A
945,806
RS

-
----
-
!!
porta
! í
mo n
ang
sabar.is.
**
; s. aid
prilom
PROPERTY OF
4
:
1
******.***?:16*** -----
),
!! i !
.
.
.
***2*436-
::!
.
.
.
-
most.com.esorios
.30.
j
nje
-
Sinopsis
om
Ligi
S
2
T
All
The chapter entitled “The Pleasure of Reading
the Bible” may also be had in separate form,
bound in paper boards, or in limp leather.
The Pleasure
of Reading
Temple SCOTT
NEW YORK
MITCHELL KENNERLEY
MCMIX
Copyright 1909 by
Mitchell Kennerley
1003
,544
Press of y. 7. Little & Ives Co.
East Twenty-fourth Street
New York
st
General Library
Clements Lib.
Giftet
5-105
TO MY WIFE AND
MY FRIEND
متر مربر
CONTENTS
I
The Pleasure of Reading
II The Pleasure of Reading
the Bible
83
143
III The Pleasure of Reading
Poetry
IV The Pleasure of Reading
Shakespeare
V The Pleasure of Reading
Novels
VI The Pleasure of Reading
History and Biography
195
259
List of Books
312
Index
323
THE PLEASURE OF
READING
THE PLEASURE OF READING

I GLEASURE is the effect pro-
A duced in us by the mind's con-
E scious realization of joyous ex-
periences. The mind is invigorated and
enlarged after the experience, and there
follows an awareness of personal alert-
ness, and self-poise, and independence.
In the laboratory of the mind sense im-
pressions are transmuted into spiritual
experiences which leave the spirit re-
freshed; the experiences have been con-
verted into food for the soul's growth
and strength. In listening to music, in
seeing good comedy and fine tragedy, in
dancing, in the contemplation of beauty
in nature and art, in hearing excellent
singing and noble speaking, and in look-
[3]
THE PLEASURE OF
ing on at all perfect expressions of
manly exercise and sport, our sensations
provide the material for reflection by
means of which pleasure in its highest
and purest form is enjoyed. There is
the danger, of course, in over-indul-
gence; and this is fatal to pleasure.
Sense is strained to the limits of its ca-
pacity, so that the mind is unable to cope
with the multitude of the material pre-
sented for its assimilation. The result
is pain and not pleasure. The soul has
become wearied and weakened instead of
being made buoyant and strengthened.
Among the most satisfying of all
pleasures is the pleasure of reading.
The mind is fed with noble thoughts and
the soul delighted with the revealing
beauty of verbal expression. It is also
the most subtle of all pleasures, appeal-
ing to our pure imagination. It de-
1
. Te
BOY,
[4]
READING
in
het
....
..
.
.
.
.
...
..:
::---
mands of us, for its real enjoyment, the
finer accomplishments of mind and heart,
the exercise of our highest powers.
The words and sentences of the printed
page are the stimuli to the imagination
which refashions experiences of sense
into ideal existences. The reader thus
lives in the Realm of the Ideal. The
more real this Realm is to him, and the
more vividly his imagination creates it
for him, the greater will be his pleasure
and the keener his personal enjoyment;
for the clearer his understanding of the
matter in hand the greater will be his
sense of personal accomplishment and
personal power.
Let me try to illustrate what I mean.
Keats begins his. Ode on a Grecian Urn
with the following lines:
“ Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time."
[5]
THE PLEASURE OF
The beginner in the art of reading
(for reading is also an art, since it gives
pleasure, and requires care) will glance
idly over these words and, mayhap,
wonder why the poet addresses the urn
in such language. Why a bride?. And
why a still unravished bride? And why
a bride of quietness? And what is
meant by calling it the “foster-child of
silence and slow time”? But he who
reads for pleasure will know that Keats
was a poet, a man who shaped his
thoughts into language, so that the
thoughts should be there, on paper, for
others to think as he himself thought
them. The words, therefore, are not
chance words, put in for effect or for
the making of rhyme; they are the in-
evitable symbols suggesting definite
thought-forms. Such a reader's mind
will become stimulated to an activity in
[6]
READING
harmony with Keats's own thoughts.
The words will conjure up in him a
whole history of the thousands of years
during which the urn had lain buried in
the quiet of an earthly grave. It is now
found again as perfect as when it left
its maker's hands, still unbroken, even
though it had been for all these centu-
ries the bride of quietness, the foster-
child of silence and slow time.
While it was lying nursed in the arms
of silence Rome had conquered Greece;
Cæsar and Augustus had reigned; Vir-
gil and Horace had sung; Goth and
Vandal had overcome Rome; Gaul and
Britain had become nations; Mahomet
and his followers had made of Byzantium
the centre of a new humanism, and had
carried their flag to the pillars of Her-
cules. The Dark Ages had dispersed
before the sun of the Revival of Learn-
[7]
THE PLEASURE OF
nan
ing. America had been discovered; a
German Empire founded, and a new
civilization born in the Western Hemis-
phere. Napoleon had devastated Eu-
rope, and the feudal system had been
destroyed. Civilizations had come and
gone; nations had been made and un-
made; the gods even had passed away as
fleeting migrants in the world of human
thought; kings and queens had lived
their little lives and become less than
shadows. During all this time the urn
was being nursed as the foster-child of
silence and slow time; and now, after the
centuries had passed, it comes to us,
the bride of quietness, still unravished,
to bear witness to us of the genius, the
high thought, the noble enterprise, the
happy doings and sylvan enjoyments of
the Greek people.
Is not this the pleasure of reading?
LI
[8]
READING
What music, what painting, what act-
ing, what oratory, is comparable in its
pleasure-giving power to this reading?
It is the very acme of enjoyment, ful-
filling every quality in us that makes for
alertness, poise, and self-possession. It
is the awakening of the latent forces
within us for accomplishment, not for
the sapping of our vitality; it is a reju-
venation of the spirit, not its decay.
“The flowers appear on the earth; the
time of the singing of birds is come;
and the voice of the turtle is heard in our
land." These are the words used by a
poet-king of Israel to tell us that Spring
was come again. Are these merely
words? Do they not cause the imagina-
tion to create for itself a very continuity
of delightful experiences? They send
us living over again our own springs,
those seasons in our own lives when we,
[9]
THE PLEASURE OF
too, loved and were loved; when we also
dwelt in Arcadia and felt the blood of
life flowing in our veins, urging us to
deeds of high enterprise, and making us
aware of the life-impulse within us, when
the heart was young.
There is no pleasure in mere reading.
I mean in that reading that demands of
the eye only a casual receptivity for the
simple purpose of forming fleeting
images, more or less pleasing or inter-
esting. These images chase each other
to a very weariness of our mental pow-
ers—if, indeed, we really, employ our
mental powers with them. They form
an ever-moving panorama, the pictures
in which stay not with us long enough
for reflection to assimilate; they shift on
to fresh pictures that lose their definition
by being merged into the others that
press on for cursory acquaintance. This
[10]
READING
I
XL
.
.
is the abuse of reading. Pleasure here is
become the excitement of an orgy. It is
a species of mental debauch, and leaves
the mind powerless to venture on its own
creative activity. For the essence of the
pleasure of reading is the stimulation re-
ceived for our own creative imagination.-
When Shakespeare makes Titania
command her fairies to "pluck the
wings from the painted butterflies, to
fan the moonbeams from his sleeping
eyes,” the real pleasure comes to us from
the picture made by our own creative
imagination. We actually see the fairies
catching the beautiful butterflies and
fanning the moonbeams from the eyes
of the slumbering Bottom. The picture
is of our own making. The marvel, of
course, lies in the wonderful power of
Shakespeare to give us a set of words
which not only suggest the picture, but
[11]
THE PLEASURE OF
steep it in its native atmosphere, so that
we are, in very truth, living the dream of
this midsummer night.
Reading for pleasure is thus an exer-
cise for the mind. To find that exercise
at its best we must seek the best oppor-
tunities, and the best opportunities are
provided by the best writers. These turn
us to a right intercourse with abiding
things. They appeal to the best in us
and challenge our ability. We must be
ready to wrestle with the angel, and not
to leave him until we shall have overcome
him; and when we shall have overcome
him he will bless us.
Who are the best writers? That is the
question we have set out to answer.
Charles Lamb, writing of Books and
Reading, confessed that he dedicated no
inconsiderable portion of his time to
other people's thoughts. “I dream
LES
[12]
READING
...
