A child's guide to reading (2025)

This is a Child’s Guide to Literature and not aGuide to Juvenile Books. The larger part of thebooks discussed in the various chapters and includedin the supplementary lists were written for adultreaders, and nearly all of them are at least as interestingto the reader of forty as to the reader of fourteen.The great writers are the goal and the childis the traveler. That is why in a Child’s Guideappear the names of Browning, Carlyle, Tolstoi,Meredith, Gibbon, Darwin, Plato, Æschylus. Anormal child will not be reading those masters, certainlynot all of them, but he will be reading towardthem; and between the greatest names will be foundlesser writers who make easy upward slopes foryoung feet that are climbing to the highest. In thesupplementary lists will be found very little of whatis admittedly ephemeral, and still less of that kindof “Juvenile” which has not sufficient literaryquality to outlast the most childish interests andtastes. On the other hand, if we have any feelingfor the abundant human nature of children, we cannotinvite them to fly, nor pretend that we have ourselvesflown, to the severe heights of Frederic Harrison’s[Pg 8]position when he advises that we read onlyauthors of the first rank in every subject and everynation. That ideal, which, to be sure, in his excellentessay on the “Choice of Books” is tempered by hishumanity and good sense, is at too chilly an altitudefor a Child’s Guide, or, I should think, for any otherguide written with appreciation of what kind of adviceordinary humanity can or will benefit by.

In the advice offered by some very wise men toyoung and old readers there is much that is amusinglyparadoxical. Schopenhauer, like FredericHarrison, enjoins us to devote our reading time exclusivelyto the works of those great minds of alltimes and countries which overtop the rest of humanity.Yet Schopenhauer is giving that advice in abook which he certainly hopes will find readers andwhich, however great we may consider him, hismodesty would not allow him to rank among theworks of the greatest minds of all ages. Emersoncounsels us to read no book that is not at least a yearold. But he is himself writing a book of which heand his publishers undoubtedly hope to sell a fewcopies before a year has passed. Thoreau tells usthat our little village is not doing very much forculture, and then he frightens us away from ourpoets by one of those “big” ideas with which he andthe other preachers of his generation liked to makeus children ashamed of ourselves. “The works ofthe great poets,” he says, “have never yet been readby mankind, for only great poets can read them.”Well, Thoreau, whatever else he was, was not a great[Pg 9]poet, and yet he seems to have read the great onesand to have understood them while he was still ayoung man. It is nearer the truth to say that anybodycan read the great poets. That is the lesson,if there is one, which this Guide seeks to inculcate.

There should be a chapter in this book about theBible and religious writings. But practical considerationsdebarred it. The American parent, thoughquite willing to intrust to others many matters relatingto the welfare of his children, usually prefersto give his own counsels as to the spirit in which theBible should be read and what other religious worksshould be read with it.

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CHAPTER I

OF GUIDES AND RULES FOR READING

If you ever go into the Maine woods to hunt andfish you will have as your companion a veteranof forest and stream, a professional guide. It willbe his duty to show you where the game and fish aremost plentiful; to see that you do not get into troublewith the authorities by breaking the game laws; tomake your camp comfortable; and if you are verygreen, to keep a watchful eye on you lest you accidentallyshoot him or mistake another sportsman fora deer. If you are the right sort—the Maine guideis almost certain to be the right sort—you will geta great deal more from your companion than thesimple services for which you pay him. He will benot only guide, but friend and philosopher, and willgrudge you nothing of his stores of wisdom, kindliness,and humor.

If, however, you are to receive most profit andpleasure from life in the woods with this good comrade,you must do your part of the work, use whatwits you have, and not show a disposition to lean[Pg 18]too limply on his strength. There are some thingsthat the best guide cannot do. Not only will he beunable to think for you, but if you are too ready tolet him do all the paddling, he will give you onlyperfunctory help and sulky advice. If, on the contrary,you are handy, he will be doubly handy. Themore you learn, the more he can tell you. The morerapidly you approach the time when you are qualifiedto set up as professional guide yourself, the moreyou will enjoy the niceties of his theories of hunting,fishing, and wood lore.

Now, a guide to reading—if he be of the rightsort—can do for the beginner in literature verymuch the same degree of service as the Maine woodsman.The literary guide is merely one who has livedlonger among books than the unprofessional reader.Since he has elected to pass his life in the literarywoods, he may be supposed to have a good nose forinteresting clews, and sharp eyes and alert ears forleading signs. He knows what novels are good fishingand what poetic trees are sound and what arehollow. But his services, however willingly tenderedand skillfully performed, have limitations. Youmust do your own thinking and your own reading,and understand that only when you cease to be infloundering need of a guide will you begin to receivethe richest benefits of reading. The guide’s idea ofhis duty is to help you to get along altogether withouthim.

No guide, no literary adviser can give you earsfor poetry or eyes for truth. The wisest companion[Pg 19]can only persuade you to live among good books inorder that your ear may have opportunity to revealits fine capacities if it has them, and in order thatyour eye, dwelling upon beautiful things, may growpracticed in discernment. He cannot read for you.If you do not intend or hope to read any of the booksmentioned in this volume, it will be waste of timefor you to turn this page. If you passively receiveevery judgment of your guide about the merits ofthe scores of books we shall discuss, and never oncequestion or try his judgment for yourself, you maybe learning something about this guide, but you willnot be learning about literature. It is not the partof a good pupil to surrender right of private judgment,but it is his part to give his judgmentsolid matter to work upon. On the other hand,too much independence, especially if it is notgrounded in experience, is not modest. Even thosewho have read a good deal and arrived at matureopinions about books, may be content to accompanyfor a while a new guide whose experience has,necessarily, been different from that of others.

Whatever your hope or intention, your guide isonly a guide; he has not power to lead you againstyour will, he has not the schoolmaster’s right to prescribea set course of reading. The reading must bevoluntary, and to have value it must involve somehard work. Healthful entertainment and recreationwe can safely promise. As for wisdom, reverence,the deeper delights of communion with noble minds,whether you meet these great spiritual experiences[Pg 20]depends on you. The guide can merely indicatewhere they may be sought.

Let us at the outset agree not to map out ourjourney too rigidly. A young friend of mine conceivedat the age of sixteen the inordinate ambitionto read everything that is good. He procured a publiclibrary catalogue, and asked a school-teacher tocheck off the titles of all the books knowledge ofwhich is essential to a perfect education. The teachersmiled and confessed that she did not know eventhe titles herself. She might have added that neitherdoes any one else know the titles, much less the insides,of all good books. But she marked some hundrednames, and the ambitious youngster enteredupon his long feast. He never finished all the booksthat were checked, for one or two proved discouraginglystiff and dull, and as he ran his eye down thelist for the next prescribed masterpiece he saw otheralluring titles which were not checked, and he wrotethe numbers on library slips. The experience taughthim that he must select books for himself, and thatthe world’s library is too vast for anyone to be acquaintedwith all its treasures.

A youth so eager to know good books can be trustedsooner or later to find his way to them. For thebenefit of less zealous persons, great faith used to beplaced in lists of the Hundred Best Books. Suchlists, even the very judicious selection made by SirJohn Lubbock (Lord Avebury), can never be satisfactory.Lord Avebury is too good a student of natureand human nature to regard his list as final. It was[Pg 21]not final for one man, John Ruskin, who has given usa most inspiring essay on books, “Of Kings’ Treasures.”Ruskin thought that Lubbock had includedin the chosen hundred some books that were not onlyunworthy but injurious. No man could make a listwhich would fare any better at the hands of anothercritic of solid convictions. Who shall select a socialFour Hundred, all of whom we should accept asfriends? Who can select a Four Hundred or a OneHundred of books and not leave out some of thenoblest and best? It may be that Lubbock and Ruskinwere both a little priggish to take that centuryof masterpieces quite so solemnly.

In books, as in all things, we cherish much thatis not the best, but is good in its way. It is notnatural nor right to reject all but the superlativelyexcellent. It is natural to prefer sometimes a bookof secondary value, and it is perversely natural toturn away from the book that we are assured tooinsistently we “ought to read.” A formal list of“oughts” is a severe test for ordinary human patience.Becky Sharp in “Vanity Fair” is a bad-temperedand bad-hearted young woman, but onecan have a little sympathy with her when she throwsher copy of Johnson’s Dictionary at the head of herteacher as she parts forever from the school gates.It is not altogether her fault if Johnson’s Dictionaryseems to her at that moment of all printed thingsthe most detestable.

Yet perhaps no better book than a good dictionarycould be found whereon to base a library and a[Pg 22]knowledge of literature. The wit who said that thedictionary is a good book, but changes the subjecttoo often, told but a partial truth, for the dictionarykeeps consistently to the first of all subjects, thelanguage in which all subjects are expressed. If itbe true that Americans are of all peoples the mostassiduous patrons of the dictionary, the future ofour popular education and of our national literatureis secure, for although mere words will not makethought, it is only thoughtful people who have azealous interest in the dictionary. The schoolmasterwho first made the present writer conscious that thereis a difference between good English and bad usedto tell us in the moments when regular school exerciseswere pending to study our dictionaries. Thedictionary would be a reasonable answer to that delightfulconundrum: “If you were wrecked on adesert island, and could have only one book, whatbook would you choose?”

The shrewdest of all answers to that questionevaded it: “I should spend so much time trying tochoose the book that I should miss the steamer andnot be wrecked.” These conundrums—the best book?—thebest hundred books?—the greatest novel?—thegreatest poem?—are not to be answered. The use ofthem is that they stir our imaginations and whetour judgments. If we come close and try to settlethem in earnest, we bring tumbling about our headsa multitude of conflicting answers. Then we fleefrom the disorder and realize that conundrums areonly stimulating nonsense. Individual choice among[Pg 23]the riches of the world’s literature is not to be confinedby hard and fast rules and tests.

As a practical matter we are not altogether free tochoose. Our book friends, like our human friends,are in part chosen for us by accidental encounters.We do not wander over the world seeking for thedozen souls that are most fit to be grappled to uswith hoops of steel. We merely choose the most congenialamong our neighbors. So it is with books.Each of us wishes to select the best among such asare available, to have judgment in accepting theright one when it falls in our way. Biography isfull of instances of chance encounters in the world’slibrary that have shaped great careers.

John Stuart Mill records in his Autobiographyhow Wordsworth’s poetry brought about in him aspiritual regeneration. At the age of twenty-one,precociously far advanced in his study of economicsand philosophy, he found himself dejected and withno clear outlook upon life. He had often heard ofthe uplifting power of poetry, and read the whole ofByron, but Byron did him no good. He took upWordsworth’s poems “from curiosity, with no expectationof mental relief.” “I found myself,” he says,“at once better and happier as I came under theirinfluence.” The reading of Wordsworth was the immediateoccasion, though not the sole cause, of acomplete change in his way of thinking, and his newway of thinking led him to life-long associations withother great men.

We cannot tell which poet, which thinker, will do[Pg 24]for us what Wordsworth did for Mill. But whilewe are young we can take trial excursions into literatureuntil we find our own. And when we dofind our own, the treasure that is most precious toour souls, we shall know it, and know it the better,perhaps, if we have tried many good books and failedto like them.

If we are to rely so frankly upon our own likings,a word of caution may be necessary to help us distinguishliberty of choice from unreasonable license.We have to ask not only, Does this book interest me?—but,Does this book appeal to the best tastes andemotions in me? Many of us, by no means badhuman beings, are so constituted that if our eyemeets the morbid, the coarse, the senselessly horrible,we are fascinated, we are indeed interested. But itrequires only the most simple self-analysis and alittle honesty, to pull ourselves together and realizethat it is an unworthy side of us, a side that we donot care to show our friends, which is being held atattention. Not that we need, like the stupidest ofthe old Puritans, be afraid of a book simply becauseit does thrill us and make us breathless. For everybad book which holds the depraved mind guiltilyalert, a good book can be found, so absorbing, socompelling, that beside it the bad book is tame.

I once had a pupil whose transparent honesty wasonly one of his many lovable qualities. He believedthat “Literature” consisted of dull books written byauthors who died long ago. The ill-reasoned conclusionwas his own, but I found that the raw materials[Pg 25]of his error lay in the prudishness of one ofhis teachers. When I told him that “HuckleberryFinn,” by a very live author, is literature, and thata short story by Mrs. Mary Wilkins-Freeman in acurrent magazine seemed to me literature of rare excellence,his delight so aroused his wits that for sometime after that my part of the lessons consistedmerely in meeting his enthusiasm halfway.

A friend once asked me what he could read toimprove his mind. In the pride of a little superiorwisdom, I loftily recommended Shakespeare.His reply was, “That is too deep for me.” A wisercounselor than I, knowing his circumstances, wouldnot have tried to cultivate a sprouting ambition withquite so perfect an intellectual instrument. But Istuck to my advice, and shortly after I had opportunityto prove that I was, if not wise, at least on theside of wisdom. We went together to see “Othello”—fromgallery seats. After that my friend readthe play and another that was bound with it.

Shakespeare is deep, forsooth. Hamlet’s soliloquyin the fourth act:

is so profound that it is darkened by its very depth.But the play “Hamlet” is a stirring melodramathat keeps the “gallery gods” leaning forward intheir seats. The larger part of literature is by deadauthors, because the “great majority” of the race isdead and includes its proportionate number of poetsand prophets. Some great books are dull except to a[Pg 26]comparatively few minds in certain moods. Butmost dull books by old writers have been forgotten;our ancestors saved us the trouble of rejecting them.Most books that have survived are triumphantly alivein all senses. The vitality of a book that is justborn may be brief as a candle flame. The old bookthat is still bright has proved that its brightness isthe true luster of the metal; else we should not knowits name.

THE PURPOSE OF READING

The question why we read books is one of thosevast questions that need no answer. As wellask, Why ought we to be good? or, Why do webelieve in a God? The whole universe of wisdomanswers. To attempt an answer in a chapter of abook would be like turning a spyglass for a momenttoward the stars. We take the great simple thingsfor granted, like the air we breathe. In a countrythat holds popular education to be the foundation ofall its liberties and fortunes, we do not find manypeople who need to be argued into the belief thatthe reading of books is good for us; even people whodo not read much acknowledge vaguely that theyought to read more.

There are, to be sure, men of rough worldly wisdom,even endowed with spiritual insight, who distrust“book learning” and fall back on the obvioustruth that experience of life is the great teacher.Such persons are in a measure justified in their convictionby the number of unwise human beings whohave read much but to no purpose.

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is a living argument against mere reading. But wecan meet such argument by pointing out that theblockhead who cannot learn from books cannot learnmuch from life, either. That sometimes useful citizenwhom it is fashionable to call a Philistine, andwho calls himself a “practical man,” often has underhim a beginner fresh from the schools, who is gliband confident in repeating bookish theories, but isnot yet skillful in applying them. If the practicalman is thoughtless, he sniffs at theory and pointsto his clumsy assistant as proof of the uselessness ofwhat is to be got from books. If he is wise, thepractical man realizes how much better off he wouldbe, how much farther his hard work and experiencemight have carried him, if he had had the advantageof bookish training.

Moreover, the hard-headed skeptic, self-made andself-secure, who will not traffic with the literaturethat touches his life work, is seldom so confined tohis own little shop that he will not, for recreation,take holiday tours into the literature of other men’slives and labors. The man who does not like to readany books is, I am confident, seldom found, and atthe risk of slandering a patriot, I will express thedoubt whether he is a good citizen.

Honest he may be, but certainly not wise. Thehuman race for thousands of years has been writingits experiences, telling how it has met our everlastingproblems, how it has struggled with darknessand rejoiced in light. What fools we should be totry to live our lives without the guidance and inspiration[Pg 29]of the generations that have gone before, withoutthe joy, encouragement, and sympathy that thebest imaginations of our generation are distillinginto words. For literature is simply life selectedand condensed into books. In a few hours we canfollow all that is recorded of the life of Jesus—thebest that He did in years of teaching and sufferingall ours for a day of reading, and the more deeplyours for a lifetime of reading and meditation!

If the expression of life in words is strong andbeautiful and true it outlives empires, like the oldestbooks of the Old Testament. If it is weak or trivialor untrue, it is forgotten like most of the “stories”in yesterday’s newspaper, like most of the novels oflast year. The expression of truth, the transmissionof knowledge and emotions between man and manfrom generation to generation, this is the purpose ofliterature. Not to read books is like being shut upin a dungeon while life rushes by outside.

I happen to be writing in Christmas week, and Ihave read for the tenth time “A Christmas Carol,”by Dickens, that amazing allegory in which the hard,bitter facts of life are involved in a beautiful myth,that wizard’s caldron in which humor bubbles andfrom which rise phantom figures of religion andpoetry. Can anyone doubt that if this story wereread by every man, woman, and child in the world,Christmas would be a happier time and the feelingsof the race elevated and strengthened? The storyhas power enough to defeat armies, to make revolutionsin the faith of men, and turn the cold markets[Pg 30]of the world into festival scenes of charity. If youknow any mean person, you may be sure that hehas not read “A Christmas Carol,” or that he readit long ago and has forgotten it. I know there arepersons who pretend that the sentimentality of Dickensdestroys their interest in him. I once took acourse with an overrefined, imperfectly educated professorof literature, who advised me that in time Ishould outgrow my liking for Dickens. It was onlyhis way of recommending to me a kind of fictionthat I had not learned to like. In time I did learnto like it, but I did not outgrow Dickens. A personwho can read “A Christmas Carol” aloud to the endand keep his voice steady is, I suspect, not a safeperson to trust with one’s purse or one’s honor.

It is not necessary to argue about the value ofliterature or even to define it. One way of bringingourselves to realize vividly what literature cando for us is to enter the libraries of great men andsee what books have done for the acknowledged leadersof our race.

You will recall John Stuart Mill’s experience inreading Wordsworth. Mill was a man of letters aswell as a scientific economist and philosopher, andwe expect to find that men of letters have been nourishedon literature; reading must necessarily havebeen a large part of their professional preparation.The examples of men of action who have been moldedand inspired by books will perhaps be more helpfulto remember; for most of us are not to be writersor to engage in purely intellectual work; our ambitions[Pg 31]point to a thousand different careers in theworld of action.

Lincoln was not primarily a man of letters, althoughhe wrote noble prose on occasion, and the artof expression was important, perhaps indispensable,in his political success. He read deeply in the lawand in books on public questions. For general literaturehe had little time, either during his earlystruggles or after his public life began, and his autobiographicalmemorandum contains the significantwords: “Education defective.” But these more significantwords are found in a letter which he wroteto Hackett, the player: “Some of Shakespeare’s playsI have never read, while others I have gone overperhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader.Among the latter are ‘Lear,’ ‘Richard III,’ ‘HenryVIII,’ ‘Hamlet,’ and, especially, ‘Macbeth.’”

If he had not read these masterpieces, no doubt hewould have become President just the same andguided the country through its terrible difficulties;but we may be fairly sure that the high philosophyby which he lifted the political differences of his dayabove partisan quarrels, the command of wordswhich gives his letters and speeches literary permanenceapart from their biographical interest, thepoetic exaltation of the Gettysburg Address, thesehigher qualities of genius, beyond the endowment ofany native wit, came to Lincoln in some part fromthe reading of books. It is important to note thathe followed Franklin’s advice to read much but nottoo many books; the list of books mentioned in the[Pg 32]biographical records of Lincoln is not long. But hewent over those half dozen plays “frequently.” Weshould remember, too, that he based his ideals uponthe Bible and his style upon the King James Version.His writings abound in biblical phrases.

We are accustomed to regard Lincoln as a thinker.His right arm in the saddest duty of his life, GeneralGrant, was a man of deeds; as Lincoln said ofhim, he was a “copious worker and fighter, but avery meager writer and telegrapher.” In his “Memoirs,”Grant makes a modest confession about hisreading:

“There is a fine library connected with the Academy[West Point] from which cadets can get booksto read in their quarters. I devoted more time tothese than to books relating to the course of studies.Much of the time, I am sorry to say, was devotedto novels, but not those of a trashy sort. I read allof Bulwer’s then published, Cooper’s, Marryat’s,Scott’s, Washington Irving’s works, Lever’s, andmany others that I do not now remember.”

Grant was not a shining light in his school days,nor indeed in his life until the Civil War, and atfirst sight he is not a striking example of a greatman influenced by books. Yet who can deny thatthe fruit of that early reading is to be found in his“Memoirs,” in which a man of action unused towriting and called upon to narrate great events, discoversan easy adequate style? There is a dangerouskind of conjecture in which many biographers indulgewhen they try to relate logically the scattered[Pg 33]events of a man’s life. A conjectured relation isset down as a proved or unquestioned relation. Ishall say something about this in the chapter onbiography, and I do not wish to violate my ownteachings. But we may, without harm, hazard thesuggestion, which is only a suggestion, that some ofthe chivalry of Scott’s heroes wove itself into Grant’sinstincts and inspired this businesslike, modern general,in the days when politeness has lost some of itsflourish, to be the great gentleman he was at Appomattoxwhen he quietly wrote into the terms of thesurrender that the Confederate officers should keeptheir side arms. Stevenson’s account of the episodein his essay on “Gentlemen” is heightened, thoughnot above the dignity of the facts, certainly not toa degree that is untrue to the facts as they are tobe read in Grant’s simple narrative. Since I haveagreed not to say “ought to read,” I will only expressthe hope that the quotation from Stevensonwill lead you to the essay and to the volume thatcontains it.

“On the day of the capitulation, Lee wore hispresentation sword; it was the first thing that Grantobserved, and from that moment he had but onethought: how to avoid taking it. A man, whoshould perhaps have had the nature of an angel,but assuredly not the special virtues of a gentleman,might have received the sword, and no more wordsabout it: he would have done well in a plain way.One who wished to be a gentleman, and knew nothow, might have received and returned it: he would[Pg 34]have done infamously ill, he would have proved himselfa cad; taking the stage for himself, leaving tohis adversary confusion of countenance and the ungracefulposture of a man condemned to offer thanks.Grant, without a word said, added to the terms thisarticle: ‘All officers to retain their side arms’; andthe problem was solved and Lee kept his sword, andGrant went down to posterity, not perhaps a finegentleman, but a great one.”

Napoleon, who of all men of mighty deeds afterJulius Cæsar had the greatest intellect, was a tirelessreader, and since he needed only four or fivehours’ sleep in twenty-four he found time to readin the midst of his prodigious activities. Nowadaysthose of us who are preparing to conquer the worldare taught to strengthen ourselves for the task bygetting plenty of sleep. Napoleon’s devouring eyesread far into the night; when he was in the field hissecretaries forwarded a stream of books to his headquarters;and if he was left without a new volumeto begin, some underling had to bear his imperialdispleasure. No wonder that his brain contained somany ideas that, as the sharp-tongued poet, Heine,said, one of his lesser thoughts would keep all thescholars and professors in Germany busy all theirlives making commentaries on it.

In Franklin’s “Autobiography” we have an unusuallyclear statement of the debt of a man of affairsto literature: “From a child I was fond of reading,and all the little money that came into my handswas ever laid out in books. Pleased with the ‘Pilgrim’s[Pg 35]Progress,’ my first collection was of JohnBunyan’s works in separate little volumes.... Myfather’s little library consisted chiefly of books inpolemic divinity, most of which I read, and havesince often regretted that, at a time when I had sucha thirst for knowledge, more proper books had notfallen in my way, since it was now resolved that Ishould not be a clergyman. ‘Plutarch’s Lives’there was in which I read abundantly, and I stillthink that time spent to great advantage. Therewas also a book of De Foe’s, called an ‘Essay onProjects,’ and another of Dr. Mather’s, called ‘Essaysto do Good,’ which perhaps gave me a turn ofthinking that had an influence on some of the principalfuture events of my life.”

It is not surprising to find that the most versatileof versatile Americans read De Foe’s “Essay onProjects,” which contains practical suggestions on ascore of subjects, from banking and insurance tonational academies. In Cotton Mather’s “Essays todo Good” is the germ perhaps of the sensible moralityof Franklin’s “Poor Richard.” The story of howFranklin gave his nights to the study of Addison andby imitating the Spectator papers taught himself towrite, is the best of lessons in self-cultivation inEnglish. The “Autobiography” is proof of howwell he learned, not Addison’s style, which was suitedto Joseph Addison and not to Benjamin Franklin,but a clear, firm manner of writing. In Franklin’scase we can see not only what he owed to books, buthow one side of his fine, responsive mind was starved[Pg 36]because, as he put it, more proper books did not fallin his way. The blind side of Franklin’s great intellectwas his lack of religious imagination. Thisdefect may be accounted for by the forbidding natureof the religious books in his father’s library. Repelledby the dull discourses, the young man missedthe religious exaltation and poetic mysticism whichthe New England divines concealed in their polemicargument. Franklin’s liking for Bunyan and hisconfession that his father’s discouragement kept himfrom being a poet, “most probably,” he says, “avery bad one,” show that he would have respondedto the right kind of religious literature, and not haveremained all his life such a complacent rationalist.

If it is clear that the purpose of reading is to putourselves in communication with the best minds ofour race, we need go no farther for a definitionof “good reading.” Whatever human beings havesaid well in words is literature, whether it bethe Declaration of Independence or a love story.Reading consists in nothing more than in takingone of the volumes in which somebody hassaid something well, opening it on one’s knee, andbeginning.

We take it for granted, then, that we know whywe read. We shall presently discuss some bookswhich we shall like to read. But before we come toan examination of certain kinds of literature andcertain of its great qualities, we may ask one furtherquestion: How shall we read? One answer is thatwe should read with as much of ourselves as a book[Pg 37]warrants, with the part of ourselves that a book demands.Mrs. Browning says:

We sometimes know exactly what we wish to getfrom a book, especially if it is a volume of informationon a definite subject. But the great book isfull of treasures that one does not deliberately seek,and which indeed one may miss altogether on thefirst journey through. It is almost nonsensical tosay: Read Macaulay for clearness, Carlyle for power,Thackeray for ease. Literary excellence is not separatedand bottled up in any such drug-shop array.If Macaulay is a master of clearness it is becausehe is much else besides. Unless we read a man forall there is in him, we get very little, we meet, nota living human being, not a vital book, but somethingdead, dismembered, disorganized. We do notread Thackeray for ease; we read him for Thackerayand enjoy his ease by the way.

We must read a book for all there is in it or weshall get little or nothing. To be masters of bookswe must have learned to let books master us. Thisis true of books that we are required to read, suchas text books, and of those we read voluntarily and[Pg 38]at leisure. The law of reading is to give a book itsdue and a little more. The art of reading is toknow how to apply this law. For there is an art ofreading, for each of us to learn for himself, a privateway of making the acquaintance of books.

Macaulay, whose mind was never hurried nor confused,learned to read very rapidly, to absorb apage at a glance. A distinguished professor, whohas spent his life in the most minutely technicalscholarship, surprised us one day by commendingto his classes the fine art of “skipping.” Manygood books, including some most meritorious “three-decker”novels, have their profitless pages, and it isuseful to know by a kind of practiced instinct whereto pause and reread and where to run lightly andrapidly over the page. It is a useful accomplishmentnot only in the reading of fiction, but in thebusiness of life, to the man of affairs who must getthe gist of a mass of written matter, and to the studentof any special subject.

Usually, of course, a book that is worth readingat all is worth reading carefully. Thoroughness ofreading is the first thing to preach and to practice,and it is perhaps dangerous to suggest to a beginnerthat any book should be skimmed. The suggestionwill serve its purpose if it indicates that there areways to read, that practice in reading is like practicein anything else; the more one does, and themore intelligently one does it, the farther and moreeasily one can go. In the best reading—that is, themost thoughtful reading of the most thoughtful[Pg 39]books, attention is necessary. It is even necessarythat we should read some works, some passages, sooften and with such close application that we committhem to memory. It is said that the habit oflearning pieces by heart is not so prevalent as itused to be. I hope that this is not so. What! haveyou no poems by heart, no great songs, no versesfrom the Bible, no speeches from Shakespeare? Thenyou have not begun to read, you have not learnedhow to read.

We have said enough, perhaps, of the theories ofreading. The one lesson that seems most obvious isthat we must come close to literature. Therefore weshall pause no longer on general considerations, butenter at once the library where the living books areranged upon the shelves.

THE READING OF FICTION

Our reason for considering prose fiction beforethe other departments of literature is not thatfiction is of greatest importance, but that it is thebranch of literature most widely known and enjoyed.Pretend as we may to prefer poetry and “solidbooks” (as if good fiction lacked solidity!) most ofus have read more novels than histories, more shortstories than poems. The good old Quaker who wrotea dull history of Nantucket could not understandwhy the young people preferred novels to hisveracious chronicle; which was the same as sayingthat he did not understand young people, or old people,either. Since the beginning of recorded humanhistory the world has gathered eagerly about theknees of its story-tellers, and to the end of the raceit will continue to applaud and honor the skillful inventorof fiction.

There was a time when preachers and teachers, atleast those of the English-speaking nations, had asomber view of life and looked with distrust onpleasant arts; and no doubt they were right in holdingthat if stories take our thoughts off the greatrealities, we cannot afford to abandon our minds to[Pg 41]such toys and trivial inventions. But the severemoralists never made out a good case against thearts; they could not prove that joy and laughter andlight entertainment interfered with high thinkingand right living; and in time they rediscovered,what other wise men had never forgotten, that art isgood for the soul. In the past century the novel hastaken all knowledge for its province and has allieditself to the labors of prophets, preachers, and educators.The philosopher finds that some of the greatspeculative minds have uttered their thoughts in theform of artistic fiction. The true scholar no longerconfines himself to annotating the fictions of theGreeks and Romans and the established classics ofhis race. He sees in the best art of his contemporariesthe same effort of the human soul to expressitself which informed the ancient masterpieces.

Jane Austen, whose delicate novels inspiredstronger writers than she, who by her gentleness andtruth influenced creative powers greater than herown, whimsically recognized and perhaps helped toremove the pedantic prejudice against fiction. Thefollowing passage from “Northanger Abbey” willgive a taste of that delicious book. It is a quietsatire on the absurdly romantic such as is still manufacturedand sold by the million copies to readerswho, one may suppose, have not had the good fortuneto read Jane Austen.

The heroines of “Northanger Abbey,” Catherineand Isabella, “shut themselves up to read novels together.Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous[Pg 42]and impolitic custom, so common withnovel writers, of degrading, by their contemptuouscensure, the very performances to the number ofwhich they are themselves adding; joining with theirgreatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithetson such works, and scarcely ever permitting themto be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentallytake up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipidpages with disgust. Alas! if the heroine ofone novel be not patronized by the heroine of another,from whom can she expect protection and regard?I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it tothe reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy attheir leisure, and over every new novel to talk inthreadbare strains of the trash with which the pressnow groans. Let us not desert one another; we arean injured body. Although our productions haveafforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure thanthose of any other literary corporation in the world,no species of composition has been so much decried.From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes arealmost as many as our readers; and while the abilitiesof the nine-hundredth abridger of the ‘Historyof England,’ or of the man who collects and publishesin a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope,and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and achapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousandpens, there seems almost a general wish of decryingthe capacity and undervaluing the labor ofthe novelist, and of slighting the performances whichhave only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them.[Pg 43]‘I am no novel reader; I seldom look into novels;do not imagine that I often read novels; it is reallyvery well for a novel.’ Such is the common cant.‘And what are you reading, Miss ——?’ ‘Oh, itis only a novel!’ replies the young lady; while shelays down her book with affected indifference, ormomentary shame. ‘It is only “Cecilia,” or “Camilla,”or “Belinda,”’ or, in short, only some workin which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed,in which the most thorough knowledge ofhuman nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties,the liveliest effusions of wit and humor, areconveyed to the world in the best chosen language.”

Since that was written the novel has overriddenits detractors by sheer bulk and power. The greatestman in Russia, Tolstoi, is, or was, a novelist.The greatest poet and thinker alive but yesterday inEngland, George Meredith, was a novelist. Of thetwo wisest living writers in America, one, Mr. WilliamDean Howells, is a novelist, and the other, MarkTwain, whom one hardly knows how to rank or label,has done a part of his best writing in the form offiction. We no longer question the power and dignityof the novel. Our only concern is to discriminategood stories from bad and get the greatest delightand profit from the good.

To bring our discussion to a vital example, let usconsider Thackeray’s “Henry Esmond,” an all butperfect fiction, in which every element of excellentnarrative is present.

The first element is plot. A story must begin in[Pg 44]an interesting set of circumstances and arrive by aseries of events to a conclusion that satisfies. Theplot of “Esmond” is unusually well made, and it iscomposed of rich matter. From the first chapter inwhich Henry is introduced to us as “no servant,though a dependent, no relative, though he borethe name and inherited the blood of the house”—ayouth with a mystery—on through the schemes forthe restoration of the Stuart King, through Esmond’sunsuccessful rivalry with the other suitors ofBeatrice, to the end of the high intrigues of politicsand the quiet conclusion of Esmond’s career, the storymoves steadily with well-mannered leisure. It takesits own time, but it takes the right time, slow whenevents are preparing, rapid and flashing when eventscome to a crisis. The great crisis, when Esmondovertakes the prince at Castlewood, breaks his swordand renounces both allegiance to the Stuarts andhis own birthright, is one of the supreme dramaticscenes in literature. There Thackeray matches, evenexcels, Scott and Dumas. And such is the varietyof his power that on other pages he writes brilliantand witty comedy surpassed only by the lighter playsof Shakespeare, on yet other pages he gives compactlucid summary of events, the skill of which an historianmight envy, and again he writes pages of commenton human character which equal the best pagesof Esmond’s friend, “the famous Mr. Joseph Addison.”

The actors in these events are as distinct andmemorable as any in history or as any in life. It[Pg 45]would be impossible for a reader not well acquaintedwith the age of Queen Anne to tell which of thepersonages in the book once moved in the flesh andwhich Thackeray created. And readers who havea wide acquaintance with the world and have knownmany of its sons and daughters will find in theirgallery of memories no brilliant and heartless womanwhom they seem to remember with more sense ofintimacy and understanding than the woman who ledMr. Esmond such an uncomfortable dance and wasthe means of defeating Stuart ambitions—BeatriceEsmond. How are these personages of a fiction madeto seem so lifelike? Genius only can answer, andgenius is often unaware by just what devices a characteris made to take on its own life and to walk, asit were, independent of the author. One thing isgenerally true of characters that strike us as real:they talk each in a style of his own, and yet they talk“like folks.” The thing that they do may be farremoved from anything in our experience, a soldiermay be talking to a king, Esmond may be speakingin noble anger to the prince; we feel somehow thatthe words on the page have in them the sound of thehuman voice, that a man placed in such circumstanceswould think and speak as the novelist makes himspeak.

