type of historical novel ever written. It never has had the
+popularity of Scott’s, but its characters are undoubtedly much stronger
+and more carefully drawn than any of his. Lady Castlewood and Beatrix
+are as real as if they had lived in the flesh, and yet as interesting
+as any a romancer ever imagined.</p>
+
+<p>His fifth great novel is The Virginians, a sort of sequel to Esmond.</p>
+
+<p>Only five novels! but they are of a kind to do for Thackeray what
+Les Miserables did for Victor Hugo as compared with the popular and
+productive Dumas. Thackeray and Hugo are both most admired, and rank
+highest in the literary firmament, in spite of the perennial popularity
+of Dickens and Dumas.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</span></p>
+
+<p>We have now considered the great romantic artists, who cared for point
+of view, Gothic castles, and the events of history; and likewise the
+great domestic story tellers, who, like Dickens, have sacrificed plot
+and scene to character portrayal.</p>
+
+<p>We have reserved until the present a novelist of France who may
+ultimately be counted the greatest master of modern fiction. He was a
+contemporary of Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, but he took no part in
+the romantic movement. Indeed, the critics of his own day would have
+nothing to do with him. His works, far more numerous than Scott’s and
+almost as bulky, sold in sufficient numbers to enable him to pay the
+debts his lack of business experience caused him to contract in various
+speculations; but even his own fellow citizens of Tours snubbed him so
+unmercifully that in sorrow he decided not to give to that town his
+large and valuable library, as he had intended to do. Only recently
+have his books been adequately translated into English, and now only a
+portion are accessible. He is the last great classic to come upon the
+stage; and the most thoughtful young writers of to-day whisper among
+themselves that the Master is Balzac.</p>
+
+<p>Victor Hugo, Dumas, George Sand, the representatives of the romantic
+movement, are fascinating story-tellers, but they are not true to human
+nature. Their works abound in glaring faults in the grammar of human
+life. They were so wrapped up in the thrills their tales were to excite
+that they had small time to think seriously about the minuter facts.
+They have never analysed the principles of life. What observation
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</span>
+chanced to bring them they used in the most effective way; and as we
+read Les Miserables and Consuelo we are shocked at every point by the
+inconsistency of the characters, the false ring of the speeches they
+make and the acts they perform. The colour has been laid on thick and
+hot, and flames with overpowering brilliancy; but the drawing will not
+bear close inspection.</p>
+
+<p>In Scott we find no such inaccuracies of characterization, however
+many faults of grammar there may be. The Englishman is a master at
+characterization, and in no great English novelists do we find the
+inaccuracies of thought and feeling which characterized the French
+romancers. But in all Scott’s pageantry, with his hundreds of figures,
+we find but relatively few types, and even they are not very profound
+or wonderful. They are the common, everyday men Scott knew, dressed up
+in the clothes of history and romance. And though they are all true
+enough as far as they go, the same type appears again and again with
+a different feather in his cap and a fresh name to be hailed by. And
+Dickens and Thackeray have drawn but a few types, those they themselves
+had come personally in contact with and known by habit and instinct.
+These they have immortalized, and repeated often enough for us to
+understand them in all their phases. The types in their books are drawn
+unconsciously. They were no deep students of the varieties of human
+nature, nor of the underlying principles of life. Their time and effort
+were devoted to the art of representation, in which, each in his own
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</span>
+peculiar line, they excelled all other men.</p>
+
+<p>But Balzac essayed to write the whole Comedy of Humanity (he called
+his books the Comedie Humaine). He takes his characters one after the
+other, beginning with Parisian life, and then taking up the life of
+the provinces, political life, military life, and in each presenting a
+series of characters that accurately represent the historical types of
+his own age in France. He is a Frenchman, his characters and his ideals
+are French, and he omits the innocent lovely rose of English purity:
+he writes no idylls. But a person with broad mind and catholic tastes
+cannot help feeling the masterly touch.</p>
+
+<p>His personal history is that of a worker. Before he was thirty he had
+published a dozen novels to which he did not attach his name. They were
+for practice. Then he came out with The Chouans, which attracted some
+attention. In the next few years he wrote and gave to the world some
+ninety compositions long and short, mostly full-fledged books.</p>
+
+<p>His friends had told him he had no talent, and his native town never
+honoured him; but by industry alone he overcame all difficulties, and
+by sheer force of character took his place among the great novelists
+of his age. Most of the money he earned was devoted to paying off his
+debts; and when that was accomplished and he had married the lady he
+loved, he died.</p>
+