X
-A
ntal
L'
.
away my life,” he said, “in others' specu-
lations. I love to lose myself in other
men's minds." He meant by this that
books aroused in him the creative activity
of the imagination. “Books think for
me,” he said. In other words, books
gave him the material on which he could
exercise himself. That which did not do
this he would not dignify with the name
of a book. He had a prejudice against
the volumes which “no gentleman's li-
brary should be without”—the Histories
of Josephus, Paley's Moral Philosophy,
Hume's History, Gibbon's Roman Em-
pire. These were “ things in books'
clothing," he said, “intruders into the
sanctuary, thrusting out the legitimate
occupants.” But then Lamb's was of
that rare order of mind that found its
own sphere of reading by an intuitive
perception of what was for him. Books
[13]
THE PLEASURE OF
to him were the disembodied spirits of
friends re-embodied as volumes. He
loved a “kind-hearted play"; an essay
emanating from a mind that revealed it-
self by gentle divagations and simple-
hearted ambulatoriness; a biography
that opened the heart of the biographer
as it did the life of the person written
about; a poem in which the aroma of a
gracious heart moved the poet's fancy to
find the heart's reflex in the things of the
world; any writing, indeed, which was
the expression of a genuine personality
and its relation with God and the things
that are God's, provided the expression
were the result of direct experience.
Herein lies the real pleasure of read-
ing—to touch hands with those who, hav-
ing truly lived, have had the divine gift
to translate their experiences into com-
municative words so that we, sitting in
ES
[14]
READING
our homes, or lying on the hillsides, may
be transported in imagination to live in
joy what they may have passed through
in pain. Pleasure is transportation; it is
a veritable carrying over of the spirit in
the stress of a joyous experience. In
reading we re-live the dead and the past.
It is not the David and Jonathan of the
Bible of whom we read as loving each
other; it is our better selves blossoming
in fine impulses toward our friend. It
is not a fictitious tale of Faust and
Mephistopheles; it is our own soul liv-
ing the temptation and finding its
strength through the imagined experi-
ence. It is not Captain Dobbin, or Joe
Gargery, or Father Goriot who is the
hero of Thackeray's Vanity Fair, or
Dickens's Great Expectations, or Bal-
zac's Père, Goriot; it is we ourselves.
We are again children who see the real
.,..-
.....
-.-.-.--...-'...
.
.
...'a...
.
[15]
THE PLEASURE OF
in the ideal, and for whom the make-
believe is the actual. And who shall say
that children are not the very types of
pleasure-knowing beings? Has it not
been said that only such as they shall
enter into the Kingdom of God?
“Ah!” you sigh; "we have been do-
ing nothing but read for the better part
of our lives and yet we have but rarely
experienced this pleasure of which you
tell us!”
That is because you have either read
that which could not bring you pleasure,
or you have read too much. It is not the
quantity but the quality of your reading
that counts in life. The advertised fic-
tion for “summer reading” may enable
you to talk blithely to your companion
at the dinner table of the latest thing in
popular esteem; but will it enable you to
commune with yourself in any one of the
[16]
READING
many lonely hours of each day's life?
Will it have transported you in delight
to self-expression? Will it have endued
your shy spirit with courage to do and to
-be? Perhaps once or twice, or maybe
thrice, at the most, you may have known
this pleasure. For the rest your read-
ing has drugged you and made you
drunken. You have read not to make
time, but to waste time; not to know you
are alive, but to forget ennui. This is
the debauch of reading and leaves you
a prey to discontent.
You do not, indeed, require to read
much to know the pleasure of reading.
Sometimes a sentence will be enough,
and you will lay down the book, steeped
in an ecstasy of imagination. The test
of a real book is that it enables you to
find yourself; it sends your mind adven-
turing, and delights your heart in that
[17]
THE PLEASURE OF
you have found another who has felt as
you feel and who has delivered himself.
Such books cannot be read always; they
rebel against a companionship that
breeds contempt. They will entertain
you to a continual intimacy only when-
you shall have climbed the heights of
your own mental pilgrimage, and have
freed yourself of your soul's burden.
Only those“ books in books' clothing”
are careless of how you approach them
and indifferent as to who you may be.
The tons of “printed stuff" ground in
the literary mill and made up by pub-
lishers to look like books,—these are but
dead things, and being lifeless they can
never impart life. You will find them
always but Dead Sea fruit, filling the
mouth with ashes.
The real books are very particular as
to whom they will know. If they do not
[18]
READING
like you, you may clothe them in purple
and gold, they will always hide them-
selves from you. If your spirit is at-
tuned to them, they will be welcome in
homespun or common cloth. It is the
nature of great books to be silent and
uncommunicative if you do not come to
them with your mind dressed in its best
and fit to enter the presence of a king
of thought. They will then not question
your dress, your wealth, or your social
standing. They will but ask of your
spirit_“Are you ready?” If it is, they
will come to you as friends, with out-
stretched arms; they will give you of the
riches of their inexhaustible treasure-
houses; they will charm you with the
magic of their music; they will endow
you with the gifts of knowledge; and
they will bless you with the strength of
their wisdom.
[19]
THE PLEASURE OF
“ The habit and power of reading with
reflection, comprehension, and memory
all alert and awake,” said John Morley,
“ does not come at once to the natural
man any more than many other sover-
eign virtues come to that interesting
creature.” None the less, the virtues of
the habit and power may be acquired and
cultivated with no great exertion on the
part of any person possessing average
intelligence and moved by the diligent
desire to be something more in himself
than a money-making drudge. A lan-
guage may be learned by taking its vo-
cabulary in daily homeopathic doses. In
exactly the same way, a half-hour de-
voted each day to the reading of one of
the masterpieces of literature, say,
Wordsworth's Lines Written Above
Tintern Abbey, or a book of the Iliad,
or a play of Shakespeare's, or a chapter
[20]
READING
of the Bible, will, in the course of a year,
give to your life of action or business a
new meaning, and quicken your sym-
pathy and moral sense to what the high-
est culture should aim at, namely,“ to find
some effective agency for cherishing the
ideal within you.” The suggestion is
John Morley's. “Multiply," he says,
“ the half-hour by 365, and consider what
treasures you might have laid by at the
end of the year; and what happiness,
fortitude, and wisdom they would have
given you during all the days of your
life.” You will do this not to become
versed in literature as the scholar is
versed, for literature is less than life;
but you will do it to become a full man,
with an ample mind, and a heart disci-
plined through association with noble ex-
amples of justice and virtue and self-
restraint. To cut out this half-hour
[21]
THE PLEASURE OF
from each day's life, for this purpose,
can surely be no great sacrifice to you.
You will hardly miss it, after a time;
and, indeed, you will soon come to give it
with a feeling of eager delight. Nay, it
is as much your duty to do this as it is to
provide for your family. Otherwise you
will starve the soul and, in starving it of
this spiritual food, you will prevent its
growth, stunt its fine impulses, and deny
to it the enjoyment and cultivation of ex-
cellent companionship and dignified in-
tercourse.
Now it does not at all follow, as I have
already hinted, that all books are worth
reading. Indeed, of the many that have
been made since printing was invented,
but a very few, comparatively, are really
necessary; are, truly, even desirable.
What is necessary and desirable is the
habit of reading with reflection and un-
[22]
READING
derstanding. The habit, once acquired
and cultivated at whatever cost of time,
a power of discrimination will come to
you which will enable you to distinguish
and select the good from the bad, what
for you is right from what for you is
wrong. Mark Pattison, a great scholar
and a voracious reader, said that no man
who respected himself could have less
than one thousand volumes in his library.
But Pattison spoke as the student with
ample time at his disposal. We, under
the stress of our latter-day business life,
dare not so overburden this duty we have
laid on ourselves. We shall respect our-
selves with a less number if those we have
are the right ones, and if we have read
them to our advantage. “Reading for
mere reading's sake,” says Mr. Frederic
Harrison in that eloquent and wise guide,
The Choice of Books,“ instead of for the
[23]
THE PLEASURE OF
sake of the good we gain from reading,
is one of the worst and commonest and
most unwholesome habits we have.” This
abuse of reading, to which I have before
referred, has bred in us an indifference,
I might say a contempt, for the books
that are, in truth, “the precious life-
blood of a master-spirit.” We have come
to look upon a “ classic” as something
wearying, dry, and too exacting. The
very word, when applied to a book, re-
pels us. This is due simply to our per-
nicious habit of reading for mere read-
ing's sake. We give the classic no chance
to prove himself what he really is, and
what he may be for us.