In a good novel human beings, whose emotionsrepresent and idealize our own, act and talk amidintelligible circumstances and entertaining events.These persons, since they seem real, are visible tothe eye of fancy and the events happen in scenes—the[Pg 46]divisions of a drama are called “scenes”—whichstrike the imagination as if they were actually strikingthe senses. Each person is recognizable by lookand gesture; each place is distinct from all otherplaces, as the room you sit in and the street beyondyour window are different from all other rooms andall other highways in the world. Our master ofstory telling is a master of description. An unskillfulauthor tries to persuade us that a woman is beautifulby merely asserting it, and his assertion makesno impression on us because it appeals to the partof our brain that collects information and not thepart that sees pictures. But Thackeray paints MissBeatrice tripping down the stairs to greet Esmond,and no eye that has seen her through Thackeray’swords but can recall the portrait at will. Furtherdescription of Beatrice accompanies the action allthrough the book and no one can tell, or cares to tell,where narration pauses and description begins.

No one can tell, either, where out of all thisemerges that quality of writing called style. Mannerof expression is not a separable shell in which thestuff is contained like a kernel. The manner is inthe substance. Yet there is a charm of words feltfor itself which seems to lie above and around thething conveyed. In other books Thackeray loses hisplot, and sometimes apparently forgets his characters,and yet he carries the reader on by virtue of sayingthings compellingly and invitingly. When, as in“Esmond,” the order of action is so satisfying andthe people are so interesting to watch and be with,[Pg 47]and in addition every page is a delight to the ear,then literary excellence is complete.

Here, united in one book, are the elements offiction—plot, character, description and style. Andfrom these elements, however blended, there resultsa total value, the measure of a book’s importance inrelation to the other things in life. This value isessentially moral, not so much because literature isunder peculiar obligations to preach and teach moralityas because it is part of life and the fundamentalthings in life are moral in the large sense of the word.It is as impossible to think of a fiction which shallbe neither moral nor immoral as to think of an actwhich shall be, in the modern meaningless word, unmoral.Even a very slight fiction, like a trivial act,weighs on one side or the other. All the best ofour novelists have been fully conscious of theirethical obligations to their readers. Having thoughtdeeply enough about life to write about it, they couldnot have failed to think deeply about their professionalresponsibility, their part in life.

I am going to quote at length a passage fromAnthony Trollope’s “Life of Thackeray” in theseries of biographies known as English Men ofLetters. The young reader can find no better bookabout the novel than this account of one great novelistby another. In spite of a current idea that shop-talkis not interesting, a thoughtful craftsman talkingabout his work is likely to be at his best. Moreover,Trollope’s judgments on the moral obligation of thenovelist are especially worthy of confidence, for he[Pg 48]is no heavy-handed preacher, no metaphysical critic,but a broad-minded humorist, an affectionate studentof human nature, a cheerful workman who regardedhis own books in a modest businesslike way.

“I have said previously,” says Trollope, “that itis the business of a novel to instruct in morals andto amuse. I will go further, and will add, havingbeen for many years a prolific writer of novels myself,that I regard him who can put himself intoclose communication with young people year afteryear without making some attempt to do them good,as a very sorry fellow indeed. However poor yourmatter may be, however near you may come to that‘foolishest of existing mortals,’ as Carlyle presumessome unfortunate novelist to be, still, if there bethose who read your works, they will undoubtedlybe more or less influenced by what they find there.And it is because the novelist amuses that he mustbe influential. The sermon too often has no sucheffect, because it is applied with the declared intentionof having it. The palpable and overt dose thechild rejects; but that which is cunningly insinuatedby the aid of jam or honey is accepted unconsciously,and goes on upon its curative mission. So it is withthe novel. It is taken because of its jam and honey.But, unlike the honest and simple jam and honey ofthe household cupboard, it is never unmixed withphysic. There will be the dose within it, eithercurative or poisonous. The girl will be taught modestyor immodesty, truth or falsehood; the lad willbe taught honor or dishonor, simplicity or affectation.[Pg 49]Without the lesson the amusement will notbe there. There are novels which certainly can teachnothing; but then neither can they amuse any one.

“I should be said to insist absurdly on the powerof my own fraternity if I were to declare that thebulk of the young people in the upper and middleclasses receive their moral teaching chiefly from thenovels they read. Mothers would no doubt thinkof their own sweet teaching; fathers of the exampleswhich they set; and schoolmasters of the excellenceof their instructions. Happy is the country thathas such mothers, fathers, and schoolmasters! Butthe novelist creeps in closer than the schoolmaster,closer than the father, closer almost than the mother.He is the chosen guide, the tutor whom the youngpupil chooses for herself. She retires with him, suspectingno lesson, safe against rebuke, throwing herselfhead and heart into the narration as she canhardly do into her task work; and there she is taught—howshe shall learn to love; how she shall receivethe lover when he comes; how far she should advanceto meet the joy; why she should be reticent, and notthrow herself at once into this new delight. It isthe same with the young man, though he would bemore prone even than she to reject the suspicion ofsuch tutorship. But he, too, will learn either tospeak the truth, or to lie; and will receive from hisnovel lessons either of real manliness, or of thataffected apishness and tailor-begotten demeanor whichtoo many professors of the craft give out as theirdearest precepts.

[Pg 50]

“At any rate the close intercourse is admitted.Where is the house now from which novels aretabooed? Is it not common to allow them almostindiscriminately, so that young and old each chooseshis own novel? Shall he, then, to whom this closefellowship is allowed—this inner confidence—shall henot be careful what words he uses, and what thoughtshe expresses, when he sits in council with his youngfriend?... A novelist has two modes of teaching—bygood example or bad. It is not to be supposedthat because the person treated of be evil,therefore the precept will be evil. If so, some personageswith whom we have been acquainted fromour youth upward would have been omitted in ourearly lessons. It may be a question whether theteaching is not more efficacious which comes froman evil example. What story was ever more powerfulin showing the beauty of feminine reticence, andthe horrors of feminine evildoing, than the fate ofEffie Deans [in “The Heart of Midlothian” byScott]. The ‘Templar’ [in Scott’s “Ivanhoe”]would have betrayed a woman to his lust, but hasnot encouraged others by the freedom of his life.‘Varney’ [in Scott’s “Kenilworth”] was utterlybad—but though a gay courtier, he has enticed noothers to go the way he went. So has it been withThackeray. His examples have generally been ofthat kind—but they have all been efficacious in theirteaching on the side of modesty and manliness, truth,and simplicity.”

To return to the elements of the novel, plot, character,[Pg 51]description, style, if we think of a score ofgreat novels that have had many readers for manyyears, we shall see that some novelists are blessedwith genius for one element more than for another,or that they have chosen to put their energies intoone or the other. And we shall see, too, that fewnovels are perfect, few as nearly perfect as “Esmond,”and that we should not expect them to be.All that we need demand is that a writer give usenough of something to make the reading of his bookworth while.

No rules that have so far been laid down aboutthe requirements of fiction are final or from thereader’s point of view of great assistance. Some of ushave made up our minds that the English novel isgrowing more shapely and well constructed: Mr.W. D. Howells, for instance, by precept and practice,and some other novelists and critics who are underthe influence of French fiction, insist on constructionand form and simplicity of plot. Then in spiteof all “tendencies” and rules of fiction, along comesMr. William De Morgan with three novels whichmight have been written fifty years ago, and winsinstantaneous and deserved success as a new novelist—atthe age of seventy. His plots are as waywardand leisurely as most of Thackeray’s, his people arehuman, and his discursive individual style is as freshas if novelists had not been filling the world withbooks for two centuries. “Joseph Vance” and “Alice-for-Short”prove how inconsiderate genius is ofrules made by critics and how far is the “old-fashioned”[Pg 52]novel from having gone stale and fallen onevil days.

So long as a plot has vitality of some kind, truthto life, or ingenuity, or dramatic power, it makesno difference to the mere reader what material thenovelist chooses. Twenty years ago there was astrange contest between realists and romanticists.The realists, or as they sometimes call themselves,“naturalists,” take the simpler facts of common lifeand weave them into stories. The romanticist selectsfrom highly colored epochs of history, or from no-man’sland, or from the more unusual circumstancesof actual life, such startling adventures, such well-joinedincidents, such mysteries, surprises, anddramatic revelations as we do not meet with inordinary times and places. Thackeray is a romanticistin “Henry Esmond,” a realist in “Pendennis”and “The Newcomes.” Scott’s novels are romantic.Those of Trollope, of Mr. Henry James, of Mr.W. D. Howells are realistic. There is no sharp linebetween the two. Dickens found extraordinary romancein ordinary London streets, which he knewwith journalistic realism to the last brick and cobblestone.In “Bleak House,” he says, he “purposelydwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things.”But, though he may have considered this book aspecial quest for the romantic in real life, it does notdiffer in the kind or the proportion of its romanticismfrom a dozen others of his novels. It is no more romanticthan “David Copperfield” or “The Old CuriosityShop,” no less romantic than the historical[Pg 53]fiction, “A Tale of Two Cities.” His imaginationpenetrated life, real or unreal, familiar or remote,and found it rich with plot and subplot; he touchedthe slums with his mythmaker’s wand, and in obedienceto his touch the children of the streets anddark tenements became heroes of strange adventure,moving through mysteries as varied and wonderfulas fairyland.

Because Dickens loved human beings and understoodtheir everyday sorrow and happiness, hewrought into the great fabric of his plots a multitudeof people as real, as like to us and our friends, ascan be found in the work of the most thorough-goingrealist; he reflects, too, like the avowed realist, thesocial and political problems of his own times. Heis both romanticist and realist. So also are his contemporaries,the Brontë sisters and Charles Reade.And their greatest successors in the English novel,Thomas Hardy and George Meredith, are equallymasters of common social facts, human nature in itsdaily aspects, and of the highly colored, the picturesque,the mystery, the surprise, the dramaticcomplexity of events.

The genius of English fiction in most of its powerfulexponents has this dual character of romance andrealism. “Robinson Crusoe” is a romantic adventure;its scene is transported far away from human life toa solitude such as only the wanderer’s eye has lookedupon; the reader is taken bodily into another world.Yet Defoe is the first great realist in English prosefiction; he piles detail upon detail, gives an exact[Pg 54]inventory of Crusoe’s possessions, and compels beliefin the story as in a chronicle of events that reallyhappened.

Later in the eighteenth century appeared Richardson’s“Clarissa Harlowe,” a vast romantic tragedy,which held the attention of all novel readers of thetime; the story was published in parts, and whenit was learned before the last part was printed thatthe ending was to be tragic, ladies wrote to Richardsonbegging him to bring his heroine out of herdifficulties and allow her to “live happily ever after.”The plot of this novel is imposed by the logic ofcharacter upon the facts of English society; the plotis not realistic or even probable in its relations tothe known circumstances of the civilization in whichit is laid; any magistrate could have rescued Clarissa.But everything stands aside to let the great romancepass by; the readers of the time, who knew betterthan we do the social facts surrounding an Englishgirl, did not question the probability of the plot,because they accepted the character. The plotgranted, Richardson’s method is realistic. We knowClarissa’s daily acts and circumstances; we have abulletin of her feelings every hour. No modernpsychological novelist ever analyzed the workings ofa human mind more minutely, with greater fidelityand insight. The result is a voluminous diary ofeighteenth-century manners and customs and sentimentshung upon as romantic a plot as was everdevised.

Midway in time between Richardson and Dickens[Pg 55]stands the king of romantics, Scott, and he, too, isa realist in his depiction of Scottish life and character.In “The Bride of Lammermoor” so melodramaticand “stagey” that it seems to be set behindfootlights and played to music—a familiar opera isbased upon it—there is one character that Scottfound not in legend or history, but in the life heknew, Caleb Balderstone. Like the gravedigger in“Hamlet,” he is a link between unusual, we mightfairly say unnatural, events and common humanity.In many of Scott’s novels, beside the strutting heroesthat startle the world in high astounding terms,walk the soldiers, servants, parsons, shepherds, whoby their presence make us feel that it is the firmearth upon which the action moves.

Argument among critics as to the nature of romanceand realism helps, as all questions of definitionmay help, to make us understand the relation of onenovel to another and to see the range and purposeof fiction. But that any one should say of two novelsthat one is better than the other, simply because itis more realistic or more romantic, is to impose atechnicality on enjoyment with which enjoymentrefuses to be burdened. Who that picks up a novelfor the pleasure of reading it cares whether it isromance or realism? So long as it has vitality of itsown kind, and gives us enough of the many virtueswhich a novel may possess, we are content to plungeinto it and ask no questions. A lily is not a rose;it takes no great wisdom to know that; the botanistswill tell us the exact difference, and the gardener[Pg 56]will tell us how they grow; but if botanist or horticulturisttells us which is more beautiful, we listento his opinion and keep our own. Mr. Kipling’s“Kim,” or Mr. Howells’s “A Modern Instance”;“Far from the Madding Crowd,” by Thomas Hardy,or Scott’s “Ivanhoe”; Stevenson’s “Kidnapped,” orMark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn”—which of thesebooks is realistic and which is the other kind? Supposeyou read them to find out. In the midst of anyone of them you will have forgotten the question,because the novelist will have filled your whole mindwith other—and more important—interests.

A good novel is a self-contained, complete worldwith its own laws and inhabitants. The inhabitantsand laws of different novels resemble each other insome degree or we should not be able to understandthem. Great books, and great men, have commonqualities, and yet it is true, in large measure, thatthey are memorable for their difference from otherbooks and men. This suggests why histories of literatureand analytical studies of the forms of literatureare so often artificial and lifeless. The criticis fond of grouping books and authors together, offinding points of resemblance, of marking genius withbrands and labels. In some histories of Elizabethandrama, Shakespeare is neatly placed in the center ofa rising and declining “school of playwrights.” Heis laid out like the best specimen of a collection ina glass case. Shakespeare was a playwright; no doubthe was a “practical” one. But the important thingabout him is that he was the greatest of poets, and[Pg 57]he is not at ease in any school or class of literaryworkmen. He is inexplicably, gigantically differentfrom all other Elizabethan dramatists, and if he isto be grouped at all, his fellows are the few greatestpoets of the world, not his contemporaries in the art,or the business, of playmaking, the best of whom donot reach to his shoulder. All the supreme creativegeniuses are difficult to classify. They work in conventionalart forms, the drama, the epic, in whichscores of lesser poets have worked; but the greatestart emerges above the form. When rules of art andsharp characterizations of schools of art fit snuglyon the shoulders of a writer, that alone is sufficientto prove that he is not a writer of the highest power.

However wisely critics and philosophers may argueabout fiction and other forms of art, inexperiencedreaders will be narrowing their outlook if they makeup their minds, after one or two experiments or asa result of a critical opinion which they get at secondhand, that there are certain classes of stories thatthey do not like. If one knows that Stevenson is aromanticist and happens to have read “David Balfour”and failed to like it, it is foolish to rule outthe romantic, for perhaps Dumas will prove better.Some people are tired beyond recovery of historicalnovels, because so many bad ones have been urgedupon the public during the last fifteen years. Somepeople have decided that they do not like stories thatend unhappily. This seems a thoughtless decisionbecause many of the great fictions from the “Iliad”to “The Mill on the Floss” terminate with the death[Pg 58]of the principal characters and sadness for the charactersthat survive. When we hear some one say,“There is tragedy enough in real life, I want somethingpleasant to read,” we may suggest that thegreat tragedy that is told in the Gospels has broughtmore lasting joy and good feeling to the race thanany other story. Not to make so high an argument,I feel that I could give to any person who pretendsto like only “pleasant” fiction a half dozen tragicnovels that would capture and delight this sad soulthat has seen enough of “tragedy in real life.”

Arguments are unnecessary, for fiction itself outstripsthem or defeats them and triumphs. Thepublic is tired, we say, of historical romance, andit cannot be charmed by sad stories which end indeath and disaster. Yet during the past winter oneof “best sellers” was Miss Mary Johnston’s “LewisRand.” This is an historical romance laid in Jefferson’sVirginia. It is a tragic romance; the finestgentleman is killed, the titular hero goes to prisonon the last page, a ruin of ambitious genius, and theheroine, his wife, parts from us at the end to enter,in the world that lies just beyond the covers of books,a life of inevitable sadness.

Individual vitality is what makes the good book.When the good book appears we like to classify itand examine its form and material, but its vitalitydefies us. You may group all your friends and acquaintancesin familiar types, and in thinking ofthem when they are absent you may assure yourselfthat they fall into definite intelligible classes. But[Pg 59]in the presence of any one of them, the most transparentand simple, you recognize the mystery of aperson, a power, however slight, that is unlike otherpowers, a vital soul that baffles analysis. And so itis with books: each makes its effect as a living individualand it may have an entirely different effectfrom the book that seems nearest like it.

Somebody once expressed the idea that he did notcare for Dickens because so many of his charactersare low persons who would not be interesting toassociate with in real life; and other readers haveexpressed the same idea, either sincerely or inthoughtless repetition. If they do not like Dickens,it is probably for some other reason than that Dickensportrays “common” people, for that reason isnot broad enough to stand on. These same readersmay like another writer whose characters are as lowand uncultivated as most of the people whom Dickensloved. If such a writer is not to be found in ourlibraries, his first book may be still unpublished; hemay walk to-morrow into the town where we live,discover the humor and pathos of our commonplaceneighbors, and of the low persons whom we do notacknowledge as neighbors. And ever after our villagewill be a shrine for tourists. The great fiction writeris a magician; he upsets conventional values in a flashand turns lead into gold in spite of all the chemists.The true reader of fiction will be a believer in thatmiracle, and he will keep his mind receptive to itin every form in which it manifests itself.

THE READING OF FICTION—(Continued)

In discussing the question of plots we could notkeep out the question of character, which weagreed for the purposes of our discussion is the secondelement of fiction. In importance it is the first—theindispensable element. What is fiction for exceptto tell us about human beings? I cannot believewhat somebody said, that the three essentials ofstories are first plot, second plot and third plot. Inthe first place, that sounds too clever to be true andin the second place—it is not true. The plot is themeans of keeping persons in action so that we canget to know them. In this “naturalists” and “realists”find a good argument, for they put their emphasison human character. They say: “Here weexhibit you and your friends and your enemies.Plot? We are telling a story. Stories are all aboutyou. But we have not forced events out of probableorder or distorted the facts of life beyond recognitionfor the sake of an exciting situation. We draw ourfellow men, so that you recognize them as they are.Even as they are in their homes and shops andchurches, so they are in these pages, talking, loving,hating, bargaining, intriguing, dying. We select the[Pg 61]significant, we heighten the values of life; but weportray life essentially as it is.” True enough. Therealist gives us “folks.” But he has no monopolyof human beings. We are quite as well acquaintedwith Alice who wandered in Wonderland and wentthrough the Looking Glass as we are with Mr. DavidCopperfield and Miss Maggie Tulliver. Peter Pan(in Mr. J. M. Barrie’s play), who flew in the faceof nature and refused to grow up, is so true a personthat all the children recognized him at once and oldmen chuckled and remembered him.

The English novel is varied and abundant, andits characters, collectively, form a populous democracy.Everybody is in it somewhere from peasantto king, and if some of us and our friends have beenleft out, new novelists are at hand watching everykind and grade of life and preparing to fix it in aliving page. The American novel is not yet oldand broad enough to have captured all our types ofmen and women and recreated them in fiction. Buta good beginning has been made. The varied voicesof the American country town are heard from allcorners of the land, but so far most of them havebeen voices of short compass, incapable of sustainedutterance. We still depend for studies of Americancharacter on sketches and short stories, and thesein the mass are an important body of literature.New England, Virginia, California, the Middle West,the great cities, have had their short-story writers.The novelists are still on the way. Our nationallife is so scattered and changing that the novelist has[Pg 62]difficulty in keeping a group of Americans togetherlong enough to plot them into a large book. InEurope where a small town contains every kind ofsociety the novelist finds the compact social stageall set and characters in abundance. Anthony Trollope,with little care to plot, sets society to turningin the quiet eddy of a small cathedral town and presentlywe are looking into the heart of England. Heintroduces the same people into novel after noveland we are always glad to see them again. Thesuccess of his many novels supports the contentionthat characters are the staff of fiction. A defect ofplot is easier to pardon than a defect in characterdrawing.

Untruth to human nature, violence either to itswaking experiences or its dreams, destroys a book,destroys the living world it represents and leaves usholding a thing of ink and paper. The other dayI was reading a novel which has multiplied itselfover the land by force of printing presses and sensationaladvertising. It is a story about modern peopleof an undistinguished but potentially interestingkind; the heroine is, if I remember right, a confidentialsecretary to a business man. The authormakes her say something like this to her lover:

“Ere I knew you, there had come into my life butfew pleasures and diversions; I had been like a birdshut up in a cage; and you set me free. Yet it wasnot that alone which attracted me to you. Gratefulas I was, I was charmed, too, by your conversationwhich was so totally different than (sic) anything[Pg 63]I had known heretofore. You saved me from thewretched monotony of commonplace existence andtook me into a new world, and my gratitude for thatblossomed into love”; and so on.

The only thing in that which sounds like humanspeech is the blunder in the use of “than,” which Isuspect is an unintentional blunder on the part ofthe author. The speech is no more appropriate tothe given character in the given place than a sentenceout of Macaulay’s essays. The most ingenious plottingcould not entice a discriminating reader beyondthat dead line of empty words, for they are proofenough that the author himself does not know hisheroine’s character. To be sure, dialogue in novelscannot be “natural as life,” for actual conversationtaken down word for word is diffuse and hard toread. The conversations in books must sound natural,appropriate to the place, the time, and thecharacter of the person whom the reader is expectedto believe in. There cannot be any rules for makingconversation; if there are any rules they are forthe novelists to study, not for the reader. The readeronly knows whether the speeches sound right orwhether the author is cheating him by passing off astalk mere words which the author strung out onpaper and did not hear with his inner sense fromthe lips of his character.

In the same book there is a description which Iwill quote, if I can resist the temptation to parodyit:

“The house nestled amid the verdurous shade of[Pg 64]immense trees; to the left of the wooded park weresloping lawns dotted here and there with beds of themost exquisite flowers, which in contrast to the oldweatherbeaten house greatly enhanced the beautyof the scene. Inside the house the utmost good tasteprevailed from the antique colonial hatrack in thefront hall to the handsome, but simple furniture ofthe parlor, in one corner of which on a sofa thatwas a cherished heirloom, a young girl might havebeen seen sitting engaged in embroidering a fine pieceof linen. She was beautiful with large dark eyes anda luxuriant mass of richest brown hair,” and so on.

Except for the poor fun of making sport of theauthor no one with a sense of humor will readbeyond that. The author himself cannot see theplace he would present to his reader’s eye. Description,which we have chosen to regard as the thirdelement of fiction, must aid the imagination to realizethe events and the people or it is worse than ineffectual.The novelist whose story is “dotted hereand there” with descriptions which really “enhancethe beauty” of his story is to be numbered amongthe immortals.

The masters of description touch in details ofsound and vision as they progress with the narrative,and the reader hears and sees without being awarethat he has read description. The more leisurely novelists,who are great enough to carry a story throughthree volumes, do often stop and paint a picture, andeven the great ones frequently fail to get the pictorialeffect they seek. Scott’s descriptions sometimes interfere[Pg 65]with his story and descend into a catalogue ofdetails. But the total effect of his description is tomake the entire world familiar with Scotland, streets,houses, mountains, and moors. It is part of Scott’spatriotic purpose to preserve in a series of novelsthe legend, the history, the character, the ideals, thesocial customs of old and new Scotland; and heallows himself, as a kind of antiquarian, all the spacehe needs for minute description. So his descriptionsserve a purpose, even when they lack imaginativevision. Moreover, the great river of his stories isbroad and swift enough to carry an amount of deadwood which would choke narratives of lesser volumeand power.

A great example of a long descriptive passage infiction is in the fifty-fifth chapter of “David Copperfield.”There is to be action enough presently tosweep the reader off his feet; in preparation for itDickens gives three or four pages of description ofthe storm. The excellence of that description growsupon the reader who finds how seldom even the betternovelists succeed in painting on large canvases. Fewartists in prose have been adequate to the greatnessof the sea. Stevenson has succeeded in giving boththe seas on the Scotch coast and the Pacific with itsmysterious islands. Of living writers in English themasters of “sea pieces” are Mr. Rudyard Kiplingand Mr. Joseph Conrad. But none of the youngerwriters, even of those especially devoted to the sea,has excelled Dickens, landsman and London cockneyas he was, in that great picture of the storm.

[Pg 66]

I once knew some young ladies who wereenamored of the books of that third-rate novelist,Miss Marie Corelli. To be fair, I never read buttwo of her novels, and though they are so false thatI doubt her ability to write anything beautiful andtrue, she may have written masterpieces that I haveunfortunately missed. The young ladies had namedtheir club after one of Miss Corelli’s books. Iasked one worshipper what she liked in her favoritenovelist. The reply was startling: “I love the beautifuldescriptions.” It was interesting to find a younglady who liked beautiful descriptions for their ownsake—most of us are not so far advanced in ourcritical enjoyment of fiction—and it was interestingto learn that Miss Corelli had written beautiful descriptions.But when I ungraciously pressed thematter, my friend confessed that she could not findany descriptive passage that seemed especially worthexhibiting.

The secret of this case, if we are ungallant enoughto subject to inquisition so tender a thing as a younglady’s conscience and literary tastes, is that she hadlearned from some muddied source that a beautifuldescription is a precious thing in a novel. She wasafraid that the things in the book which really interestedher might not be admirable—though I daresay they are harmless enough—and so she presentedthat little white excuse for reading the novel. Justso ladies who are not young have been known toadmire a fiction of doubtful character wholly for its“exquisite style,” when if they really appreciated[Pg 67]“exquisite style,” they would be reading somethingelse.

There is an enjoyment of style that seems eitherapart from the other kinds of enjoyment in readingor is a refinement, an addition, which makes theother kinds keener. In choosing novels, however,we do not need, as a practical matter, to hunt forstyle, any more than we need to hunt for descriptions,for the writer who is great enough to contriveplots and draw characters must have learned howto write well. The good novels are all in good style.The fiction maker whose style is poor is almostcertain to fail in other ways and be altogether unacceptable.It is true that among the great onessome have more distinction of manner than others.Thackeray never writes so clumsily as Dickens athis worst. Stevenson’s phrasing is invariably excellent,whereas a greater novelist, Walter Scott,often for pages at a time throws off his sentencesso hastily that they are not easy, not pleasant, toread. Jane Austen in her style is near to perfection;George Eliot, a writer of much more power,whose heights of eloquence are not equaled by anyother woman, seems sometimes to be either expressinga kind of thought, or expressing it in a vocabularyand with a complexity of construction, which wouldbe tolerable in a philosophic essay but is not suitedto fictitious narrative. It is well to begin to be awareof the degrees of style and their general effect, toenjoy beauty and eloquence and grace in some measurefor their own sake. But the inexperienced[Pg 68]reader is safe to choose his novels for their substance;the style will usually be adequate and the meritsof the style will enter the reader’s consciousnessgradually and without effort of appreciation on hispart.

In choosing novels the ordinary reader need notat first concern himself with the history of a novelistor his technical characteristics, or with the placewhich critics have given to him in their schemes ofliterary development. A simple method of selectionis to find on somebody’s advice a novel that hasinterested many readers, and then if it prove good,to try another by the same author. If a writer hasproduced two novels that interest you, it is safe toassume that he has written a third and a fourth.Some writers, it is true, have been distinguished fora single masterpiece. “Don Quixote” is the only bookof Cervantes’ that we are likely to care for. “RobinsonCrusoe” is all that most people have found goodin Defoe’s tales (though there is much merit in hisother stories). No other book of Mrs. Stowe’s is evensecond to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” “The Vicar ofWakefield” is the glorious whole of Goldsmith’s narrativeprose, though he succeeded in every other formof literature, including the prose drama. But theman who can write two novels can write three if hehas time; the two-novel power is likely to be a ten-novelpower with torpedo fleets of short stories andessays. Anyone who has liked “Silas Marner” and“Middlemarch” will not need to be urged to read“Felix Holt,” “Adam Bede,” “Romola,” “The Mill[Pg 69]on the Floss.” The person who has once read andenjoyed two novels of Dickens is likely to read sixor eight. “Pendennis” leads to “The Newcomes.”And any of Trollope’s “Barchester,” novels is anintroduction to the happily interminable series.

I have purposely said little about the short story,because in this day of magazines we all read shortstories, some of them pretty good ones. There arefifty persons who can write one or two acceptableshort tales to one who can make a novel of moderatemerit. And the great writers of the tale haveoften been novelists as well, so that if one beginsto read novels one will meet with the best shortstories which have been worth collecting into volumes.Readers of “The House of Seven Gables” and“The Scarlet Letter” will make the acquaintance ofHawthorne’s “Twice Told Tales” and “Mosses froman Old Manse.” Among modern fictionists of importancePoe stands almost alone as a writer of taleswho never tried the longer and greater form of thenovel, though there are several excellent authors,such as Mr. Rudyard Kipling, Miss Sarah OrneJewett, Mrs. Mary Wilkins-Freeman, whose shorttales outweigh in value, if not in quantity, theirmore extended narratives.

In our discussion of fiction we have dwelt entirelyon books for adults and neglected what isknown as juvenile fiction. Here again the omissionwas intended. Juvenile fiction is certain to make itsway in more than ample supply into American homes,and I doubt whether fiction that is wholly good for[Pg 70]adults is not the best for boys and girls of, say, thirteen.When our fathers and mothers, or our grandfathersand grandmothers, were young, they readthe newest book by Dickens, Thackeray, Wilkie Collins,and were no worse for having fewer “juveniles”than modern publishers purvey for the benefit of thegrowing generation. I should think that Henty’sbooks, which have merits, but were turned out on asteam lathe, would suggest that Scott’s historicalromances are better, and that the Pattys and Pollysand Lucys and Brendas, whose adventures are chronicledin many an entertaining series would speedilymake way for heroines like Maggie Tulliver andheroes like Master Tom Brown, whose youth is perennial.When “juveniles” are really good, parentsread them after children have gone to bed. I do notknow whether “Tom Brown at Rugby” is cataloguedby the careful librarians as a book for boys, but Iam sure it is a book for men. I dare say that agood many pairs of eyes that have passed over thepages of Mr. John T. Trowbridge and Elijah Kelloggand Louisa Alcott have been old enough to wearspectacles. And if Mrs. Kate Douglas Wiggin everthought that in “Timothy’s Quest” and “Rebecca”she was writing books especially for the young, adultreaders have long since claimed her for their own.I have enjoyed Mr. A. S. Pier’s tales of the boysat “St. Timothy’s,” though he planned them foryounger readers. We are told on good authority thatSt. Nicholas and The Youth’s Companion appear inhouseholds where there are no children, and they[Pg 71]give a considerable portion of their space to serialstories written for young people. Between good“juveniles” and good books for grown persons thereis not much essential difference.

Anyone who is old enough to make out the wordscan safely enter the large world of the English andAmerican novel. The chances of encountering thefew that are unfit for the young are slight. Ruskin inhis essay “Of Queens’ Gardens,” which treats of theeducation of girls, says: “Whether novels, or poetry,or history be read, they should be chosen, not forwhat is out of them but for what is in them. Thechance and scattered evil that may here and therehaunt, or hide itself in, a powerful book, never doesany harm to a noble girl; but the emptiness of anauthor oppresses her, and his amiable folly degradesher.” A novel in our language that has been readand freely talked of for many years is as safe as achurch; and there are enough such novels to keepone happily occupied during all the hours one cangive to reading fiction to the end of one’s days.

LIST OF FICTION

Supplementary to Chapter IV

The following list of novels, tales, and prosedramas is offered to the young reader by way of suggestionand not as a “prescribed” list. Like theother lists in this book it omits many masterpiecesthat will occur immediately to the mind of the older[Pg 72]reader, and it includes some books that are not masterpieces.The notes, or “evaluations” as the librarianscall them, are arbitrary, indicating the privateopinions of the present Guide; they are sometimesextensive in the case of less important writers andare omitted in the cases of the great masters. Theway to use the list is to run over it from time totime until you form a bowing acquaintance with thenames of a few authors and some of their books.One title or another is likely to attract you or exciteyour curiosity. If you follow the impulse of thataroused curiosity and go get the book, the list willhave served its purpose.

Edmond François Valentin About (1828-85).Le Roi des Montagnes.

Easy to read in French, and to be found translatedinto English.

Æsop. Fables.

Found in many editions, some especially selectedand illustrated for children.

Louisa May Alcott (1832-88). An Old-FashionedGirl. Little Women. Little Men. Work.Jack and Jill. Jo’s Boys.

Miss Alcott has always been a favorite of youngpeople. Her faithful and wholesome stories of lifein a New England country town entitle her to placein the delightful company of Rose Terry Cooke,Sarah Orne Jewett, Mrs. Mary Wilkins-Freeman,and Miss Alice Brown.

[Pg 73]

Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836-1907). The Storyof a Bad Boy. Marjorie Daw.

A delicate romancer with subtle humor and a turnfor paradoxical ingenious fooling which is characteristicin one form or another of American writers asunlike as Frank R. Stockton, Edward Everett Hale,and Mark Twain.

James Lane Allen. Flute and Violin. The BlueGrass Region. A Kentucky Cardinal. Aftermath.

Hans Christian Andersen (1805-75). FairyTales.

To be found in Everyman’s Library. This collectionof books, published at fifty cents the volume byE. P. Dutton & Co., is perhaps the best ever groupedin an inexpensive edition. It will be frequently referredto in this and succeeding lists. Most of thebooks in it are worth reading and no doubt worthbuying, and this is true of most “Universal Libraries,”“Libraries of the World’s Best Literature,”“Five-Foot Book Shelves,” etc. But for variety’ssake one would wish not to have all the books on one’sshelves in the same style of type and binding. Andin general it is better to buy the book one wants,distinguished by its title and author, than to take asa whole any editor’s or publisher’s collection of“classics.”

Rasmus Björn Anderson. Norse Mythology.

The simplest form in which to read the stories ofthe Eddas and Scandinavian myths. It is at once[Pg 74]a lore book for students and a wonder book for youngand old.

Arabian Nights. In a volume of Everyman’sLibrary. Another good edition is that prepared byAndrew Lang.

Jane Austen (1775-1817). Sense and Sensibility.Pride and Prejudice. Mansfield Park.Emma. Northanger Abbey. Persuasion.

In Everyman’s Library.

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850). Atheist’s Mass.The Chouans. Christ in Flanders. EugénieGrandet. Old Goriot. The Quest of the Absolute.Wild Ass’s Skin.