+<p>Not all of Balzac’s novels will be liked by the English reader, and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</span>
+they differ immensely in subject, character, and interest.</p>
+
+<p>The most popular of his stories, perhaps, because it treats of the
+rotten though dramatic life of Paris, is Père Goriot, the story of
+a simple old man whose daughters become fashionable, and to whose
+passions he is made to minister, while his own comforts in life are
+heartlessly sacrificed.</p>
+
+<p>Rivaling Père Goriot as Balzac’s masterpiece is Eugenie Grandet, a
+story of country life utterly devoid of the excitement with which the
+Parisian story abounds. Eugenie is the daughter of a rich miser, who
+deprives her and her mother almost of the necessities of life. She
+meets and learns to love her cousin, Charles Grandet. He goes to the
+West Indies where he begins to build his fortunes with the savings
+Eugenie has given him. But the girl’s mother dies, and then her father,
+and she is left a rich heiress. Not knowing this, Charles writes asking
+her to release him that he may marry an heiress. Eugenie never thinks
+of her own sacrifice, but gives him his liberty, and even secretly pays
+his father’s debts lest they hamper him in his career. She ends her
+life in works of philanthropy.</p>
+
+<p>It is a simple story, but told with the hard exactness of fate and
+truth, and it is this profound truth that makes it appeal to us so
+powerfully.</p>
+
+<p>Many are very fond of The Country Doctor. The first half of the book
+tells the simple life and good works of this remarkable man; but the
+intense interest of the story is in the recital of the romantic early
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</span>
+life of this strange man—his own story of himself which fills the
+second half of the book.</p>
+
+<p>Cousin Pons tells the story of a collector of curios, for whose
+property various relatives are intriguing. Cousine Bette teaches us
+the lengths to which a Parisian middle-class family will go to get
+the money to maintain their respectability, and the catastrophes
+which are likely to follow when character is rotten at the bottom.
+Madame de Langeais is one of the shorter and more exciting stories of
+Parisian love. César Birroteau portrays the typical life of a Parisian
+lawyer, and The House of Nucingen that of a Parisian banker, while in
+The Illustrious Gaudissart we have the French drummer or travelling
+salesman.</p>
+
+<p>In still another series of novels, much less generally read, Balzac
+goes into philosophy and even the mysticism of Swedenborg. The most
+philosophic of these novels is Louis Lambert, the most mystical and
+Swedenborgian is Seraphita, the story of an angel, so to speak. The
+Magic Skin is symbolistic, and The Search for the Absolute gives us
+most realistically the mystic and self-sacrificing life of an inventor.</p>
+
+<p class="space-above2">
+Zola has attempted to do for his time what Balzac did for his, and in
+stories of the Rougon-Macquart family tells us the life histories of
+as varied a series of characters. The thing that made Balzac great,
+however, is his profound knowledge of human nature and the laws of
+human life, while Zola is bent on telling the thrilling stories he has
+found in different classes of society which, as a journalist, he has
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</span>
+investigated.</p>
+
+<p>Balzac and Zola handle contemporary life in much the same spirit that
+the romantic novelists handle the life of a past age; but Balzac
+is also a realistic student of character, and the interest in his
+characters predominates over the interest in his subjects and scenes.
+He is as much a master of description, however, as Scott or Victor
+Hugo. But much of Balzac’s and Zola’s realism is distasteful to the
+English or American reader. To be appreciated they must be read
+intellectually and not emotionally.</p>
+
+<p class="space-above2">
+Among the great realists, or novelists of character and domestic life,
+we must include the women who have written fiction. Of these the
+greatest is George Eliot, whose novels rank below those of Dickens and
+Thackeray only because they are lacking in humour and fun. They are
+very serious, but they give us women as they really are in heart and
+soul and emotion. The best of George Eliot’s novels is Middlemarch, the
+story of an English country village and especially of an interesting
+educated young woman, Dorothea Casaubon. But there are other and almost
+equally interesting quiet English characterizations. More dramatic
+in its plot is Adam Bede, which tells the story of a girl who had an
+illegitimate child which she destroyed. The Mill on the Floss begins
+by realistically describing the everyday life of two children, a boy
+and a girl, and many will find the first half of the book very dull and
+commonplace. The last half is dramatic enough, however, to make up
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</span>
+for the dullness of the first part. Daniel Deronda is considered less
+successful, though Silas Marner is a classic. It is a shorter story,
+of a certain phase of English country life. These are practically all
+of George Eliot’s works, the two or three other books being hardly
+fascinating enough to hold the modern reader.</p>
+
+<p>To many Jane Austen is greater even than George Eliot. She wrote in the
+early part of the century, even before the appearance of the Waverley
+novels; but her stories are read as much to-day as they ever were.