The world of books is so crowded that
we shall find it no easy matter to make
friends in it unless we have acquired the
power of selection. Failing this power
we must accept the judgment of the
[24]
READING
world of men. This has long ago de-
cided which are the masters we may count
ourselves privileged to know. That
judgment is there to help us in our
choice. Homer and Æschylus and
Shakespeare; Dante and Milton; Goethe
and Molière, will remain great among
the best writers so long as men shall have
minds and hearts to frame and cherish
ideals. In this world of books, as in the
world of life, you will find there are not
so very many real friends after all. You
may consider yourself fortunate if you
find a hundred or even fifty. Having
found them, “ grapple them to your soul
with hooks of steel.” If you are worthy
of their friendship; if you are courteous
and grateful for their courtesy and lov-
ingkindness, they will keep nothing from
you. They will capture you with their
enchanter eyes and lead you to pleasant
[25]
THE PLEASURE OF
places. In their company you will travel
richly and live in rich experiences.
Shakespeare's revealing magic will make
you know real men and women as you
could never have known them of your
own knowledge. Homer will chant to
you of the deeds of his heroes. Icelandic
poets will troll the Sagas of their Vi-
kings. Historians will unroll the scrolls
of time and blazon on them the many-
coloured robes of the people of the world
as they pass from the darkness across the
light into the darkness again. All these
things shall be done for you alone; not
in a public place, but in the quiet seclu-
sion of your study or the hidden nook
of your summer garden. Here is
enough possibility of experience to last
you your lifetime. Do not be over-eager
to make too many acquaintances at one
time. The gods were ever jealous of
[26]
READING
each other. Therefore go to each as
your spirit moves you, and leave him the
moment you feel you have touched
hands. In that moment there will have
been imparted to you some of the au-
thor's spirit which you will do well to
keep as your own. It is the touch that
shall make you kin with all the rest. The
hour you set aside for the reading of one
of these books should be a sacred hour;
for the spirit of the writer is the spirit
of the place for the time being, and the
ground you stand on is therefore made
holy. But be of good courage, of good
cheer, of a clean mind and a tempered
spirit, and the great one shall find it
pleasant to remain with you and, may-
hap, abide with you always. So shall
you, yourself, become a good friend, a
true lover, a fine father, and an excellent
good fellow.
[27]
THE PLEASURE OF
TOLE
“A book, like a person,” said Walter
Pater, “has its fortunes with one; is
lucky or unlucky, in the precise moment
of its falling in our way, and often by
some happy accident counts with us for
something more than its independent
value.” That is the moment to which I
have just referred. It will be often wise
to put off the reading of a book; per-
haps only to glance idly at its pages to
see if your mood is just then the book's
mood, or if your mood finds its proper
air in the book. If you are not held, let
it go; the right time has not yet come;
but it certainly will. “Some happy ac-
cident,” mayhap, will send you to it, or
it to you, and then it will become the
wonder-working thing which you had
sought for your life long. A new world
will then open before you at the touch of
this magician's wand. Like the apple
[28]
READING
that dropped into Newton's lap, it may
send you exploring mysteries and lead
you to a new revelation; or it may inspire
you to some great deed, or bring you
back loving to the dear one you parted
from in anger.
To be fortunate in such a happy acci-
dent, the books must be at hand where
you can see them at all times of your
leisure. Let them be about you, even if
you do not touch them for years. They
can wait, if you can. But let them be
there; for you never know when the
voice in the temple of your mind will
call you. And let them be there also for
the sake of their presence. Their silent
breathing will perfume the air of your
home and make it a place pleasant to live
in. Their silent companionship will ap-
peal to the better part of you, and you
will hesitate in your follies; you must be
[29]
THE PLEASURE OF READING
a gentleman to live with gentlemen.
“ Come, my best friends, my books,”
you will say with Cowley, “ and lead me
on."
[30]
THE PLEASURE OF
READING THE BIBLE
THE PLEASURE OF READING
THE BIBLE

ANGE
.
THE Bible is not one book; it is
a library of books; a literature
in itself. It is the ancient liter-
ature of the people of Israel, embodying
the best exercise of the creative imagina-
tion in poetry, romance, history, oratory
and prophecy, of the people who believed
themselves to be the chosen people of
God. It is also the ethical code of both
Jews and Christians, and the source of
rabbinical exposition and Church The-
ology. In dealing with this book, how-
ever, as a means for giving pleasure, I
must disregard its authoritative value
for religion or theology. The religious
emotion is not primarily pleasurable;
[33]
THE PLEASURE OF
nor is theology literature. The purpose
of religion is directive to conduct; it is
based on the existence of a definite re-
lation between the individual and an ac-
cepted objective ideal. Pleasure is di-
rective to nothing; it is the emotion
experienced from a freedom from any
relation, when the individual is most
himself. The two, therefore, are anti-
thetical. This is not, however, to say
that the religious man cannot experience
pleasure, or that the man of pleasure
may not be deeply religious. Each can
be the other; but, in being each, he is not,
for the time being, the other. The Ser-
mon on the Mount can be read for the
purpose of fortifying a faith in Christ;
but it can also be read for the sake of
the beauty of its literary form, its noble
language, its suggestive influence on the
mind for cherishing an inspiring ideal.
[34]
READING THE BIBLE
The pleasure from this is the purest and
most satisfying of all pleasures, because
it affirms and fulfils the self.
When I speak of the Bible I mean
the English translation of the Hebrew
Scriptures and the Greek Testament.
The translators of these writings tapped
the purest springs of the English lan-
guage. Whether or no they rendered
the exact meanings of the original words
of the Hebrew and Greek texts is, in this
connection, of small matter. As it has
been given us, in the Authorised and
Revised Versions, the Bible is the noblest
monument of English we possess; a book
of magnificent language embodying the
aspirations of men and women for an
ideal to be cherished as an abiding influ-
ence on life.
It is the reading of this book for the
sake of the pleasure to be derived from
[35]
THE PLEASURE OF
the reading that I am now urging; and
I am urging this because, in the first
place, the pleasure is purifying and, in
the second place, because I believe we are
losing that freshness of outlook and that
child-like naïveté which are so essential
to pure enjoyment, and which are espe-
cially essential to the reading of the
Bible. Our Puritan forefathers had
these qualities. When the Bible was first
given to them it became for them a uni-
versal solvent, a comfort and a joy.
What the discovery and the translations
of the Greek and Latin classics did for
the Renaissance, the translation of the
Bible did for the Reformation. It
brought about a new birth, a re-awaken-
ing of men's spirits. Men and women
knew each other again, and joyed in the
knowledge. An ideal was revealed which
each could cherish in his own soul; and
U
[36]
READING THE BIBLE
a new language was in the people's
mouths:
“ Come unto me all ye that labour and are
heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.”
“ For ye shall go out with joy, and be led
forth with peace; the mountains and the hills
shall break forth before you into singing, and
all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.”
“ Search me, O God, and know my heart:
try me, and know my thoughts: and see if
there be any way of wickedness in me, and lead
me into the way everlasting."
“ Prepare ye in the wilderness the way of
the Lord, make straight in the desert a high-
way for our God. Every valley shall be ex-
alted, and every mountain and hill shall be
made low; and the crooked shall be made
straight, and the rough places plain; and the
glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all
flesh shall see it together."
“ God made not death; neither delighteth
He when the living perish. For He created all
things that they might have being; and the
[37]
THE PLEASURE OF
generative powers of the world are healthsome,
and there is no poison of destruction in them
· .. for righteousness is immortal.”
“ Blessed are they that hunger and thirst
after righteousness: for they shall be filled.
... Blessed are the pure in heart: for they
shall see God."
The compelling power precipitated
from words rightly placed is enough in
itself to make converts. The mind is
lifted by the beauty of the language and
placed on the high road to faith: the
pleasure has paved the way. To men
and women, “looking before and after
and pining for what is not,” such words
as I have quoted must have come like the
sound of refreshing waters to the thirsty
traveller. They carried a music in them
that charmed quite apart from the com-
forting message they bore. The people
marched to the music, they fought to
[38]
READING THE BIBLE
the sound of it, and they died with it
ringing joyously in their ears, the while
their souls were dancing to it. Unhap-
pily, to later generations, the freshness
of the music wore off; the message alone
was heard, and heard without the music,
robbed of its virgin vivifying beauty.