These are the works of Balzac found in translationin Everyman’s Library. All the novels of Balzachave been translated into English. Balzac is not theeasiest of French novelists to read in the original,though not very difficult. The young American whowill take the trouble, and give himself the pleasure,of reading a score of French novels will find himselfwith a good reading knowledge of the language, andschool and college examinations in French will losetheir terror.

James Matthew Barrie. Auld Licht Idylls. AWindow in Thrums. The Little Minister. SentimentalTommy. Tommy and Grizel.

Mr. Barrie has the most tender and whimsicalimagination of living writers in English. His laterwork has been largely for the stage.

[Pg 75]

Richard Doddridge Blackmore (1825-1900).Lorna Doone.

George Henry Borrow (1803-81). Lavengro.Romany Rye.

In Everyman’s Library.

Charlotte Brontë (1816-55). Jane Eyre.

Emily Brontë (1818-48). Wuthering Heights.

Alice Brown. King’s End. Meadow Grass. TivertonTales.

John Brown (1810-82). Rab and His Friends.

In Everyman’s Library.

Thomas Bulfinch. The Age of Chivalry, orLegends of King Arthur. The Age of Fable,or Beauties of Mythology. Legends of Charlemagne,or Romance of the Middle Ages.

The prose storehouse of Arthurian legend in Englishis Thomas Mallory’s “Morte d’Arthur,” whichis in two volumes in Everyman’s Library. But Malloryis not easy reading. The finest versions arethose by the poets, Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King,”Matthew Arnold’s “Tristram and Iseult,” Swinburne’s“Tale of Balen.” Modern prose versionssuited to young readers are Howard Pyle’s “Storyof King Arthur and his Knights,” Sidney Lanier’s“Boy’s King Arthur” and Andrew Lang’s “Bookof Romance.” Legends allied to the Arthurianstories are found in Lady Guest’s “Mabinogian,”which appears in one volume in Everyman’s Library.[Pg 76]See also “The Boy’s Mabinogian,” by SidneyLanier.

The stories of Charlemagne are found in a volumesuited for young readers edited by Alfred JohnChurch.

Classic mythology in its highest form is, of course,to be found in the Greek and Roman poets, and itpermeates English poetry. Prose versions of Greekand Roman tales suited to young readers are to befound in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Wonder Book”and “Tanglewood Tales,” Charles Kingsley’s “TheHeroes, or Greek Fairy Tales for My Children,”and “Stories from the Greek Tragedians,” by AlfredJohn Church. See also “A Child’s Guide to Mythology,”by Helen A. Clarke.

Henry Cuylur Bunner (1855-96). Short Sixes.

Among the best American short stories.

John Bunyan (1628-88). The Pilgrim’s Progress.

In Everyman’s Library and many other cheapeditions.

Frances Hodgson Burnett. Little Lord Fauntleroy.Editha’s Burglar. Sara Crewe.

Frances Burney (Madame d’Arblay, 1752-1840).Evelina.

George Washington Cable. Old Creole Days.The Grandissimes.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616).Don Quixote.

[Pg 77]

In Motteux’s translation in two volumes of Everyman’sLibrary, and other popular editions.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (“Mark Twain”).Tom Sawyer. The Prince and the Pauper.Huckleberry Finn. A Connecticut Yankee inKing Arthur’s Court. Pudd’nhead Wilson.Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. TheMan that Corrupted Hadleyburg.

William Wilkie Collins (1824-89). The Womanin White. The Moonstone.

Joseph Conrad. Youth. Falk. The Children ofthe Sea. Typhoon.

One of the most remarkable of recent writers, aPole who adopted the English language and has contributedto its beauties. Unsurpassed as a writer ofstories of the sea.

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851). The Spy.The Pilot. The Last of the Mohicans. ThePrairie. The Pathfinder. The Deerslayer.The Red Rover.

The young reader had better plunge into Cooperbefore he ceases to be a young reader; not that theadult reader cannot enjoy these virile narratives,which have been read all over the world for nearlya century, they will always remain important recordsof early American life; but better fiction soon displacesthem, growth in literary taste makes evidentthe defects which Mark Twain sets forth in his wittyessay on Cooper; and to have grown beyond Cooper[Pg 78]without having met and enjoyed him means agenuine loss.

Dinah Maria Craik (Mrs. Mulock, 1826-87).John Halifax, Gentleman.

Francis Marion Crawford (1854-1909). Mr.Isaacs. Dr. Claudius. Saracinesca. Sant’Ilario. A Cigarette Maker’s Romance.

Crawford had a vein of real genius which is obscuredby the great number of his less meritoriousbooks.

George William Curtis (1824-92). Prue and I.

This pleasant, fine-hearted humorist should notbe neglected by the rising generation of Americans.

George Cupples (1822-91). The Green Hand.

Richard Henry Dana (1815-82). Two YearsBefore the Mast.

It is a happy accident that Dana’s name followsthat of Cupples. Fifty years ago in “The GreenHand” and “Two Years Before the Mast” Englandand America held command of the sea in fiction.This is an appropriate place to mention three booksby the American writer, Herman Melville (1819-91),“Omoo,” “Typee” and “Moby Dick,”which are big enough to sail in the fleet with Cupplesand Dana. Sea craft are growing larger every yearbut not sea books, though Mr. Joseph Conrad, Mr.Rudyard Kipling, Mr. Frank Bullen and Mr. ClarkRussell are taking us on good voyages under sailand steam.

[Pg 79]

Alphonse Daudet (1840-97). Le Petit Chose.Jack. Tartarin of Tarascon. Contes Choisis.

Among the easiest of French writers to read inthe original. Several of his books have been publishedin English.

Richard Harding Davis. Gallegher. Van Bibberand Others.

Fresh and charming short stories by a writer whohas not fulfilled the promise of his youth.

Edmondo de Amicis. Heart; A School Boy’sJournal.

A fine story of schoolboy life, to be found inEnglish translation.

Daniel Defoe (166?-1731). Robinson Crusoe.

William De Morgan. Joseph Vance. Alice-for-Short.Somehow Good.

Charles Dickens (1812-70).

No list of titles is necessary under the name ofDickens. There are innumerable editions of hisworks.

Benjamin Disraeli (Lord Beaconsfield, 1804-81).Vivian Grey. Coningsby. Lothair. Sybil.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (“Lewis Carroll”).Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Throughthe Looking Glass. Silvie and Bruno.

And we could not be happy without “The Huntingof the Snark” and other verses in Lewis Carroll’s“Rhyme and Reason.”

[Pg 80]

Arthur Conan Doyle. Adventures of SherlockHolmes. Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. MicahClark. The White Company.

The fame of the Sherlock Holmes stories hasthrown somewhat into the background the best ofSir Conan Doyle’s work, the two historical romances.

Alexandre Dumas, Père (1803-70).

No list of titles is necessary under Dumas’s name.For though he and his “syndicate” of assistantsproduced a great number of mediocre works, thosemost frequently met in English are good, “TheThree Musketeers,” “The Count of Monte Cristo,”“The Queen’s Necklace” and “Twenty YearsAfter.”

No titles are necessary under George Eliot’s name.Several of her novels are in Everyman’s Library, andthere are other inexpensive editions.

Erckmann-Chatrian (Emile Erckmann and LouisAlexandre Chatrian). Friend Fritz. TheBlockade of Phalsburg. Madame Thérèse. TheStory of a Conscript. Waterloo.

The two last named are in Everyman’s Library.

[Pg 81]

Anatole France (Thibault). Le Crime de SylvestreBonnard. From a Mother of PearlCasket.

All the works of this writer are being translatedinto English. The title given above in English isa translated collection of some of his short stories.

In Carlyle’s translation.

In Everyman’s Library.

Edward Everett Hale (1822-1909). The ManWithout a Country.

The volume under this title, published by Little,Brown & Co., contains the best of Dr. Hale’s shortstories. The title story is a masterpiece of fictionand the greatest of all sermons on patriotism.

Ludovic Halévy. The Abbé Constantin.

A charming story in simple French, and to befound translated into English.

[Pg 82]

Thomas Hardy. Far from the Madding Crowd.The Return of the Native. The Mayor of Casterbridge.A Pair of Blue Eyes. Under theGreenwood Tree.

Incomparably the greatest of living novelists ofour race. Certain characteristics of his later novelsmake them neither pleasant nor intelligible to youngreaders, but any of those here mentioned is as welladapted to the reader of any age as are George Eliot’s“Adam Bede” and Thackeray’s “Pendennis.”

Joel Chandler Harris. Uncle Remus. Nightswith Uncle Remus. Mingo. Free Joe.

Francis Bret Harte (1839-1902). The Luck ofRoaring Camp.

The volume of this title, published by Houghton,Mifflin & Co., contains the best of Harte’s shortstories, and the best remain very good indeed, thoughsince they took the world by storm other writers havegiven us a truer insight into the life which Hartewas the first to discover and proclaim. Harte is acapital humorist in his way, both in his swaggeringhearty short stories (see “Colonel Starbottle’sClient”) and in his parodies (see “CondensedNovels”).

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64).

No list of titles is necessary under Hawthorne’sname. America has no other literary artist of hisstature and perfection, and he is the one Americanwhose works we can say “you ought to read” entire—wedare say it, that is, to American readers.

[Pg 83]

Maurice Hewlett. Life and Death of RichardYea-and-Nay.

Mr. Hewlett is one of the ten or twelve importantliving writers of English fiction. I have seen nobook of his which is not good. I give only one title;his brilliant and varied achievement in the pastdecade makes difficult the selection of other titles forthis limited list.

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-94). ElsieVenner. Guardian Angel.

Holmes’s fiction is subordinate both to his essaysand his poems, and should be postponed until thereader has become a true lover of the Autocrat. Thenovels are good for the reason, if for no other, thatHolmes was one of the rare geniuses who cannotwrite otherwise than with wisdom and charm.

Anthony Hope (Hawkins). The Prisoner ofZenda.

The first in point of time and excellence of a nownumerous class of historical novels in which thehistory and the geography as well as the “story”are fictitious.

William Dean Howells. A Chance Acquaintance.The Lady of the Aroostook. Dr. Breen’sPractice. A Modern Instance. The Rise ofSilas Lapham. The Minister’s Charge. AprilHopes. The Flight of Pony Baker.

Thomas Hughes (1823-96). Tom Brown’sSchooldays. Tom Brown at Oxford.

[Pg 84]

Victor Hugo (1812-85). Les Miserables. Quatrevingt-Treize.Notre Dame de Paris. LesTravailleurs de la Mer.

Hugo’s novels appear in several English translations.

Henrik Ibsen. Prose Dramas.

Edited and translated by William Archer andothers. The reading of Ibsen, the greatest dramatistof the nineteenth century, may be postponed untilthe reader has come to mature views of life.

Washington Irving (1783-1859). Sketch-Book.Tales of a Traveler. Bracebridge Hall.

W. W. Jacobs. Many Cargoes. Light Freights.Dialstone Lane.

A teller of delightfully droll stories. Like FrankR. Stockton, a much finer artist than the moreserious-minded critics would be disposed to admit.It is difficult to select for this list the best of thescore of talented short-story writers of the day. Perhapsthis is a good place to slip in the name of acontemporary American whose fresh and originalstories have deservedly survived their day in themagazines and been collected in volumes—Mr. SidneyPorter, “O. Henry.”

Henry James. Roderick Hudson. Daisy Miller.The American. The Portrait of a Lady. ThePrincess Casamassima.

Young readers should beware of misleading chatterabout Mr. James which appears in columns of book[Pg 85]gossip and newspaper comment; it attempts to turnMr. James into a joke and caricatures his subtletyand obscurity; it is analogous to the flippant andderisive nonsense through which Browning lived toreach the people at last. “Roderick Hudson” is agreat novel and is as clear, strong, and easy toread as the work of any other thoughtful novelist youmay choose for comparison.

Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909). Country By-Ways.A Country Doctor. A White Heron.Strangers and Wayfarers. The Country of thePointed Firs.

Stories of the better classes of New England countryfolk written in a style of unblemished clarityand sweetness.

Mary Johnston. Lewis Rand.

Charles Kingsley (1819-75). Alton Locke. Hypatia.Westward Ho!

Rudyard Kipling. Plain Tales from the Hills.Many Inventions. Wee Willie Winkie. Life’sHandicap. Soldiers Three. In Black andWhite. The Story of the Gadsbys. The Lightthat Failed. The Jungle Book. The SecondJungle Book. The Day’s Work. CaptainsCourageous. Kim.

In spite of a curiously eager disposition on the partof current writers to regard Kipling’s career as overand done, he is the foremost living writer of shortstories in English, and of no other young living[Pg 86]writer can it be so safely averred that he has becomeone of the established classics of his race.

Friedrich Heinrich Karl de La Motte Fouqué(1777-1843). Undine.

Pierre Loti (L. M. J. Viaud). An Iceland Fisherman.

This and the autobiographical “Romance of aChild,” and several of Loti’s books of travel are inEnglish.

Edward G. E. L. Bulwer-Lytton (1801-72).Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings. LastDays of Pompeii.

Lord Lytton is one of the Victorian novelistswhose great reputation is growing rapidly less, anddeservedly so, but his historical novels are morethan worth reading.

George Macdonald (1824-1905). David Elginbrod.Robert Falconer. Sir Gibbie. At theBack of the North Wind.

A novelist whose popularity among younger readersis probably less than his great merits.

Xavier de Maistre (1764-1852). La JeuneSibérienne.

Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873). The BetrothedLovers.

There are several English translations of this mostfamous of Italian historical romances.

[Pg 87]

Frederick Marryat (1792-1848). Jacob Faithful.Peter Simple. Mr. Midshipman Easy.Masterman Ready.

A. E. W. Mason. The Four Feathers.

A story of bravery and cowardice of unusual merit.

Guy de Maupassant (1850-93). The Odd Number.

This is an English translation of some of Maupassant’sbest tales.

George Meredith (1828-1909). Harry Richmond.Beauchamp’s Career. Rhoda Fleming.Evan Harrington.

At his death the foremost English man of letters.A noble poet and a novelist who easily stands amongthe few greatest of the century. A taste for Meredithgrows on the individual as it has grown on thegeneral world of readers. The novels in this listinclude not all the greatest but the best for the newreader to try first.

Prosper Mérimée (1803-70). Colomba.

In easy French, and has been translated into English.

Silas Weir Mitchell. Hugh Wynne. RolandBlake.

Mary Russell Mitford (1786-1855). Our Village.

William Morris (1834-96). The Well at theWorld’s End.

[Pg 88]

Readers who chance to like this prose poem bya devoted apostle of liberty and beauty will be ledto his other romances in prose and verse.

Mary Noailles Murfree (“Charles Egbert Craddock”).In the Tennessee Mountains. Downthe Ravine. In the Clouds. In the StrangerPeople’s Country.

Portrays the solitude and pathos of the life ofthe mountaineers of Tennessee. In sincerity and thegenuineness of the substance better than in workmanship.

Nibelungenlied.

The story of the Treasure of the Nibelungs is toldfor young readers by A. J. Church in “Heroes ofChivalry and Romance.” It is also found in “WagnerOpera Stories” by G. E. Barber, and in “TheWagner Story Book” by W. H. Frost. Any criticalor biographical work on Wagner will take the readerinto this great German legend.

Frank Norris. The Octopus. The Pit.

A serious novelist cut off in his prime before hiswork attained the greatness that it seemed to promise.

Margaret Oliphant (1828-97). Chronicles ofCarlingford. A Beleaguered City.

Alfred Ollivant. Bob, Son of Battle.

A first-rate story of a dog.

Thomas Nelson Page. Elsket. In Ole Virginia.

A sincere and sympathetic portrayer of old andnew Virginia. As is generally true of American[Pg 89]fictionists, he is better in the short story than in thenovel.

Gilbert Parker. Pierre and His People. TheBattle of the Strong. Seats of the Mighty.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Fourteen to One. ASingular Life.

Eden Phillpotts. Children of the Mist. TheHuman Boy. The Secret Woman.

One of the distinguished living novelists of England.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49). Tales of the Grotesqueand Arabesque.

There are many single-volume editions of Poe’sshort stories. An inexpensive complete edition ofPoe is published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons. The bestand final edition of Poe is that edited by Stedmanand Woodberry.

Jane Porter (1776-1850). Scottish Chiefs.

Howard Pyle. Some Merry Adventures of RobinHood. The Garden Behind the Moon.

Mr. Pyle’s books are delightful for the illustrations.The competence of his painting and his dramaticand literary imagination make him the foremostAmerican illustrator, and the texts which hewrites to accompany his drawings are adequate,though not in themselves remarkable.

Rudolf Erich Raspe. Surprising Adventures ofBaron Münchausen.

[Pg 90]

In the translation edited by Thomas Seccombe. Aselection of the Münchausen stories for young peoplemade by Dr. Edward Everett Hale, is publishedby D. C. Heath & Co.

Charles Reade (1814-84). The Cloister and theHearth. Hard Cash. Put Yourself in HisPlace.

Samuel Richardson (1689-1761). Clarissa Harlowe.

There is an abridged edition of this very longnovel.

George Sand (A. L. A. Dupin, 1804-76). Consuelo.The Little Fadette. The Devil’s Pool.Mauprat.

These and others of George Sand’s novels are inEnglish.

Walter Scott (1771-1832).

No list of titles is necessary under Scott’s name.

Ernest Thompson Seton. Biography of a Grizzly.

A nature writer who for the most part wisely andartistically embodies his knowledge of animals infiction where they are not subjected to those acidtests of fact which have recently betrayed the basemetal in some of the other modern writers aboutnature.

Anna Sewell. Black Beauty.

The story of a horse; a tract in the interests ofkindness to animals which proved to be more than[Pg 91]a tract, a charming and immensely popular piece ofimaginative writing.

Henryk Sienkiwicz. The Deluge. Quo Vadis.With Fire and Sword.

In the translation by Jeremiah Curtin.

William Gilmore Simms (1806-70). The Scout.

A writer historically important to Americansbecause he had a great vogue in his day andaccomplished much in a time when there wasno American literature south of Poe’s Richmond.Simms is an inferior writer, but “The Scout”is a vigorous narrative and will interest youngreaders.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816). DramaticWorks.

In Bohn’s Library and in one volume of Everyman’sLibrary.

Joseph Henry Shorthouse. John Inglesant.

Annie Trumbull Slosson. Seven Dreamers.Story-Tell Lib.

Francis Hopkinson Smith. Colonel Carter ofCartersville.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1849-94). TreasureIsland. Prince Otto. Kidnapped. David Balfour.The Merry Men. Dr. Jekyll and Mr.Hyde. The Black Arrow. The Master of Ballantrae.St. Ives.

[Pg 92]

Perhaps the wittiest of all contemporaneous writersabout southern life.

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745). Gulliver’s Travels.

There are several editions of “Gulliver” preparedfor schools. It is to be found in Everyman’s Library.The book is, of course, a satirical essay onman; it is also a masterpiece of fictitious narrative.

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63).

No list of titles is necessary under this name.

Leof Nicolaevich Tolstoi. War and Peace.

Advanced students of French can read the Frenchversion of this novel. A good English version isthat by Leo Wiener.

Anthony Trollope (1815-82). The Warden.Barchester Towers. Framley Parsonage. Dr.Thorne. The Small House at Allington. LastChronicle of Barset. (The foregoing six constitutethe Chronicles of Barsetshire.) CanYou Forgive Her? Phineas Finn. PhineasRedux. The Prime Minister. The Duke’s Children.[Pg 93]The Eustace Diamonds. (The foregoingsix constitute the Parliamentary Novels.) IsHe Popenjoy? Orley Farm. The Vicar of Bullhampton.(The last are called the ManorHouse Novels.)

This list, disproportionately long perhaps, seemsjustifiable because Trollope wrote an incrediblenumber of novels not all of which are equally good,and because his books are in the present quartercentury not so widely read as they should be. AfterDickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot, who are thehighest peaks in the half century (we cannot quitemeasure Meredith and Hardy yet), Anthony Trollopeis easily fourth. And even among the peaks thebroad massive plateau of his work seems more andmore to have enduring solidity. Like Balzac inFrance (though little like him, book for book), Trollopehas written England’s comédie humaine. Withhim quantity is a quality, for he is a master in largepart by virtue of his bulk; no other novelist seems tohave told so much about the daily life of his nation.The one thing lacking to make Trollope a very greatwriter of fiction is that his prose is not eloquent;though it is good, it has no moments of supreme goodness;but few other English novelists have sustainedsuch a level of merit through so many volumes.

John Townsend Trowbridge. Neighbor Jackwood.Jack Hazard and His Fortunes. AChance for Himself. Doing His Best. Cudjo’sCave. The Tinkham Brothers’ Tidemill.

[Pg 94]

No other writer of equal ability has devoted himselfto books for boys.

Ivan Sergyevich Turgenieff (1818-83). Fathersand Children. Smoke.

Several of Turgenieff’s novels have been translatedinto English. The English reader should, if possible,read Russian novels in French.

Alfred de Vigny (1799-1863). Cinq-Mars.

This great historical novel is in easy French. Ithas been published in an English translation.

Mary Arnold Ward (Mrs. Humphrey Ward).Robert Elsmere.

An English writer of excellent ideals and deepseriousness, overrated by Americans who seem tothink that she is giving them the “true inwardness”of British high life.

Elizabeth Cherry Waltz. Pa Gladden.

Humorous and touching stories of a Kentuckyfarmer.

Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900). A LittleJourney in the World. The Golden House.

John Watson (“Ian Maclaren”). Beside theBonnie Brier Bush. The Days of Auld LangSyne.

Edward Noyes Westcott. David Harum.

An illustration of the fact that a true humorouscharacter will catch the fancy of the world, no matterin how defective a plot it is embodied.

[Pg 95]

Kate Douglas Wiggin (Mrs. Riggs). The Birds’Christmas Carol. Penelope’s Progress. TheStory of Patsy. Timothy’s Quest. Rebecca ofSunnybrook Farm.

Mary Eleanor Wilkins (Mrs. Freeman). AHumble Romance. A New England Nun.Jane Field. Pembroke. Jerome, a Poor Man.Silence and Other Stories.

Owen Wister. The Virginian. Lady Baltimore.

Israel Zangwill. Children of the Ghetto. Dreamersof the Ghetto.

THE READING OF POETRY

When Julia Bryant, the daughter of WilliamCullen Bryant, was a child, a neighbor of thepoet made her first call, and was shown into theparlor. She found the small Julia seated on the floorwith an illustrated volume of Milton in her lap. Sheknew, of course, that the pictures and not the textengaged the child’s attention, but by way of beginningan acquaintance, she asked:

“Reading poetry already, little girl”?

Julia looked up and regarded her gravely. Thenwith an air of politely correcting ignorance, sheexplained:

“People don’t read poetry. Papas write poetry,and mamas sing poetry, and little girls learn to saypoetry, but nobody reads poetry. That isn’t whatit’s for.”

If the several members of all families were ashappily accounted for as those in Bryant’s household,the Muses would not live so remote from thisworld. That mothers sing poetry and little girls sayit is enough to keep it everlastingly alive. Thetrouble is that few households are blessed with papaswho write poetry; and there are none too manypapas who read it.

[Pg 97]

If we have not learned to read poetry, let usbegin now. Suppose we read and commit to memorythe following stanza, and then talk a little about it.

This is from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.”It is one of the most musical, most magical stanzasin all English poetry; that much anyone can tellyou who has read the poets. But to tell you inwhat consists its glory is beyond any critic whois not a poet; nothing of analysis can add to theeffect it is making in your ears, in your brain, nowthat you have committed it to memory. One of thebest of English critics—and he was a poet, too—MatthewArnold, in his essay, “The Study ofPoetry,” made but a dull and wordy discourse whenhe tried to tell what the qualities of poetry are.Only by reading the rest of the poem, and then therest of Keats, and then other poets, can you increasefor yourself the delight of those wonderfullines. If they do not tempt you to the great excursioninto the poets, you have not read them over,you have not repeated them aloud often enough.[Pg 98]Only for the sake of dwelling upon these lines, andbecause we have agreed to talk about poetry, andnot because our comment can reveal the secret, letus go back and study the stanza.

The nightingale’s song is the voice of immortality.It releases the individual soul from the present hour,from the struggle of life and makes it one with thegreat experiences of the race. The imaginationsweeps over all history on the wings of those firstfour lines, and then carries us into the world ofreligious story, in the lines recalling the Book ofRuth. And finally we are borne out of the humanworld into fairyland. All this in a single stanza!

Every poem of high quality, every one of thetreasured passages from long poems, makes such amagic flight into the realm of eternal ideas, so thatit is commonly said that poetry is “uplifting.” Lifeand death and Heaven and the stars are the poet’ssubjects. And the poem of common things, in praiseof simple virtues and domestic happiness, such ashave made Burns and Longfellow and Whittier sodear to the heart, have the same kind of power in lessdegree; if they do not transport us to Heaven theyreveal the seed of immortality in daily circumstance.

Keats bears the imagination over the world andbeyond it in a single stanza. All poetry of thehighest rank has this power to utter eternity in a fewwords. And though at first it seems a contradictorything to say, it is true that the long poem has thesame quality of compression; it makes long flightsof idea in relatively short compass of words. The[Pg 99]time of reading, the time that the physical eye needsto catch the winged sentences, is nothing. What,you say, “The Faerie Queene,” “Paradise Lost,”“Hamlet,” the “Iliad,” the “Idylls of the King”are compressed so that the time it takes to read themis annihilated? Just that. The complete works of agreat poet do not fill more space than one or twolong novels. Poetry is greater than prose if onlybecause it expresses noble ideas in fewer words; itis language at its highest power. Its rhymes andrhythms are all a means of conveying this power.The person who regards poetry as rhymed sentencesthat might as well be put into prose, has his eye onthe shell of form and has never felt the inner virtuesof poetry. Poetry has its forms because only in itsforms can it say the most.

But what of the great lines of prose that are aseloquent and compact with thought as any line ofpoetry? There is only one answer to that. Such linesof prose are poetry too. “In my Father’s house aremany mansions” is poetry. That it looks like proseon the printed page is a matter of typesetting, andtype is only the outermost husk about the shell.Hear that sentence from the Bible, think it and feelit, and you will know that it has high poetic quality.The intensity of language, the heat of high passionhas made the diamond; the diamond is more beautifulafter it is cut, but cutting cannot make a diamond.The outward form we shall enjoy, but we must lookinward for the essential quality. As our Bible isprinted, the following passage from Ecclesiastes has[Pg 100]the appearance of prose, yet it has, too, somethinglike the stanzaic divisions of poetry.

Whatever else this may be, it is poetry of highpower. Millions of men have found in the Biblesomething which is not in other books, but that ithas in common with other great books the miracleof poetic utterance every right view of the Biblemust admit. The passage we have just quoted isin beauty equal and not wholly dissimilar to thestanza from Keats. The Biblical poet has into afew words condensed the tragic symbols of death[Pg 101]and sorrow; and from their dust and dissolution hissoul has aspired upward to the stars.

If the stanza from Keats and the verse from theBible are both essentially poetic, what becomes ofcertain devices of arrangement which are in Keatsand not in the Bible poem, such devices as rhymes andregularity of accent? These are but instruments ofbeauty; the words and their arrangement are theresult of the inward passion and beauty of thethought, and we in reading are acted upon by thatresult, and feel again the passion and idea that producedit.

In inferior poetry cause and effect are reversed orfail altogether. Thousands of poets have tried tomake poetry by devices of rhyme and line division,by deliberately arranging vowels and consonantsinto pleasant sounds; almost any conventionallyeducated person can learn to do this, just as almostanybody with practice can learn to play a piece onthe piano and carefully obey every sign on the musicscore. But no music results, only an empty regularityof sound. Because there are so many of thesemechanical pianists, the sound of the piano seldomattracts and arrests us. Because so many verses,thousands in the monthly magazines, have merelythe outward form of poetry, thousands of personshave come to believe that poetry is an artificial trickof words. The heart of poetry is emotion and asense of beauty. The great emotions, patriotism,religion, love, acting upon the poet, turn his wordsinto magic sequences. When the poetry is finished[Pg 102]and arranged on the printed page, we find, true, thatit has a form, that it has metrical excellences, thatits varieties of sound are thus and so; the poets aremasters of at least as many technicalities as the littleversifiers. The test comes when we read the sequenceof words cooled, as it were, into a set form, andtouched by their appeal to our inward sense feelthem start into warm life again.

If we go far enough in our reading to studypoetry, then we shall expect to learn about the technicalmethods and rhetorical elements of verse; weshall expect to learn about the lives of the poets andabout their growth in their art. Just so the loverof music will wish to study the laws of sound, eventhe mechanical and physical properties of musicalinstruments, mastering from a scientific point ofview the conditions and materials of the art.Such study helps us to appreciate great music andgreat poetry. But it is not necessary. The orchestrawill act upon us without our knowing how it isarranged. The true poem will act on us if we knownothing more than our own language and our ownfeelings. Our pleasant task is to offer ourselves tothe great poem with attention and a desire forpleasure.

Attention and a desire for pleasure are easilydistracted in those who have not the habit of readingpoetry. And poetry is often surrounded byunnecessary distractions. The very zeal of those whowould draw our sympathies to it leads them to standin the light attempting to explain what needs no[Pg 103]explanation, what, indeed, cannot be explained. Thelecturer upon music too often talks while the orchestrais playing. After one knows Shakespeare, adiscourse on the “lessons of the tragedies” may enlargeone’s understanding. But such disquisitionsare a forbidding introduction to any poet. We havein America many worthy persons who lecture on theethical beliefs of Robert Browning. Of course anyinterest, any occasion that will bring in a new “convert,”and lead him to think of Browning at all, isa gain—the principal excuse for lectures and criticismsis that they do invite wandering souls in tomeet a poet. But it is usually true that two hours’reading in Browning is more delightful and moreprofitable than a two hours’ lecture about him. Andit is often the case that lectures about his philosophyrepel readers who might enjoy his poetry. Thelesson of poetry is beauty; the meaning of poetry isexalted emotions. The private special beliefs of thepoet are of interest, because those beliefs raised thepoet’s intelligence to a white heat, and that heatleft us verse crystals which are beautiful long afterthe poet’s beliefs have passed away. Through hisbeliefs the poet reaches to great passions that endure,and anyone can understand them without knowinghow the poet arrived at them. If a poet cannotdeliver his message, a critic cannot do it for him.Shelley was a worshiper of democracy; Shakespearewas a believer in the divinity of kings. Browningwas an optimist. Omar Khayyám, as Edward Fitzgeraldrendered him in English poetry, was a kind[Pg 104]of pessimistic fatalist. All this is interesting to know.But the reader of poetry does not, in the immediateenjoyment of the poets, vex himself with these diversitiesof faith. Hear the poets themselves:

Shakespeare’s unrighteous king, Macbeth, hedgedround by his enemies, dulled in feeling yet stillkeenly intelligent, hears of the death of his queen.

Shelley, the lover of human liberty and the widefreedom of nature, chants to the West Wind:

Hear Browning, the athletic optimist:

And of himself, at the close of his life, Browningsings:

Finally listen to the beauty-loving pessimist thatFitzgerald brought out of Persia and set among thejewels in the crown of English poetry:

Here are four poets of different generations anddifferent beliefs; large volumes have been written toexpound each and tell us the meaning, the philosophy,the development, the tendencies, the influence ofthis poet and that. But see them together: no explanationof their meanings can divide them, forthey are all poets, and no group of men on earthare liker one to another in purpose than great poetsare like to each other. They are all singing theeternal in words of unmatchable power. They arewondrously alike in their celebration of beauty andhigh feelings.

The great poet differs not from other great poets,but from inferior ones; he differs from his equalsmainly in manner of expression. The new poetis he who brings the old messages in ways that noother poet has conceived, and the old poet is alwaysnew, because he has attained to beautiful utteranceof ideas that we cannot outgrow, which indeed mostof mankind have not yet reached. Prose becomesold-fashioned (except the Bible, which has a specialplace in our life and is, moreover, largely poetic insubstance); the prose of Shakespeare’s time and Milton’sis difficult to read, it seems written in anantique language. But Shakespeare and Milton arethe poetry of to-day and of uncounted to-morrows.

Not to read poetry is to miss the greatest ideas[Pg 107]in the world, to disregard the noblest and most exaltedwork that the human mind has achieved. Topoetry all other arts and sciences are in some wayinferior. Not music, nor painting, nor the laws ofgovernment, nor the discoveries of mechanics, noranything else that man has done has the right ofpoetry to be called divine, except only that of whichpoetry is the vehicle, which is in a sense one with it,religious prophecy and worship. Whether religionand poetry are one, as some philosophers hold, it isa fact of history that the great religious prophetshave had the gifts of poets, and the poets are allsingers of hymns and incantations which stir inour hearts the religious sense. We need not gofurther into this question than to this simple truth,that the man who has no poetry in him is likely tobe an irreligious man, not necessarily lacking ingoodness and righteousness, but lacking the upwardaspiration of the truly religious mind.

Arthur Hugh Clough.

THE READING OF POETRY—(Continued)

In almost every American household there willbe some volume of poetry through which theyoung reader can make his entrance into the enchantedworld; there will be a volume of Shakespeare,an old copy of “Paradise Lost” or the worksof Longfellow or Tennyson. In our day a desire toread is seldom thwarted by lack of books. Indeed,it sometimes seems as if the very abundance ofbooks made us so familiar with their backs that wedo not value the treasures inside. The biographiesof our grandfathers tell us of walks of five milesto secure some coveted volume, and a volume sosecured was not skimmed or neglected; the effort toget it made it doubly precious.

If one is left to choose the door through whichto enter the realm of poetry, a good anthology willprove a broad approach. There is none better thanPalgrave’s “Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics.”It is inexpensive, so that anyone can save enoughpennies to buy it. It is convenient to carry in one’spocket, a virtue that makes it preferable to largeranthologies, to those old-fashioned “household collections”printed in double columns. If all our men[Pg 110]and boys had the “Golden Treasury” in their coatpockets, what a civilization we should have at theend of ten years! In order to keep up with us theladies would have to provide pockets in their dressesor carry more spacious handbags than the tyrannyof style now permits.

The selections in Palgrave or in the four volumesof Ward’s “English Poets,” are so rich and variedthat no reader can fail to find his own poet, andthe next step will be to get a larger selection fromthat poet’s works. All the English poets have beenpublished in inexpensive volumes of selections, manyof them in the same Golden Treasury Series; andas poets, like other human beings, are not alwaysat their best, an edition which contains only the bestwill save the reader from the unfortunate experienceof meeting a poet for the first time in his inferiorwork. When we have learned really to like a poet,we shall wish to have his complete works, but forthe young reader most modern poets are better forthe suppression of their less admirable passages.Only three or four—Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton,our greatest poets—wrote long poems which to be enjoyedat their fullest must be read entire. Althoughit is true that poetry consists of great lines and thata collection of short poems and passages will beenough to nourish the soul for its whole earthlylife, yet supreme poetry is built on a mighty plan.Brief lyrics and bits of song are like jewels, precious,complete, beautiful. Great poems, epics and dramas,are like cathedrals in which the jewels are set in the[Pg 111]walls and in the windows. One might read all thefine passages from Shakespeare and yet not feelShakespeare’s highest, that is, his entire, poeticpower.