+They are fine and exceedingly true portrayals of the uneventful but
+interesting heart life of a number of different young women in English
+country villages. Some consider Emma her greatest story; but it is
+less interesting than Sense and Sensibility (a study of two girls, one
+representing sense and the other sensibility) and Pride and Prejudice
+(the story of the marrying off of five daughters, one of whom is
+especially interesting and is the heroine). Jane Austen is notable in
+that she has a lively though quiet sense of humour that runs through
+all her work.</p>
+
+<p>Another charming, simple, and rather amusing study of English village
+life is Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford, a book well worth reading if one is
+interested in the unheroic struggles and devotions of women.</p>
+
+<p>Of modern writers in this style, Mary Wilkins is probably the best, her
+short stories being superior to her novels.</p>
+
+<p>There are two women’s novels entirely different from any that had gone
+before or that have come after. They are Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</span>
+and Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.</p>
+
+<p>The lives of these girls was sad and unfortunate. They belonged to a
+respectable family, and throughout maintained their respectability
+shut in by conventionality and suffering from poverty. Jane Eyre is
+a girl whose mind and not her face was her fortune. The story is in
+reality the autobiography of the inner tempestuous life of Charlotte
+Bronte herself. Jane is governess in the family of an eccentric man
+named Rochester, who was at one time the hero of half the women of
+England. He loved Jane and asked her to marry him, but at the altar it
+is discovered that he has a wife living, whom he had looked on as dead
+because she was insane. So the lovers are parted to be united only in a
+tragedy.</p>
+
+<p>Wuthering Heights is a story of love and revenge within the
+conventionalities of English higher-class life, and extends over two
+generations. As a study of love and the far-reaching effects of its
+disappointment, it is a powerful though gloomy story, and by no means
+so finely artistic as Jane Eyre.</p>
+
+<p>Another woman’s work in a class by itself is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
+Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which to this day is found in the list of half dozen
+best selling books, equaling the sales of the latest current novel.
+It is a wonderfully humorous, pathetic, and sympathetic picture of
+Southern life before the war, and probably as exact as most historical
+fiction, though many Southerners violently resent its claim to
+truthfulness.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</span></p>
+
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XI">CHAPTER XI.<br>
+<i>THE SHORT STORY—POE, HAWTHORNE, MAUPASSANT.</i></h2>
+
+
+<p>As we have seen, the original form of modern fiction was that of the
+short story—the tavern tale rendered in classic language by Boccaccio
+in The Decameron and by the unknown author of The Arabian Nights.</p>
+
+<p>All the great novelists wrote more or less short stories. Irving’s
+“Rip Van Winkle” and “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” are classics. Balzac
+was a master of the short story, and in “A Passion in the Desert” and
+“La Grande Bretèche” we have two of the most powerful stories ever
+written. Dickens and Thackeray are also short story tellers of rare
+accomplishments. “A Christmas Carol,” “The Chimes,” and “The Cricket on
+the Hearth” are among Dickens’s best work; and scattered through his
+novels we will find such complete narratives as “The Five Sisters of
+York” in Nicholas Nickleby. “The Princess’s Tragedy” is a chapter in
+Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon.</p>
+
+<p>But Edgar Allan Poe is the father of the modern short story, the short
+story as a refined work of art rather than merely a simple short
+narrative.</p>
+
+<p>There is an impression that all of Poe’s stories are gruesome, but
+this is not true. The most famous of his narratives are his three
+great detective stories, “The Gold-Bug,” “The Murders in the Rue
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</span>
+Morgue,” and “The Purloined Letter.” Only the second has the elements
+of terror in it. “The Gold-Bug” is the original treasure-finding and
+cipher-reading story. “The Purloined Letter” and “The Murders in the
+Rue Morgue” introduce Dupin, the French amateur detective, father of
+Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes (who by the way is an excellent son).