Teachers then became fanatics; soldiers
dogmatics; and the people spiritually
barren. Science and trade, with their
siren voices, led to the worship of false
gods where beauty is not; men fought
for wealth and killed each other for a
creed. Beauty fled, a hunted thing, to
dwell in lonely places, and now the music
of the Bible is rarely heard at all. Even
where, in some quiet spot, a sincere shep-
herd may be found piping to his flock,
his voice is perhaps uncouth, and his fin-
gers have not been taught the cunning of
their use. What we too often hear are
[39]
THE PLEASURE OF
brazen-mouthed teachers blatantly repeat-
ing the words; but the noise that comes
from them is that of sounding brass, as
if they were counting the coins of their
wage-the harp and the psaltery are no
more. Yet can I well imagine a Salvini
in the pulpit speaking the words of the
Bible in such fashion as to put a tongue
in every sense and set the hearts of his
hearers again dancing to the organ
music:
“Every valley shall be exalted, and every
mountain and hill shall be made low; and the
crooked shall be made straight, and the rough
places plain; and the glory of the Lord shall
be revealed.”
“Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to
the waters."
“ Sing, o heavens:
And be joyful, 0 earth;
And break forth into singing, O mountains;
For the Lord hath comforted his people,
And will have compassion upon his afflicted."
UU
[40]
READING THE BIBLE
Why are not ministers of religion
more generally taught the art of reading
this Bible aloud, that its language might
be listened to and its music be made
known in all its many tones of exquisite
sound? It is an education devoutly to be
wished for.
Biblical criticism and modern science
may have settled this or that fact. The
story of the creation as we read it in
Genesis may or may not appeal to the
sophisticated reason of the day; but the
reader of this story, if he is to know its
real pleasure-giving power, must deal
with it in quite a different fashion from
that of the critic. It will be sufficient for
him that the writer of the story believed
it; and by the writer I mean the transla-
tors just as much as I do the author of
the Hebrew original; for only because of
the influence of such a belief can I ac-
[41]
THE PLEASURE OF
count for the excellence of the later ex-
pression. It is the excellence born of
sincerity, a sincerity that is stamped
everywhere in the Bible, and that makes
its language so arresting and so appeal-
ing:
“In the beginning God created the heavens
and the earth. And the earth was without
form, and void; and darkness was upon the
face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved
upon the face of the waters. And God said,
Let there be Light: and there was Light. And
God saw the Light that it was good: and God
divided the Light from the Darkness. And
God called the Light Day; and the Darkness
he called Night. And the evening and the
morning was the first day.”
The arresting impressiveness lies in the
telling simplicity of the language that
holds the poet's imaginative thought
amply and completely: not a drop is
spilt. Out of this telling simplicity
comes a fulfilling music of words in-
11
[42]
READING THE BIBLE
evitably placed that soothes the ear:
“And darkness was upon the face of the
deep. And the spirit of God moved
upon the face of the waters.” The words
with their music send us feeling with
Wordsworth-
“ A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling® is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.”
With what a fine reiteration does this
same sense steal over us in reading of
God's covenant with Noah! How nobly
simple is the language of the poet's child-
like naïveté of intimacy, expressing his
own soul's relation with nature and na-
ture's God!
[43]
THE PLEASURE OF
“ And God said, This is the token of the
covenant which I make between me and you
and every living creature that is with you, for
perpetual generations: I do set my bow in the
cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant
between me and the earth. And it shall come
to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth,
that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: And I
will remember my covenant, which is between me
and you and every living creature of all flesh:
And the waters shall no more become a flood
to destroy all flesh. And the bow shall be in
the cloud: and I will look upon it, that I may
remember the everlasting covenant."
God was very real to this writer, as real
to him as the spirit that “ rolls through
all things” was to Wordsworth. The
personification is the poet's way of mak-
ing his thought visual so that his readers
might be, with him, in the same living
relation to it. The rainbow in the cloud,
coming as it did with the cheering light
of the smiling sun, spoke to him of di-
vine clemency after storm; filled him
[44]
READING THE BIBLE
with the benignancy of the quiet, cool
atmosphere after summer's heavy show-
ers, and coloured an imagination tran-
quilised after the fear from the raging
elements. It became the symbol of a
covenant between God and man, of se-
curity and life.
In the art of story-telling the writer of
the human tale of Joseph and his breth-
ren has very rarely been surpassed. The
narrative opens simply and moves along
gently, reaching its climax of emotion
by the very force of the situation
brought about. It is nowhere strained,
nowhere marred by attempts at the
grandiose or pathetic. It is a delightful
example of the power of sincerity in the
telling of a tale. Who can read un-
moved Joseph's final words, when he re-
veals himself to his brothers? “I am
Joseph: doth my father yet live?” But
.
[45]
THE PLEASURE OF
it is all so simple, so direct and so finely
inevitable in its simplicity and directness.
The splendid imagery of Jacob's fare-
well words to his sons is another instance
of the wonder-working literary art of
the Biblical writers. It is an appeal, a
benediction, a touching of spirits to fine
issues, a father's prophetic insight into
his children's characters, and all couched
in noble words nobly ordered. It reads
like an ode addressed to the founders of
a new nation:
“Reuben, thou art my first-born,
My might, and the beginning of my strength;
The excellency of dignity, and the excellency
of power.
Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel.
* Simeon and Levi are brethren;
Weapons of violence are their swords.
O my soul, come not thou into their council;
Unto their assembly, my glory, be not thou
united;
[46]
READING THE BIBLE
For in their anger they slew men,
And in their self-will houghed oxen.
Cursed be their anger, for it was fierce;
And their wrath, for it was cruel:
I will divide them in Jacob,
And scatter them in Israel.
“Judah, thee shall thy brethren praise:
Thy hand shall be on the neck of thine ene-
mies;
Thy father's sons shall bow down before thee.
Judah is a lion's whelp;
From the prey, my son, thou art gone up:
He stooped down, he couched as a lion,
And as a lioness; who shall rouse him up?
The sceptre shall not depart from Judah,
Nor the ruler's staff from between his feet,
Till he come to Shiloh,
Having obedience of the peoples.
Binding his foot unto the vine,
And his ass's colt unto the choice vine;
He hath washed his garments in wine,
And his vesture in the blood of grapes:
His eyes shall be red with wine,
And his teeth white with milk.”
From such a stock were born the tribes
who founded a new nation and ordered a
[47]
THE PLEASURE OF
new commandment. Is it any wonder
that they did great deeds and saw vi-
sions? Who shall dare hope to win
against men who walk with God, and see
their ideals in all living things, and who
make the ideal appear in the work of
their hands? This was the spirit with
which Palestine was nationalized; it was
the spirit in which the great mission
bearers conquered. It is the spirit in
which alone abiding work can be accom-
plished. It is the power that lies in all
noble expressions, and gives meaning
and value to all literature. Poets have
made more heroes in the flesh than they
have pictured in their language. That
is what they are for—through noble lan-
guage to attune hearts and inspire minds
to doing nobly and being noble. Other-
wise literature has no place in life. I go
back in thought and find the solution of
[48]
READING THE BIBLE
England's greatness in the past and
America's foundation in the present to
the moving influence of this English
Bible on our Puritan forefathers. It
was a trumpet-blast calling on them as
the hosts of the Lord to fight the battles
of the Lord; it was a revelation of man's
equality in the sight of the Lord; it was
a realization of a living ideal by which
men might come to live in peace and joy
together; and it was also a glorious mes-
sage of hope.
“ The people that walked in darkness have
seen a great light; they that dwelt in the land
of the shadow of death, upon them hath the
light shined.”
The light that shined on the people of
England in King James's and King
Charles's days came from this Bible.
Life, because of it, took on new and
lovely colours, and men braced them-
[49]
THE PLEASURE OF
selves to live it anew. What they had
once dared as barons they now dared as
yeomen; and the fathers who dared
King Charles bred sons who dared King
George. Thus does literature justify
itself.
What must have been in the hearts of
the children of Israel as they listened to
Moses' song, on the eve of his death,
when in sight of the Promised Land?
“ Give ear, ye heavens, and I will speak;
And let the earth hear the words of my mouth:
My doctrine shall drop as the rain,
My speech shall distil as the dew;
As the small rain upon the tender grass,
And as the showers upon the herb:
For I will proclaim the name of the Lord.
“For all his ways are judgement:
A God of faithfulness and without iniquity,
Just and right is He.”
Do these same children of Israel hear
[50]
READING THE BIBLE
these words now? Does their music make
glad their spirits ? Surely, if words mean
anything, these words mean the same to-
day that they meant thousands of years
ago! God is still a God of faithfulness,
if we remain true to our ideal. He is still
without iniquity, if we keep our own na-
tures clean. He remains just and right,
so long as we live justly and rightly,
each to the other. But we have missed
the pleasure of reading this Bible, and
no longer hear its inspiring music. I
must believe that we have misunderstood
this wonderful book; that we have al-
lowed ourselves to be led astray and so
lost the sense for pure enjoyment. If
we have read the letter we have been alto-
gether blind to the spirit—the spirit of
Beauty, which is in the Bible as it is in
the Iliad, as it is in the Divine Comedy,
as it is in Shakespeare, in Milton, in
[51]
THE PLEASURE OF
Keats, in Wordsworth, and in all great
manifestations of literary art.