For the marvelous speeches and songs, howeversatisfying in themselves, lose some of their meaningwhen taken out of the structure of which they are apart. The stained glass window is beautiful in theartist’s studio, but when it is set in the church andthe light falls through it, it becomes part of a beautygreater than its own. So, too, “Macbeth” is greaterthan Shakespeare’s lyrics, “Paradise Lost” isgreater than all of Milton’s short poems taken together.The true reader of poetry will pass beyondthe delight of the perfect stanza to the wider joyof the complete drama, the complete epic.

In approaching a long poem, the modern impatientreader is discouraged sometimes by the numberof pages of solid verse which follow those first pagesinto which he has plunged. It is well to rememberthat in reading poetry, a little traveling of the eyetakes the imagination on long journeys, and thatimagination will join for us the first page and thelast even if we have spent six months in makingthe intervening journey. “Hamlet” need not beread in a day. If one reads a few lines at a timeone will soon be in the depths of it, and there is nodanger of losing one’s way. We can spend a monthin the first perusal or we can run rapidly throughit in the three hours which it is supposed to occupyon the stage. We can go backward and forward in[Pg 112]it, pause as long as we will on a single speech, orfly swiftly upon the wings of the action. The senseof leisure, of independence of hourly circumstance,is one of the spiritual uses of poetry. The poet andour own nature will determine the time for us.When we follow the pageant of Shakespeare’s sadhistories of the death of kings, we shall not, I hope,comport ourselves like tourists hurrying through apicture gallery in order that we may have “done”it before our train goes. We shall not be so misguidedas to plume ourselves when we enter in ourdiary: “Read two plays of Shakespeare this week.”Reading that consists merely in passing the eye overthe page is not reading at all. When we become consciousof turning pages without any inward response,it is time to lay the book down and do somethingelse. When we are really reading, we shallnot be conscious of the book and we shall not knowhow many pages we have read—until we wake upout of dreamland and come back into our own world.

Two or three plays of Shakespeare are being readevery year in every high school in America. It isa common experience of teachers that the pupils regardShakespeare’s plays as the hardest part of theprescribed reading. One reason is that these dramaticpoems are through a regrettable necessitymade the text of lessons in language. The atmosphereof study and duty surrounding “A MidsummerNight’s Dream” in the classroom takes thecharm out of that fairy play. This is not the faultof the teachers and it is not for us to criticise them;[Pg 113]the wisest leaders in education have not found away to make the study of Shakespeare in school lesslaborious than it is. And many of them think thatit is well that lessons should be hard nuts to crack,that the young mind is better disciplined if itsschoolday tasks are not made too delightful and easy.Some teachers believe that the old-fashioned hard diggingat books is being in too large a measure replacedby kindergarten methods, which are so unadvisedlyextended that even a geometry lesson is treated as agame.

For the present we will keep our consideration ofthe uses and delights of reading apart from theproblems of the schools, and regard Shakespeare aswe regard Scott—a friend to enjoy in leisure hours.I should advise, then, that pupils who are readingShakespeare in school select other plays than thoseprescribed in class and come to them as to a novelchosen for pleasure. If the class work requires astudy of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” let theyoung reader try “The Tempest” by himself. If“Julius Cæsar” is a part of the winter’s schooltask, let us in vacation time slip “Macbeth” or“Henry V” into our pockets. And while ourfriends in the other hammock are reading a romanceof the hour, let us be reading a romance of theages. When we are tired of reading and are readyto play that game of tennis, our opponent, who hasbeen reading a book that he bought on the newsstandat the railroad station, will not necessarilybeat us, because we know what he does not know,[Pg 114]that a gift of tennis balls comes into the plot of“Henry V.”

The Dauphin of France sends Henry the tennisballs for a mocking gift, and Henry answers:

That has a spirit which your friend will not findin the excellent story of a school game which hehas been reading, “How Ralph Saved the Day.”

The great poems receive us on any good ground ofinterest which we choose to tread. Would you havea romantic novel? Shakespeare provides that in“As You Like It” and “Twelfth Night.” Or amilitary adventure? There is “Henry Fifth.” Ora love tragedy? There is “Romeo and Juliet.”These satisfy our primitive liking for a good story.And so in some measure do all great poems, for thegreat poems are epics and dramas, that is, stories inverse. Literature finds its best structural material inaction and event, and language is best suited to theexpression of actions, perhaps because it has beenmade by a world of workers and doers. The mosteffective means of conveying abstract ideas is throughstory. The most moving sections of the Bible arenarrative, the greatest lessons are taught in parablesand instances. “Paradise Lost” is a narrative of[Pg 115]great vigor, for all the dull debates and arguments;and if it was not Milton’s primary intention to tella great story for its own sake, nevertheless he didtell a great story and we can enjoy it for its ownsake long before we have begun, and long after wehave ceased, to be interested in his theology andphilosophy.

To say that great poets, Homer, Vergil, Dante,Spenser, Shakespeare, are romancers as truly as arethe writers of prose novels is not to belittle poetry.The highest thoughts can be conveyed in a story.When a great poetic story-teller ceases for too manylines to be master of narrative, it will often be foundthat some other poetic qualities have for the momentdied out of him too. And when he attempts to conveygreat ideas with little regard to their place in a movingsequence of events, he pays the penalty of notbeing read, he loses hold of the reader’s interest. Themost titanic case of the failure of high poeticthoughts to win their way to the common heart ofman, because of the disregard of narrative form, isBrowning’s “The Ring and the Book.” There thestory, a terrible and touching story, is told over adozen times, and not once told well. Imbedded inits strange shapelessness are wonderful ideas andpassages of intense beauty. As a heap of poetry itis the only production of the Victorian age that hasthe magnitude of Shakespeare and the classic epics.Other poems of Browning’s, “Clive” and “IvanIvanovitch,” show that he had narrative gifts.Some scenes in his dramas are in emotional energy[Pg 116]and narrative progression unrivaled by any poetsince Shakespeare. But in “The Ring and theBook,” into which he put his whole heart, hewould not or could not tell his story as the experienceof all ages has shown that stories must be told: hispoem does not move forward in a continuously highand noble style. And so most of the world of readersare deprived of the richness with which hefreighted from his prodigal mind and great soul hismighty rudderless ship that goes down in midocean.

Shakespeare told good stories in almost all hisplays. He did not invent the stories, but he selectedthem from the literature of the world and from otherElizabethan writers, and then enriched the narrativewith every kind of beauty and significance whichit would hold. On account of their excellence asnarratives and their intensely human and stirringmaterials, the plays of Shakespeare enjoyed somemeasure of popularity even in their own time, ifthe scholars have rightly informed us; and the playshave continued to hold the stage and to interest manyof the “great variety of readers” who are addressedin one of the introductions to the first collectededition of Shakespeare’s works. In our time theinfluence of the schools has insured popular acquaintancewith Shakespeare as an object of seriousstudy. On the other hand, the great increase in thequantity of prose fiction, and the fact that it iseasier to read thin prose than rich poetry, have obscuredfor many readers the elementary delight ofShakespeare’s plays as fictitious romances.

[Pg 117]

One reason that the inexperienced reader regardsthe reading of Shakespeare as an unusual operationof eye and brain is that we are not accustomedto read the drama of our own time; so that we havenot the habit of following naked dialogue accompaniedonly by a few terse stage directions. SinceShakespeare’s time our literature has not been sorich in drama as in other forms. Some of ourplays—those that have succeeded on the stage andthose written in conventional dramatic form withoutregard to performance on the stage—are worth reading.But the public does not encourage the printingof them. Many of our writers shrewdly make doubleuse of their ideas and turn them both into stageform and into prose fiction. The large number ofdramatized novels and “novelized” dramas—Shakespearehimself dramatized novels—shows that inEngland and America we regard the playbook assomething for the actor to learn and represent to us inspoken word and action. In France the latest playis for sale in the bookshops like the latest novel. Ifour stage is to return to high literary standards, theremust grow up in our public an audience of intelligentplayreaders as well as playgoers. The more intelligentlywe read plays, the more there will be worthreading; we can help the stage to attain and hold abetter level of excellence by demanding of it that itsproductions shall be “literary,” that is, readable.

That Shakespeare is the single dramatist in our languagewhom we feel we ought to read is regrettable.It sets him apart in a solitude which is as artificial[Pg 118]in its way as the attempt of some critics to grouphim in a “school of playwrights.” He is solitaryin greatness, quite lonely among his many contemporaries[1]in drama, but the form he used, narrativedialogue, ought to be as familiar to us as the novel.If ten people read “The Vicar of Wakefield” toone that reads “She Stoops to Conquer,” the reasonis not that “The Vicar” is better work, but that theprinted play looks strange to the eyes of our readingpublic. Plato put his philosophy in dramaticdialogue, apparently with the intention of choosing apopular and readable form. And the author of theShakespearian drama seems to have felt that he hadchosen the most popular and practical vehicle ofideas. Perhaps, if he had known to what a low conditionPuritan prejudice, the social weaknesses ofstage life and other causes were to bring dramaticliterature, he might have turned his narrative geniusinto other than dramatic form.

That we are not readers of plays is no specialfault of this age. A hundred years ago Charles andMary Lamb found a wide audience for their “Talesfrom Shakespeare.” The publisher announced inthe second edition that the “Tales,” intended primarilyfor children, had been found “an acceptableand improving present to young ladies advancingto the state of womanhood.” If Shakespeare was tobe retold for the young, it was fortunate that CharlesLamb was selected as the emissary from the land ofpoetry to those who had never made the great adventure[Pg 119]beyond the confines of prose. Yet it is hardto believe that Lamb’s “Tales” are necessary to anybut lovers of Lamb. There is a danger that theyoung reader, for whom he designed the book as adoor to Shakespeare, will linger in the vestibule, contentwith the genuine riches that are there, andwill not go on to the greater riches of Shakespearehimself. Shakespeare told the stories better thananother can tell them, and anyone who knows enoughof the English language to read Lamb’s “Tales”will find Shakespeare’s plays intelligible to read,just as when performed on the stage they are intelligibleto the people in the gallery, even to those inthe boxes. Repeated readings with some referenceto simple explanatory notes will make the deep meaningsand fine beauties ever more and more clear.

The plays which a beginner should read are, “AMidsummer Night’s Dream,” “The Merchant ofVenice,” “As You Like It,” “Twelfth Night,”“The Tempest,” “Henry IV,” “Henry V,” “RichardIII,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Julius Cæsar,”“Hamlet,” “Othello,” “King Lear,” and “Macbeth.”The other plays and the poems may, for variousreasons, be reserved for the time when one nolonger needs advice about reading.

We shall have gained much of the freedom of soulwhich is the necessary condition of reading poetry,if we make a New Year’s resolution not to be frightenedaway from the real mysteries of Shakespeareby the false mysteries of his editors and critics.[2][Pg 120]Shakespeare speaks our language, but the scholarsspeak a language which they invented, as if they intendedto hold their authority by wrapping themselvesin impenetrable obscurities which common folkwould not try to master. Let us not be deceived.“The Tempest” was not written for universityprofessors. Let us open it with the same confidentcuriosity that we should bring to “Robinson Crusoe”or “Ivanhoe.”

And after you have read “The Tempest,” what doyou remember to have found difficult? Is it notclearer than daylight, that enchanted island whereProspero, the exiled duke, has lived twelve yearswith his daughter Miranda? Is it not a simple andsweet romance that Prince Ferdinand should bewrecked on the island and should fall in love withMiranda and that she should fall in love with him,the first man she has seen except her father? Isit not clear that Prospero, a student of magic, hasgained control of the spirits of the island and hashis blithe servant, Ariel, and his brutal servant,Caliban? Did you find any difficulty in understandingthat when the wicked brother, who cheatedProspero of his dukedom, is cast ashore upon theisland, Prospero pardons him and gets his dukedomback? What is obscure in this wonder tale? “Cinderella”and “The Sleeping Beauty” are made ofthe same stuff, and we hear them at our mothers’knees before we are able to read at all.

But there is more in “The Tempest” than achildish fairy tale. Yes, much more, but that more[Pg 121]is insinuated into the story, it is embroidered uponit, it comes to us without effort of ours, for the poetis a Prospero and teaches us, as Prospero taughtMiranda, by art and nature and not by laboriouscounsel. You will feel as you follow the fairy storythat the spirit of nature has stolen over you unawares,that Caliban represents the evil in the naturalworld and Ariel the good, and that both areobedient to the bidding of man’s intelligence. Somuch philosophy will come to you of itself; it is not adull lesson to knit your brows over; you need seekno lecturer to expound it to you. A song of Arielwill linger in your ear. All that is required ofyou is that your senses be wide awake and thatyour fancy be free from bookish anxiety and readyto be played upon. The miracle will be wrought foryou. You need only sit, like Ferdinand, and watchthe masque which the wizard evokes—“a most majesticvision, and harmoniously charming.” Therewill remain with you some speech, grave with philosophyand luminous with imagery, such as this:

[Pg 122]

It is better, perhaps, to read the comedies andhistories before the tragedies. The comedies andhistories are simpler in motive, and through lighterthoughts give one the feeling for Shakespeare’s dictionand prepare one to enter the tragedies that treatof higher matters. It is because tragedy is concernedwith greater ideas, not because it ends unhappily,that it is greater poetry than comedy. It deals withmore important motives and more serious events,and its thought is complete; the career of Hamlet,or of Macbeth, is finished, and the ideas of life thatinformed the career and shaped the events are carriedout to their fullest. Tragedy does not consistin the piling up of corpses in the last act; the endof the characters is nothing in itself. Shakespearealways rounds off the conclusion with rapid strokes;having done with the ideas and motives that leadto the end he has little interest in the mere death ofhis characters. It is the “way to dusty death” thatinterests him and us and makes the tragedy profound.To those readers referred to in a previouschapter, who do not like sad endings, we can nowgive another answer. They put too much thoughtupon the ending and too little upon the story thatleads to the end. Whoever does not like tragedydoes not like serious ideas, and whoever does notread tragedy does not read the greatest poetry. Forthe greatest poetry must consist of the most importantideas. Not only upon beauty of form andmagic of phrase, but on the heart, the content,depends the greatness of a poem.

[Pg 123]

LIST OF BOOKS OF POETRY

(Supplementary to Chapter VI)

COLLECTIONS AND ANTHOLOGIES OF POETRY

The English Poets, edited by T. H. Ward, and publishedby Macmillan, in four volumes, at $1each.

On the whole, the most satisfactory collection ofEnglish poetry. Each of the chief poets is representedby several selections, and the introductorycriticisms are in themselves a liberal education.

Little Masterpieces of Poetry, edited by Henry VanDyke, in six volumes, and published by Doubleday,Page & Co.

The poems are divided according to form; onevolume containing ballads; another, odes and sonnets;another, lyrics; and so on. This is a rational,but not a practical, principle of division, for it isbetter to have the selections, say, from Keats, togetherin one’s anthology than to have his sonnetsin one volume and his lyrics in another. A poet andhis poetry are very definite units, but the lines betweenlyrics and ballads and odes are not sharp and,on the whole, not important.

Lyra Heroica, edited by William Ernest Henley,and published by Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Called “a book of verse for boys”; really a bookof verse for everybody, consisting of the martial, the[Pg 124]heroic, the patriotic, from the old English ballads toRudyard Kipling.

A Victorian Anthology, edited by Edmund ClarenceStedman, and published by Houghton,Mifflin & Co.

A remarkably adequate collection of Englishpoems of the last seventy years.

An American Anthology, edited by Edmund ClarenceStedman, and published by Houghton,Mifflin & Co.

Not only a wise selection of the best Americanpoetry, but a complete survey of the poetic utteranceof this country, from a biographical and historicalpoint of view.

The Golden Treasury, edited by Francis TurnerPalgrave, and published by Macmillan (seepage 109 of this Guide).

The Golden Treasury, second series, edited byFrancis Turner Palgrave.

This continues the first Golden Treasury and includesthe Victorian poets. It is not so completeas Stedman’s Anthology, but costs only half asmuch.

The Children’s Treasury of Lyrical Poetry, editedby Francis Turner Palgrave.

The Children’s Garland from the Best Poets, editedby Coventry Patmore.

[Pg 125]

The two foregoing are in the Golden TreasurySeries, and published by Macmillan.

Elizabethan Lyrics, edited by Felix E. Schelling.

An inexpensive collection, published by Ginn &Co., covering the same period as is covered by aboutone sixth of the Golden Treasury, but in larger typeand so pleasanter to read.

Seventeenth Century Lyrics, edited by Felix E.Schelling.

Continues the volume mentioned above.

The Blue Poetry Book, edited by Andrew Lang.

A good collection of verse intended by the editorfor young people, and selected by him wisely, butquite whimsically, from poets he happens to like.

Golden Numbers, edited by Kate Douglas Wigginand Nora Archibald Smith.

An excellent anthology intended for youth.

Oxford Book of English Verse, edited by ArthurT. Quiller-Couch.

A handsome book which represents, in less degreethan most anthologies, the traditional standards ofexcellence or traditionally excellent poets, and inrather greater degree the fine taste of the editor forthe best.

English and Scottish Popular Ballads, edited byFrancis James Child.

[Pg 126]

This is a selection in a single volume from thegreat edition of the ballads by Professor Child. Itis equally for the student and the reader. In theCambridge Poets, published by Houghton, Mifflin& Co.

Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, edited byCharles Lamb.

Passages that pleased Lamb in the works ofShakespeare’s contemporaries. Interesting to areader of Elizabethan drama and to a reader ofLamb.

INDIVIDUAL POETS

Æschylus (525-456 B.C.). Lyrical Dramas.In Everyman’s Library.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836-1907). Poems.

Household Edition. Aldrich was a careful editorof his own work and this volume is complete in itsinclusions and its omissions. It is one of the fewvolumes of American poetry worth owning.

Aristophanes (about 450-380 B.C.). Comedies.

In two volumes of Bohn’s Library, translated byW. J. Hickie.

Matthew Arnold (1822-88). Poetical Works.

The Globe Edition, published by Macmillan,which costs $1.75, is the best. Most of the chiefBritish poets can be had in this edition. The CambridgeEdition, published by Houghton, Mifflin &Co., costs a little more the volume, but it is preferable[Pg 127]on the whole in point of manufacture and readability.The young reader of Arnold may beginwith the narrative poem, “Sohrab and Rustum.”

Francis Beaumont (158?-1616). Dramatic Works.

The best selection of the plays of Beaumont andFletcher is the two volumes, edited by J. St. LoeStrachey in the Mermaid Series, published byCharles Scribner’s Sons. In this series are, in thewords of the title page, “The Best Plays of the OldDramatists.” A taste for Elizabethan drama is aswell left undeveloped until after a fair acquaintancehas been formed with the plays of Shakespeare.

William Blake (1757-1827). Songs of Innocence.Songs of Experience.

There are several collections of Blake’s lyrics insingle-volume editions. A good one is that with anintroductory essay by Lawrence Housman. Blake’slyrics of children and his “Tiger, Tiger, BurningBright” will be found in many of the anthologies.

Thomas Edward Brown (1830-97). CollectedPoems.

A remarkable English poet, but little known tothe general public until the posthumous publicationof his work in 1900 by Macmillan & Co., in thesingle-volume Globe Edition, which contains theworks of Shelley, Tennyson, and other great poets;Brown is worthy of that distinguished company.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1809-61). PoeticalWorks.

[Pg 128]

In one volume, in Macmillan’s Globe Edition.“The Sonnets from the Portuguese” are to be foundin a small volume by themselves. They are the bestof Mrs. Browning’s work. The new reader of Mrs.Browning should begin after page 150 in the Macmillanedition and read only the shorter poems.

Robert Browning (1812-89). Complete Poeticand Dramatic Works.

The Cambridge Edition is the best, in one volume.The Globe Edition is in two volumes. Thetwo volumes in Everyman’s Library contain all ofBrowning’s poems written up to 1864. A good volumefor the young reader is “The Boys’ Browning,”which contains poems of action and incident. Aninexpensive volume, published by Smith, Elder &Co., called “The Brownings for the Young,” containsa good variety of Browning, with some selectionsfrom Mrs. Browning.

William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878). PoeticalWorks.

The poems of Bryant are published in one volumeby D. Appleton & Co. Bryant’s translations of the“Iliad” and the “Odyssey” are better than mostpoetic versions of Homer in simplicity and dignity.The young reader cannot do better than to meetHomer in Bryant before he learns Greek enough tomeet Homer himself.

Robert Burns (1759-96). Poems, Songs, andLetters.

[Pg 129]

The complete work of Burns in the Globe Edition(Macmillan).

George Gordon Noel Byron (1788-1824). Poetryof Byron.

A selection by Matthew Arnold in the GoldenTreasury Series.

Charles Stuart Calverley (1831-84). FlyLeaves.

A taste for refined parody indicates the possessionof a critical sense. Coarse parody which implies nointimate knowledge of the poet parodied is not worthwhile. The reader who appreciates Calverley’s deliciousverses will have learned to appreciate theserious modern poets. Other writers of humorousverse, including parodies which are delicate andwitty, are J. K. Stephen, Mr. Owen Seaman, HenryCuyler Bunner.

Thomas Campbell (1777-1844).

Enough of Campbell will be found in Ward’sPoets.

George Chapman (1559-1634). Dramas.

One volume in the Mermaid Series. (See pages243-8 of this Guide.)

Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400). CanterburyTales.

A volume in Everyman’s Library contains eighteenof the tales, slightly simplified in spelling and vocabulary,said to be the first successful attempt to[Pg 130]modernize Chaucer, for the benefit of the ordinaryreader, without destroying the essential quality ofthe original. But with the glossary and notes foundin “The Student’s Chaucer,” edited by W. W. Skeat,the lover of poetry will find himself able to readChaucer in the original form without great difficulty.

Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-61). Poems.

In the Golden Treasury Series. Readers of poetrywho have not met Clough have an entirely newpoetical experience before them in “The Bothie,” anarrative poem. It should be tried after Longfellow’s“Miles Standish” and “Evangeline.” Clough wasnot among the greatest Victorian poets, but there isroom for him in an age like ours which is said,whether justly or not, to be lacking in poetic voices.In this connection readers may turn to Clough’spoem, “Come, Poet Come!” (see page 107 of thisGuide).

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). PoeticalWorks.

In the Globe Edition. The single volume inEveryman’s Library is adequate.

William Cowper (1731-1800). Poetical Works.

In the Globe Edition.

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). Divina Commedia.

Cary’s translation is in Everyman’s Library. Thebest way on the whole for English readers to learn[Pg 131]their Dante is through Charles Eliot Norton’s prosetranslation (see page 210 of this Guide).

Thomas Dekker (157?-163?). Dramas.

In the Mermaid Series.

John Donne (1573-1631). Poems.

In the Muses Library (Charles Scribner’s Sons).A wonderful poet, who, perhaps, is not to be readuntil one’s taste for poetry has grown certain, buta liking for whom in mature years is an almost infallibleproof of true poetic appreciation.

John Dryden (1631-1700). Poetical Works.

In the Globe Edition and also in the CambridgeEdition. The reader should first read Dryden’s odesand lyrical pieces; his satires may be deferred.

George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-80).Poems.

In one volume, published by Doubleday, Page &Co., and to be found in any complete edition of herworks. Her reputation as a novelist has overshadowedher excellence as a poet. “The Choir Invisible”is one of the noble poems of the century.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82). Poems.

In one volume, published by Houghton, Mifflin& Co. Emerson is the most exalted spirit of our literature,and his poems condense and refine the bestideas to be found in his prose.

Euripides (480-406 B.C.). Dramas.

[Pg 132]

In two volumes in Everyman’s Library.

Everyman and Other Miracle Plays.

In Everyman’s Library. See also “Specimensof Pre-Shakespearean Drama,” edited by J. M.Manly (Ginn & Co.). The recent stage productionof “Everyman” has created a new popular interestin very early English dramas. The value of mostof them is historical rather than intrinsically poetic.

Eugene Field. A Little Book of Western Verse.

Contains the familiar poems for and about children.

Edward Fitzgerald (1809-83). Translation ofthe Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.

There are innumerable editions of this famouspoem. An inexpensive one is published by Houghton,Mifflin & Co.

John Fletcher (1579-1625). Dramas.

With Beaumont in the Mermaid Series.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832).Dramatic and Poetic Works.

The dramas, translated by Walter Scott and others,are in Bohn’s Library. American readers willbe interested in Bayard Taylor’s poetic version of“Faust.”

Oliver Goldsmith (1728-74). Poems, etc.

Goldsmith’s few poems are to be found in a goodedition of his works in one volume, published byCrowell & Co.

[Pg 133]

Thomas Gray (1716-71). Poetical Works.

In one volume, in the Aldine Edition (Macmillan).Readers of the familiar “Elegy in a CountryChurchyard” need only to be told that a half dozenof Gray’s other poems are equally fine; and theyshould not overlook the delightful “Ode on theDeath of Mr. Walpole’s Cat.”

Kate Greenaway. Marigold Garden. Under theWindow.

Miss Greenaway’s delightful pictures of childrenwould entitle her to a place among the poets, evenif she had not done the little rhymes that go withher drawings.

Francis Bret Harte (1839-1902). PoeticalWorks.

In one volume, published by Houghton, Mifflin& Co.

Heinrich Heine (1797-1856). Poems.

Heine’s lyrics have tempted the talents of manytranslators. The finest collection of verses fromHeine in English is that by Emma Lazarus, herselfa true poet.

William Ernest Henley. Poems.

Henley’s one volume of poems, a slender volume,published by Scribner, places him high among thesecondary poets of nineteenth century England.

George Herbert (1593-1633). Poems.

Herbert’s poems with his “Life” by Izaak Walton,are published by Walter Scott, in one volume[Pg 134]in the Canterbury Poets, and also, in a single volume,by Crowell & Co. Herbert is the finest of thereligious lyric poets of the seventeenth century.

Robert Herrick (1591-1674). Poems.

A fine selection, with an introduction by ThomasBailey Aldrich, is published in one volume by theCentury Co. Herrick is to be found also in theCanterbury Poets, in one volume, and in Morley’sUniversal Library, published by George Rutledge& Sons.

Thomas Heywood (158?-164?). Dramatic Works.

In the Mermaid Series.

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-94). CompletePoetical Works.

In the Cambridge Edition.

Homer. The Iliad. The Odyssey.

See pages 211-12 of this Guide.

Thomas Hood (1799-1845). Poems.

Hood’s humorous poems are found in a pleasantlyillustrated volume, published by Macmillan. Hisserious poems, “Eugene Aram,” “The Bridge ofSighs,” “The Song of the Shirt,” are well known,and are in many anthologies.

Horace. Odes, Epodes, Satires, and Epistles.

Selected translations from the best English poetsand scholars in one volume of the Chandos Classics,published by Frederick Warne & Co.

[Pg 135]

Ben Jonson (1573-1637). Plays.

In the Mermaid Series. Jonson’s fine lyrics, includingthe perfect song “Drink to Me Only withThine Eyes,” should be looked for in the anthologies.

John Keats (1795-1821). Poems.

The best edition of Keats is that edited by BuxtonForman. Good editions are those in Everyman’sLibrary and in the Golden Treasury Series.

Rudyard Kipling. Barrack-Room Ballads. TheSeven Seas.

Sidney Lanier (1842-81). Poems.

In one volume, published by Scribner. An inspiredpoet, if ever one was born in America.

Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864). Poems,Imaginary Conversations, etc.

A volume of selections from the prose and verseof Landor is to be found in the Golden TreasurySeries.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-82).Complete Poetical Works.

In the Cambridge Edition. A good selection fromLongfellow appears in the Golden Treasury Series.

James Russell Lowell (1819-91). CompletePoetical Works.

In the Cambridge Edition.

Maurice Maeterlinck. Plays.

Translated by Richard Hovey.

[Pg 136]

Christopher Marlowe (1564-93). Plays.

In the Mermaid Series.

George Meredith (1828-1909). Poems.

Published in one volume by Scribner. Meredith’spoems of nature should be read first.

John Milton (1608-74). Complete PoeticalWorks.

In the Cambridge Edition and also in the GlobeEdition. There are many texts of Milton preparedfor use in schools. The young reader will be fortunateif he can read and enjoy the shorter poemsand two or three books of “Paradise Lost,” beforehe comes to the study of them in school.

Molière (Jean Baptiste Poquelin, 1622-73).Dramatic Works.

There are many English versions of Molière, someprepared for the stage. The edition in three volumesin Bohn’s Library is practically complete.

Thomas Moore (1779-1852). Irish Melodies.

The complete poems of Moore are published in aninexpensive volume by T. Y. Crowell & Co. Moore’ssongs are his best work and many of them retain asure place in the popular balladry of our race.

William Morris (1834-96). The Defence ofGuinevere. Life and Death of Jason.

The great fluency of Morris’s poetry makes hislonger narratives remarkably easy to read. Althoughhe is a poet known and cherished by the few, his[Pg 137]stories in verse are singularly well adapted to youngreaders.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49). Complete PoeticalWorks.

The best edition is that edited by Stedman andWoodberry. There are several other single-volumeeditions. The dozen best poems of Poe should beknown to every young American, and Mr. AndrewLang is right in saying (preface to the “BluePoetry Book”) that the youngest ear will be delightedby the beauty of the words.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744). Complete PoeticalWorks.

In the Cambridge Edition. A century that beganwith Keats and Shelley and ended with Swinburneand Meredith does not accord Pope the high placehe enjoyed in his own century, but places him atbest among the most brilliant of the comic poets.The “Rape of the Lock” is a humorous masterpiece.A surprisingly good anthology of Pope is the sectiongiven to him in Bartlett’s “Familiar Quotations”;the large number of lines from his work is sure proofof his place in our literature; only Shakespeare,Milton, and the Bible contribute so much that is“familiar.”

James Whitcomb Riley. Old-Fashioned Roses.

A natural and joyous singer about common things,deservedly popular in America and a truer poet thanmany critics suspect.

[Pg 138]

Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-94). Poems.

Published in one volume by Little, Brown & Co.Among English women only Mrs. Browning is sofine a poet as Christina Rossetti.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82). CompletePoetical Works.

In two volumes, published by Little, Brown & Co.The young reader should begin with Rossetti’s songs,ballads, and simpler poems, “The Blessed Damosel”and “My Sister’s Sleep.” The sonnet sequence,“The House of Life,” is for mature readers.

Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller(1759-1805). Dramatic Works and Poems.

In several volumes of Bohn’s Library, translatedby Coleridge and others.

Walter Scott (1771-1832). Complete PoeticalWorks.

In the Cambridge Edition. Scott’s narrativepoems are preëminently adapted to the taste andunderstanding of young readers. There are manyschool editions of Scott’s poetry, and innumerablereprints attest his continued popularity.

William Shakespeare.

The best one-volume edition of Shakespeare is theCambridge Edition. The best edition in many volumesis the Cambridge Shakespeare, published byMacmillan & Co. It gives the readings of the Elizabethantexts so that the reader can distinguish (and[Pg 139]accept or reject) the emendations of scholars. Apocket edition such as the Temple (Macmillan), orthe Ariel (Putnam), will prove a good friend.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). CompletePoetical Works.

In the Cambridge Edition or the Globe. In twovolumes in Everyman’s Library. Selected poems inthe Golden Treasury Series.

Philip Sidney (1554-86). Lyric Poems.

In a small attractive volume, published by Macmillan.

Sophocles (495-406 B.C.) Plays.

In the English translation of R. C. Jebb. Thevolume in Everyman’s Library contains translationsby Young. Professor G. H. Palmer’s “Antigone”is as remarkable as his “Odyssey.”

Robert Southey (1774-1843). Poems.

Selected poems in the Golden Treasury Series.

Edmund Spenser (1552-99). Complete Poems.

In the Globe Edition. Called the poet’s poet; asource of inspiration to other poets. If we do notread “The Faerie Queene” at length, it is becausewe have so many poets since Spenser. Yet if thereader had only Spenser he would have an inexhaustibleriver of English poetry.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1849-94). A Child’sGarden of Verses.

[Pg 140]

Published by Scribner, in one volume, which containsStevenson’s other verse. “The Child’s Garden”celebrates childhood in a way that touchesthe grown imagination, like the poems about childrenby Blake, Swinburne, and Francis Thompson, butit appeals also to children of all ages.

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909).Selected Poems.

Edited by R. H. Stoddard and published byCrowell. The young reader should approach Swinburnefirst in “Atalanta,” poems about children,poems about other poets, and poems of liberty, notably“The Litany of Nations.” He is a noble poet,frequently misrepresented by friendly and unfriendlywafters of current literary opinion.

John B. Tabb. Poems.

In two or three small volumes, published by Small,Maynard & Co. The purest note among livingAmerican poets.

Alfred Tennyson (1809-92). Poetic and DramaticWorks.

Complete in one volume in the Cambridge Editionand also in the Globe.

Of all modern poets preëminently the one foryoung and old readers to know entire (with the possibleexception of his dramas).

Theocritus. Idylls.

In English prose, together with translations fromBion and Moschus, by Andrew Lang, in the Golden[Pg 141]Treasury Series. Theocritus is translated into excellentEnglish verse by the poet, C. S. Calverley.

James Thomson (1700-48). The Castle of Indolence.The Seasons.

Dimmed but not displaced by later poets of nature.Thomson may be read first in the anthologies, fromwhich now and again a sincere admirer will be sentto his complete works.

James Thomson (1834-82). The City of DreadfulNight.

A remarkable poet, easily among those whomwe think of as next to the greatest poets. ProfessorWilliam James calls “The City of Dreadful Night”“that pathetic book,” “which I think is less wellknown than it should be for its literary beauty,simply because men are afraid to quote its words—theyare so gloomy, and at the same time so sincere.”

Francis Thompson (1859-1907). The Hound ofHeaven.

This poet, lately dead, has surely taken his placeamong the true voices of English poetry.

Henry Vaughan (1622-95). Poems.

In the Aldine Edition (Macmillan).

Vergil (70-19 B.C.). Eclogues. Georgics. Æneid.

In Conington’s prose translation. The poetic versionof William Morris is spirited and fluent.

John Webster (lived in the Elizabethan age).Dramas.

[Pg 142]

In the Mermaid Series.