+That Poe was a real and not a sham detective he demonstrated in
+his analysis of the real case of Marie Roget, in which he used the
+newspaper reports of a New York mystery and came to conclusions that
+were afterward verified.</p>
+
+<p>Another kind of story which Poe originated was the tale of imaginary
+science. His stories of this kind are none of them gruesome, with the
+single exception of “The Case of M. Valdemar.” The first story he wrote
+of this kind was “Ms. Found in a Bottle.” This was followed by “Hans
+Pfaal’s Voyage to the Moon,” “A Descent into the Maëlstrom,” “Mellonta
+Tauta,” and “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherezade.”</p>
+
+<p>A still different type of story is his prose poems such as the
+beautiful “Eleonora,” and his studies in landscape such as “The Island
+of the Fay,” “The Domain of Arnheim,” and “Landor’s Cottage.”</p>
+
+<p>His terrible and thrilling stories, by which he is best known, have
+never been surpassed. The best is “William Wilson,” the story of a
+double; but still more gruesome are “The Black Cat,” “Berenice,” “The
+Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Cask of Amontillado.” Less horrible and
+unnatural, but curious and interesting, are “The Man of the Crowd,”
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</span>
+“Hop-Frog,” and “The Pit and the Pendulum.” His “Fall of the House of
+Usher” is unique.</p>
+
+<p>Poe’s life was one of hardship and unhappiness, and he was terribly
+libelled by his biographer Griswold, who hated him for the scathing
+reviews Poe had written of his books. So the great poet and
+story-writer has been painted in the popular mind much blacker than he
+really is, according to the latest and most authentic evidence. But
+he was certainly the most original genius America has produced. When
+he had made a success in one kind of story he did not care to go on
+writing more stories of that kind, but originated another type.</p>
+
+<p>Hawthorne is better known as a novelist, the author of The Scarlet
+Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, Blithedale Romance, and Marble
+Faun, than as a short-story writer; but he alone among Americans has
+approached Poe as a teller of tales. His reputation was first made
+by two volumes of short stories called Twice-Told Tales, among which
+are the deeply interesting “Gray Champion,” “The Great Carbuncle,”
+“David Swan,” “Howe’s Masquerade,” “The Ambitious Guest,” and “The
+Three-fold Destiny.” Many like the Mosses from an Old Manse better,
+considering “The Birthmark” his masterpiece. “Drowne’s Wooden Image”
+is a remarkable tale, and “Rapaccini’s Daughter” (the girl who was
+brought up on poisons and whose kiss was poison) is most weird. The
+most popular story for children is “The Snow Image,” and “The Great
+Stone Face” (which I like best of all) appeals alike to young and old.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</span>
+“Ethan Brand” is another good story in this volume, and children will
+be fascinated by “Little Daffydowndilly.”</p>
+
+<p>Hawthorne’s stories are all more or less fantastic allegories, written
+in unexceptionably beautiful and perfect English. The author was a
+recluse, and his stories are stories of loneliness in one form or
+another. Those who like solitude will be very fond of him; those who
+like gaiety, liveliness, and society, will find him depressing.</p>
+
+<p>The other great American short story writers include Bret Harte, author
+of “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat”; Edward
+Everett Hale, author of “The Man Without a Country”; Frank Stockton,
+author of “The Lady or the Tiger?” and Mary E. Wilkins. With these may
+be included Thomas Hardy’s “Life’s Little Ironies,” which are full of
+fun.</p>
+
+<p>More perfect in his art than either Poe or Hawthorne is the modern
+writer Guy de Maupassant. His stories are most of them very short; but
+not a word is wasted, and they tell as much as stories much longer.
+His most perfect tales are not accessible in English because they
+are slightly improper. The two best are said to be “Boule de Suif”
+(Butter-Ball) and “La Maison Tellier” (Madame Tellier’s Girls, or The
+Tellier Establishment). The thirteen tales translated by Jonathan
+Sturgis in “The Odd Number” are unexceptionable, however, and intensely
+interesting.</p>
+
+<p>The French have perfected the artistic short story or <i>conte</i> as
+they call it, and there are many good tales in that language. One of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</span>
+the most famous is the old-fashioned “Paul and Virginia,” a simple
+rustic love story, and Prosper Mérimée, the contemporary of Balzac,
+wrote some excellent tales. One might mention also Daudet with his
+“Pope’s Mule,” Gauthier, and Zola’s “Attack on the Mill.”</p>
+
+<p>But far stronger stories than those just mentioned are the great
+Russian tales of Tolstoi and Turgenev. Tolstoi is better known by his
+great novels, “The Cossacks,” “War and Peace,” and “Anna Karénina.”