The conforming Jew reads the Psalms
every Sabbath day, until he has learned
them by rote. They appear in his daily
prayers and reappear in the devotional
exercises on festival and fast days. He
can chant them by number, and recite
them at command. Has he accomplished
more than a feat of the memory? Has
the poet's music stirred his soul to finer
impulses through purer pleasure? Let
his life answer the questions. But the
same questions may be asked of the
Christian also. The truth is we have
spoiled our taste for this splendid litera-
ture by making its reading a task instead
of a life-giving delight. When the child
at school is compelled to learn by rote
Wordsworth’s Lucy Gray, or Shelley's
Ode to a Skylark, or Keats's Ode
[52]
READING THE BIBLE
DU
to a Nightingale, or a hundred lines
from Goldsmith's Deserted Village,
the child cannot possibly see the reveal-
ing beauty in these poems. Its mind is
centered on quite a different object, the
object of accomplishing an ordered ex-
ercise. For the child to see beauty it
must come on beauty, so to speak.
Beauty must startle it into an awareness
of something strange in its experience.
Then will the child's curious soul be
drawn to the revelation, and it will never-
more forget the meeting. In exactly the
same way all great literature must be ap-
proached-gently led to delightful sur-
prises. If the mood be not upon us it is
wiser to leave the reading alone. “ Soft
stillness and the night become the touches
of sweet harmony.” Let the right at-
mosphere be made and the right mood
realized before you listen to the poet's
[53]
THE PLEASURE OF
songs. Then will such a psalm as the
nineteenth lift your spirit on self-born
wings:
“ The heavens declare the glory of God;
And the firmament showeth his handiwork.
Day unto day uttereth speech,
And night unto night showeth knowledge.
There is no speech nor language;
Their voice is not heard.
“ Their line is gone out through all the earth,
And their words to the end of the world.
In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun,
Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his
chamber,
And rejoiceth as a strong man to run his
course.
His going forth is from the end of the
heavens,
And his circuit unto the ends of it;
And there is nothing hid from the heat
thereof.
“ The lare of the Lord is perfect, restoring the
soul;
The testimony of the Lord is sure, making
wise the simple.
[54]
READING THE BIBLE
The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing
the heart:
The commandment of the Lord is pure, en-
lightening the eyes:
The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring for-
ever:
The ordinances of the Lord are true, and
righteous altogether.
“More to be desired are they than gold, yea,
than much fine gold;
Sweeter also than honey and the droppings of
the honeycomb.”
1
V
Or this exquisite confession of God's
protective influence, as embodied in the
twenty-third Psalm:
“ The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;
He leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul:
He guideth me in the paths of righteousness
for his name's sake.
CU
“ Yea, though I walk through the valley of the
shadow of death,
[55]
THE PLEASURE OF
I will fear no evil; for thou art with me;
Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.
“ Thou preparest a table before me in the pres-
ence of mine enemies;
Thou hast anointed my head with oil;
My cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and loving-kindness shall --
follow me all the days of my life;
And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord
for ever.”
The poetry of devotion must be gently
dealt with, otherwise we are in danger of
adulterating its fine aroma. The poet's
mood must be our mood, or we shall alto-
gether miss the music. The hour that
fits Burns's The Jolly Beggars is not
the hour for Tennyson's In Memo-
riam, and the mood meet for the story
of Samson and Delilah shuns the Ser-
mon on the Mount. The Bible must be
treated fairly, as we would any other
work of accepted literature. One need
not read at all if the ear be not inclined.
[56]
READING THE BIBLE
If the singing of songs is the natural
demand, then sing songs. We are no
longer children to do this or that at a
bidding. It were well that children were
also dealt with in a proper fashion. It
is unseemly to force or be forced, and
unjust to your author. When we shall
have learned to be less familiar and more
courteous to the Bible we shall not only
value it with livelier discrimination, but
the book itself will yield to us, more and
more benignantly, the fine enjoyment
of its beauty.
Rich as the Bible is in poetry of de-
votion, it is as rich in lyrical poetry. The
Book of Psalms is full of lyrics, and the
Song of Solomon is an entire series of
love lyrics. These latter are exquisitely
beautiful:
“ I am a rose of Sharon,
A lily of the valleys.
[57]
THE PLEASURE OF
“ As the apple-tree among the trees of the wood,
So is my beloved among the sons.
I sat down under the shadow with great de-
light,
And his fruit was sweet to my taste.
He brought me to the banqueting house,
And his banner over me was love.
“ Stay ye me with raisins, refresh me with
apples;
For I am sick from love.
Let his left hand be under my head,
And his right hand embrace me.
“ The voice of my beloved! behold, he cometh,
Leaping upon the mountains,
Skipping upon the hills.
My beloved is like a roe or a young hart:
Behold, he standeth behind our wall;
He looketh in at the windows;
He glanceth through the lattice.
My beloved spake and said unto me,
Arise up, my love, my fair one, and come
away.
“ For, lo, the winter is past;
The rain is over and gone;
[58]
READING THE BIBLE
The flowers appear on the earth;
The time of the singing of birds is come,
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our
land;
The fig-tree ripeneth her green figs,
And the vines are in blossom;
They give forth their fragrance,
Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away."
These songs of love between a husband
and wife must be read in their complete
sequence to enjoy their pulsating melody.
Whatever secondary interpretation the
criticism of theologians may offer by
way of explanation, the poems must con-
tinue to appeal because of the response
they find in every true lover's heart.
“Many waters cannot quench love,
neither can floods drown it."
The writers of the Bible possessed a
gift which few modern writers possess;
they had the power to express the phi-
losophy of life as literature. The Book
[59]
THE PLEASURE OF
of Job is a masterly dramatic allegory,
the language of which rises to the highest
form of poetical expression. The Prov-
erbs of Solomon may be arranged, as
Professor Moulton has arranged them, so
that they form sonnets. He has also di-
vided the Book of Ecclesiastes into es-
says, epigrams, sonnets, and “wisdom
clusters.” But the Book of Job stands
supreme, among its kind, in all literature.
We shall best accept it as the poetic trag-
edy of a noble mind struggling to find a
reasonable basis for faith in God's divine
judgments and finding peace at last in
a realization that faith is better than
knowledge and is the profoundest wis-
dom the human soul can attain.
Job had been a wealthy man. He
feared God and walked in the ways of
righteousness. Suddenly, in one single
day, ruin came upon him. He lost his
[607
READING THE BIBLE
flocks, his camels, his home and his fam-
ily. He barely had time to realize the
calamities that had befallen him when he
himself was afflicted by a loathsome dis-
ease. He became an outcast and a
dweller with the dogs on the village ash-
mound. As he lived there wondering
why God had thus punished him, his
friends came to argue with him by way
of explaining the reason for his afflic-
tions. Each, according to his point of
view, tells him that sin is the cause of all
misfortune in life, and that he must have
sinned grievously to be thus visited by
God's anger. Job cannot understand
this. He never believed he was a per-
fect man; but if God is all-powerful,
why does he not pardon his sin, so that
he may pass into "the land of darkness
and of the shadow of death” with some
little of comfort to himself? One of
[61]
THE PLEASURE OF
his friends thereupon asks him: “ Canst
thou by searching find out God? Canst
thou find out the Almighty unto perfec-
tion?” And he advises him to be good
and of faith in God:
“If thou set thine heart aright,
And stretch out thine hands toward Him;
If iniquity be in thine hand, put it far away,
And let no unrighteousness dwell in thy tents;
Surely then shalt thou lift up thy face with-
out spot;
Yea, thou shalt be steadfast, and shalt not
fear.”
Job answers:“No doubt but ye are the
people, and wisdom shall die with you.
