path: root/76097-0.txt

*** 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
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                             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 ***