+But “The Long Exile,” “What Men Live By,” and other short tales are
+unsurpassed for dramatic force. Turgenev’s “First Love” is a rather
+long short story, but an intensely interesting one. “A Lear of the
+Steppes” is regarded as his classic. But there are others equally good.</p>
+
+<p>Of modern writers of short stories Kipling is doubtless the greatest;
+but his early books such as “Plain Tales from the Hills,” “Soldiers
+Three,” “Phantom Rickshaw,” “Wee Willie Winkie,” etc., are probably
+better than the later ones, though in the later books a strong story
+will be found here and there.</p>
+
+<p>No greater short story has been published in modern times than
+Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” and Gilbert Parker has published
+some excellent short stories in “Pierre and His People.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="allsmcap">NOTE.</span>—Many of the stories here referred to may be found in “A
+Selection from the World’s Greatest Short Stories,” edited by Sherwin
+Cody.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</span></p>
+
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XII">CHAPTER XII.<br>
+<i>CLASSIC STORIES FOR YOUNG PEOPLE.</i></h2>
+
+
+<p>The boy or girl who has grown up without reading Robinson Crusoe, the
+Arabian Nights and Gulliver’s Travels is to be pitied; but it is to be
+presumed that there are few such. These books are good alike for young
+and old.</p>
+
+<p>For young children fairy tales are usually considered the first to
+become familiar with, and of these the best are Grimm’s and Hans
+Christian Andersen’s. There are many volumes variously edited, and
+all are fairly good. A modern fairy tale that is also a classic is
+Kingsley’s Water Babies, and even better are Lewis Carroll’s Alice in
+Wonderland and Kipling’s Jungle Book.</p>
+
+<p>There are also Æsop’s Fables.</p>
+
+<p>But when boys and girls get a little older they want to find what is
+to them a really good book. I know none better than Louisa M. Alcott’s
+Little Women. It is the story of four girls and a boy; but boys will
+like it almost as well as the girls will.</p>
+
+<p>Boys will be especially interested in the lives of great men, and of
+these none is better than Franklin’s Autobiography. He tells just how
+he worked, and what he did, and how he succeeded, and tells it in
+simple, natural English. And next to this one will like a good life of
+Washington or Lincoln, of which there are many.</p>
+
+<p>Hawthorne wrote many good stories for young people, and of these the
+simplest are his Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales from the ancient
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</span>
+Greek, and his Biographical Stories of Great Men. But readers a little
+older will like even better such stories as “The Snow-Image,” “The
+Great Stone Face,” etc.</p>
+
+<p>There is a remarkable book not very much known, entitled Moby-Dick, or
+the Great White Whale, by Herman Melville. It is not all as interesting
+as the last part, in which this giant whale named Moby-Dick is hunted
+down and killed, though not until he has sunk the ship and boats of the
+men who have pursued him and taken his life.</p>
+
+<p>For adventure there are no more classic books than Kingsley’s Hereward
+the Wake, and Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and David
+Balfour, and some will wish to read his beautiful Child’s Garden of
+Verse. Not quite so literary but equally interesting are The Boys of
+Seventy-Six, Green Mountain Boys, Scottish Chiefs, Thaddeus of Warsaw,
+Dana’s Two Years before the Mast, and The Swiss Family Robinson.</p>
+
+<p>Last of all we must mention Tom Brown’s Schooldays, which, though very
+English, is very interesting. John Halifax, Gentleman, by Miss Mulock,
+is also a fine English story.</p>
+
+<p>Though not stories precisely, Lamb’s Tales from Shakspere and Dickens’s
+Child’s History of England are quite as fascinating as if they were
+genuine stories.</p>
+
+<p>In these days the Bible seems to be neglected somewhat, and not all
+children are familiar with the fine stories for young people with
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</span>
+which the Old Testament is filled. There are, to be sure, uninteresting
+genealogies and other things mixed in with the stories; but there is
+nothing in Grimm or Andersen to equal the stories of Adam and Eve, of
+Cain and Abel, of Noah and the Flood, of David and Goliath, of Daniel
+in the Lion’s Den, and of Jonah and the Whale.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="INDEX_OF_RECOMMENDED_BOOKS">INDEX OF RECOMMENDED<br>
+BOOKS<br>
+(With Dates)</h2>
+
+
+<p>The following are the books the author would choose for a small public
+or private library for general reading. Of course this list should be
+supplemented by a judicious selection of books on history, science, and
+economics, as well as works of reference:</p>
+
+<p class="nindc">Books for young people are marked “juv.”</p>
+
+<ul class="index">
+<li class="ifrst">Joseph Addison (1672-1719), <a href="#Page_74">74</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Essays from the Spectator.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Louise M. Alcott (1833-1888), <a href="#Page_122">122</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Little Women (juv.)</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Alice in Wonderland, (juv.), by Lewis Carroll, <a href="#Page_122">122</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875), <a href="#Page_122">122</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Fairy Tales (juv.)</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Æsop’s Fables (75 B. C.) (juv.), <a href="#Page_122">122</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_79">79</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Culture and Anarchy.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Poems.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Arabian Nights (1450-1704-’07) (juv.), <a href="#Page_88">88</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Jane Austen (1775-1817), <a href="#Page_115">115</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Sense and Sensibility.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Pride and Prejudice.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Emma.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Francis Bacon (1561-1626), <a href="#Page_74">74</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Essays.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), <a href="#Page_100">100</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">The Country Doctor.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Eugenie Grandet.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Père Goriot.</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Duchess de Langeais.</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Alkahest.</li>
+<li class="isub1">César Birotteau.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Cousin Pons.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">J. M. Barrie (1860- ), <a href="#Page_80">80</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">The Little Minister.</li>