But I have understanding as well as you;
I am not inferior to you... The
tents of the robbers prosper, and they
that provoke God are secure. Why does
God permit these things? Why should
evil succeed and good be punished?” He
[62]
READING THE BIBLE
tries to find the meaning in this seeming
paradox, and is driven along two lines of
thought. Either God's world is void of
meaning, a world in which evil must tri-
umph; or it may be that all things will be
righted in a world to come, in a future
life. Either way, however, does not com-
fort Job, because he is consumed by a pas-
sionate desire to vindicate himself now,
while he is yet in the flesh, before the peo-
ple he knew in the days of his prosperity
who have falsely interpreted the cause of
his degradation. In a series of remark-
ably dramatic speeches the argument is
taken up by each of the actors in turn,
until God Himself, as a Voice out of the
whirlwind, interrupts the speakers and,
in a poem of magnificent grandeur, hum-
bles Job to the very dust. Then does
Job realize that true wisdom is not to be
found in knowledge but in faith. When
[63]
THE PLEASURE OF
he has realized this in its fulness he is
able to say, “ Though he slay me, yet will
I trust him.” But he comes to this wis-
dom only after he has been shown that
the mystery of evil is but the least of the
mysteries of the universe. The Divine
argument is so wonderfully embodied
that Job is overwhelmed, and can but
brokenly cry: “I know that thou canst
do all things, and that no purpose of
thine can be restrained ... There-
fore have I uttered that which I under-
stood not, things too wonderful for me,
which I knew not. Hear, I beseech thee,
and I will speak... I had heard of
thee by the hearing of the ear; but now
mine eye seeth thee: wherefore, I abhor
myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”
Here is a portion of the Divine Argu-
ment by which God revealed Himself to
Job and brought him to a sense of the
[64]
READING THE BIBLE
profound and purifying humility of ig-
norance that leads him to faith:
“Where wast thou when I laid the foundacions
of the earth?
Declare, if thou hast understanding,
Who determined the measures thereof, if thou
knowest?
Or who stretched the line upon it?
Whereupon were the foundations thereof
fastened?
Or who laid the cornerstone thereof,
When the morning stars sang together,
And all the sons of God shouted for joy?
IM
“ Or who shut up the sea with doors,
When it brake forth, as if newly born;
When I made clouds the garment thereof,
And thick darkness a swaddling-band for it,
And marked out for it my bound,
And set bars and doors,
And said, Hitherto shalt thou come, but no
further;
And here shall thy proud waves be stayed?
“ Hast thou commanded the morning since thy
days began,
And caused the dayspring to know its place?
[65]
THE PLEASURE OF
Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea?
Or hast thou walked in the recesses of the
deep?
Have the portals of the grave been revealed
unto thee?
Or hast thou seen the gates of the shadow of
death?
Hast thou comprehended the earth in its
breadth?
Declare, if thou konowest it all!
“ Where is the way to the dwelling place of
light?
And as for darkness, where is the place
thereof,
That thou shouldest take it to the bound
thereof,
And that thou shouldest discern the paths to
the house thereof?
Doubtless thou knowest, for thou wast then
born,
And the number of thy days is great!
“ Canst thou bind the cluster of the Pleiades,
Or loose the bands of Orion?
Canst thou lead forth the signs of the Zodiac
in their season?
Or canst thou guide the Bear with her train?
[66]
READING THE BIBLE
Knowest thou the ordinances of the heavens?
Canst thou establish the dominion thereof in
the earth?”
Well, indeed, may Job have exclaimed:
“What shall I answer thee? I lay mine
hand upon my mouth.” The argument
is a sublime poem of a mighty execution.
The creative genius of this poet has here
never been surpassed. He may worthily.
take his place by the side of Homer,
Dante and Milton. But the whole book
is, indeed, one of the marvels of litera-
ture.
In Ecclesiasticus, one of the so-called
Apocryphal books of the Bible, there is
a little essay on Friendship which de-
serves re-setting, even though the sub-
ject has been dealt with by many writers
since, from Bacon downwards.
“Sweet words,” says this counsellor,
“will multiply a man's friends; and a
[67]
THE PLEASURE OF
fair-speaking tongue will multiply cour-
tesies. Let those that are at peace with
thee be many; but thy counsellors one of
a thousand. If thou wouldest get thee
a friend, get him by proving, and be not
in haste to trust him. For there is a
friend that is so for his own occasion, and
he will not continue in the day of thy
affliction. And there is a friend that
turneth to enmity; and he will discover
strife to thy reproach. And there is a
friend that is a companion at the table,
and he will not continue in the day of thy
affliction; and in thy prosperity he will
be as thyself, and will be bold over thy
servants; if thou shalt be brought low,
he will be against thee, and he will hide
himself from thy face. Separate thyself
from thine enemies; and beware of thy
friends. A faithful friend is a strong
defence; and he that hath found him
[68]
READING THE BIBLE
hath found a treasure. There is nothing
that can be taken in exchange for a faith-
ful friend; and his excellency is beyond
price. A faithful friend is a medicine of
life; and they that fear the Lord shall
find him. He that feareth the Lord di-
recteth his friendship aright; for as he is,
so is his neighbour also.”
From Ecclesiastes I take the liberty
to quote, in Professor Moulton's set-
ting, a portion of the twelfth chapter,
which he entitles, “ The Coming of Evil
Days”:-
TT
“ Remember also thy Creator in the days of
thy youth!
Or ever the evil days come,
And the years drare nigh,
When thou shalt say, I have no pleas-
ure in them:
“ Or ever the sun,
And the light,
And the moon,
[69]
THE PLEASURE OF
And the stars,
Be darkened,
And the clouds return after the rain:
“In the days when the keepers of the house
shall tremble,
And the strong men shall bow themselves,
And the grinders cease because they are few,
And those that look out of the windows be
darkened,
And the door shall be shut in the street;
“When the sound of the grinding is low,
And one shall rise up at the voice of a bird;
And all the daughters of music shall be
brought low;
“ Yea, they shall be afraid of that which is
high,
And terrors shall be in the way;
“ And the almond tree shall blossom,
And the grasshopper shall be a burden,
And the caperberry shall burst:
“ Because man goeth to his long home,
And the mourners go about the streets :
[70]
READING THE BIBLE
“Or ever the silver cord be loosed,
Or the golden bowl be broken,
Or the pitcher be broken at the fountain,
Or the wheel broken at the cistern:
“ And the dust return to the earth,
As it was;
And the spirit return unto God
Who gave it."
The Preacher prefixes this beautifully
sombre poem with a short exhortation
written in prose as beautiful, and reveal-
ing his kindly and sweet sympathy for
the frailty of human nature and the
evanescence of human life:
“ Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant
thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun. Yea,
if a man live many years, let him rejoice in them
all; and remember the days of darkness, for
they shall be many. All that cometh is vanity.
Rejoice, O) young man, in thy youth, and walk
in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of
thine eyes: but know then, that for all these
things God will bring thee into judgement.
Therefore remove sorrow from thy heart, and
11
00
[71]
THE PLEASURE OF
put away evil from thy flesh: for youth and
the prime of life are vanity.”
But this tone is not the prevailing tone
of the Bible, which is one of splendid op-
timism. Only serve the Lord and it shall
be well with you—that is the keynote of
the Hebrew Scriptures; it is also its prac-
tical value for life. Even Isaiah rejoices
in this truth:
“How beautiful upon the mountains are the
feet of him
That bringeth good tidings, that publisheth
peace,
That bringeth good tidings of good, that
publisheth salvation:
That saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth.”
That is the secret revealed. Every-
thing is beautiful, everything is right,
everything is good, because God reigneth.
From this fountain did Browning drink
[72]
READING THE BIBLE
ven
his joyous faith: “God's in His heaven.
All's right with the world.”
The lasting appeal in the New Testa-
ment is made as the Gospel of Love.
That is the revelation it brought to man-
kind; and it has been embodied largely,
not in poetry, but in prose. The prose,
however, is of so excellent a quality that
its words have passed into our current
speech; so that if we use them even care-
lessly they have yet an arresting power to
make us pause and give us thought. The
Sermon on the Mount and the thirteenth
chapter of the first epistle to the Corin-
thians are together the finest flowers of
speech containing this gospel. The ser-
mon, however, is expressed in the lan-
guage as of one in authority; the epistle
is argumentative and persuasive. Christ
spoke to eager listeners; Paul wrote to
cultured thinkers. Yet when Paul comes
[73]
THE PLEASURE OF
to the subject of love he rises to finely
moving eloquence:
U
“If I speak with the tongue of men and
angels," he says, “but have not love, I am be-
come sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal.
And if I have the gift of prophecy, and know
all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have
all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have
not love, I am nothing. And if I bestow all my
goods to feed the poor, and if I give my body
to be burned, and have not love, it profiteth me
nothing. Love suffereth long, and is kind;
love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself, is not
puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly,
seeketh not its own, is not provoked, taketh not
account of evil; rejoiceth not in unrighteous-
ness, but rejoiceth with the truth; beareth all
things, believeth all things, hopeth all things,
endureth all things. Love never faileth: but
whether there be prophecies, they shall be done
away; whether there be tongues, they shall
cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall be
done away. For we know in part, and we
prophesy in part: but when that which is per-
fect is come, that which is in part shall be done
away. When I was a child I spoke as a child,
[74]
READING THE BIBLE
12
I felt as a child, I thought as a child: now that
I am become a man, I have put away childish
things. For now we see in a mirror darkly;
but then face to face: now I know in part; but
then I shall know even also as I have been
known. But now abideth faith, hope, love,
these three; and the greatest of these is love."