Walt Whitman (1819-92). Leaves of Grass.

Whitman’s poetry is complete in one volume, publishedby Small, Maynard & Co. The most powerfulof American poets. The young reader shouldbegin with the patriotic pieces and the poems ofnature in the sections entitled “Sea-Drift,” “By theRoadside,” “Drum Taps,” “Memories of PresidentLincoln,” “Whispers of Heavenly Death.”

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-92). CompletePoetical Works.

In the Cambridge Edition. Widely loved inAmerica for his popular ballads and songs of commonthings. In his poems of liberty and in poemsof religious sympathy and faith, the true passion ofthe poet overcomes the technical limitations of hisverse and results in pure poetry.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850). CompletePoetical Works.

In the Globe Edition. The true Wordsworthianbelieves with Robert Southey that “a greater poetthan Wordsworth there never has been nor ever willbe.” A serene voice that swelled increasinglythrough a troubled century, and is more and morefelt to have uttered the essential ideas needed inthese hundred years. Yet much of Wordsworth isless than poetic, and the new reader should seekhim first in the selections edited by Matthew Arnoldin the Golden Treasury Series.

THE READING OF HISTORY

The plays of Shakespeare which are based uponthe chronicles of English kings are grouped inthe Folio edition of the dramatic works as “Histories.”It will not surprise any reader, who happensnot to have thought of it before, to learn that theepisodes in “Henry IV” and “Henry V” do notfollow the actual course of events in the reigns ofthe real kings; we take it for granted that Shakespearemeant to write historical fiction, and we readthe plays as creations of the poetic imagination.But many readers will be surprised to hear thatmost works which we call historic are likewise figmentsof the imagination, and that we should readmany of them in somewhat the same spirit as weread the historical plays of Shakespeare or goodhistorical novels. Not only do we get the most pleasureout of the great historians by regarding theirworks as pieces of artistic writing, but we save ourselvesfrom the error of accepting their narrativesas fact. For it is generally true that the more glowing,the more imaginative, the more architectural awork of history, the more it is open to suspicion thatit is not an exact account of true events. In taking[Pg 144]this position we are not appropriating to the usesof literary enjoyment works of information thatshould be left among the dictionaries and encyclopedias;we are only obeying the best critical historians,who warn us not to believe the acceptedmasterpieces of history, but allow us to enjoy them.And enjoyment is what we seek and value.

The conception of history as the work of the imaginationwas held by all the older historians. Baconsaid that poetry is “feigned history.” That is, heconceived that the methods of poetry and historyare the same and that the difference lies in thematerial, the poet inventing the substance of hisstory, the historian finding his substance in the recordedevents of the past. This view of historyobtained up to the nineteenth century. Macaulaysaid that history is a compound of poetry and philosophy.And Carlyle thought it proper to designateas a history his “French Revolution,” a work basedon certain facts in history but consisting in largepart of dramatic fiction, philosophic reflection, andpolitical argument. In the last hundred years therehas grown up a view of history as a science, thepurpose of which is to examine the evidences of thepast in human life as the geologist studies the pastof the physical globe on which we live. The newschool of history is comparatively so young that ithas not produced many writers of high rank in eloquenceand literary power, whereas poetic historyis as old as literature and includes the work of manygreat masters. These masters live by their eloquence;[Pg 145]for it is eloquence rather than mere truth to factthat gives a work a permanent place in literature.So our knowledge of historic events must come tous, the world of general readers, in large part fromhistorians who were great artists rather than accuratescholars. And scientific history, and alsoscientific biography, will for another century be avoice crying in the beautiful wilderness of legend,myth, philosophical opinion, political prejudice, andpatriotic enthusiasm.

We can cheerfully leave this scientific historywhere it belongs, in the hands of historians andspecial students. The better for us as readers ifwe can read the great histories with the same delightand somewhat the same kind of interest thatwe bring to the reading of romances. There will beenough truth in them to give us a fairly just view offormer ages. The culture and humanity will bethere. Shakespeare’s stories of English kings giveus the spirit of England. Carlyle’s “French Revolution”will never cease to be a splendid work ofart. Bancroft’s “History of the United States”will remain a noble celebration of democracy, eventhough he was not strict in his use of documents.

In school we expect to learn true lessons in history,to get our dates right and keep our judgmentsimpartial. Out of school we shall read history forpleasure and like it the better if it is informed withthe eloquence, the prejudice, the philosophy, in shortthe personality of a great writer.

There are certain books that occur immediately[Pg 146]as introductions to the various departments of literature.We agreed that Palgrave’s “Golden Treasury”is the best book to put into the hands of oneknocking for the first time at the door of poetry.Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” is a perfect biographyto win the new reader’s liking for biographical literatureand memoirs. And so there is one volumeof history that seems the best of all books in whichEnglish-speaking youth may read the great story ofthe race, Green’s “Short History of the EnglishPeople.” One might wish from patriotic motivesthat there were an American history equally good,but there is none, so far as I know—none whichcovers our national life as a whole. We can, however,be content with Green, for the American cannotknow his own history or his own literature andtraditions without knowing those of England. Ourliterature is English literature and must be for centuriesto come, and in most of our reading of poetryand fiction we shall find that the history of Englandis involved more deeply than the history of ourcountry.

The merits of Green’s History, the literary merits,are its clear arrangements, the fine lucidity of thewriting, its condensation of national movements intorich chapters where, as from a peak one overlooksthe great epochs of disaster and progress. These arethe opening sentences:

“For the fatherland of the English race we mustlook far away from England itself. In the fifthcentury after the birth of Christ, the one country[Pg 147]which we know to have borne the name of Angelnor the Engleland lay in the district which we now callSleswick, a district in the heart of the peninsulawhich parts the Baltic from the northern seas. Itspleasant pastures, its black-timbered homesteads, itsprim little townships, looking down on inlets of purplewater, were then but a wild waste of heatherand sand, girt along the coast with sunless woodland,broken here and there by meadows which crept downto the marshes and the sea.”

Could any historic novel, we may say could anyother historic romance, open more enticingly? Hereis rich promise, promise of the picturesque, promiseof the eloquent phrase, promise of a sympathetic historyof a people who are delvers in the soil, dwellersin homesteads, and no mere pawns in the game ofkings. This is to be a history of a people. We shalllearn of their great common characteristics; we shallunderstand them as we understand a family, andevery adventure from King Alfred’s burning of thecakes to Clive’s conquest of India will spring likethe episodes in a great plot from the character ofthe English race.

From Green’s History, as a whole, we shall learnwhat are the important things in the history of anypeople. His admirable sense of the relative valuesof events and persons informs his work with a philosophyof life that is just, wholesome, and salutaryfor a young person to be imbued with who mustlook out on the daily struggle about him, read theendless hodge-podge of newspaper chronicle, and[Pg 148]weigh the day’s events wisely. Green fulfils theideal which he sets forth in the preface: “It is thereproach of historians that they have too often turnedhistory into a mere record of the butchery of menby their fellow men. But war plays a small part inthe real history of European nations, and in that ofEngland its part is smaller than in any.... If Ihave said little of the glories of Cressy, it is becauseI have dwelt much on the wrong and miserywhich prompted the verse of Longland and thepreaching of Ball. But on the other hand, I havenever shrunk from telling at length of the triumphsof peace. I have restored to their place among theachievements of Englishmen the ‘Faerie Queene’and the ‘Novum Organum.’ I have set Shakespeareamong the heroes of the Elizabethan age.... Ihave had to find a place for figures little heeded incommon history—the figures of the missionary, thepoet, the printer, the merchant, the philosopher.”

One of the practical merits of Green’s Englandas an introduction to the reading of historic literatureis that at the head of each chapter he givesthe works from which he has drawn. And as hisnature and ideals of history led him to the mostfertile and interesting of other historians, his listscontain the titles of readable books rather than dryand obscure sources. So that if a reader finds onepart of the story of England especially fascinatinghe can turn aside to those historians who have treatedit more fully, to the authorities whom Green readand enjoyed. For instance, see the wealth of books[Pg 149]which Green mentions at the head of the chapterthat most concerns us, The Independence of America.There are Lord Stanhope’s “History of Englandfrom the Peace of Utrecht,” Bancroft’s “Historyof the United States,” Massey’s “History ofEngland from the Accession of George the Third,”Lecky’s “History of England in the EighteenthCentury”; the letters and memoirs of individualswho witnessed the struggle, or took part in it, suchas the “Letters” of Junius, “Life and Correspondenceof Charles James Fox,” Burke’s speeches andpamphlets. And we should add the newest importantauthority on the conflict, Trevelyan’s “AmericanRevolution.”

These books in turn will lead to others as far asthe reader cares to go. Indeed it is one of the delightsand excitements of reading that one book suggestsanother, and the eager reader, who is under noobligation to go along a definite course, finds himselfin a glorious tangle of bypaths. A book like Green’smay lead into any corner of literature; one mayfollow, as it were, over the intellectual ground wherehe got his education. We may begin with Gibbon’s“Rome” which he read at sixteen (other boys ofsixteen can read it with as much pleasure as hefound in it, even if they do not become historians),and we can go on through his early studies of theEnglish church. If one reads only the poets andmen of letters to whom he gives a place in his chronicleof English life one will be, before one knowsit, a cultivated man—even a learned man.

[Pg 150]

Let us dwell a moment on this aspect of leadershipin books. No two persons will ever follow thesame course of reading; no list will prove good foreverybody; but any book which has interested you,and which you have reason to think the product ofa great mind, will constitute itself a guide to reading;[3]it will throw out a hundred clues, far-leadingand profitable to take up, clues which show whathas been the reading of the author whose work suggeststhem. And there must always be safety infollowing where a great man has gone in his literarypilgrimages.

If there is no history of America comparable inscope and style to Green’s “Short History of theEnglish People,” there are several American historiansof high rank. Perhaps because they wereendowed with dramatic imagination, or were influencedby the literary rather than the scientificmasterpieces of history, American historians ofgenius have applied their talents to romantic periodsin the story of foreign nations, or to those earlynavigations and settlements which resulted in thefounding of our nation. Washington Irving beganin his “Life of Columbus” and “The Conquest ofGranada” the brilliant stories of Spanish chivalryand adventure, which were continued by WilliamHickling Prescott in “The History of the Reignof Ferdinand and Isabella,” “The Conquest of Mexico”and “The Conquest of Peru.” The writingsof Prescott and Irving have a kind of antique gorgeousness[Pg 151]in which the modern historian does notallow himself to indulge. The history of the Frenchand the Indians and the pioneers appealed to thegenius of Francis Parkman. The beginner may settledown to any book of Parkman’s with the happycertainty of finding a brilliant and thrilling story.John Lothrop Motley, in “The Rise of the DutchRepublic” and “The United Netherlands,” treatsof a people whose story the American reader maylearn in youth or may postpone until after he hasbecome acquainted with some books on English andAmerican history. The colonial history of Americais best read in the work of John Fiske, whose giftsof style and philosophic outlook on life place himamong the great historians. The history of Americafrom the beginning to modern times must be readin books by various authors, who deal with limitedsections and periods. It is especially true of recentperiods that no one historian is adequate.Partisanship and our closeness to the Civil Warhave prevented the American historian from seeingthe conflict clearly in its relations to the restof our national story, and for a just impression ofthe struggle between the states, the reader shouldgo to the documents and the memoirs of the time.The reminiscences of the political leaders, the biographyof Lincoln, and the excellent narratives ofUnion and Confederate generals—Grant, Alexander,Longstreet, Gordon, Sherman, Sheridan, and others—constitutea history of the period. There is peculiarvalidity in the reminiscences of the contemporary[Pg 152]witnesses of historical events. The writer of autobiographyand memoirs is not expected to give finaljudgments, and we unconsciously allow for his personallimitation. The professional historian, on theother hand, is obliged to make sweeping decisions,and we are likely too often to accept his decisionsas final, unless we are trained and critical studentsof history. If one reads several memoirs of the sameperiod, one gradually forms an historical judgmentabout it and comes to a position midway betweenthe points of view of the various writers.

The young man beginning to read history now,as Green began Gibbon at sixteen, may considerwhether he will devote himself to the task of writingthe history of the American people. Even if hisambitions are not so high, he may be sure that asa citizen of the Republic he can never know toomuch about the history of his nation and of the menwho helped to make it.

As aids to historical reading, it is well to havesome books of bare facts, a short history of America,a dictionary of dates, and a compact generalencyclopedia of events, such as Ploetz’s “Epitome.”But these are for reference and not for entertainment.As a rule, text books of history prepared forschools, however excellent they may be for the purposesof study, are not entertaining to read. Theyhave not space for all the elaborate plots, politicalintrigues, biographical interludes, accounts of popularmovements of thought, which appeal to theimagination of the leisurely reader. Our school[Pg 153]teachers will take care that we learn the salient factswhich everyone must know. By ourselves we shalldip into Parkman’s “Montcalm and Wolfe” orPrescott’s “Conquest of Mexico” or Carlyle’s“French Revolution.” In reading these masterpiecesfor pleasure, we shall be supplementing ourwork in school and making our daily lessons easier.

LIST OF WORKS OF HISTORY

Supplementary to Chapter VII

The following list of titles is not intended to outlinean adequate reference library for the student ofhistory. It includes principally books that havetaken their place in literature by virtue of theirreadability and their imaginative power, and maytherefore be supposed to interest the general reader.A few books are included which deal with currenthistorical problems and politics.

AMERICAN HISTORY

Henry Adams. History of the United States.

Covers exhaustively the period immediately followingthe Revolution.

George Bancroft (1800-91). History of theUnited States from the Discovery of the Continentto 1789.

James Bryce. The American Commonwealth.

The recognized authority on American politicalinstitutions.

[Pg 154]

Edward Channing. Students’ History of theUnited States.

Said to be the best of the one-volume historiesof this country.

John Fiske (1842-1901). Discovery of America,with Some Account of Ancient America and theSpanish Conquest. New France and New England.Old Virginia and Her Neighbors. TheBeginnings of New England. The PuritanTheocracy in its Relations to Civil and ReligiousLiberty. Dutch and Quaker Colonies inAmerica. American Revolution. Critical Periodof American History (1783-89). War of Independence.Mississippi Valley in the CivilWar. Civil Government in the United States.

John Brown Gordon. Reminiscences of the CivilWar.

Albert Bushnell Hart (and collaborators). AmericanHistory Told by Contemporaries.

Four volumes of extracts from diaries and writerswho lived in the epochs under consideration. Arich source of information and enjoyment, as arealso the following books:

How Our Grandfathers Lived. Colonial Children.Camps and Firesides of the Revolution. Romanceof the Civil War.

William Edward Hartpole Lecky. AmericanRevolution.

[Pg 155]

Selected from his “History of England in theEighteenth Century.” This with Trevelyan’s“American Revolution” will give American readersthe history of the conflict from a British point ofview.

James Longstreet. From Manassas to Appomattox.

To be read in conjunction with the Memoirs byGrant, Porter, Sherman, Gordon, Alexander, andother Union and Confederate generals.

Francis Parkman (1823-93). The Oregon Trail.France and England in North America.

“France and England in North America” is dividedinto seven parts under the following titles:

Pioneers of France in the New World; The Jesuitsin North America in the Seventeenth Century;La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West;The Old Régime in Canada; Count Frontenacand New France under Louis XIV; A HalfCentury of Conflict; Montcalm and Wolfe.

James Ford Rhodes. History of the United Statesfrom the Compromise of 1850.

Theodore Roosevelt. American Ideals. TheNaval War of 1812. The Winning of the West.

Ellen Churchill Semple. American Historyand Its Geographic Conditions.

Goldwin Smith. Canada and the Canadian Question.The United States, an Outline of PoliticalHistory.

[Pg 156]

George Otto Trevelyan. American Revolution.

Woodrow Wilson. Congressional Government: aStudy in American Politics. History of theAmerican People.

The second work, in five volumes, covers the historyof the country from the beginnings to the presenttime; both readable and trustworthy.

GREAT BRITAIN

Francis Bacon (1561-1626). History of theReign of Henry VII.

The first great piece of critical history in ourlanguage.

Henry Thomas Buckle. History of Civilizationin England.

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). Cromwell’s Lettersand Speeches, with Elucidations.

Earl of Clarendon (1608-74). History of theGreat Rebellion.

A vivid account of the Cromwellian wars by aroyalist. Interesting to read in connection withCarlyle’s “Elucidations” of the letters and speechesof Cromwell.

Mandell Creighton. Age of Elizabeth.

Edward Augustus Freeman (1823-92). Historyof the Norman Conquest. William theConquerer. Growth of the English Constitutionfrom the Earliest Times.

[Pg 157]

James Anthony Froude (1818-94). Historyof England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeatof the Armada.

Samuel Rawson Gardiner. A Student’s Historyof England. History of England from the Accessionof James to the Outbreak of the CivilWar. History of the Great Civil War. Historyof the Commonwealth and the Protectorate.

The three histories last named constitute a continuouswork of eighteen volumes. Gardiner isnot the easiest historian to read, but his workis indispensable to anyone who would get a trueview of a period which more than any other inEnglish history has been discolored by brilliantbiased historians, from Clarendon to Carlyle andMacaulay.

John Richard Green (1837-83). A Short Historyof the English People. The Making ofEngland. The Conquest of England. A Historyof the English People.

The “History” is a longer, though, perhaps, nota “greater,” book than the “Short History.”

Richard Hakluyt (1553-1616). The PrincipalNavigations, Voyages and Discoveries of theEnglish Nation.

In eight volumes of Everyman’s Library.

Henry Hallam (1777-1859). Constitutional Historyof England.

[Pg 158]

David Hume (1711-76). History of England.

Almost displaced as a historian by later writers,but still interesting because of his philosophic andliterary genius.

Andrew Lang. History of Scotland.

William Edward Hartpole Lecky. History ofEngland in the Eighteenth Century.

Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59). Historyof England from James II.

In three volumes in Everyman’s Library.

Goldwin Smith. The United Kingdom.

Jacques Nicolas Augustin Thierry. History ofthe Norman Conquest of England.

In Everyman’s Library.

FRANCE

Edmund Burke (1729-97). Reflections on theRevolution in France.

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). The French Revolution.

Victor Duruy. History of France.

English translation, published by Crowell & Co.

François Pierre Guillaume Guizot. Historyof France from the Earliest Times to 1848.

Victor Hugo. History of a Crime.

Deals with the Coup d’etat of 1851, of which Hugo[Pg 159]was a witness. Vivid, powerful writing, easy to readin the French.

Henry Morse Stephens. History of the FrenchRevolution.

The work of a modern scientific historian, may beread after Carlyle’s “French Revolution” as a correctiveand for the sake of comparing two historicalmethods.

Hippolyte Adolphe Taine. The Ancient Régime.The French Revolution. The Modern Régime.

The application to French history of somewhatthe same philosophic methods and principles thatinform his “History of English Literature.”

GERMANY

Samuel Rawson Gardiner. The Thirty Years’War.

Ernest Flagg Henderson. A Short History ofGermany.

Helmuth Karl Bernhard von Moltke. TheFranco-German War.

ANCIENT GREECE

Alfred John Church. Pictures from Greek Lifeand Story.

Especially adapted to young readers.

[Pg 160]

Ernst Curtius. History of Greece.

A monumental German work to be found in areadable translation.

Thomas Davidson. Education of the Greek Peopleand its Influence on Civilization.

George Finlay. Greece Under the Romans.

In Everyman’s Library.

George Grote. History of Greece.

The standard English work in Greek history. Intwelve volumes of Everyman’s Library.

Herodotus. Stories of the East from Herodotus.

Extracts retold by Alfred John Church, especiallyfor young readers.

John Pentland Mahaffy. Greek Life andThought from the Age of Alexander to theRoman Conquest. A Survey of Greek Civilization.

ANCIENT ROME

Samuel Dill. Roman Society in the Last Centuryof the Western Empire.

Edward Gibbon (1737-94). History of the Declineand Fall of the Roman Empire.

The supreme contribution of England to historicalliterature, in its combination of distinguished styleand scientific method.

[Pg 161]

Theodor Mommsen. History of Rome.

A great German work, in five volumes, to be foundin a readable English translation.

OTHER HISTORIES

Cambridge Modern History.

Of this great History planned by the late LordActon, ten volumes have been published. It is thework of many writers and will be a storehouse of themost competent historical writing of our time.

James Bryce. Holy Roman Empire.

Readers of Bryce’s “American Commonwealth”will seek this other excellent work.

Jean Froissart. Chronicles.

In Everyman’s Library.

There are several translations and condensationsof Froissart’s “Chronicles,” notably “The Boy’sFroissart,” edited by the American poet, SidneyLanier.

Mary Henrietta Kingsley. The Story of WestAfrica.

Henry Hart Milman (1791-1868). History ofLatin Christianity.

Robert Louis Stevenson. A Footnote to History:Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa.

A fine piece of historical writing showing thatStevenson had the gifts of the historian as well asthe gifts of the poet and romancer.

[Pg 162]

William Hickling Prescott (1796-1859). Conquestof Mexico. Conquest of Peru. Reign ofPhilip Second. Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella.

John Lothrop Motley (1814-77). Rise of theDutch Republic. History of the United Netherlands.

Archibald Forbes. The Afghan Wars.

A mixture of history and vivid reporting by agreat war correspondent.

Pierre Loti. Last Days of Pekin.

Washington Irving (1783-1859). Knickerbocker’sHistory of New York. The Conquest ofGranada.

These books demonstrate the wide range of Irving’sgenius from burlesque, mingled with genuinestudy of racial characteristics, to sober and poetichistory.

François Marie Arouet (Voltaire). History ofCharles XII of Sweden.

Accompanied in the English translation by thecritical essays of Macaulay and Carlyle. Easy toread in the French.

John Addington Symonds (1840-93). Renaissancein Italy.

A work of rare beauty on the men, the history, andthe art of Italy.

[Pg 163]

Walter Raleigh (1552-1618). The Discovery ofthe Empire of Guiana. A History of the World.

Raleigh’s “History of the World” is not so largeas it sounds in scope, but in imagination it almostlives up to its title. Thoreau says: “He is remarkablein the midst of so many masters. There is anatural emphasis in his style, like a man’s tread,and a breathing space between his sentences.”

Frederic Harrison. The Meaning of History.

An excellent guide to the reading of history.

THE READING OF BIOGRAPHY

Since literature is, broadly, the written recordof human life, biography, the life story of realmen, lies at the core and center of literature. Onone side biography is allied to history, which is thecollective biography of many men. On the otherside it is related to fiction.

In our discussion of “History” we found thatthere are two ideals or methods of writing it: onethe picturesque, the other the scientific. The scientifichistorian accuses the picturesque historian offalsifications and disproportions. Scientific historyis new and aggressive and it accentuates its differencesfrom the old ideals. Yet there is no essentialopposition between fact and an imaginative representationof fact. Gibbon is picturesque, yet he isone of the first great historians to make exhaustivestudy and accurate use of documents. Carlyle canbe as eloquent when he is telling the truth as whenhe is misled by his love of color and his partisanpassions. The great historian of the future will notfalsify or distort facts except as human nature mustalways intervene before the facts which it presentsin human language. The true historian will have[Pg 165]great imagination, great vision, and yet have scrupulouscare to precisions of truth. For the present,history is recovering from its traditional eloquenceand trying to learn to present facts honestly andclearly. Never again will the spirit of history andhistorical criticism tolerate such a magnificent fabricationas the end of De Quincey’s “Flight of aTartar Tribe,” in which he gives, with all the paraphernaliaof a learned note, the inscription carvedon the columns of granite and brass to commemoratethe migration of the Kalmucks. The columns are astructure of De Quincey’s fancy, and the inscriptionis in such prose as he alone among white men orChinamen knew how to write! In De Quincey’stime it was not considered an ethical aberration toinvent facts. In a ponderous article which he wrotefor the Encyclopædia Britannica on Shakespeare, hequoted the poet from memory and spun some of thebiography from his own fancy. The pious andlearned President of Harvard College, Jared Sparks,for the greater glory of America and its founder,“improved” the style of Washington’s private papersand ably defended the emendations. AndWeems, an early biographer of the man who seemsnobler the more truly we know him and who needsno legend to dignify him, wrote his life of Washingtonwith the deliberate purpose, indicated on the titlepage, of inculcating patriotic and moral lessons inthe young. Hence the cherry-tree story.

History has improved in its morals, if not in itsmanners, and scientific biography is making some[Pg 166]headway. But biography is still in a hazy state oflegend and myth. Approach any man you choose,especially among men of letters who have been writtenabout by other men of letters, and you find amass of conjecture and legend masquerading as fact.Sometimes there is an added garment of disguise,the dignified gown of science and scholarship.

No great writer has suffered from credulous andweak-principled biographers so much as the greatestof all—Shakespeare. Most of the lives of him aregigantic myths, built on hardly as many known factsas would fill two pages of this book. Of late historiansand men of science have begun to laugh atliterary biographers for making such confusion ofthe institution of Shakespeare biography. It is wellenough for the young reader to learn carefully thebiographical notes prefixed to the school editions ofShakespeare, for the better the young reader learnsschool exercises and the notes in the text books, thebetter basis he has for reading and thinking forhimself. I may say, however, that there are atpresent, so far as I know, only two books on the lifeof Shakespeare which are trustworthy, Halliwell-Phillips’s“Outlines,” which gives all the documents,and a recent masterly discussion of the documentsby George G. Greenwood called “The ShakespeareProblem Restated.” It is a problem and not one forus to go into here except that it illustrates what weare saying about scientific and fanciful biography.I should not wonder if another generation were moreinterested than our fathers have been in the poetic[Pg 167]achievements, whatever they are, of the man whoseyouthful portrait is on the cover of this book—FrancisBacon. One thing is certain: the rising generationhad better learn early to approach with caution andtolerant scepticism books bearing such titles as“Shakespeare, Man, Player and Poet,” “Shakespeare,His Life, His Mind and His Art.” We hadbetter bend our attentions to the plays themselves,and when we wish to read about Shakespeare, turnnot to the so-called biographies and “studies inShakespeare” by college professors, but to the greatcritics, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey, Pater.

As we said that we, mere readers, should leavescientific history in the hands of specialists, so wemay leave the problems of literary biography to expertinvestigators. We are interested rather in thatkind of biography which is as old as the earliest legendsof heroes, that which celebrates the great onesof the earth. If it is true to fact so much the better;but since biographers are likely to be the friends,kinsmen, admirers of their subjects, biography willbe the last division of history to be informed withthe scientific spirit. And so far as it is an art, itwill err on the right side, like fiction and poetry, bypresenting an ennobled view of human nature.

That biography is an art is proved by the admittedlygreat examples. The novelist who createsa fictitious biography has no more difficult and delicatetask than the biographer who finds in a reallife story the true character of a man, and gives tothe events which produced the character artistic[Pg 168]form, unity, and movement. Boswell’s “Life ofSamuel Johnson” and Robert Southey’s “Life ofLord Nelson” are as beautifully designed as thebest novels. Boswell’s masterpiece resembles a realisticnovel and Southey’s “Nelson” is like a romantictale of chivalry and heroism.

Benjamin Jowett, the great professor of Greekat Oxford, said that biography is the best materialfor ethical teaching. In many ways it is the bestmaterial for all kinds of teaching. For everythingthat human beings have done and thought is to befound in the life stories of interesting individuals,so that biography opens the way to every subject.In our discussion of history we said that the directestpath to the heart of an historical epoch is throughthe biography of an important figure or a wise observerof that epoch. There is no better politicalhistory of America during the Civil War thanNicolay and Hay’s “Life of Lincoln.” Grant’s“Memoirs” contains all that an ordinary readerneeds to know of the movements of the Northernarmies after Grant took command. The memoirs andreminiscences of Davis and Confederate generals giveus an adequate account of the civil and militarymovements of the Southern side. Carlyle’s “Cromwell,”no matter how biased and overwrought it seemsto discriminating students, will open the seventeenthcentury for those of us who cannot be specialistsin history. Bourrienne’s “Memoirs of Napoleon,”in the English translation, is a good introductionto the history of Europe during the Napoleonic wars[Pg 169](and it makes little difference to us that the bookwas largely rewritten and augmented by the Frencheditor). Morley’s “Life of Gladstone” is a historyof Victorian England. The life of Luther is theheart of the Protestant Reformation.

The layman who would know something of thetendencies of modern science cannot do better thanto read the biographies of men of science in whichsympathetic pupils have told in a style more simplethan the masters’ treatises the intellectual principlesand human conditions of the masters’ work. Suchbiographies are the “Life and Letters” of Darwin,of Huxley, of Agassiz. The “Life of Pasteur”by Valery-Radot, which has been translated intoEnglish, is a clear account of the main tendencies ofmodern medicine, the subject that all the world isso much interested in. Anyone who reads it willknow better how to make his way through the massesof popular articles on medicine and public healthin the current magazines.

Since literary men are the most interesting of allheroes to other makers of books, it is natural thatthe lives of the masters of literature should havebeen written in greater abundance and usually withgreater skill and charm than the lives of any otherclass of men. A good way, perhaps the best way, tostudy literature is to read the lives of a dozen ora score of great writers. An ambitious youth, determinedto lay the foundations of a knowledge ofliterature, might begin to read in any order the biographiesin the series called English Men of Letters.[Pg 170]From that series I should cross out William Black’s“Goldsmith” and substitute Forster’s or WashingtonIrving’s “Life of Goldsmith”; I should alsoomit Leslie Stephen’s “George Eliot” and read insteadthe “Life and Letters” by J. W. Cross. Itwould be as well to pass by Mr. Henry James’s“Hawthorne” in favor of the biography by Mr.George E. Woodberry in American Men of Letters.

It will not be wise even for the enthusiastic readerof literature to confine his reading in biography tothe lives of men of letters. There is such a thing asbeing too much interested in bookish persons. Menof action have led more eventful lives than mostwriters, and their biographers are likely thereforeto have more of a story to tell. Whenever you findyourself interested in any man, when some referenceto him rouses your curiosity, read his biography.In general it is better to read about him ina complete “Life,” even if it is a bulky one in aforbidding number of volumes. You are not obligedto read it all. It is better to roam for half an hourthrough Boswell than to read a short life of Johnson.This is a day of pellet books, handy volumes,and popular compendiums; we need to learn againthe use and delight of a little reading in big books,in which we can dwell for long or short periods.We need, also, to get over the idea that only learnedpersons and special students can go to original documents.A boy of fifteen will have more fun turningover the state papers and letters and addresses ofWashington and Jefferson and Lincoln than in reading[Pg 171]a short encyclopedia article on one of those greatmen. Just try it the next time you happen to bewandering aimlessly in a public library and see ifyou do not stumble on something interesting. Thewhole “Dictionary of National Biography” is notso much worth owning and, except for purposes ofreference, not so much worth reading as half asmany volumes of first-hand biography.

The first of all original documentary biography isautobiography. A man knows more about his ownlife than anyone else and he is quite as likely totell the truth about it as his official biographer.“The Story of My Life” is always an attractivetitle, no matter who the hero is. If an autobiographyhas continued to find readers for a numberof years, it is likely to be worth looking at. Sometimesmen who are not entitled to be called greathave written great autobiographies. The “Autobiography”of Joseph Jefferson is full of delightfulhumor and sweetness. At a time when the theateris not an institution of which we are proud andactors as they appear in the public prints are usuallybores and vulgarians, Jefferson’s “Autobiography”will give the reader a new sense of the potentialdignity of the stage and of the humanity of theactor’s profession. Among the great men who havewritten autobiographies we have mentioned Mill andFranklin and Grant. Others who have written delightfulvolumes of self-portraiture are Goethe, Gibbon,Trollope, Mrs. Oliphant. As a working rule,I should suggest that when you are interested in a[Pg 172]man, you should first read his autobiography if hewrote one. If he did not, turn to the most completestory of his life, the one that contains whatever lettersand documents have survived. And as a thirdchoice try to find a life of him by some writer whowas intimate with him during his life, or who is anexpert in the subject to which his life was devoted,or who is a master in the art of biography.

LIST OF BIOGRAPHIES

Supplementary to Chapter VIII

This list of biographies does not constitute a catalogueof great men. It merely gives some biographiesthat have literary quality or some otherquality that makes them important. The subject ofthe biography is given first whenever the person writtenabout would naturally come into the mind beforethe author of the book; thus: Samuel Johnson;“Life” by James Boswell. In other cases the authorcomes first; thus: Plutarch; Lives.

John and Abigail Adams. Familiar Letters ofJohn Adams and His Wife, Abigail Adams,During the Revolution.

Joseph Addison. Life, by William John Courthope.

In English Men of Letters.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Life, by Ferris Greenslet.

Alfred the Great. Life, by Walter Besant.

[Pg 173]

Henri Frédéric Amiel. Journal, translated byMrs. Humphrey Ward.

Aurelius Augustinus. Confessions of St. Augustine.

A remarkable autobiography. Pusey’s translationis in Everyman’s Library.

Francis Bacon. Life and Letters, edited by JamesSpedding.

James Matthew Barrie. Margaret Ogilvy.

Barrie’s life of his mother; a delicious book.

George Henry Borrow. The Bible in Spain.

The subtitle defines this interesting book: “Thejourneys, adventures, and imprisonments of an Englishmanin an attempt to circulate the Scriptures inthe peninsula.” Readers of Borrow (see page 75of this Guide) will be interested in his “Life andLetters,” edited by William I. Knapp.

Robert Browning. Life and Letters, by AlexandraLeighton Orr.

James Bryce. Studies in Contemporary Biography.

Edmund Burke. Life, by John Morley.

In English Men of Letters.

Robert Burns. Life, by John Gibson Lockhart.

Julius Cæsar. Life, by James Anthony Froude.Commentaries on the Gallic and Civil Wars.

[Pg 174]

Thomas Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle. Life andLetters, by James Anthony Froude.

Thomas de Quincey. Autobiographic Sketches.Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Reminiscencesof the Lake Poets.

Charles Dickens. Life, by John Forster.

In the edition abridged and revised by the Englishnovelist, the late George Gissing.

George Eliot. Letters and Journals, edited byJohn Walter Cross.

Ralph Waldo Emerson. Life, by Oliver WendellHolmes.

In American Men of Letters. See also Emerson’sletters to Carlyle and John Sterling.

Francis of Assisi. Life, by Paul Sabatier.

In the English translation.

Benjamin Franklin. Autobiography.

William Ewart Gladstone. Life, by JohnMorley.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Autobiography.

Translated in Bohn’s Library.

Oliver Goldsmith. Life, by Austin Dobson. Seealso the biographies by John Forster and WashingtonIrving.

Ulysses Simpson Grant. Personal Memoirs. Life,by Owen Wister (in the Beacon Biographies).