+<li class="isub1">A Window In Thrums.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Sentimental Tommy.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Tommy and Grizel.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bible, <a href="#Page_123">123</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">R. D. Blackmore (1825-1900)</li>
+<li class="isub1">Lorna Doone.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1792)</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855), <a href="#Page_115">115</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Jane Eyre</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)</li>
+<li class="isub1">Poems</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Robert Browning (1812-1889), <a href="#Page_58">58</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Poems</li>
+
+<li class="indx">William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), <a href="#Page_61">61</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Poems</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), <a href="#Page_100">100</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">The Last Days of Pompeii.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">John Bunyan (1628-1688), <a href="#Page_84">84</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Pilgrim’s Progress.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Robert Burns (1759-1796), <a href="#Page_62">62</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Poems.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), <a href="#Page_61">61</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Poems</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), <a href="#Page_76">76</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Essays.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</span></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616), <a href="#Page_84">84</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Don Quixote.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain) (1835- )</li>
+<li class="isub1">Innocents Abroad</li>
+<li class="isub1">Huckleberry Finn (juv.)</li>
+<li class="isub1">Joan of Arc (juv.)</li>
+
+<li class="indx">S. T. Coleridge (1772-1834), <a href="#Page_64">64</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Poems</li>
+
+<li class="indx">James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), <a href="#Page_100">100</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">The Spy (juv.)</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Last of the Mohicans.</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Prairie.</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Pathfinder.</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Deerslayer.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dinah Maria Craik (Miss Mulock) (1826-1887), <a href="#Page_123">123</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">John Halifax, Gentleman (juv.)</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Richard Henry Dana (1815-1882), <a href="#Page_123">123</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Two Years Before the Mast (juv.)</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Daniel Defoe (1661-1731), <a href="#Page_84">84</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Robinson Crusoe (juv.)</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859), <a href="#Page_75">75</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Confessions of an English Opium Eater.</li>
+<li class="isub1">The English Mail Coach.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Charles Dickens (1812-1870), <a href="#Page_102">102</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Pickwick.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Oliver Twist.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Old Curiosity Shop.</li>
+<li class="isub1">A Christmas Carol.</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Cricket on the Hearth (juv.)</li>
+<li class="isub1">Dombey &amp; Son.</li>
+<li class="isub1">David Copperfield (juv.)</li>
+<li class="isub1">Little Dorrit.</li>
+<li class="isub1">A Tale of Two Cities.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)</li>
+<li class="isub1">Vivian Grey.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sir A. Conan Doyle (1859- ), <a href="#Page_118">118</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Alexandre Dumas (1808-1870), <a href="#Page_94">94</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">The Count of Monte Cristo.</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Three Musketeers.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Twenty Years After.</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Vicomte de Bragelonne.</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Black Tulip.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">George Eliot (pseud.) (1819-1880), <a href="#Page_114">114</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Adam Bede.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Middlemarch.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Mill on the Floss.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Romola.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Silas Marner.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), <a href="#Page_76">76</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Essays.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Henry Fielding (1707-1754), <a href="#Page_85">85</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Tom Jones.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Edward FitzGerald (1809-1883), <a href="#Page_64">64</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Benj. Franklin (1706-1790)</li>
+<li class="isub1">Autobiography (juv.)</li>
+<li class="isub1">Poor Richard’s Almanac.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mrs. Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810-1865), <a href="#Page_115">115</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Cranford.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774), <a href="#Page_86">86</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Vicar of Wakefield.</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Deserted Village.</li>
+<li class="isub1">She stoops to Conquer (play).<span class="pagenum" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</span></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Green Mountain Boys.</li>
+<li class="isub1">By Elisa F. Pollard (juv.)</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Grimm Brothers (1785-1863, 1786-1859), <a href="#Page_122">122</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Fairy Tales (juv.)</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Edward Everett Hale (1822- ), <a href="#Page_120">120</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">A Man Without a Country (juv.)</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Thomas Hardy (1840- )</li>
+<li class="isub1">Far From the Madding Crowd.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Tess of the D’Urbervilles.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bret Harte (1839-1902), <a href="#Page_120">120</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">The Luck of Roaring Camp.</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Outcasts of Poker Flat.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Twice-Told Tales.</li>