It is not possible to read this language
senseless to the power of words. The
magical art of the writer is almost a piece
of wizardry. He rings the changes on
the word, turning it this way and that
way, until the mind of the reader has ex-
hausted its own experiences in following
the writer's argument. And after the
kaleidoscope has been turned in every di-
rection, the final appeal is made to the
personal emotion; but so deftly made that
the reader is not conscious of having been
led to a conviction, but believes he has
brought himself to it. And yet the con-
[75]
THE PLEASURE OF
viction would be worth little were there
no response in the reader's heart to the
truth; were there no possibility of the re-
lation between him and the ideal pre-
sented to him. It is because of this pos-
sibility that Paul's epistle will be read so
long as men shall walk the earth. It be-
longs, with the rest of the Bible, to that
body of work of the creative imagination
which in song, oration, romance and story,
has attempted to spell the experiences of
life in the language of beauty, and given
to striving and travailing men and women
a joyous hope in each to-morrow in the
happiness of each to-day. For literature
is less than life; it is not our master, but
our servant. The gods well know how
profoundly and pathetically we still need
the help.
I have tried, in as few words as I could
express it, to show that the Bible, taking
[76]
READING THE BIBLE
it as literature only, may be read for the
pleasure it affords. I have tried to em-
phasize fruitfully the purity of that
pleasure, leading as it does, to the culti-
vation of our sense of beauty in lan-
guage and thought; and to an awareness
of beauty in all things. I have done this,
in the first place, because I believe there
is no one book, in all the literatures
of the world, that so amply and so
bravely searches all that can affect our
minds and hearts. It is a panorama of
life in action, of the struggle of man
against nature and himself and of his
reconciliation with nature and himself;
it is a pageant of the progress of peoples
to the making of nations; it is a body of
poetry and prose singing of the joy of
living for life's sake, and the joy of lov-
ing for all sakes. It is, finally, the rec-
ord in imperishable speech of the dis-
[77]
THE PLEASURE OF
covery of how man redeemed himself
by achieving an ideal.
In the second place, it has seemed to
me proper to do this, in order that I
might help to reinstate the Bible in its
rightful place. It has too long been al-
lowed to rest, in lordly isolation, to be
guarded by augurs from the common
touch, as if it required interpreters to ex-
plain its hidden secrets. The Bible will
never be known after this fashion.
There are no secrets in it that any true
heart cannot know. There is nothing to
explain. It is a book to take by the hand;
to turn to in hours of joy; to look to in
times of sorrow; and to accept at all
times as the sincere efforts of men and
women like ourselves toward perfection.
Above all, it is a book to be happy with.
“ Behold, I stand at the door and knock: if
any man hear my voice and open the door, I
[78]
READING THE BIBLE
will come in to him, and will sup with him, and
he with me. I am the Alpha and the Omega,
the beginning and the end. I will give unto
him that is athirst of the fountain of the water
of life freely. And the Spirit and the bride
say, Come. And he that heareth, let him say,
Come. And he that is athirst, let him come:
and whosoever will, let him take the water of
life freely."
[79]
III
THE PLEASURE OF
READING POETRY
THE PLEASURE OF READING
POETRY

C
POMOT has always seemed to me
R 2 strange that poetry should re-
quire an introduction to its en-
joyment; that any “defence” or “apol-
ogy” should be made for it; or that any
guide should be necessary to its “knowl-
edge.” Poetry is not an object for
knowledge; it is really a personal ex-
perience, a necessary condition of the
soul toward growth that comes to us at
certain moments without any conscious
effort on our part, but that may be
aroused in us by reading a poem. How
or why this is so is a mystery. The fact,
however, remains that the appeal poetry
makes is universal, immediate, and does
[83]
THE PLEASURE OF
St
not depend for appreciation on infor-
mation to be obtained from instructors
or guides.
A poem is when, in reading it, we are
en rapport with it. If there arise no re-
sponse in us to what it is, then for us, it
is not. Yet, like the
" barrèd clouds that bloom the dying day,"
it is still there. It is we who are, for the
moment, either blind or without the
sense to experience it. I must then be-
lieve, since, as a matter of fact, the
guide is found to be necesary, that his
business is not so much to point out what
particular poetry gives most pleasure, as
what in us requires cultivation in order
to experience the pleasure to be obtained
from any poem.
Now this is not very easy to do; nor
would it be very exciting to read when
done. Were I even competent for the
[84]
READING POETRY
task the result, I am afraid, might not
accomplish the purpose I have in mind.
The reader would be wearied in an in-
tricacy of psychological analyses which
would not greatly enlighten him, nor
would it much help him to the enjoyment
of poetry.
It is possible, of course, by enquiring
into the nature of poetry, into its so-
called meaning and value, to build up, so
to speak, that condition of the mind
which is favourable to poetic experience.
In this way, we might come to discover
hidden virtues in ourselves and, there-
fore, hidden beauties in the poems; and,
perhaps, find that our blindness and lack
of sense were only seeming or momen-
tary, and that poetry is itself a revealing
and sensing power. But along this road
also we may meet Professor Dryasdust,
and he is not a very interesting compan-
[85]
THE PLEASURE OF
ion, if we are intending to travel with
those who say of themselves:
“We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-lovers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
“ With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities,
And out of the fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory:
One man, with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown:
And three with a new song's measure
Can trample a kingdom down.
“We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself in our mirth;
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world's worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.”
[86]
READING POETRY
These are daring, reckless fellows who
are apt to fling friend Dryasdust into
the nearest wayside ditch; and we our-
selves might catch their infectious spirits
and do things that are not seemly on the
highroad of a law-abiding land.
Perhaps we shall do as well if we set
no definite course, but let the subject it-
self take us where it will. If the high-
road call us, let us take to it, but let us
not feel obliged to keep to it if we find
ourselves drawn to the by-lanes and
grassy foot-paths that lead nowhere in
particular, and may perhaps leave us
listening to a brook, murmuring “un-
der moon and stars in brambly wilder-
nesses."
The pleasure of reading poetry may
not be tapped at will. If it come not
now, it may come then. The habit of
reading poetry, however, maybe so
[87]
THE PLEASURE OF
gently encouraged and trained that the
pleasure may be ours more and more
frequently:
“Ever let the Fancy roam,
Pleasure never is at home:
At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth,
Like to bubbles when rain pelteth."
The poet also, if he be worthy the
name, has not sung “by precept only,”
or “shed tears by rule.” He has quaffed
“the live current.” He has grown to
the power of his accomplished singing,
even as the meadow-flower grew to the
unfolding of its bloom—in freedom
bold:
“ And so the grandeur of the Forest-tree
Comes not by casting in a formal mould,
But from its own divine vitality.”
This is Wordsworth's poet, the man
who is able to sing so that his songs
shall be to us “ a substantial world both
[88]
READING POETRY
pure and good.” If then we are to know
the pleasure poetry affords we must
search the literatures and find out who
are the poets and what of their poetry
best fulfils their high moods. This, per-
haps, leads us to the purposes of this
chapter, which are to name by name
“the great music-makers,” “ the dream-
ers of dreams," " the world-lovers and
world-forsakers,” and to taste the purity
and beauty of their work in its power to
make pure our own impulses and to un-
fold our own sense for beauty. If po-
etry have a “meaning” and the poet a
“value," both meaning and value are to
be precipitated by our consideration of
the man and his work.
Before naming these master-workers
let us, for a moment, consider what the
poet is, and how we may recognize his
work as poetry. The poet has been nec-
[89]
THE PLEASURE OF
essary at all times. Without him we
should still be content, like the ox, to
look only for the next mouthful of grass.
Many of us, indeed, who have never ex-
perienced poetry, still spend our lives
biting herbage and chewing the cud,
though we call the food and the exercise
by other names. Money and social posi-
tion keep the eye blind and the ear deaf
to what the poet is calling us. We have
more need of the poet to-day than ever
before, because of the greater need to-
day than ever before for a living ideal
that shall be the centre of our emotional
activity. For the poet works in faith-
fulness to his ideal; he sets before us
what is worshipful, what is desirable
and worthy our aspirations, and what is
hopeful and inspiring. These are what
may be called his subject-matter. If he
aim at anything it is to express an ex-
[90]
READING POETRY
perience so that we, reading it, shall also
live the experience even as he lived it.