[Pg 175]

Thomas Gray. Letters, edited with a biographicalsketch by Henry Milnor Rideout.

Alexander Hamilton. Life, by Henry CabotLodge.

In American Statesmen.

Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne and His Circle,by Julian Hawthorne. Life, by GeorgeEdward Woodberry (in American Men of Letters).

Oliver Wendell Holmes. Life and Letters, editedby John Torrey Morse, Jr.

Thomas Henry Huxley. Life and Letters, editedby Leonard Huxley.

Washington Irving. Life and Letters, edited byPierre Munroe Irving. Life, by Charles DudleyWarner (in American Men of Letters).

Jeanne d’Arc. Life, by Francis Cabot Lowell.Life, by Andrew Lang. Condemnation andRehabilitation of Jeanne d’Arc, by J. E. J.Quicherat (in the English translation).

Samuel Johnson. Lives of the Poets, selected byMatthew Arnold. Life of Johnson, by JamesBoswell (in two volumes in Everyman’s Library).

John Keats. Life, by Sidney Colvin.

In English Men of Letters.

Charles Lamb. Letters, edited by Alfred Ainger.

[Pg 176]

Robert Edward Lee. Life, by Philip AlexanderBruce. Life and Letters, by John WilliamJones. Recollections and Letters, by R. E. Lee,Jr. Life, by Thomas Nelson Page.

Abraham Lincoln. Life, by John George Nicolayand John Hay. A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln,by John George Nicolay. Lincoln, Masterof Men, by Alonzo Rothschild.

David Livingstone. Last Journals in CentralAfrica. How I Found Livingstone, by HenryMorton Stanley.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Life and Letters,edited by Samuel Longfellow.

Thomas Babington Macaulay. Life and Letters,by George Otto Trevelyan.

John Stuart Mill. Autobiography.

John Milton. Life, by Mark Pattison.

In English Men of Letters.

Napoleon. Life, by John Gibson Lockhart. Life,by William Milligan Sloane. Memoirs of L. A.F. de Bourrienne. Life, by John Holland Rose.

Margaret Oliphant. Autobiography and Letters.

Charles William Chadwick Oman. Seven RomanStatesmen of the Later Republic: theGracchi, Sulla, Crassus, Cato, Pompey, Cæsar.

Samuel Pepys. Diary.

Two volumes in Everyman’s Library.

[Pg 177]

Plutarch. Lives.

In the Elizabethan translation by Thomas North,or the modern translation by Arthur Hugh Clough.An abridged edition of this is published for schoolsby Ginn & Co.

Jacob August Riis. The Making of an American.

Walter Scott. Memoirs of the Life of Sir WalterScott, by John Gibson Lockhart.

There is an abridged edition of Lockhart, editedby J. M. Sloan.

William Shakespeare. The Shakespeare ProblemRestated, by George G. Greenwood. Outlines ofthe Life of Shakespeare, by James OrchardHalliwell-Phillips.

At the present time the most reliable works onShakespeare’s life.

William Tecumseh Sherman. Memoirs. HomeLetters of General Sherman, edited by M. A.DeWolf Howe.

Robert Southey. Life of Nelson.

In Everyman’s Library.

Anthony Trollope. Autobiography.

Izaak Walton. Lives of John Donne, George Herbertand Richard Hooker.

George Washington. Life of Washington, byWashington Irving. The Seven Ages of Washington,[Pg 178]by Owen Wister. Life, by WoodrowWilson.

John Wesley. The Heart of Wesley’s Journal,with an essay by Augustine Birrell, publishedby Fleming-Revell Co.

The journal is found in four volumes of Everyman’sLibrary.

THE READING OF ESSAYS

All literature consists of the written opinionsand ideas, the knowledge and experience, ofindividuals; it is a chorus of human voices. Oftenthe individuality of the creative artist is lost in themagnitude of the work. It is present, necessarily,in every line, but in the highest forms of literature,epic and dramatic poetry, the personal lineaments aredissolved. Shakespeare, sincerest of poets, did notin his dramas reveal his heart or directly utter asingle belief that we can feel sure was the privateconviction of the author, and the attempts to associatelines from Shakespeare with the personal experiencesof the actor of Stratford are invariablygrotesque. Homer, who, according to Mr. Kipling,“smote his bloomin’ lyre” and “winked back” atus, was no such living man; it is likely that even ifthere was a Homer, a poet who made the nucleus of“Iliad,” many hands during several centuries producedthe Greek epics, “The Iliad” and “TheOdyssey,” as we have them. Although Dante writesin the first person, his adventures in worlds beyondthe earth are those of a disembodied spirit, a universalsoul seeing visions in regions where he must[Pg 180]put off something of his personality before he canenter. In the places where his prejudices and localenmities creep into his immense epic of the heavens,his work is least poetic; it is precipitated from theideal to a kind of ghostly guide book, and the voicesof the angels and the winds of the under world forthe moment become still.

The novelist at his best disappears from his work.There is no greater shock than when at the end of“The Newcomes,” Thackeray abruptly wrenches usfrom the deathbed of Colonel Newcome and says thathe, W. M. Thackeray, has just written a story andthat it is now fading away into Fableland. A deviceof printing would save us from the shock; the epilogueought to begin on a new page, and a large“Finis” should follow Colonel Newcome’s death.The person who makes a work of art has the privilegeof talking about himself in a preface; after that hemust stand back and let the stage fill with characters.

Even in great art, however, we do feel the presenceof a man and we are willing to let him step in frontof his stage sometimes and talk in his own person.The best English novelists, Fielding, Thackeray,George Eliot, Meredith, are essayists for pages ata time, and most of us do not resent their intrusion.We like writers who use the capital I.

So we take peculiar delight in that kind of literaturewhich is avowedly a talk, a monologue inwhich an author discourses, not through poetic forms,or through fiction in which other characters are thespeakers, but directly to us as in a private letter or[Pg 181]a spoken lecture. This kind of discourse is calledan essay. The man who talks may pretend to besomething that he is not, and the essayist is oftena writer of fiction portraying only one character.Such was Lamb when he pretended to be Elia; suchwas Swift in many of his pamphlets; such was the“Spectator,” a multiple personality whose wig Addisonand Steele and their friends could put on atwill.

Whether it is a real or a fictitious person whoaddresses us through the essay, the form of the essayis the same, a direct communication from a “me”to a “you.”

The essay may have for its subject anything underthe sun. It may be a short biography with criticalcomment, as in Macaulay’s essays on Addison, onChatham, on Clive, and Carlyle’s essays on Burnsand Scott. Other essays by Macaulay and Carlyleare on a framework of historical narrative. OliverWendell Holmes invented an essay form all hisown in “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,” inwhich the opinions of the autocrat are linked togetherby a pleasant boarding-house romance. And heachieved an unusual triumph when he continued theform in other books, “The Poet at the BreakfastTable” and “The Professor at the Breakfast Table,”and did not suffer the disaster that usually befalls awriter’s effort to repeat a success.

Most of the written philosophy of the modernworld is in the form of essays. In Emerson we havephilosophy in short eloquent discourses, many of[Pg 182]them like sermons. Political arguments and orations,if they have literary quality, like those of Burke andWebster, properly come under the head of essay.And almost all of the important body of literaturecalled criticism is in essay form.

To say that every kind of writing seems to be essaywhich is not something else is, like some other Hibernianstatements, a short way of expressing the truth.To be an artistic essay, to be really worthy the name,a composition must have in it a living personality.Personality is the soul of the essay. We do not admitunder the term, essay, broad as it is, the discoursewhich has only utility to recommend it. An articleon “How Our Presidents are Elected” may be instructive,it may be more necessary to the educationof the young citizen than Leigh Hunt’s chat aboutstage-coaches. But Hunt’s chat is an essay: the otheris not. A present-day indication of the differencebetween the essay and the unliterary form of expositionis the habit of our magazines of classifying allprose pieces that tell us “how” and “what” as“special articles,” whereas “essays”—the editorsdo not print essays if they can help it! If a modernwriter has an idea that would make an essay he istempted to disguise it under some more acceptableshape. But the editors would retort—and withjustice—that they would gladly print essays if theycould get good ones.

There is something frank and immediate in theappeal of an essay; the writer of it must be able totalk continuously well; he has no surprises of plot[Pg 183]to fall back on to wake the interest of an inattentiveauditor; he stands before us on a bare platform withno stage lights or scenery to help him. When he succeeds,his reward is a kind of personal victory, hefinds not only readers but friends. This is especiallytrue of those essayists who discourse of “things ingeneral,” the true essayists, Charles Lamb, WilliamHazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Montaigne, Oliver WendellHolmes, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oliver Goldsmith.The true essayist, like the Walrus in “Alice in Wonderland,”advises us that the time has come

And he proceeds, subject to no obligation in theworld except the great obligation never to be dull.The obligation upon the essayist not to be dull imposesa peculiar obligation upon the reader that heshall be keen-witted. A stupid person may be stirredto attention by a novel or a play, but no stupid personcan enjoy an essay. Indeed a taste for essays isa pretty sure sign of a reader who appreciates theliterary spirit in itself.

Just as the essay form is a kind of test of appreciation,so certain writers are touchstones by which thetaste of the reader may be judged. One such touchstoneis Charles Lamb, the prince of English essayists.Whoever likes Lamb with unfeigned enthusiasm[Pg 184]has passed the frontier of reading and is at homein the universe of books. The reader who hopes tocare for the best in Lamb will not do well, I think,to begin with the most familiar of his essays “ADissertation on Roast Pig”; certainly he will notstop with that, for it has not Elia’s finest smile noreven his jolliest fooling. And of course it has nothis wisdom and pathos. The young reader can in anhour read a half dozen of Lamb’s essays, “OldChina,” “The Superannuated Man,” “Dream Children,”“Imperfect Sympathies,” “The Sanity ofTrue Genius” and “A Chapter on Ears,” and get ataste of his sweet variety. Lamb is one of the easiestof writers to read entire. His attempts at fiction andeven his verse may be disregarded. The true Lamb,the Lamb of the essays and the letters, which are asgood as essays, can be contained in a couple of volumesof moderate size. The essays of Elia areprinted in many cheap editions; I have seen a bookseller’s counter stacked high with copies at twenty-fivecents. As late as 1864, the editor of the firstcomplete edition of Lamb thought that the publicat large knew him but little, though his fameand popularity had increased since his death.I believe that since 1864 his popularity has increasedstill more—those twenty-five cent editionsseem to show that in his own phrase, he has become“endenizened” in the heart of the English-speakingnations.

Perhaps the beginner will be a little perplexed atfirst by the obscurity of Lamb’s allusions to literature,[Pg 185]for though he says that he could “read almost anything,”he has a special liking for the quaint, andhalf the books that he mentions will be unfamiliarto the modern reader. But any book that pleasedhim will be worth looking at, and there is so muchof common humanity in him that one can pass overhis obscure references and still understand and enjoyhim. So that if I recommend as the best possibleshort guide to literature his “Detached Thoughts onBooks and Reading,” I do not forget that the beginnerwill not recognize all the book titles andauthors that Lamb touches with affectionate familiarity.Yet the thoughts are clear enough and havemore of the true spirit of reading packed into themthan is to be found in many a thick volume of literarycriticism. The essays that touch the heartof the simplest reader, such as “Dream Children,”may be read first, and they will lead to the literaryessays, which are the best of all criticisms inthe English language. Knowledge of Lamb isknowledge of literature. He opens the way not onlyto the choicest old books, but to the finest of hiscontemporaries. No man knew better than he thevalue of those friends of his whom we have sethigh in literature; he measured their altitude whilethey were swinging into place among the poeticstars.

As the chief master of literary ceremonies of histime, Lamb will be found at his best not only in hisessays but in his letters. His essays have the informalityof letters, and his letters have much of the[Pg 186]choiceness of phrase, the original turn of thoughtthat distinguish his essays. In his friendly lettersyou can meet almost everybody worth knowing inthat great period of English literature. Lamb isamong the fine few whose correspondence is a workof literary art.

The literature of private letters stands somewherebetween essays and biography and partakes of theinterest of both. The good letter writer is as rarein printed books as in the mail bags that are nowhurrying over the world; and the delight of readinggood printed letters by a distinguished man is somewhatlike the delight of reading a well-written letterfrom a friend. To be sure, a book of letters is nota masterwork of art, but it often brings pleasurewhen the reader is not just in mood for the artisticmasterpiece, for the great poem or novel. I can recommendfor a place in a library even of verylimited dimensions such a collection of letters asMr. E. V. Lucas’s “The Gentlest Art,” or Scoones’s“English Letters.”

It is said that the modern modes of communication,the telegraph, the telephone, the unpardonablepost card, have caused or accompanied a decline inthe art of letter writing. But the mail of the dayhas not yet been sorted; there may be great letterwriters even now sending to their friends epistlesthat we shall some day wish to read in print. Ithardly seems as if the world could be growing sounfriendly that it will let polite correspondence gothe way of some other old-fashioned graces. Certainly[Pg 187]the young man and the young woman cando nothing better for the pleasure of friends andfamily, and nothing better for their own self-cultivation,than to develop the habit of careful andcourteous letter writing. Better than most schoolcourses in literature and composition would be thedaily practice of writing to some brother, sisteror friend. One of the most remarkable youngwriters of the present day owes much of her purityof style, much of her education, to the practice ofwriting—no, of rewriting letters to her manyfriends.

Our friendly letters need not be stiff compositionswritten with the nose to the paper and the tonguesqueezed painfully between the lips. But they shouldbe written with care. A rewritten letter need not bean artificial thing. Why should we not take pains inphrasing a message to a friend? Neither sinceritynor “naturalness” enjoins us to send off the firstblotted drafts of our communications, any more thanfreedom and “naturalness” oblige us to go out inpublic hastily dressed. Candor and spontaneity donot suffer from a care for our phrases and somethought in grooming our style.

If the courtly letter and the well-bred essay arenot the characteristic literary form of our generation,we have some writers of satire and of literary andpolitical opinions who deserve to be ranked amongthe essayists. Mr. F. P. Dunne would have beena pamphleteer in Swift’s time, a writer of the chattyessay in the days of Lamb and Hunt. Since he was[Pg 188]born to bless our time, he finds a wider audience byputting his wit and wisdom, his Celtic blend of ironyand humanity, into the mouth of “Mr. Dooley.”Another essayist of great power, though he is probablynot called an “essayist” in the encyclopedias,is Mark Twain. He promises us an interminableAutobiography, some parts of which have been published.It is to be different from all other autobiographies,for the principle of its construction isthat it is to have no order; he will talk about anythingthat happens to interest him, talk about it untilhe is tired of it and then talk about something else.This unprincipled willfulness of order and subject isthe essayist’s special privilege. No man since Eliahas succeeded better than Mark Twain in keepingup the interest of discursive monologue about thingsin general. Our public does not yet know how greata writer is this master of the American joke, andthere are critics who will cry out that the mentionof Mark Twain and Charles Lamb in the same breathis a violation of good sense. Yet Charles Lamb’s“Autobiography” is, except in its brevity, as liketo the fragments of Mark Twain as the work of twomen can be.

“Below the middle stature,” says Elia of himself,“cast of face slightly Jewish, with no Judaic tingein his complexional religion; stammers abominably,and is therefore more apt to discharge his occasionalconversation in a quaint aphorism, or a poor quibble,than in set and edifying speeches; has consequentlybeen libeled as a person always aiming at wit;[Pg 189]which, as he told a dull fellow that charged himwith it, is at least as good as aiming at dullness. Asmall eater, but not drinker; confesses a partialityfor the production of the juniper berry; was a fiercesmoker of tobacco, but may be resembled to a volcanoburnt out, emitting only now and then an occasionalpuff.... He died ——, 18—, much lamented.”The footnote to the last sentence reads: “To anybody.—Pleaseto fill up these blanks.” That is about asnear to Mark Twain’s manner of fooling as anythingin literature. All the genial essayists are given tojest and quibble and folly. And when you come upona writer whose fantastic whimsies and nonsensicalabandon are charming, be sure to turn the page, foryou will invariably find wisdom and pathos andgreatness of heart.

In one class of essay Mark Twain is past master,the essay of travel. In “A Tramp Abroad” and“Following the Equator,” not to speak of that satireon foolish American tourists, “Innocents Abroad,”we have not only some of the best of Mark Twain’swriting, but examples of a kind of essay in whichvery few authors have succeeded. The traveler whocan see things with his own eye and make the readersee them, with a tramp’s independence of what guidebooks, geographies, and histories say, is the rarest ofcompanions. A good essay in travel looks easy whenit is done, but is very seldom met with because theindependent eye is so seldom placed in a humanhead. Moreover, until recent times of cheap transit,most men of letters have been obliged to stay at[Pg 190]home and make literature of domestic materials orwhat the great world sent them in books. Thoughliterature of travel is very old, going back to thetime when the first educated man visited a neighboringtribe and lived to return home and tell the tale,yet the personal essay of travel is, in its abundance,the product of the nineteenth century, when authorsceased to be poor and could circumnavigate theglobe.

The English historian, Kinglake, is rememberednot for his “Crimean War” but for his “Eothen,”published in 1844. It was so strange and fresh abook of travel that several London publishers rejectedit. An account of a journey in the East that omittedinformation about many great landmarks of Palestineand had not a word of statistics—how could a publisherrecommend it to the British people? Onesecret of the book is that Kinglake, having tried towrite his travels in various forms and having failed,hit on the plan of addressing his account to a friend,and the feeling of freedom which this gave himprevented him, he says, “from robing my thoughtsin the grave and decorous style which I should havemaintained if I had professed to lecture to the public.Whilst I feigned to myself that you, and onlyyou, were listening, I could not by any possibilityspeak very solemnly. Heaven forbid that Ishould talk to my genial friend as though he werea great and enlightened Community, or any otherrespectable Aggregate.” Thus it came about thatKinglake, aiming at one friend, reached the community,[Pg 191]the “Aggregate,” and found in it a host offriends.

In the same year that saw the publication of“Eothen,” Thackeray began his “Journey fromCornhill to Cairo,” another book of travel that standslike a green tree in a world of guide posts. AmongAmerican writers, besides Mark Twain, who havemade delightful books of their journeys abroad, areAldrich, Howells, and Charles Dudley Warner.

These touring essayists are usually more interestedin living people than in monuments of the dead;and they take more pleasure in their own opinionsand experiences than in encyclopedic facts. Theyare good traveling companions because they arestored with wisdom and sympathy before they setsail, and in the presence of strange sights and scenesthey give play to their fancy. So they are akin notso much to the professional traveler, the geographerand student of social conditions, as to the essayistwho is good company at home.

That is what the essayist must be, above all otherwriters—unfailing good company. He may be philosopher,historian, or critic, but if he is to be numberedamong the choice company of essayists, hispages must be lighted by the glow of friendliness,enlivened by the voice of comradeship. Sometimes thisfriendliness takes terribly unfriendly forms, as inthe stinging irony of Swift or the hot thunder andlightning of Carlyle; these preachers seem not to lovetheir audience, but at heart they have sympathy evenfor us whom they browbeat, and it is not we, but the[Pg 192]heavy thoughts with which their souls are burdened,that have banished the smile from their faces.

LIST OF ESSAYS

Supplementary to Chapter VIII

Joseph Addison (1672-1719). Selections from theSpectator.

Edited by Thomas Arnold in the Clarendon PressSeries. There are many school editions of the DeCoverley papers. A sense of unity rather than ofexcellence has singled out the De Coverley papersfor school reading and has made them, consequently,the best known of Addison’s (and Steele’s) work.But only about a third of the De Coverley papersare among the fifty best essays from the Spectator.Owing to the weight of eighteenth-century tradition,under which criticism is still laboring, Addison’s reputationis greater among professional writers aboutliterature than many modern readers, coming withfresh mind to the Spectator, can quite sincerely feelis justified. Only the mature reader who has somehistorical understanding of Addison’s time can appreciatehis cool wit and somewhat pallid humor,and feel how nearly perfect is the adaptation of hisstyle to his purpose and his limited thoughts.

Matthew Arnold (1822-88). Essays in Criticism.Culture and Anarchy.

Arnold’s essays on books and writers are amongthe very best, for he combines deep knowledge of literature[Pg 193]with the charm of the true essayist. Hisessays on “Culture,” like many of the literary sermonsof Carlyle and Ruskin, propound with greatearnestness what every well-bred person takes moreor less for granted. But one reason we take theneed of culture for granted, one reason that suchsermons are becoming obsolete, is because Carlyleand Ruskin and Arnold made their ideas, throughtheir writings and the hosts of writers they influenced,part of the common current thought of ourtime.

Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Essays. Wisdom ofthe Ancients. The Advancement of Learning.

There are many inexpensive editions of the “Essays,”and good texts of Bacon’s other work in Englishprose have been prepared for students. Owingto their brevity the “Essays” are the best knownof Bacon’s prose work. But compared with thelonger works of Bacon, they are scarcely more thantours de force, experiments in epigrammatic condensation.Not the young reader, but the mature readerwho would know the Elizabethan age, its noblestthinker and the most eloquent prose contemporarywith the King James Bible, will wish to read Bacon’slife and works in Spedding’s edition.

Thomas Browne (1605-82). Religio Medici. UrnBurial. Enquiries into Vulgar Errors.

The three or four small books of this very greatessayist are to be found in a volume of the Golden[Pg 194]Treasury Series, and also in the fine little Dentedition.

Edmund Burke (1729-97). Speech on AmericanTaxation. Speech on Conciliation with America.Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol.

A good edition of Burke’s principal speeches isthat edited by F. G. Selby and published by Macmillan.The prescriptions of the schools have madethe “Speech on Conciliation” familiar as a difficultthing to analyze rather than as a magnificent essay(for essay it is, though delivered as a speech). Burke’sother philosophic and political essays are amongthe great prose of his century and should be soughtboth by the student of history and by the reader ofliterature.

John Burroughs. Birds and Poets. Locusts andWild Honey. Wake-Robin.

After Thoreau Mr. Burroughs is the most distinguishedof modern writers on nature and out-of-doorlife.

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). Sartor Resartus.Heroes and Hero-Worship. Past and Present.Critical and Miscellaneous Essays.

“Heroes and Hero-Worship” is, for the beginner,the best, because the clearest, of Carlyle’s work. Carlyle’sopinions become of less and less consequenceas time passes, and he remains great by virtue of thesuperbly eloquent passages in which the poet overcomesthe preacher. He is an illustrious example of[Pg 195]the fact that nothing passes so rapidly as the beliefsof a day which a preacher hurls at the world abouthim—and at posterity,—and also of the fact that eloquenceand beauty survive the original burning questionwhich gave them life and which later generationsare interested in only from a biographic and historicpoint of view. The essay carries in it the journalisticbacteria that make for its speedy dissolution,but the poetic thought, whatever the occasion of itsutterance, outlives circumstance and changes of ideasand taste.

Cicero. Letters and Orations.

In English, in Everyman’s Library.

Samuel McChord Crothers. The Gentle Reader.

The most charming and humorously wise of livingAmerican essayists.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). BiographiaLiteraria. Lectures on Shakespeare.

Both in Bohn’s Library and in Everyman’s Library.Coleridge’s detached opinions on books aregolden fragments of criticism. His “Lectures onShakespeare” are, for a reader with imagination,the most inspiring notes on Shakespeare that we have,though the many and patent inaccuracies make hiscomments distasteful to modern scholars, who preferto commit their own inaccuracies.

William Cowper (1731-1800). Letters.

In the Golden Treasury Series.

[Pg 196]

Daniel Defoe (1661-1731). Essay on Projects.The Shortest Way with the Dissenters.

Defoe was a journalist and pamphleteer who lackedthe charm of the true essayist, but whose prose inessay form is worth reading for its vigor and varietyof idea.

Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859). Selections.

In one volume, published by Houghton, Mifflin& Co. “The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater”is in Everyman’s Library, and also the“Reminiscences of the Lake Poets.” De Quincey’sbeautiful poetic prose is unlike anything before orsince. The “Opium-Eater” belongs perhaps under“Biography,” but may stand here. Its somewhatsensational subject has secured for it, fortunately, awide reading and so kept De Quincey from passinginto the shadowy company of distinguished writersknown only to the few. His essays fill many volumes.Those in the inexpensive volume in the CamelotSeries, published by Walter Scott, include someof the best and should be read, perhaps, before the“Opium-Eater.”

John Dryden (1631-1700).

There are collections of Dryden’s prose, but thebest way to become acquainted with “the father ofmodern English prose” is to run through his completeworks and read the remarkable prefaces to hisplays and poems. In them English criticism, forall the merit of some essays earlier in the seventeenthcentury, really begins.

[Pg 197]

Finley Peter Dunne. Mr. Dooley in Peace andWar. Mr. Dooley in the Hearts of His Countrymen.Mr. Dooley’s Philosophy.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82). Essays. RepresentativeMen. The Conduct of Life. Societyand Solitude.

Emerson’s essays, including “The AmericanScholar” (which is as fresh and pertinent to ourtime as if written yesterday), have been printed ininexpensive editions by Houghton, Mifflin & Co.The volumes named above should be owned in Americanhouseholds. More than Carlyle or Ruskin orany other of the preaching essayists of the nineteenthcentury, Emerson emerges as the prophetic, visionaryspirit who seized and phrased the best moral andspiritual ideas that his time had to offer to futuretimes.

John Florio (1550-1625). Translation of Montaigne’sEssays.

There are several handy editions, notably thepocket edition, published by Dent, of this famoustranslation whereby Montaigne became an Englishclassic.

Oliver Goldsmith (1728-74). The Citizen of theWorld.

Among the lighter satirical essays of the eighteenthcentury “The Citizen of the World” is second onlyto the Spectator, if not equal to it.

[Pg 198]

William Hazlitt (1778-1830). Essays.

A good selection appears in the Camelot Series.“Though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays,”says Stevenson, “we cannot write like Hazlitt.”(See Hazlitt’s “English Comic Writers” and “Lectureson the English Poets” for his studies of Shakespeare).

Lafcadio Hearn. Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan.Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese InnerLife.

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-94). Autocrat ofthe Breakfast Table. Professor at the BreakfastTable. Poet at the Breakfast Table.

In Everyman’s Library and in inexpensive editions,published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. A wise,witty, beautifully lucid mind. Holmes snatched philosophyfrom the library and brought it to the breakfasttable so that the poorest boarder goes to his day’swork from the company of an immortal who hasmet him halfway and talked to him without condescension.

James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784-1859). Essays.

One volume of selections in the Camelot Series.Also in two volumes with his poems in the TempleClassics (Dent & Co.). Young readers who will lookat Hunt’s essay “On Getting Up on Cold Mornings”will not need to be urged further into his delightfulsociety.

[Pg 199]

Richard Jefferies (1848-87). An English Village.Field and Hedgerow. The Open Air.The Story of My Heart.

Samuel Johnson (1709-84). Lives of the Poets.

Students of literature will wish to read one ortwo of Johnson’s criticisms. He was a much greaterman than writer, better as a talker and letter writerthan as an essayist. A good selection from the“Lives of the Poets” is edited by Matthew Arnold.

Charles Lamb (1775-1834). Essays of Elia.

See pages 183-6 of this Guide.

Abraham Lincoln (1809-65). Letters andSpeeches.

To be found in the complete works, edited byNicolay and Hay, and in several small volumes ofselections; the volume in Everyman’s Library hasan introduction by James Bryce.

James Russell Lowell (1819-91). Among MyBooks. My Study Windows. Democracy andOther Addresses. Political Essays. Letters.

The foremost American critic. Interest in thebookish and literary side of Lowell should not leadus to overlook his ringing political essays, notablythat on Lincoln, written during the war and remarkableas having phrased at the moment the judgmentof the next generation.

Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59). Essays.

[Pg 200]

There are many editions of the more familiar essaysof Macaulay, especially those that have formeda part of school and college reading courses. Theessay on Milton, unfortunately prescribed in collegepreparatory work, is one of the poorest. Those onClive and Hastings, also often prescribed, are amongthe best. It is the prevailing fashion to underrateMacaulay as a critic, as it was perhaps in his lifetimethe fashion to overrate him. He is lastinglypowerful and invigorating, a great essayist, if onlybecause he knows so well what he wishes to say andknows precisely how to say it. He is not subtle,not poetic, but his clear large intellect is still a brightlight through the many-hued mists of Victorian criticism.

John Milton (1608-74). Areopagitica, etc.

Milton’s prose is difficult to read and only a littleof it is worth reading except by the student of Miltonand the student of history. The noblest passagesof Milton’s prose have been collected in a single volume,edited by Ernest Myers, and published byKegan Paul, Trench & Co.

John Muir. The Mountains of California. OurNational Parks.

John Henry Newman (1801-90). Idea of a University.Apologia pro Vita Sua.

An admirable volume of selections, edited byLewis E. Gates, is published by Henry Holt & Co.Newman’s “Apologia” belongs properly in our list[Pg 201]of Biography, but it is really an essay in defense ofcertain of his ideas. Owing to the fact that Newman’swork is largely religious controversy and discoursedirected to practical rather than artistic ends,his literary power and the beauty of his prose havenot won him so many readers as he deserves.

Blaise Pascal (1623-62). Provincial Letters.

In the English translation of Thomas M’Crie.

Walter Horatio Pater (1839-94). The Renaissance.Appreciations.

The finest English critic of his generation. Contraryto a current impression that Pater is for the“ultra-literary,” most of his work is clear and simple;the essays on Wordsworth and Coleridge are thebest to which a reader of those poets can turn.

John Ruskin (1819-1900). Sesame and Lilies.Crown of Wild Olive. Queen of the Air.Frondes Agrestes.

There are fourteen volumes of Ruskin in Everyman’sLibrary. “Sesame and Lilies” and “FrondesAgrestes” (selected passages from “Modern Painters”)have been often reprinted. The best of Ruskin’sprose is very beautiful, the worst is tediously prolix.He regretted that his eloquence took attention fromhis subject matter, but like Carlyle, he lives by hiseloquence and poetry rather than by his opinions andteachings.

Sydney Smith (1771-1845). The Peter PlymleyLetters. Essays.

[Pg 202]

In one volume, published by Ward, Lock & Co.After Swift, perhaps the wittiest English essayistwho used his keen weapons in the interests of justice.

Richard Steele (1671-1729). Essays from theTatler and the Spectator.

Steele is usually found with Addison in selectionsfrom the Spectator.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1849-94). FamiliarStudies of Men and Books. Memories and Portraits.An Inland Voyage. Travels with a Donkey.

The best thoughts of this romancer and some ofthe best of his writing are in his essays.

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745). Selected Prose.

Selections from his prose writings are to be foundin a volume of the Camelot Series and also in asmall volume published by D. Appleton & Co. Notuntil the reader is familiar with “Gulliver’s Travels”and has some understanding of Swift’s life andthe historical background of his work, can he feel thegenius of the satirical essays and political lampoons.Swift is often repellent to those who only half understandhim, but he grows in power and dignity to thosewho appreciate his underlying righteousness.

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63).Book of Snobs. Roundabout Papers. FromCornhill to Cairo. English Humorists.

Thackeray is an essayist by temperament andshows it in his novels. His satirical and literary[Pg 203]essays may be reserved until after one has read hisnovels, but they will not be overlooked by anyonewho likes Thackeray or who likes good essays.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-62). A Week onthe Concord and Merrimac Rivers. Walden.Excursions. The Maine Woods. Cape Cod.Spring. Summer. Winter. Autumn.

Thoreau’s work is one long autobiographical journalranging from brief diary notes on nature to fullrounded essays. A prose poet of nature, and secondto Emerson only as a philosophic essayist on natureand society. His greatness becomes more and moreevident in an age when “nature writers” are popular.

Izaak Walton (1593-1683). The Complete Angler.In Everyman’s Library.

Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900). In theWilderness. As We Go. Backlog Studies. Inthe Levant.

A charming essayist, a humorous lover of booksand nature. His reputation has waned somewhatduring the past twenty years, but Americans cannotafford to lose sight of him.

Daniel Webster (1782-1852). Speeches and Orations.

In one volume, published by Little, Brown & Co.The literary quality of Webster’s orations entitlesthem to a place among American essays.

THE READING OF FOREIGN CLASSICS

Since there is not time in the short life of manto read all the good books written in one language,the young reader, or even the person who hasformed the habit of reading, may feel that he neednever go beyond the books of his own race. In asense this is true. Perhaps it is especially true forus who are born to the English language. For theEnglish people, however insular they may be in somerespects, have always been great explorers of thelands and the thoughts of other races. They haveplundered the literature of their neighbors andloaded the borrowed riches into their own books. Inthe Elizabethan age some writers seem to have regardedit as a patriotic duty to render for their countrymenthe choicest literature of France and Italyand Spain. While they were robbing their neighborsacross the channel, they were also building Englishclassics out of the literary monuments of “insolentGreece and haughty Rome.” And for manygenerations English writers, like those of othermodern countries, have been brought up on theclassics.

So we find incorporated in English literature the[Pg 205]culture of the entire ancient and modern world, andone who should read only English books could stillhave a full mind and a cultivated spirit. We cannotsay, therefore, that it is necessary, in order to realizethe true purpose of reading, to make excursions intothe literature of foreign countries. But we can pointout the advantage of such excursions, and I wouldinsist on the ease with which the ordinary person,who has enjoyed only a limited formal education,can make himself acquainted with foreign languagesand literatures if he will.

In our time we have schools to teach everythingknown to man from advertising to zoölogy. It iswell that our schools are broadening in interest andthat every kind of knowledge is being organized sothat it can be imparted. But there is a danger thatwe may get into the habit of leaving too much forthe schools, that we may come to think that theschools monopolize all knowledge, or at least all themethods of teaching. This would be a great pity ina nation that is proud of self-made men. We, of allpeoples, must remember what Walter Scott said, thatthe best part of a man’s education is that which hegives himself. Schools and universities only startus in a methodical way, on a short well-surveyedpath, into the world of knowledge. Most of thelearning of educated men and women is acquiredafter they have left the college gates, and anyonemay set out on the road to knowledge with littledirect assistance from the schools. The better, theeasier for us, if we can go to college; but if we[Pg 206]cannot have the advantage of formal education weneed not resign ourselves to ignorance.[4]

Most young people, however, will think of Greek,Latin, French, and German as difficult and “learned”mysteries accessible only to the fortunate whocan go to the higher schools, and of use only to thosewho intend to enter scientific and literary professions.If I say that with no knowledge of any languagebut English you can teach yourself any otherlanguage well enough to read it, I hope you will notshake your head and say that such self-teachingis possible only to extraordinary intellects. Manycommonplace persons have learned languages byreading them, with no equipment but a lexicon, ashort grammar, and an interesting text. Perhaps itis not fair on top of that statement to cite thecase of Elihu Burritt, for he was an exceptionalman. But as readers will learn from his excellent“Autobiography,” he began his studies under verydifficult circumstances; so that, taking all thingstogether, talent and conditions, many a young man canstart where he began and under no greater disadvantages.Burritt would have gone some way on theroad to learning even if his endowments had beensmall. And with no genius but the genius of industrywe can follow for a little distance his democraticcourse.