+<li class="isub1">House of the Seven Gables.</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Scarlet Letter.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Blithedale Romance.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Mosses from an Old Manse.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Wonder Stories (juv.)</li>
+<li class="isub1">Tanglewood Tales (juv.)</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894), <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Poems.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Thomas Hughes (1828-1896), <a href="#Page_123">123</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Tom Brown’s Schooldays (juv.)</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Victor Hugo (1802-1885), <a href="#Page_97">97</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Notre Dame.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Les Miserables.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Toilers of the Sea.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Washington Irving (1783-1859), <a href="#Page_117">117</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">The Sketch-Book.</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Alhambra.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Knickerbocker’s History of New York.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">John Keats (1795-1821), <a href="#Page_61">61</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Poems.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Rudyard Kipling (1865- ), <a href="#Page_121">121</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Soldiers Three, etc.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Jungle Book (juv.)</li>
+<li class="isub1">Kim.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Captains Courageous.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), <a href="#Page_101">101</a>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Hypatia.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Westward, Ho!</li>
+<li class="isub1">Hereward the Wake (juv.)</li>
+<li class="isub1">Water Babies (juv.)</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Charles Lamb (1775-1834), <a href="#Page_75">75</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Essays.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Tales from Shakspere (with Mary Lamb) (juv.)</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Alain René Le Sage (1668-1747), <a href="#Page_87">87</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Gil Blas.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Charles Lever (1806-1872)</li>
+<li class="isub1">Charles O’Malley.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), <a href="#Page_54">54</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Poems (juv.)</li>
+<li class="isub1">Evangeline.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Hiawatha (juv.)</li>
+<li class="isub1">Courtship of Miles Standish.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)</li>
+<li class="isub1">Poems.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), <a href="#Page_77">77</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Essays.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Lays of Ancient Rome (juv.)<span class="pagenum" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</span></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Frederick Marryat (1792-1848)</li>
+<li class="isub1">Pacha of Many Tales.</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Phantom Ship.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893), <a href="#Page_120">120</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">The Odd Number.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (121-180 A. D.).</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Herman Melville (1819-1891), <a href="#Page_123">123</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Moby-Dick (juv.)</li>
+
+<li class="indx">George Meredith (1828- )</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Ordeal of Richard Feveral.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Diana of the Crossways.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">John Milton (1608-1674), <a href="#Page_63">63</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Poems.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Paradise Lost.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Donald Grant Mitchell (1822- ), <a href="#Page_80">80</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Reveries of a Bachelor, by Ik Marvel.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Gilbert Parker (1862- ), <a href="#Page_121">121</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Pierre and His People.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Seats of the Mighty.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Right of Way.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Paul and Virginia. By Bernardin de St. Pierre (1788)</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Best Tales.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Best Poems and Essays.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Plutarch’s Lives (about 80 A. D.) (juv.)</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Charles Reade (1814-1884), <a href="#Page_101">101</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Cloister and the Hearth.</li>
+<li class="isub1">It’s Never Too Late to Mend.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">John Ruskin (1819-1900), <a href="#Page_77">77</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Sesame and Lilies.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Crown of Wild Olive.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Modern Painters.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), <a href="#Page_88">88</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Guy Mannering.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Old Mortality.</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Antiquary.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Rob Roy.</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Heart of Midlothian.</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Bride of Lammermoor.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Ivanhoe.</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Monastery.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Kenilworth.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Quentin Durward.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">William Shakspere (1564-1616), <a href="#Page_65">65</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Plays and Sonnets.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Scottish Chiefs, by Jane Porter.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), <a href="#Page_61">61</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Poems.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Henry Sienkiewicz (1845- ), <a href="#Page_101">101</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Quo Vadis.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), <a href="#Page_121">121</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Treasure Island (juv.)</li>
+<li class="isub1">Prince Otto (juv.)</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Frank Stockton (1834-1902), <a href="#Page_120">120</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">The Lady or the Tiger?</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), <a href="#Page_116">116</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Uncle Tom’s Cabin (juv.)</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), <a href="#Page_74">74</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Gulliver’s Travels (juv.)<span class="pagenum" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</span></li>
+
+<li class="indx">The Swiss Family Robinson (juv.), by J. R. Wyss.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), <a href="#Page_57">57</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Poems.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Wm. Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), <a href="#Page_105">105</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Vanity Fair.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Pendennis.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Henry Esmond.</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Newcomes.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Count Leo Tolstoi (1828- ), <a href="#Page_121">121</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">War and Peace.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Anna Karénina.</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Long Exile and other stories.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883), <a href="#Page_121">121</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Short Stories.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Lew Wallace (1827-1905), <a href="#Page_101">101</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Ben-Hur.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Walt Whitman (1819-1892)</li>
+<li class="isub1">Poems.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892), <a href="#Page_61">61</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Poems.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman (1862- ), <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">A New England Nun.</li>
+<li class="isub1">A Humble Romance and other short stories.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">William Wordsworth (1770-1850), <a href="#Page_62">62</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">Poems.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Emile Zola (1840-1902), <a href="#Page_113">113</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">The Downfall.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Money.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Drink.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</span></li>
+</ul>
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="SUPPLEMENTARY_LIST">SUPPLEMENTARY LIST</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="nind">
+Of titles suggested partly by Mr. Fred H. Hild, of the Chicago Public
+Library, and partly by Mr. W. I. Fletcher, editor of the American
+Library Association’s Index to General Literature and Librarian of
+Amherst College.</p>
+
+<p class="nindc">Books for young people are marked “juv.”</p>
+
+<ul class="index">
+<li class="ifrst">Aldrich, T. B.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Story of a Bad Boy (juv.)</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Barrie, J. M.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Margaret Ogilvie.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bellamy, Edward</li>
+<li class="isub1">Looking Backward.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Besant, Walter</li>
+<li class="isub1">All Sorts and Conditions of Men.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bjornson</li>
+<li class="isub1">Arne; and The Fisher Lassie.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Black</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Princess of Thule.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bowker, R. R.</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Arts of Life.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Brace, C. L.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Gesta Christi.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Brown, John</li>
+<li class="isub1">Rab and his friends, and Other Dogs and Men (juv.)</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bullfinch, Thos.</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Age of Chivalry (juv.)</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Age of Fable (juv.)</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bulwer-Lytton</li>
+<li class="isub1">My Novel.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Rienzi.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Eugene Aram.</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Caxtons.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Burroughs, John</li>
+<li class="isub1">Fresh Fields (juv.)</li>
+<li class="isub1">Locusts and Wild Honey.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Carlyle</li>
+<li class="isub1">Sartor Resartus.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Heroes and Hero-Worship.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Clemens (Mark Twain)</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Prince and the Pauper.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Tom Sawyer (juv.)</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Collins, Wilkie</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Moonstone.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Emerson, R. W.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Representative Men.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Creasy, Edward S., Sir</li>
+<li class="isub1">Fifteen Decisive Battles.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Curtis, George W.</li>
+<li class="isub1">Prue and I.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Daudet</li>
+<li class="isub1">Tartarin of Tarascon.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Doyle</li>
+<li class="isub1">The White Company.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dumas</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Queen’s Necklace.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Eggleston, Edward</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Hoosier School-Master (juv.)</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Field, Eugene</li>
+<li class="isub1">A Little Book of Profitable Tales.</li>
+<li class="isub1">A Little Book Western Verse.</li>
+</ul>
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="transnote spa1">
+<p class="nindc"><b>TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES</b></p>
+
+<p>Simple typographical errors have been silently corrected; unbalanced
+quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and
+otherwise left unbalanced.</p>
+
+<p>Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant
+preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not
+changed.</p>
+
+<p>Inconsistent hyphens left as printed.</p>
+</div></div>
+
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76097 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
+
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+This book, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this book outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+book #76097 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76097)