Burritt was a blacksmith by trade. He had onlysuch education as he could get in a country academy,where his brother was the master. In his leisure he[Pg 207]studied mathematics and languages, and before hedied he had acquired a reading knowledge of fiftytongues and dialects, ancient and modern. Yet hewas not a self-absorbed man who shut himself up inprofitless culture. He became a world-wide apostleof peace. The study of languages taught him thatall men are brothers. If he could learn fifty foreignlanguages, any of us can learn one, and through thatone we too shall understand that we are not anisolated people, not the only people in the world. Weshall meet in their native tongue some great groupof our brothers, the Germans, the French, the Italians,learn their ideals and broaden our own. It isimpossible to learn Greek and Latin and not to feelhow close we are to the peoples of two thousandyears ago. It is impossible to learn French orGerman and keep in our hearts any of that contemptfor “foreigners” which ignorant and provincial peopleso stupidly cherish.

We shall arrive, too, through knowledge of anotherlanguage at a finer appreciation of our own language,its shades and distinctions, its variety andpower. We shall understand better the great Englishwriters, many of whom have known something offoreign literature and refer in a familiar way toFrench and German and ancient classics, as if theytook for granted in their readers an acquaintancewith the literature of other nations.

How shall we go to work to learn foreign languages?The answer is as simple as the prescriptionfor reading English. Open a book written in the[Pg 208]foreign language and take each word in orderthrough a whole sentence. Then read that samesentence in a good translation. Then write down allthe words that seem to be nouns and all the wordsthat seem to be verbs. After that read the sectionsin the grammar about verbs and nouns. The otherparts of speech will take care of themselves fora while. Then try another sentence. I know oneyoung person who read through a French book andgot at its meaning by guessing at the words andthen returning over those which appeared oftenestand which, of course, were the commonest. It ispossible by a comparison of the many uses of thesame word to squeeze some meaning out of it. Thedictionary and the grammar will give the rest.

The foreign book stores, the publishers of textbooks, and the purveyors of home teaching methodsthat are advertised in the more reputable journalsoffer language books that are of real assistance. Thescope of this Guide does not admit any detailedinstruction in the methods of learning foreign languages.I can only insist that with a few books andperseverance anyone can learn, not to speak, perhapsnot to write, but to read a strange tongue. And Isay to the boy or the girl who is going to the highschool that not to take the courses in Greek, Latin,French and German is to throw away a precious opportunity.Upon the grounding of those few yearsin school, the young receptive years, what a knowledgeof languages one can build! The notion, alltoo prevalent, that foreign languages, especially[Pg 209]Greek and Latin, are of no use to the boy or thegirl who is going “right into business,” is one ofthe dullest fallacies with which a hard-workingpractical people ever blinded its soul. Playing thepiano and learning to sing, nay, even going to church,are of no use in business. But who will be so foolishas to devote his whole life to business? Burritt, theblacksmith boy, taught himself languages. The high-schoolboy who is going to be a blacksmith can beginto study languages before he picks up the tools of hisbread-winning labor. If this seems like the vainidealism of a bookish person, let me make an appealto your patriotism. Do you know that this land ofopportunity and prosperity is not developing so manyfundamentally educated men and women as weshould expect from our vast system of public schoolsand our many universities? One reason is that wehave so many bread-and-butter Americans who allowtheir boys and girls to stay away from those classesin Greek and Latin and French and German whichour high schools provide at such great cost to thegenerous taxpayer. All we lack in America is thewill to use the good things we have provided for us.

Well, we who are interested in the reading of goodbooks will make up our minds to get by hook or crooka little taste of some language besides English. Ifwe truly care for poetry we shall try to read Vergiland Homer and Dante and Goethe. To becomegradually familiar with one great foreign poet, sothat we know him as we know Shakespeare, is toconquer a whole new world.

[Pg 210]

The easiest books to read in a foreign tongue areprose fictions, in which the interest of the story spursthe reader on and makes him eager for the meaningsof the words. Text-book publishers issue inexpensiveeditions of modern French and German fictions,which are, of course, selected by the editorswith a view to their fitness for young readers. TheFrench or German book which has become a recognizedclassic in its native land and is considered byeditors of school books to be a good classroom textis likely to have universal literary qualities, simplicity,purity of style, and right-mindedness. I find inadmirable inexpensive texts representative stories byDumas, Zola, George Sand, Halévy, Daudet, PierreLoti, Balzac, Hugo, About, and other French masters,and by Freytag, Baumbach, Sudermann, andHeyse among modern German writers. French andGerman drama and history lie but a step beyond.I, for one, have read more of these school editions offoreign classics since I left school than when theywere part of school-day duty, and I am still gratefulfor the convenient notes and lists of hard words.As one with only an imperfect reading knowledge offoreign languages, I can testify with the right degreeof authority to the pleasure of the ordinary personin reading unfamiliar tongues. If one has a fairgrounding of Latin, the exploration of Italian andSpanish is a tour through a cleared and easy country.With Professor Norton’s wonderful prose translationand with the text of Dante in the Temple Classics,where the English version faces the Italian, page[Pg 211]for page, one can read Dante as one would readChaucer. And there could be no better way to learnthe difference between prose and poetry than to turnnow and again to Longfellow’s truly poetic translationand feel how his verse lifts in places to somethingthat the prose cannot quite attain.

If we are not persuaded that our soul’s good dependson a knowledge of foreign languages, we canmake the acquaintance of the classics of other nationsin the best English renderings. Our greatest book,the King James Bible, is a translation, so great atranslation that in point of style it is said by somecritical scholars to be better than its Greek and Hebreworiginals. In general it is true that translationfalls below the original or radically changes its character.Until the nineteenth century, when the scholarsof our race began to give us literal translationsof the classics, which although “literal” are stillidiomatic English, translators in our tongue havebeen, as a rule, willful conquerors who dominated thenative spirit of their originals with the overwhelmingpower of the English language and spirit. Theyanglicized the foreign masterpiece so that its ownfather would not recognize it. The result was often,as in Pope’s “Iliad,” a new English classic but nota good pathway to the house of the foreign poet.

Pope’s “Iliad” is a “classic” but it is poorHomer and not the best of Pope. His genius ismuch better expressed in “The Rape of the Lock.”And Homer’s genius is much better preserved for usin the simple prose of Leaf, Myers, Butcher, and[Pg 212]Lang. Professor G. H. Palmer’s “Odyssey” is sogood that no translator hereafter has a right to pleadas excuse for the failure of his version of any classicthat “the English language will not do it.” MatthewArnold’s essay “On Translating Homer” willstimulate the reader’s interest in the art of translationand help bring him near to the Greek spirit.But this essay goes into subtleties which may bafflethe beginner. Any beginner, old enough to read atall, can read Professor Palmer’s “Odyssey.” Manybooks of Greek stories and legends of the heroes havebeen prepared for young readers. “Old GreekStories” by C. H. Hanson, or A. J. Church’s booksof Greek life and story, together with Bulfinch’s“Age of Fable,” will initiate one into the Homericmysteries.[5]

After the reader has advanced far enough to beinterested in philosophy, he will wish to read Epictetusand Plato. Jowett’s “Plato” is one of the greattranslations of the nineteenth century. The readerof Browning will not omit his noble, if somewhatdifficult translation of the “Agamemnon” of Æschylus.From the early Elizabethans to the lateVictorians the works of the English poets are starredwith bits from the Latin and Greek poets. One ofthe finest of translations from the Greek is the“Theocritus” of Charles Stuart Calverley, the Englishpoet, who loved all things beautiful and enjoyedall things absurd. Calverley’s translations from theclassics and his delicious burlesques and parodies will[Pg 213]give one a new sense of how close together the differentmoods of literature may lie in the same heart,both the heart of the poet and the heart of the reader.

If an artistic translation of a foreign work hasnot been made or is not easily accessible, a literaltranslation is of great service to the casual reader.Even in the preparation of lessons in Latinand Greek a literal translation, honestly used, helpsone to learn the original language and extends one’sEnglish vocabulary. The reason there is a ban uponthe “pony” in school is that people ride it too hardand do not learn to walk on their own feet. Out ofschool we can get much from literal renderings of theclassics, such as are to be found in the cheap seriesof Handy Literal Translations, published by Hinds& Co. Their fault is that they are printed in tryinglysmall type, but this is a defect due to theirmerits of compactness and low cost.

The best translation of Vergil is Conington’sprose version, which has become an English classic.The introduction is one of the best essays on translating.There are several renderings of Vergil intoEnglish verse. Dryden’s is the best known, and isof interest to the reader of English principally becauseDryden did it. He brought to Vergil somewhatthe same ideals of translation and the same kindof skill that Pope brought to the “Iliad.” WilliamMorris’s version is probably the most fluent andpoetic of modern translations of Vergil into Englishverse.

The Latin poet who has been most often translated,[Pg 214]and by the greatest variety of talent, is Horace,whom our forefathers thought that every gentlemanshould be able to quote. The accomplished translatorlikes to match his skill against the clever Roman,to render his light philosophy, his keen phrase,his beautiful brevity. The American will like thefree and joyous “Echoes from the Sabine Farm,”by the late Eugene Field and his brother, Mr. RoswellField, a book that must have made the shadeof Horace inquire appreciatively in what part ofthe world Chicago is “located.”

Modern literature in all countries has attracted thereaders of other countries, and the work of translationis going on continuously. Not only the greatforeign classics of the last three hundred years, buta host of lesser writers on the continent of Europehave made their way into English. At the beginningof the nineteenth century there was a new interestin German literature and philosophy—indeed, therewas a new German literature. Goethe was translatedby Sir Walter Scott and others. Coleridge translatedSchiller’s “Wallenstein.” Carlyle made a numberof translations from German romance, among thema glowing version of Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meister,”which, in part, suggested his own strange masterpiece,“Sartor Resartus.” Bayard Taylor’s poeticversion of “Faust” is of interest to the Americanreader and is no mean representation of the original.

Hugo and Dumas are as well known to us asScott and Dickens. Who has not read “Les Miserables”and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and[Pg 215]“The Toilers of the Sea”; “The Count of MonteCristo” and “The Three Musketeers”? “TheDevil’s Pool,” “Mauprat” and “The Little Fadette”by George Sand have been English literature thesemany years. So, too, have “Eugénie Grandet” and“Le Père Goriot” by Balzac, the first of the greatFrench realists whose work has come to us directlyin translation and indirectly through the English andAmerican writers whom they have influenced.

As for later French fiction we can trust to thetaste of English translators, as we can to the judgmentof the editors of the school texts, to give us thebest, that is, the best for us. The finest of Maupassantcomes to us politely introduced by Mr. HenryJames in “The Odd Number.” Bourget, Daudet,Pierre Loti, Mérimée, Halévy, the great Belgianpoet, Maeterlinck, who belongs to French literature,Anatole France in his beautiful story, “The Crimeof Sylvestre Bonnard,” the poet Rostand—these andothers we have naturalized in English. It is toFrance that we turn for the best criticism, and thereader who gets far enough to be interested in thatbranch of literature will find that many of the criticsof our race have been pupils of the French criticsfrom Sainte-Beuve to Brunetière and Hennequin.

Other countries besides France, Germany, and Englandhave produced literature which has crossed theboundaries of the nations and become the possessionof the world. The Russian novel is, perhaps, the mostpowerful that the nineteenth century has seen, butthe American reader may as well leave it until he has[Pg 216]read a great deal of English fiction. Then he willfind that Turgenieff, Tolstoi, Dostoevski are giants ina giant nation. Poland has one writer who is knownto English readers, Sienkiewicz, whose “Quo Vadis”and “With Fire and Sword” are among the greatnovels of our age. I should recommend that admirersof “Ben Hur” read “Quo Vadis” and get alesson in the difference between a masterpiece and apleasant book that is very much less than a masterpiece.Readers who think there is some special virtuein American humor—and no doubt there is—oughtto know at least one of the great books of Spain,“Don Quixote.” Spanish has become an importantlanguage to us who are learning about our neighbors,“the other Americans,” and are trying to wake upour lagging trade relations with them and our backwardsympathies. The young man going into businesswill find some good chances open to him if heknows Spanish, and, what is perhaps quite as important,he will find that Spain, too, has a modernliterature.

We cannot know all foreign literatures, but we canknow at least one. Whether we visit in spirit Italyor Norway or Spain or Russia, we shall be learningthe great lesson of literature, that our brothers theworld over are doing and thinking and hoping thesame things that we are. Reading foreign books[6] isthe cheapest and perhaps the wisest kind of travel,for the body rests while the mind goes abroad.

THE PRESS OF TO-DAY

If we were guiding an intelligent stranger fromanother planet through our busy world, beforewhat institution should we pause with greatest anxietyto explain to our alien comrade its meaning, itsvalue? Perhaps before the church, yet when we rememberedthat the Bible and other works of religionand poetry are in our homes, we could not bring ourselvesto tell our companion that the church is theheart, the indispensable fountain of our religious life.The school then? Maybe that, yet Knowledge spendsin the school but relatively few hours of her day-longministrations. We might wax eloquent before thehospitals, but they are only repairing some of thedamages which man and nature have inflicted upona small part of the race, and it is the healthy majorportion of humanity that carries on the life of theworld and does whatever is worth doing. It wouldbe simple to explain the thundering factories whosedin drowns the voice of the expositor, to tell how inyonder building are made the machines that cut andthresh the wheat that feeds the world, and how inthe building beyond are made the cars that bringthe wheat from the fields to the teeming towns. All[Pg 218]these institutions are wonderful, all are essential inour life. Yet greater than any, more difficult to explain,inspiring and disheartening, grinding good andevil, is the press, from which our visitor could seestreaming forth thousands of tons of paper blackenedwith the imprint of little types.

The stranger could see that. We should have tomake it clear to him that those types are turningover once a year almost all that man hasever known and thought. The contemporary press isengaged in three kinds of activity: the reprinting ofold books, the printing of new ones, and the printingof the magazines, periodicals, newspapers, and othercommunications relating to the conduct of daily business.

The first activity, the printing of old books, is anunmixed blessing. Every book, great or small, thatthe world has found worth preserving is continuouslyrevived and redistributed to our generation. Neverbefore were the classics of the ages so cheap, soaccessible to the common man.

Toward the second product of the whirling presses,the books of to-day, our attitude may easily becometoo censorious or too complacent. It is the fashionto slander the productions of one’s own age and recallwith a sigh the good old days when there weregiants. But in those good old days it was fashionable,too, to underrate or ignore the living and praisethe dead. When the Elizabethan age was waningbut not vanished, Ben Jonson wrote: “Now thingsdaily fall, wits grow downward, and eloquence grows[Pg 219]backward.” And yet Milton, the greatest poet afterShakespeare, was even then a young man and hadnot done his noblest work. A century later Popewrote:

But Chaucer is more alive now than he was inPope’s day, and both Dryden and Pope are brightlymodern in diction if not in thought. Pope’s ideais not so much that his contemporaries are unworthyof long life as that changes in taste and language willsoon make their work obsolete. He pleads for hiscontemporaries, yet like many another critic he islaudator temporis acti, a praiser of times past anddone. His injunction that we befriend and commendour neighbor’s merit before it speedily perishesis generous but fails to recognize that merit, truemerit, does not die. This is certainly true in ourtime when books are so easily manifolded and comeinto so many hands that there is little likelihood ofa real poet’s work being accidentally annihilated,or failing to find a reader somewhere in the world.

In the nineteenth century pessimism about current[Pg 220]literary productions was almost chronic, at leastamong professional critics. The Edinburgh Reviewersand the other Scotch terrier, Thomas Carlyle,set the whole century to growling at itself. Thoreau,with a humorous parenthesis to the effect that it ispermissible to slander one’s own time, says thatElizabethan writers—and he seems to be speakingnot of the poets but the prose writers—have a greatervigor and naturalness than the more modern, andthat a quotation from an Elizabethan in a modernwriter is like a green bough laid across the page.Stevenson says we are fine fellows but cannot writelike Hazlitt (there is no reason why we shouldwrite like Hazlitt, or like anybody else in particular).Emerson, tolerant and generous toward hiscontemporaries, looks askance at new books, implieswith an ambiguous “if” that “our times are sterilein genius,” and lays down as a practical rule, “Neverread any book that is not a year old,”—which beingtranslated means, “Encourage literature by starvingyour authors.”

As we have said, most of the great authors aredead because most of the people ever born in thisworld are dead. And it is natural for bookmen toglance about their libraries, review the dignifiedbacks of a hundred classics, and then, looking themodern world in the face, say, “Can any of youfellows do as well as these great ones?” To be sure,one age cannot rival the selected achievements of ahundred ages. But the Spirit of Literature is abroadin our garish modern times; she has been continuously[Pg 221]occupied for at least three centuries in everycivilized country in the world. And, as Pope pleads,let us welcome the labors of those whom the Spiritof Literature brushes with her wing.

So far as one can judge, a very small part of contemporaneouswriting has literary excellence in anydegree. But a similarly small portion of the writingof any age has had lasting excellence; and more menand women, more kinds of men and women, are to-dayexpressing themselves in print than ever in theworld before. Since no one person has to read manybooks, the world is not unduly burdened with them;it can read, classify, and reject or preserve all thatthe presses are capable of putting forth. “Thetrash with which the press now groans” was foolishcant a hundred years ago, when Jane Austen satiricallyquoted it.[7] And it is more threadbare now thanit was then. There are alive to-day a goodly companyof competent writers of novels; I could name ten.I believe, too, that there are genuine poets, thoughwe do not dare name young poets until they are dead.History and biography are, regarded as a collectiveinstitution, in flourishing state, though, to be sure, thework of art in those departments of literature as inpoetry and fiction, appears none too frequently. Itis our part to join in the work of that great critic,the World, encourage the good and discourage thebad, and help make the best book the “best seller.”

It would be foolish to hope for that ideal conditionin which only authors of ability should write[Pg 222]books. “Were angels to write, I fancy we shouldhave but few folios.” But writing is a human affair,and human labor is necessarily wasteful. We haveto endure the printing of a hundred poor books andwe have to support a score of inferior writers inorder to get one good book and give one talentedwriter a part of his living. Thousands of machinesare built and thrown away before the Wrights makeone that will fly, and they could not make theirs ifother men had not tried and in large part failed,bequeathing them a little experience. A hundredmen for a hundred years contributed to the makingof Bell’s telephone. We do not grudge the wastedmachines, the broken apparatus in the laboratory.So, too, when hundreds of minor poets print theirlittle books and suffer heartache and disappointmentfor the sake of the one volume of verse that showsgenius, we need not groan amid the whir of thepresses; we need only contemplate with sympathyand understanding the pathetic losses and brave gainsof human endeavor. Numberless books must be bornand die in order that the one or two may live. Weshall try to ignore the minor versifier as gently aspossible, to suppress the cheap novelist as firmly aswe can, and give our dollar for the good book whenwe think we have found it.

The third part of the printed matter publishedfrom day to day, periodicals and magazines and newspapers,presents a complex problem. It is in placefor us to say a word about it, for this is avowedlya guide to reading and not a guide to literature, and[Pg 223]most of us spend, properly, a good third of our readingtime over magazines and newspapers. Muchdepends on our making ourselves not only intelligentreaders of books but intelligent readers of periodicalsand papers.

The magazine industry in America is colossal, andits chief support is that amazing business institution,American advertising. The public pays a big taxon flour, shoes, clothes, paint, and every other commodityin order that advertisers may pay for spacein periodicals and newspapers. The periodicals andnewspapers, in turn, pay writers from a fiftieth to atwentieth of the income from advertising in orderto make the advertising medium interesting enoughfor people to buy it.

In this the magazine manufacturers are on thewhole successful. Perhaps there are sages andseers who can live content with bound books andprefer that those books should be at least fifty yearsold. I know of one man, a constant reader of poetryand philosophy, who tried the experiment of retiringto his library and stopping all his subscriptions tothe current periodicals. The experiment was an utterfailure, because he was a man of active intelligence,and because, in truth, the magazines, manyof them, are very good. No less a philosopher thanProfessor William James said in a recent article:“McClure’s Magazine, The American Magazine, Collier’sWeekly and in its fashion, The World’s Work,constitute together a real popular university....It would be a pity if any future historian were to[Pg 224]have to write words like these: ‘By the middle ofthe twentieth century the higher institutions of learninghad lost all influence over public opinion in theUnited States. But the mission of raising the toneof democracy which they had proved themselves solamentably unfitted to exert, was assumed with rareenthusiasm and prosecuted with extraordinary skilland success by a new educational power; and for theclarification of their human preferences, the peopleat large acquired the habit of resorting exclusivelyto the guidance of certain private literary ventures,commonly designated in the market by the affectionatename of ten-cent magazines.’ Must not weof the colleges see to it that no historian shall eversay anything like this?”

The possible failure, here implied, of universitiesto lead in the subjects which they profess to studyhas already become actual in the departments ofEnglish literature. Of this we shall say somethingin the next chapter.

It is, however, the other side of the matter that isimportant. Our best magazines are vital: they areenlisting the services of every kind of thinker andteacher and man of experience, and they are printingas good fiction and verse as they can get; certainlythey are not willfully printing inferior work. Butit is not the fiction or the verse in the magazines thatis of greatest moment, even when it is good. Thevalue of the magazine lies in the miscellaneous contributionson science, politics, medicine, and currentaffairs, which seem to me of continuously good substance[Pg 225]from month to month. And the literary qualityof these articles (the words I quoted from ProfessorJames are from a fine article printed in a popularmagazine, McClure’s) is, on the whole, just as highas the average in the old Edinburgh Review, throughwhich Sydney Smith, Lord Jeffrey, and others, withstinging and brilliant essays, helped to reform thatterribly brutal England of the early nineteenthcentury.

It is easy to find fault with the magazines. Youmay say that the Atlantic Monthly is pseudo-literaryand seems to be living on the sweepings of a NewEngland culture of which all the important representativesdied twenty years ago. You may say thatthe Nation often sounds as if it were written by themore narrow-minded sort of college professor. Youmay say that the Outlook is permeated by a weakreligiosity. All the same, if you see on a man’s tablethe Atlantic Monthly, the Nation, and the Outlook,and the copies look as if they had been read, youmay be reasonably sure that that man appreciatesgood writing and has a just-minded view of publicquestions.

Of the lighter, more “entertaining” magazinesthere are, from an ideal point of view, too many, andthe large circulation of some of the sillier ones indicateswhat we all know and need not moralize about—thatthere are millions of uneducated people whowant something to read. It is, however, a matter forcongratulation that some of the best magazines,McClure’s, Collier’s, The Youth’s Companion,[Pg 226]Everybody’s, have large circulations, and that ourrespectable and well-bred old friends, Scribner’s,Harper’s, the Century, are national institutions.[8]

It is difficult to understand how the Americanmagazine and the American newspaper are productsof the same nation; the magazine is so honestand so able, the newspaper so dishonest and soignorant except in its genius for making moneyand sending chills up the back. We will not wasteour time by turning the rest of this chapter into anarticle demanding a “reform” of the newspapers,but in the spirit of a conscientious guide of youngreaders we will make two or three observations.

The advertising departments of the Americannewspaper, with few exceptions, differ from the advertisingdepartments of all reputable magazines, inthat the newspaper proprietors take no responsibilityfor the character of the advertisements. The magazinesreject all advertisements that the managersknow to be fraudulent. The newspapers do not rejectthem. Let the reader draw his own conclusions asto the trustworthiness of his daily paper as a businessinstitution and a purveyor of the truth. Whenwe have a generation of Americans who understandthe business dishonesty of the newspaper and whatit implies about the character of the news and theeditorials, the newspapers will be better in all departments.[Pg 227]Meanwhile, all our writing about thelow quality of our daily press will have littleeffect.

In the matter of journalistic honesty in the newsand editorial departments, let us understand this:With few exceptions, American newspapers are soirresponsible that no unsupported statement appearingin them is to be counted on as the truth or asa fair expression of what the men in the editorialoffices believe to be the truth. Of course, much ofevery daily paper is true, because the proprietorshave no motive in most cases for telling anythinguntrue. In order to give some weight to theseopinions I may say that for a number of yearsI was an exchange editor and read newspapers fromall parts of America. Also, for a number of yearsI acted as private secretary to a distinguished personwhose name is often in the newspapers, and whoseposition is such that no editor can have any motive,except the desire to print a “story,” for connectingthe name with any untrue idea. From a collectionof fifty clippings made from American newspapersin a period of two years I find over thirty that aremainly incorrect and contain ideas invented at thereporter’s or the editor’s desk; more than ten thatare entire fabrications; and five that are not onlyuntrue, but damaging to the peace of mind of thesubject and other interested persons. And under allthis is not a touch of malice, for toward that personthe entire press and public are friendly. Imagine thelies that are told about a person to whom the editors[Pg 228](or, rather, the owners) are indifferent or unfriendly!

When one considers the energy and enterprise ofthe newspaper, it is difficult to understand why thereis not more literary ability, at least of the humblerkind, in the news columns, the reviews and the editorialcomments. One reason is, perhaps, that themagazines take all the best journalistic ability, sofar as that ability consists in skill in the use of language;any journalist or writer on special subjectsprints his work in the magazines if he can, and thenewspapers get what is left. Editorial writing is atsuch a low pitch that there are only two or threereal editorial pages in the daily press of the nation.The reporting is often clever and quite as often withoutconscience. The machinery for gathering worldnews is amazingly well organized. Other kinds ofability are abundant in the newspaper office; and itis a natural economic fact that the most debasedpapers, making the most money, can hire the mosttalented men—and debauch them; while the moreconscientious paper, struggling in competition withits rich and dishonest rivals, cannot afford to payfor the best editors and reporters.

If the rising generation will understand this andgrow up with an increasing distrust of the newspaper,the newspaper will reform in obedience tothe demand of the public, the silent demand expressedby the greater circulation of good papers andthe failure of these that are degrading and degraded.

We called in the opinions of one philosopher, Professor[Pg 229]James, to support our view of the Americanmagazine. Let us summon another philosopher tocorroborate in part our view of the newspapers, toshow that the foregoing opinions are not (as somenewspapers would probably affirm if they noticed thematter at all), the complaints of a crank who doesnot understand “practical” newspaper work. Ourphilosopher will confirm, too, the belief of this Guidethat the ethics of the newspaper is of importanceto the young reader. The newspaper is ours. Wemust have it; it renders indispensable service to alldepartments of our life, business, education, philanthropy,politics. We cannot turn our backs on it;we cannot in lofty scorn reject the newsboy at thedoor. It is for us to understand the constitution andmethods of the daily press and not be duped byits grosser treacheries as our fathers have been. Iquote from The Outlook a letter from ProfessorGeorge Herbert Palmer, whose name will be foundelsewhere in this book as philosopher and translatorof the “Odyssey.”

THE STUDY OF LITERATURE

In our age of free libraries and cheap editions ofgood books anyone who has time and dispositionmay become not merely a reader of literature, but astudent of literature. The difference is not great,perhaps not important; it seems to be only a matterof attitude and method. The reader opens any bookthat falls in his way or to which he is led for anyreason, tries a page or two of it, and continues ornot, at pleasure. The student opens a book whichhe has deliberately sought and brings to it not onlythe tastes and moods of the ordinary reader, but adetermination to know the book, however much orlittle it may please him. He is impelled not only toknow the book, with his critical faculties more orless consciously awake, but to know the circumstancesunder which the book was written, and its relation toother books. One may read “Hamlet” ten timesand know much of it by heart and still not be astudent of “Hamlet,” much less a student of Shakespeare.The student feels it necessary to know theother plays of Shakespeare, some of the other Elizabethandramatists, a little of the history and biographyof Shakespeare’s time, and something, too, of[Pg 236]the best critical literature that “Hamlet” has inspiredin the past two centuries. The study of literatureimplies order and method in the selection ofbooks, and orderly reading in turn implies enoughseriousness and willful application to turn the actof reading, in part, from play to work.

Well, then, it is better to be a student of literaturethan a mere reader. Ideally that is true; ifthere were years enough in a human life we shouldlike to be students of everything under the sun. Butthe conditions of life limit the mere reader on oneside and the student on the other, and it is a questionwhich one is ultimately richer in mind. Amere reader will read “Hamlet” until he can almostimagine himself standing on the stage able to speakthe lines of any part. The student of literature willread “Hamlet” thoroughly, investigate its real orsupposed relation to the rest of the Shakespearianplays, toil through a large volume of learned notesand opinions, read fifty other Elizabethan tragediesand a half dozen volumes on the life and works ofShakespeare. He is on the way to becoming a studentof Shakespeare. But while he is struggling withthe learned notes, the mere reader is reading, say,Henley’s poems; while the student is reading thelesser plays of Shakespeare, the mere reader is enjoyingBrowning’s tragedies; while the student of“Hamlet” is making the acquaintance of fifty tragediesby Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Jonson,Marlowe, Webster—less than ten of which aremasterpieces—the idle reader is wandering through[Pg 237]Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy,” ten modern novels,the seventh book of “Paradise Lost” (that nobleChant of Creation), a beautiful new edition ofthe poems of George Herbert, and some quite unrelatedbits of prose and verse that happen to attracthis eye. Which of the two has pursued the happier,wiser course? Each has spent his time well, andeach, if there were more time, might profitably followthe other’s course in addition to his own. Intensive,orderly reading, like that of the student, tends tomake the mind methodical and certainly furnishesit with a coherent body of related ideas on which tomeditate. Extensive reading, such as we assumethe reader’s will be, seems to engender superficiality,and yet such is the nature of books and humanthought that scattered reading may disclose unexpectedand vital relations of idea. Greater effort ofwill is required to keep the student on his narrowercourse, and effort of will is profitable to the spirit.On the other hand, the mind is likely to have keenerappetite for what it meets on a discursive course, andit assimilates and absorbs more exhaustively whatit approaches with natural, unforced interest. “Itis better,” says Johnson, “when a man reads fromimmediate inclination.”

It would be educational anarchy to depreciate orderlyintensive study of any subject, and we shallpresently consider some helpful introductions to themethodical study of literature. But I believe thathuman nature and human conditions favor the unmethodicalreader, and that he, on the whole, discovers[Pg 238]the best uses of books in the world as it is. Forin the world as it is, we have in adult life thirty,forty, fifty years in which to read books. If weconsider everything a book from the little volumewhich occupies half an hour to the Bible which cannotbe read through once intelligently in under sixmonths, we see that three books a week is a liberalnumber for an assiduous reader. So that in a lifetimeone cannot expect to know more than five orsix thousand books. Five thousand, or two thousand,or one thousand are plenty for a life of wisdom andenjoyment. The five thousand or the one thousandbooks of the discursive reader are likely to be atleast as good a collection as the five thousand or theone thousand of the student of literature. Readerand student are both restricted to a small pickingfrom the vineyard of books. The ordinary readerwill have spent a third of his reading hours on booksthat have meant little to him. The student will havespent a third of his time in digging through sapless,fiberless volumes. But the free wandering readeris not disturbed by the number of books he has readin vain or by the vast number of interesting bookshe has not read at all; whereas the student of literatureis lured by his ideal of exhaustive knowledgeto hurry through books that he “ought to know,”and in desperation is tempted to insincere pretensions.

In no class of readers does the tendency to unwarrantedassumptions of knowledge show more comicallythan in those advanced students of books[Pg 239]who are called Professors of English Literature.Properly speaking, no one is a professor of literatureexcept the man who can produce something worthreading. But as the term is used it defines a classof teachers who have spent much time and study,not as writers but as readers of books, and who thenset themselves up, or are set up in spite of individualmodesty by the artificial university systems, to“teach” literature. The professional teacher ofliterature can know only a limited number ofbooks. And while he has been reading his kind,his unprofessional neighbors, even his students, arereading their kind. He knows some literature thatthey do not; they know some literature that he doesnot. The chances are that the professor and not thelay reader will have departed the farther from thetrue uses of literature. It is possible to read a numberof good books while the professor is studying whatanother professor says in reply to a third professor’sopinions about what Shakespeare meant in a certainpassage. The professor of literature seems to regardShakespeare and other poets as inspired childrenwho need a grown person to interpret their babytalk; whereas the lay reader takes it for granted thatShakespeare had more or less definite ideas aboutwhat he wished to say and succeeded in saying itwith admirable clarity.

To be sure, a professor here and there may befound who is a live and virile reader of poetry likethe rest of us, and the faults of pedantry and pretentiousauthority are not inevitable faults of the[Pg 240]profession as a whole. There is, however, one universalfault of the professional teacher of literaturewhich is imposed by the conditions of employmentin our universities and is subversive of the true purposeof colleges and the true purposes of literature.One fundamental idea of a college is to afford acertain number of scholarly men the means of livelihoodfrom college endowments in order that theymay have time to devote to books. The modernprofessor of literature seems to have so many dutiesof administration and discipline that he has littletime to read for the sake of reading—which is thechief reason for reading at all. The old idea of auniversity as a place where the few educated membersof society could retire for study and intellectual communionhas passed away, and the professor of literatureis rather at a disadvantage in the modern worldwhere there are more educated persons outside theuniversities than in them, and where the cultivatedperson of leisure, reading literature by himself, caneasily outstrip the professor.

Professor of literature? As well might there be aprofessor of Life, or a professor of Love, or a professorof Wisdom. Literature is too vast for anyoneto profess it, excepting always him who cancontribute to it. Even if our professors of literaturewere a more capable class of men, they would stillbe anomalous members of society, for they are tryingto do an anomalous thing, maintain themselves inauthority on a subject which is open to everybody ina world of books and libraries. And they are working[Pg 241]under conditions not only not helpful, butdistinctly unfavorable to a true knowledge and enjoymentof literature, as compared with the conditionsof the person of equal intelligence outside the college.

My purpose is not so much to dispraise the literarydepartments of universities as to praise a worldwhich has grown so rich in opportunities that theuniversities are no longer the unique leaders in literatureor the seats of the best knowledge about it.Our masters are on the shelves and not in the colleges.(Carlyle, Emerson, and Ruskin all said that,and it was said before them.) Without going tocollege we can become students of literature, professorsof literature, if we have the talent and thewill. I do not say or mean that we should not go tocollege if we can. I mean that we can stay awayfrom college if we must and still be as wise andhappy readers of books as those bachelors of arts whohave sat for four years or more under “professorsof literature.” If my advice were sought on thispoint, I should advise every boy and girl to go tocollege if possible, but to take few courses in Englishliterature and English composition. One great advantageof a college course is that it offers four yearsof comparative leisure, of freedom from the day’swork of the breadwinner; and in those four yearsthe student, with a good library at hand, can readfor himself. I should advise the student to takecourses in foreign languages, history, economics, andthe sciences, things which can be taught in classroomsand laboratories and are usually taught by experts.[Pg 242]There is no need of listening to a professor of Englishwho discourses about Walter Scott and Shakespeare;we can read them without assistance. Literatureis a universal possession among people ofgeneral intelligence. It is made, fostered, and enjoyedby men who are not professors of literaturein the meaningless sense; it is written for and addressedto people who are not professors of literature;and it is understood and appreciated, I dare affirm,by no intelligent, cultivated class in the world lesscertainly, less directly, less profitably than by professorsof literature in the modern American college.

Well, we may leave our little declaration of independencefrom those who are supposed to be authoritiesin literature, and turning from them not too disrespectfully,go our own way. Let us be readers ofliterature. The study of literature will take care ofitself. We cannot expect to know as much about thesources of “Hamlet” as Professor Puppendorf thinkshe knows. Neither can we hope to bring as muchimagination to our reading as Lamb brought to his.But of the two masters we shall follow Lamb, whowas not a professor, nor even, it seems, a student ofliterature, but only a reader. If we happen to beinterested in Professor Smith’s ideas of Milton, wecan in three or four hours read his handbook on thesubject, or, better, the other handbook from which hegot his ideas. For the professors do not keep theirwisdom for their students in class; they live, in spiteof themselves, in a modern world and publish for thegeneral reader all the knowledge they have—and a[Pg 243]little more. We can follow the professors, if wechoose, in the libraries. But probably there will bemore wisdom and happiness in following Lamb orStevenson, or some other reader who was not a professor;they tread a broader highway and never forgetwhat books are made for. We may well follow Dr. S.M. Crothers, “The Gentle Reader,” who seems tohave been enjoying books all his life and still enjoysthem, though he lives near a great university. Anothergenial guide and counselor, whose company theyounger generation might well seek often, is Mr.Howells. He is a professor of literature in the realsense, because he makes it. He is also a reader whoseenthusiasms are fresh and individual. Many of hisrecorded impressions of contemporaneous books areburied in an obscure magazine, and his reticence hasits disadvantages in an age when too many ineptvoices chatter about books. But he reads books andwrites about them because he likes them, and sohis accounts of his reading are rich in suggestion.

Most of the authentic professors of literature, thatis, the men who have produced literature, have beenreaders rather than students of books. Keats, I amquite sure, had neither opportunity nor inclinationto make a formal study of books, even of the oldpoets from whom his genius drew its sustenance. Heseems not to have studied Homer or the Englishtranslation by the Elizabethan poet, George Chapman.He calls his sonnet “On First Looking IntoChapman’s Homer.” You see, he only read it, only“looked into” it, just like an ordinary reader. But[Pg 244]he was not ordinary, he was a poet, and so he couldwrite this of his experience as a reader:

Something like that experience ambushes the roadof any reader, the most commonplace of us. We,too, can travel in the realms of gold. Only three orfour men are born in a century who could expressthe experience so finely as that. But the breathlessadventure can be ours, even if we cannot writeabout it.

The great writers themselves are the best guidesto one another, for they have kept the reader’s pointof view—they had too much imagination, as a rule,to descend to any other point of view. We conjecturethat Shakespeare was an omnivorous reader. Andso, certainly, were Milton, Browning, Tennyson,Shelley, Carlyle, George Eliot, Macaulay. Nearlyall the great writers have been, of course, life-long,[Pg 245]assiduous students of the technical characteristics ofcertain kinds of literature from which they werelearning their art. The poet must study the poets;the novelist must study the novelists. But the creativeartist is usually far from being a scientific ormethodical student of literature as it is laid out (suggestivewords!), in handbooks and courses. The natureof literature and the experience of the makersof it seem to confirm us in the belief that books areto be read, to be understood and enjoyed as they cometo one’s hands, and not jammed into text-book diagramsof periods and cycles and schools. The greatwriters of our race, those obviously who know mostabout literature, seem to have taken their books asthey took life, just as they happened to come. Theywere wanderers, not tourists. And though we shallnever see as much by the way as they did and havenot the power to travel so far, we can roam through“many goodly states and kingdoms” and be sure ofinspiring encounters, if only a small corner of ournature is capable of being inspired.

But as travelers in lands of beauty and adventuremay profitably spend an hour a day in searching theguide books for facts about what they have seen anddirections for finding the most interesting places, sothe reader, without sacrificing his spirit of freedom,may well equip himself with a few handbooks ofliterature. Suppose that Keats has interested us inChapman’s Homer. Let us find out who Chapmanwas and when he lived. A fairly reliable bookin which to seek for him is Professor George Saintsbury’s[Pg 246]“History of Elizabethan Literature.” It isone of a series of histories in which the volume on“Early English Literature” is by Mr. StopfordBrooke, and the volume on “English Literature ofthe Eighteenth Century” is by Mr. Edmund Gosse.We find in Saintsbury’s handbook ten pages of biographyand criticism of Chapman and extracts fromhis poetry. This is enough to give a little notion ofChapman’s place in literature and to suggest to theordinary reader whether Chapman is a writer he willwish to know more fully. We find among Mr. Saintsbury’scomments on Chapman the following:

“The splendid sonnet of Keats testifies to theinfluence which his work long had on those Englishmenwho were unable to read Homer in the original.A fine essay of Mr. Swinburne’s has done, for thefirst time, justice to his general literary powers, anda very ingenious and, among such hazardous things,unusually probable conjecture of Mr. Minto’s identifieshim with the ‘rival poet’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets.But these are adventitious claims to fame.What is not subject to such deduction is the assertionthat Chapman was a great Englishman who, whileexemplifying the traditional claim of great Englishmento originality, independence, and versatility ofwork, escaped at once the English tendency to lackof scholarship, and to ignorance of contemporarycontinental achievements, was entirely free from thefatal Philistinism in taste and in politics, and inother matters, which has been the curse of our race,was a Royalist, a lover, a scholar, and has left us[Pg 247]at once one of the most voluminous and peculiar collectionsof work that stand to the credit of any literaryman of his country.”

Here, in this paragraph, we stand neck-deep in thestudy of literature, its exhilarating eddies of opinion,its mind-strengthening difficulties, and also, we mustconfess, its harmless dangers and absurdities. Let usrun over Mr. Saintsbury’s sentences again and seewhither they take us.

Keats’s sonnet—we have just read that—whichMr. Saintsbury says, testifies to the influence ofChapman for a long time on Englishmen who couldnot read Greek, really does nothing of the sort. Ittestifies only that Keats met Chapman, and the momentousmeeting took place, in point of fact, at atime when the interest in Elizabethan poetry wasreviving after a century that preferred Pope’s“Iliad” to Chapman’s. Handbook makers sometimesgo to sleep and make statements like that, andit is just as well that they do, for their noddingstumble them from their Olympian elevations to ourlevel and help to make them intelligible to the commonrun of mortals. The mention of Swinburne’sessay is an interesting clue to follow. His recentdeath (1909) has occasioned much talk about him,and at least his name is familiar, and the fact thathe was a great poet. It is interesting to discover thathe was also a critic of Elizabethan poetry. We arethus led to an important modern critic and poet as aresult of having struck from a side path into ahistory of Elizabethan literature. Mr. Minto’s conjecture[Pg 248]that Chapman was the “rival poet” ofShakespeare’s sonnets is valuable because it willtake us to those sonnets, and will give us our firsttaste of the great hodge-podge of conjectures and ingeniousguesses which constitute a large part of the“study of literature” and are so delightful andstimulating to lose oneself in. After you have readShakespeare’s sonnets and a biography of Shakespeareand the whole of Mr. Saintsbury’s book, youcan pick out some other Elizabethan poet and conjecturethat he is the rival to whom Shakespeareenigmatically alludes. Neither you nor anyone elsewill ever be sure who has guessed right. But thatmatters little. The value of the game, whatever itsfoolish aspects, is that interest in a problem of literatureor literary biography cultivates your mind,keeps you reading, so entangles you in books and thethings relating to books that, like Mr. Kipling’s hero,you can’t drop it if you tried. The rewards of suchan interest are lifelong and satisfying, even if thesolution is unattainable or not really worth attaining.The literary problem is a changeful wind thatkeeps one forever sailing the sea of books.

The rest of Mr. Saintsbury’s remarks, those aboutEnglish character, have this significance for us: Onecannot read books, or study literary problems, withoutstudying the people who produced them. The studyof literature is the study of national characteristics.The reason we Americans know so much more aboutthe English than the English know about us, is thatwe have been brought up on English literature, while[Pg 249]the Englishman has only begun to read our literature.Mr. Saintsbury’s reflections on the Philistinism ofthe English open at once to the reader large questions,philosophic in their nature, but not too philosophicfor any ordinary person to think about, thequestion of the relation of English literature to Continentalliterature, and the question whether the English,who have produced the greatest of all modernpoetry, are in comparison with their neighbors anotably poetic race. One of the best works on Englishliterature for the student to read and possess,that by the Frenchman Taine (the English translationis excellent), is based on a philosophic inquiryinto the nature of the English people. There is, sofar as I know, no analogous study of American literature,though Professor Barrett Wendell’s “LiteraryHistory of America” might have developedinto such a book if the author had taken pains tothink out some of his clever, fugitive suggestions.The best books on the literature of our countrywhich I have seen are Professor Charles F. Richardson’s“American Literature” and the “Manual,”edited by Mr. Theodore Stanton for the GermanTauchnitz edition of British and Americanauthors, and published in this country by thePutnams.

Well, we have entered the classroom in which Mr.Saintsbury is discoursing of Elizabethan literature,we have entered, so to speak, by the side door. Ifour nature is at all shaped to receive profit andenjoyment from the study of books, we shall be curious[Pg 250]to see from reading the whole of Mr. Saintsbury’sbook what has led up to Chapman and whatwriters succeed him. Of the various ways in whichauthors may be grouped for analysis the historicalis the best for the young student; and it is on thehistorical scheme of division that most studies of literatureare based. A very useful series of bookshas been begun under the editorship of ProfessorWilliam A. Neilson in which each volume deals witha class of literature, one with the essay, one with thedrama, one with ballads, and so on. This series,intended for advanced students, will probably notbe the best for the beginner, though it is often truethat works intended for advanced readers are thevery best for the young, and that books for youngreaders entirely fail as introductions to more thoroughstudies. The reader who is really interestedin tracing out the relations between writers will ingood time wish to read studies of literature madeon the historic plan and also some which surveygeneric divisions of literature. The two methods intersectat right angles. The main thoroughfare ofliterary study which runs from the early story-tellersthrough Fielding and Thackeray to Hardy andGeorge Meredith, crosses the other great thoroughfares:the one which follows the relations betweenFielding, Gray, Johnson, and Burke and other greatmen of that age; the one which makes its waythrough the age of Wordsworth and passes fromBurns’s cottage to Scott’s Abbottsford; and the onethrough the age of Victoria. This has been surveyed[Pg 251]as far as George Meredith, and the critics are busilyputting up the fences and the sign posts.

In view of the limitations which mere time imposeson the number of books which any individualmay study, we shall resolve early not to attempt theimpossible, not to try to study with great intimacythe entire range of literature. The thing to do is toselect, or to allow our natural drift of mind to selectfor us, one period of literature, or one group, or onewriter in a period. In ten years of leisurely butthoughtful reading, after the day’s work is done, onecan know, so far as one’s given capacity will admit,as much about Shakespeare as any Shakespearescholar, that is, as much that is essential and worthknowing. Not that ten years will exhaust Shakespeareor any other great poet, but they will sufficefor the laying of a foundation of knowledge completeand adequate for the individual reader, and on thatfoundation the individual can build his personalknowledge of the poet, a structure in which thematerials furnished by other students become of decreasingimportance.

There is a story of a French scholar who made uphis mind to write a great book on Shakespeare. Inpreparation he resolved to read all that had beenwritten about the poet. He found that the accumulationof books on Shakespeare in the Paris librarieswas a quarry which he could not excavate in a lifetime,and more appalling still, contemporary scholarsand critics were producing books faster than hecould read them. This story should console and instruct[Pg 252]us. We cannot read all that has been writtenabout Shakespeare; neither can the professionalShakespearians. But we can all read enough. Twoor three books a year for ten years will, I amsure, put any student in possession of the best thoughtof the world on Shakespeare or any other writer.The multitude of works are repetitious, one volumerepeats the best of a hundred others, and most ofthem are waste matter, even for the specialist whovainly strives to digest them.

The thing for us to learn early is not to be appalledby the miles of shelves full of books, but toregard them in a cheerful spirit, to look at them asan interminable supply of spiritual food and drink,a comforting abundance that shall not tempt us to begourmands. I am convinced that young people areoften deterred from the study of books by professionalstudents who preside over the long shelves in the twilightof libraries—blinking high priests of literaturewho seem to say: “Ah! young seeker of knowledge,here is the mystery of mysteries, where only a few ofus after long and blinding study are qualified todwell. For five and forty years I have been studyingShakespeare—whisper the name in reverence, notfor him, but for me—and I have found that in the‘Winter’s Tale’ a certain comma has been misplacedby preceding high priests, and the line should readthus and so.” Well, if you go inside and open a fewwindows to let the light and air in, you are likelyto find, sitting in one of the airiest recesses, an acquaintanceof yours, quite an ordinary person, who[Pg 253]has read the “Winter’s Tale” for only five years,has not bothered his head about that blessed comma,can tell you things about the play that the high priestwould not find out in a million years, and is usingthe high priest’s latest disquisition for a paperweight.

So approach your Shakespeare, if he be the poetyou select for special study in the next ten years, ina light-hearted and confident spirit. He is a mystery,but he is not past finding out, and the elements ofmystery that baffle, that deserve respect, are thosewhich he chose to wrap about himself and his work.The mysteries which others have hung about himare moth-eaten hangings or modern slazy draperiesthat tear at a vigorous touch. If you hear learnedliterary muttering behind the arras and plunge yoursword through, you will kill, not the king, but acommentator Polonius.

Anyone in the leisure of his evenings, or ofhis days, if he is fortunate enough to have unoccupiedsunlit hours, may master any poet in thelanguage to which we have been born. Nothing isnecessary to this study but a literate, intelligent mind,the text of the poet and such books as one can getin the libraries or with one’s pin money. And inselecting the books one has only to begin at randomand follow the lead of the books themselves. Anytext of “Macbeth” will give references to all thecritical works that anyone needs and they in turnwill point to all the rest. You do not need a laboratorycourse in philology in order to read your poet[Pg 254]and to know him, to know him at least as well asthe philologist knows him, to know him better, ifyou have a spark of poetic imagination. There isno democracy so natural, so real, and so increasinglypopulous as the democracy of studious readers. Weacknowledge divinity in man, in our poet above all,and we see flickerings of divinity in the rare readerwho is a critic. But we do not acknowledge thedivine right of Shakespearian scholars or of anyother self-constituted authorities in books. In ourliterary state the scholars are not our masters butour servants. We rejoice that they are at work andnow and again turn up for us a useful piece of knowledge.But they cannot monopolize knowledge of thepoets. That is open to any of us, and it is attainablewith far less labor than the scholars have led usto believe.

The selection of a single writer for special study,a selection open to us all, should not be made inhaste. It should be a “natural selection” determinedgradually and unawares. It will not do tosay: “I will now begin to study Shakespeare for tenyears.” That New Year’s resolution will not survivethe first of February. But as you browse amongbooks you may find yourself especially drawn to someone of the poets or prose writers. Follow your masterwhen you find him.

In the meantime you can get a general idea ofthe development of English literature and the placeof the chief writers. A good method is to readselections from English prose and poetry grouped[Pg 255]in historical sequence. The volumes of prose editedby Henry Craik and Ward’s “English Poets” affordan adequate survey of British literature. Carpenter’s“American Prose” and Stedman’s “American Anthology”constitute an excellent introduction tothe branch of English literature produced on thisside of the water. The volumes of selections maybe accompanied by the historical handbooks alreadymentioned, which deal with literary periods, or by oneof the histories which cover all the centuries of Englishauthors, such as Saintsbury’s “Short History,”or Stopford Brooke’s “English Literature.” Thestudent should guard against spending too large aportion of his time reading about literature insteadof reading the literature itself. But a systematicreview of the history of a national literature hasgreat value, apart from the enjoyment of literature;it is, if nothing more, a course in history andbiography. I have found that the study of a handbookof a foreign literature in which I could nothope to read extensively was in effect a study of thedevelopment of the foreign nation. I never read abetter history of Rome than J. W. Mackail’s “LatinLiterature.” The student who can read French willreceive pleasure and profit from Petit de Julleville’s“Littérature Française” or from the shorter “PetitHistoire” of M. Delphine Duval.

Everyone will study literature in his own way,keep the attitude which his own nature determines,and for that matter the nature of the individual willdetermine whether he shall study literature at all.[Pg 256]I would make one last suggestion to the eager student:Let your study be diligent and as serious asmay be, but do not let it be solemn. I once attendeda lecture on literature given to a mixed audience,that is, an audience composed mainly of ladies. Thelecture was not bad in its way; it contained a gooddeal of useful information, but at times it remindedme of the discourses on “terewth” by Mr. Chadbandin “Bleak House.” It was the audience thatwas oppressive. The ladies were not, so far as Icould see, entertained, but they had paid their moneyfor a dose of light, literature and culture and theymeant to have it. So they sat with looks of solemndetermination devotedly taking in every word. Twoladies near me were not solemn; they concealed theirrestiveness and maintained a respectful but not quiteattentive demeanor. As I followed them out, I heardone of them say, “Would not Falstaff have roaredto hear himself talked about that way”? I onceheard a class rebuked for laughing aloud at somethingfunny in Chaucer. The classroom was a seriousplace and the professor was working. But Chaucerdid not intend to be serious at that moment. Onanother occasion the professor remarked that it waswell that Chaucer had not subjected his genius to thedeadening effect of the universities of his time, andit occurred to me then that he would have fared aboutas well in a medieval university as his poems werefaring in a modern one. Of course we take literatureseriously; by a kind of paradox we take humorousliterature seriously. But solemnity is seldom in[Pg 257]place when one is reading or studying books. Thehours of hard work and deliberate application whichare necessary to a study of literature should be joyoushours, and the only appropriate solemnity is thatdirectly inspired by the poets and prose writers whenthey are solemn.

LIST OF WORKS ON LITERATURE

Supplementary to Chapter XII

Below are given the titles of a few books helpfulto the student of literature and literary history.

Hiram Corson. Aims of Literary Study.

Frederic Harrison. Choice of Books and OtherLiterary Pieces.

George Edward B. Saintsbury. A Short Historyof English Literature.

Stopford Augustus Brooke. English Literature.

William Minto. Manual of English Prose Literature.

William Vaughn Moody and Robert MorssLovett. History of English Literature.

Remarkable among books for schools on account ofits excellent literary style.

Hippolyte Adolphe Taine. History of EnglishLiterature.

Philosophical criticism for advanced readers.

[Pg 258]

Stopford Augustus Brooke. Early English Literature.

George Edward B. Saintsbury. Elizabethan Literature.

John Addington Symonds. Shakespeare’s Predecessorsin the English Drama.

George G. Greenwood. The Shakespeare ProblemRestated.

This work gives a trustworthy appraisal of manymodern works on Shakespeare. (See page 166 ofthis Guide.)

John Churton Collins. Studies in Shakespeare.

Edmund William Gosse. Jacobean Poets. FromShakespeare to Pope. A History of EighteenthCentury Literature.

Francis B. Gummere. Handbook of Poetics.

Thomas Seccombe. The Age of Johnson.

Walter Bagehot. Literary Studies.

Charles Francis Richardson. American Literature.

In one volume, in the popular edition.

Theodore Stanton (and others). Manual ofAmerican Literature.

Edward Dowden. History of French Literature.

[Pg 259]

Ferdinand Brunetière. Manual of the Historyof French Literature.

In the English translation.

Delphine Duval. Petite Histoire de la LittératureFrançaise.

In Heath’s Modern Language Series.

Petit de Julleville. Littérature Française.

Both the foregoing works are in easy French.

René Doumic. Contemporary French Novelists.

In the English translation.

Henry James. French Poets and Novelists.

Kuno Francke. History of German Literature.

Gilbert Murray. History of Ancient Greek Literature.

John Pentland Mahaffy. History of ClassicalGreek Literature.

John William Mackail. Latin Literature.

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY

If there is one central idea which it is hoped ayoung reader might find in the foregoing pages,it is this: that literature is for everyone, young orold, who has the capacity to enjoy it, that no specialfitness is required but the gift of a little imagination,that no particular training can prepare us for thereading of books except the very act of reading. Forliterature is addressed to the imagination; that is, awork which touches the imagination becomes Literatureas distinguished from all other printed things.By virtue of its imagination it becomes permanent, itremains intelligible to the human being of every raceand age, the only conditions of intelligibility beingthat the reader shall be literate and that the bookshall be in the language in which the reader has beenbrought up or in a foreign tongue which he haslearned to read. We have insisted on a kind of liberty,equality, and union in the world of writers andreaders, and have, perhaps needlessly, made a declarationof independence against all scholars, philosophers,and theorists who try to put obstacles in ourway and arrogate to themselves exclusive rights andprivileges, special understandings of the world’s literature.[Pg 261]We believe that literature is intended foreverybody and that it is addressed to everybody bythe creative mind of art. We believe that all readersare equal in the presence of a book or work of art,but we hastily qualify this, as we must qualify thepolitical doctrine of equality. No two men are reallyequal, no two persons will get the same pleasure andbenefit from any book. But the inequalities are naturaland not artificial. Of a thousand persons of allages who read the “Iliad,” the hundred who get themost out of it will include men, women, and children,some who have “higher” education and some whohave not, well-informed men and uninformed boys.The hundred will be those who have the most imagination.The boy of fourteen who has an active intelligencecan understand Shakespeare better than theleast imaginative of those who have taken the degreeof Doctor of Philosophy in English at our universities.The man of imagination, even if he has takenthe degree of Doctor of Philosophy, will find deeperdelight and wisdom in Shakespeare than the uninformedboy. Readers differ in individual capacitiesand in the extent of their experience in intellectualmatters. But class differences, especially school-madedifferences, are swept away by the power ofliterature, which abhors inessential distinctions andgoes direct to the human intelligence.

The direct appeal of literature to the human intelligenceand human emotions is what we mean byour principle of union. Nothing can divorce usfrom the poet if we have a spark of poetry in us.[Pg 262]The contact of mind between poet and reader is immediate,and is effected without any go-between, anyintercessor or critical negotiator.

Now, what happens to the principles of our declarationof independence and the constitution of ourdemocracy of readers when we open to a page of oneof Darwin’s works on biology, or a page of the philosopherPlato, and find that we do not get the senseof it at all? We can understand the “Iliad,” the“Book of Job,” “Macbeth,” “Faust”; they meansomething to us, even if we do not receive their wholeimport. But here, in two great thinkers who haveinfluenced the whole intellectual world, Plato andDarwin, we come upon pages that to us mean absolutelynothing. The works of Plato and Darwin arecertainly literature. But they are something elsebesides: they are science, and the understanding ofthem depends on a knowledge of the science thatwent before the particular pages that are so meaninglessto us. Here is a kind of literature, the merereading of which requires special training.

We may call this the Literature of Informationas distinguished from the Literature of Imagination.The distinction is not sharp; a book leans to one sideor the other of the line, but it does not fall clear ofthe line. A work of imagination, a poem, a novel,or an essay, may contain abundant information, maybe loaded with facts; on the other hand, the greatestof those who have discovered and expounded facts,Darwin, Gibbon, Huxley, have had literary powerand imagination. But most great works of imagination[Pg 263]deal with universal experiences, they treathuman nature and common humanity’s thought andfeelings about the world. As Hazlitt says, natureand feeling are the same in all periods. So the commonman understands the “Iliad,” and the story ofJoseph and his brothers, and “The Scarlet Letter”and “Silas Marner.”

In Macaulay’s “Essay on Milton” is a very misleadingpiece of philosophizing on the “progress ofpoesy.” It is a pity, when there are so many betteressays—Macaulay wrote twenty better ones—thatthis should be selected for reading in the schools aspart of the requirements for college entrance. Macaulaysees that the “Iliad” is as great a poem asthe world has known. He also sees that science inhis own time is progressing by leaps and bounds,that, in his own vigorous words, “any intelligentman may now, by resolutely applying himself for afew years to mathematics, learn more than the greatNewton knew after half a century of study and meditation.”He accordingly reasons, or rather makesthe long jump, that whereas science progresses, poetrydeclines with the advance of civilization, and thewonder is that Milton should have written so great apoem in a “civilized” age. Macaulay was youngwhen he wrote the essay; he seldom muddled ideasas badly as that. Poetry, if we view the history ofthe world in five-century periods, neither advancesnor declines. It fluctuates from century to century,but it keeps a general permanent level. Now andagain appears a new poet to add to the number of[Pg 264]poems, but poetry does not change. Neither does theindividual poem. The “Iliad” is precisely what itwas two thousand years ago, and two thousand yearsfrom now it will be neither diminished nor augmented.Creative art, dealing with universal ideasand feelings and needing only a well-developed languageto work in, can produce a masterpiece in anyone of forty countries any time the genius is borncapable of doing the work. This statement is toosimple to exhaust a large subject. The point is thatonce man has reached a certain point of culture,has come to have a language and a religion and anational tradition, more civilization or less, morescience or less, neither helps nor hinders his art.The arrival of a great poet can be counted on everytwo or three centuries. It is because poetry andother forms of imaginative literature are independentof time and progress that the reader’s ability tounderstand them is independent of time and progress.Our boys can understand the “Iliad.” Fetcha Greek boy back from ancient Athens and give ushis Greek tongue and we can interest him in Milton’sstory of Satan in half a day. But it willtake a year or two to make him understand an elementaryschoolbook about electricity. The greatideas about human nature and human feelings andabout the visible world and the gods men dream ofand believe in, these are the stuff of ImaginativeLiterature; they have been expressed over and overagain in all ages and are intelligible to a Chinamanor an Englishman of the year one thousand or the[Pg 265]year two thousand. That is why we are all citizensin the democracy of readers. That is why we donot need special knowledge to read “Hamlet,”why the most direct preparation for the readingof “Hamlet” is the reading of “Macbeth” and“Lear.”

Now, all special subjects, biology, geology, zoölogy,political economy, are continually being forced bythe imaginative power of great writers into the realmof Imaginative Literature. Poetry is full of philosophy.Our novels are shot through and through withproblems of economics. Great expositors like Huxleyand Mill are working over and interpreting thediscoveries of science, relating them to our commonlife and making, not their minute facts but their bearing,clear to the ordinary man. So that there is agreat deal of science and philosophy within the reachof the untrained reader. And a wide general readingprepares any person, by giving him a multitudeof hints and stray bits of information, to make hisway through a technical volume devoted to one specialsubject. The moral talks of Socrates to Athenianyouths lead one on, as Socrates seems to have intendedto lead those boys on, into the uttermost fieldsof philosophy. The genial essayists, Stevenson,Lamb, Emerson, are all tinged with philosophy andscience, at least the social and political sciences.And when an idle reader approaches a new subject,economics, chemistry, or philosophy, he often findswith delight that he has been reading about it allhis life. He is like the man in Molière’s comedy[Pg 266]who was surprised to find that he had always beenspeaking prose.

Yet there remains a good deal of the Literature ofInformation which can be understood only after agradual approach to it through other works. Youmust learn the elements of chemistry before you canunderstand the arguments of the modern men ofscience about radium. You must read some elementarydiscussions of economics before you can takepart in the arguments about protection and free trade,socialism, banking, and currency.

At this point the Guide to Reading parts companywith you and leaves you in the hands of the economists,the historians, the chemists, the philosophers.Special teachers and advisers will conduct you intothose subjects. They are organized subjects. Thepaths to them are steep but well graded and paved.If you wander upon these paths without guidanceyou will not harm yourself, and, if you do not tryto discuss what you do not understand, you will notharm anyone else. The list of works in philosophyand science which I append includes some that I, anerrant reader, have stumbled into with pleasure andprofit. I do not know surely whether any one ofthem is the best in its subject or whether it is theproper work to read first. I only know in generalthat a civilized man should for his own pleasureand enlightenment set his wits against a hard technicalbook once in a while for the sake of the exercise,and that although for purposes of wisdom and happinessthe Literature of the Ages contains all that is[Pg 267]necessary, everybody ought to go a little way intosome special subject that lies less in the realm ofliterature than in the realm of science.

LIST OF WORKS IN SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY

Supplementary to Chapter XIII

In this list are a few volumes of scientific andphilosophic works, notable for their literary excellence,or for their clearness to the general reader,or for the historical and human importance of theauthor. There is no attempt at order or system exceptthe alphabetical sequence of authors. Somephilosophic and scientific works will be found in thelist of essays, on page 192.

Grant Allen. The Story of the Plants.

In Appleton’s Library of Useful Stories.

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. Thoughts or Meditations.

In Everyman’s Library and many cheap editions.

John Lubbock (Lord Avebury). The Beauties ofNature and the Wonders of the World We LiveIn. The Use of Life.

A popular writer on scientific and philosophic subjects.

Liberty Hyde Bailey. First Lessons with Plants.Garden Making.

Robert Stawell Ball. The Earth’s Beginning.Star-Land: Being Talks with Young People.

[Pg 268]

John Burroughs. Birds and Bees and Other Studiesin Nature. Squirrels and Other FurBearers.

These books are especially suitable for youngreaders.

Charles Tripler Child. The How and Why ofElectricity.

For the uninformed reader.

James Dwight Dana. The Geological Story BrieflyTold.

Charles Robert Darwin. On the Origin of Species.What Mr. Darwin Saw in His VoyageRound the World in the Ship “Beagle.”

The second of the two books named is especiallyfor young readers. The book from which it is taken,Darwin’s “Journal” of the voyage is in Everyman’sLibrary. For expositions of Darwin’s theories, seeHuxley’s “Darwiniana,” Wallace’s “Darwinism”and David Starr Jordan’s “Footnotes to Evolution.”

Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson. The Greek Viewof Life. A Modern Symposium.

Robert Kennedy Duncan. The New Knowledge.

A popular exposition of theories of matter thathave developed since the discovery of radioactivity.Intelligible to any (intelligent) high-school pupil.

Epictetus. Discourses.

The English translation in Bohn’s Library.

[Pg 269]

Francis Galton. Natural Inheritance. Inquiriesinto Human Faculty.

The second volume is in Everyman’s Library.

Archibald Geikie. Class-Book of Geology.

Henry George. Our Land and Land Policy. TheScience of Political Economy.

Asa Gray. Manual of the Botany of the NorthernUnited States.

Arthur Twining Hadley. The Education of theAmerican Citizen.

Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz.Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects.

In the English translation by Edmund Atkinsonwith Helmholtz’s “Autobiography” and an introductionby Tyndall.

Karl Hilty. Happiness: Essays on the Meaningof Life.

Translated by Francis Greenwood Peabody.

William Temple Hornaday. The American NaturalHistory.

Charles de Forest Hoxie. How the People Rule;Civics for Boys and Girls.

Thomas Henry Huxley. Darwiniana. Evolutionand Ethics. Man’s Place in Nature.

Huxley is the greatest man of letters amongmodern English men of science. A volume of hisessays is in Everyman’s Library.

[Pg 270]

Ernest Ingersoll. Book of the Ocean.

Especially for young people.

Harold Jacoby. Practical Talks by an Astronomer.

William James. The Principles of Psychology.The Will to Believe.

Herbert Keightly Job. Among the Water-Fowl.

David Starr Jordan. True Tales of Birds andBeasts.

Especially for young readers.

William Thomson (Lord Kelvin). Popular Lecturesand Addresses.

Henry Demarest Lloyd. Wealth Against Commonwealth.

An important work on modern economic and businessproblems.

John Stuart Mill. On Liberty. Principles ofPolitical Economy.

John Morley. On Compromise.

Hugo Münsterberg. Psychology and Life. On theWitness Stand.

Frederic William Henry Myers. Science and aFuture Life.

Simon Newcomb. Astronomy for Everybody.

George Herbert Palmer. The Field of Ethics.The Nature of Goodness.

[Pg 271]

Walter Horatio Pater. Plato and Platonism.

Friedrich Paulsen. Introduction to Philosophy.

The excellent English translation affords withineasy compass a view of philosophy equal to severalelementary courses in philosophy at a university. Itmay be begun by any young man or woman of, say,eighteen.

Plato. Dialogues.

The “Republic” is in Everyman’s Library and inother cheap editions. Several of the dialogues areto be found under the title, “Trial and Death ofSocrates” in the Golden Treasury Series. See alsoWalter Pater’s “Plato and Platonism.” The greatPlato in English is Jowett’s.

Jacob August Riis. The Battle with the Slum.How the Other Half Lives. The Children ofthe Poor.

Among the most sensible, sympathetic and humanof modern works on sociology.

Josiah Royce. The Spirit of Modern Philosophy.Studies of Good and Evil. The World and theIndividual.

“The Spirit of Modern Philosophy” is a beautifullywritten introduction to the study of philosophy.

George Santayana. The Sense of Beauty. Poetryand Religion.

[Pg 272]

Garrett Putnam Serviss. Astronomy with anOpera Glass.

Nathaniel Southgate Shaler. Aspects of theEarth. The Individual: A Study of Life andDeath. Nature and Man in America.

Dallas Lore Sharp. A Watcher in the Woods.Wild Life Near Home.

Henry Sidgwick. The Elements of Politics. TheMethods of Ethics.

Herbert Spencer. First Principles. The Principlesof Ethics. The Principles of Sociology.

Silvanus Phillips Thompson. Elementary Lessonsin Electricity and Magnetism.

Richard Chenevix Trench. On the Study ofWords.

Contains all the philology that anyone needs.

John Tyndall. Fragments of Science. New Fragments.Essays on the Imagination in Science.Glaciers of the Alps and Mountaineering in1861.

The last volume is in Everyman’s Library, withan introduction by Lord Avebury.

Alfred Russel Wallace. Man’s Place in theUniverse. The Malay Archipelago. Australiaand New Zealand.

Gilbert White. Natural History and Antiquitiesof Selborne.

In Everyman’s Library.

[Pg 273]

Wilhelm Windelband. History of Ancient Philosophy.

Walter Augustus Wyckoff. The Workers: AnExperiment in Reality.

The story of a professor of economics and sociologywho became a laborer. Interesting as a story anda good popular introduction to the problems of laborand wages.

THE END