His success, in the appeal he makes to
us, and his power in carrying us with
him, are, together, the measure of the
quality of his poetry. He also recalls us
from the illusions of the world of things
to the realities of the world of thinks.
Good food, much money, high estate are
good things to know and to have; but if
our lives are mainly occupied with these,
we are not living, says the poet; for we
have thus severed our relation with that
by which all things, good and less good,
have fruitful and abiding values—the
ideal within us. We must believe with
Wordsworth that he
“Who looks
In steadiness, who hath among the least things
An undersense of greatest; sees the parts
As parts, but with a feeling of the whole "
[91]
THE PLEASURE OF
VIOLI
lives and experiences what is worth the
knowing.
The ideal within us is a phrase I per-
mit myself to use for want of a better
expression, merely to suggest what I
mean. It is not a thing to comprehend;
it is that which apprehends all things, so
that these shall not be felt as separate
and lifeless, but as unified, and alive be-
cause of the unification. It must, how-
ever, be a conscious reality to us if this
universe of things is to mean anything
for us, or if we are to experience joy.
“Our meddling intellects
Mis-shape the beauteous forms of things-
We murder to dissect."
This power that links all things, and
us to all things, is the
“ Spirit that knows no insulated spot,
No chasm, no solitude, from link to link
It circulates, the soul of all the worlds."
[92]
READING POETRY
Wordsworth believed in this power as
no poet before or since believed in it.
Through its living wisdom he was able
to reveal for us the mystery and the
beauty that are in all the common things
of life. By its saving grace he came to
know the joy of a contemplative peace
that almost passes understanding.
The poet also points out the futility of
gaining the world and losing the soul.
The gain is obtained at the sacrifice of
the power to experience joy; for joy
comes to us, not from the thing as thing,
but from the relations the thing has to
the infinite number of other things in
play that we call life. From this point
of view the poet is the interpreter of life.
The interpretation, however, is not, as it
is in philosophy or science, a formulation
or a classification; it is a revelation; and
the revelation is not to the mind's com-
[93]
THE PLEASURE OF
prehension, but to the soul's apprehen-
sion.
Let me try to illustrate what I mean.
Air in motion as wind is explained by
science to be due to certain conditions
brought about by the heat of the sun, and
the earth's rotation on its axis. The
physical fact of the wind blowing is a
common experience at any season of the
year. The thing is well known as thing.
How did this physical fact affect the
poet Shelley? He will tell us in his own
magnificent language; in an ode which
is, perhaps, the most passionately ap-
pealing lyric of the kind in English po-
etry—the Ode to the West Wind.
Shelley begins by addressing the West
Wind as “Thou breath of Autumn's
being,” and tells how the leaves of the
trees are being driven by it in all direc-
tions. He speaks of it as the charioteer
IV
[94]
READING POETRY
of “winged seeds” bearing them “ to
their dark wintry bed” to lie there until
Spring shall bring Autumn's “azure
sister” and fill plain and hill once more
with living hues and odours. He calls
on it as the “wild spirit,” the “ destroyer
and preserver," to hear him. He begins
again and pictures the wind as a stream
on which are being shed loose clouds like
earth's decaying leaves, “ shook from the
tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean."
“On the blue surface of thine airy surge,”
he says, “are spread like the bright hair
uplifted from the head of some fierce
Mænad ... the locks of the ap-
proaching storm.” He calls again on
the West Wind to hear him:
“ Thou dirge
Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might
[95]
THE PLEASURE OF
Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst; O,
hear!”
Once again he calls on it, and this time
the note of the appeal is calmer, though
still intense:
“ Thou who didst waken from his summer
dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,
LUI
Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ's bay,
And show in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day.
11
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them!
Thou
For whose path the Atlantic's level powers
Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the cosy woods which
wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know
[96]
READING POETRY
Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with
fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: 0,
hear! »
This is his call. This is how the West
Wind appealed to him. Now what is it
he has to say to the West Wind? How
does he appeal to it? How does he re-
late it to the ideal within him, and in re-
lating it, make it one with the play of
things called life? Thus:-
“ If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, 0, uncontroulable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a vision: I would ne'er have
striven
[97]
THE PLEASURE OF
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has changed and
bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and
proud.
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit
fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,
Like wither'd leaves, to quicken a new birth;
And by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among man-
kind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
III
The trumpet of a prophecy! O wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”
[98]
READING POETRY
It is a sacrilege almost to break the
sacred silence that must follow the read-
ing of this magnificent prayer, this
achingly moving communion with Na-
ture. An approaching autumnal storm,
near a wood by the Arno, had set Shel-
ley's creative imagination weaving the
web of this poem with the golden threads
of his heart's emotions, and the colours
of his magical fancy. Does this expe-
rience show any likeness to what we
know, either through science or by our
own senses, of the West Wind? Prob-
ably not. Our experiences of the West
Wind are of the thing unrelated to the
infinite number of other things we call
life, untouched by the ideal within us.
Shelley's experience of the West Wind
is alive by virtue of his ideal, becomes
an interpretation of life; but the inter-
pretation is neither a formulation nor a
[99]
THE PLEASURE OF
classification; it is, indeed, a revelation.
This revelation, I have said, is one as-
pect of the poet's activity; that side of
him with which he is himself concerned;
the workings of his creative imagination
in a conscious effort to embody them as
poetry. The other side of him is in us;
in the workings of our creative imagi-
nation, in the completeness with which
we succeed in realizing the poem as our
own personal experience. If the poem
have any meaning or value it is here that
these are made manifest; meaning and
value are precipitated in the crucible of
our consciousness. Art has no purpose
other than this. It is in this sense that
we speak of the poem as “living,” when
it becomes, to use a philosophical expres-
sion, “a permanent possibility of ex-
perience.” We supplement the poem,
and we are also the poet's complement.
[100]
READING POETRY
We say then that the poet “ builded
better than he knew." We read into his
work what he may never have thought;
we derive from it many experiences that
he had not. That is one of the mysteries
in all great creative art. In its making
something has slipped in between
“ The beauty coming and the beauty gone."
This quality lies in the power of its in-
finite suggestiveness, which the best po-
etry has in common with all creation.
We exercise ourselves in efforts to spell
out its meanings. We would do far
better were we simply to permit the
aroma of the budding emotion, which the
suggestion breathes in us, to spread its
perfume in silence. It is, perhaps, be-
cause of this that poetry is the wonder-
ful joy-giver it is. It enables us to see
“the light that never was on sea or
[101]
THE PLEASURE OF
land," and to catch the voices of mys-
terious echoes that reverberate in our
hearts:
“ Such rebounds our inward ear
Catches sometimes from afar
Listen, ponder, hold them dear;
For of God-of God they are."
It lingers with the beneficent sympathy
of the inexpressible pathos that lies in
such words:
“But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me.”
It fills Keats's Ode to a Nightingale,
where the poet becomes one with the bird
by forgetting his pain in the joy of
being:
“ Thou wast not born for death, immortal
Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days of emperor and clown:
[102]
READING POETRY
UD
Perhaps the self-same song that found a
path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick
for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the
foam
Of perilous seas, in faëry lands forlorn.
Du
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! Adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still
stream,
Up the hillside; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:-Do I wake or sleep?"
It is the spirit that binds us to the hope in
Shelley's passionate appeal to the West
Wind:
“O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”
[103]
THE PLEASURE OF
It is what Wordsworth felt, and said,
and did not say, and wished to say, in
Tintern Abbey:
“ These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ʼmid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love. Not less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessèd mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened :—that serene and blessèd mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,
Until the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
[104]
READING POETRY
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.”
Shakespeare knew this shy spirit and
caught her coming to him as he caught
the south wind coming to him from a
bank of violets. She is present in Mac-
beth, in King Lear, in Hamlet, in
Othello, and in some of the lyrics scat-
tered through his plays:
“ Take, O take those lips away
That so sweetly were forsworn,
And those eyes, the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn:
But my kisses bring again,
Bring again“
Seals of love, but seald in vain,
Seal'd in vain."
It is this spirit of suggestion, a crea-
tion in herself, which arises from a poem
like the perfume from a meadow-flower,
[105]
THE PLEASURE OF
and which the poet conjures up by the
magic of his art, that is for us to catch
and cherish. She is the poet's gift to us,
as Light was God's gift. Born out of
the chaotic vortex of the poet's creative
imagination, she is yet a thing of beauty,
and may be a joy forever. In the radiat-
ing light of her beauty is transfigured all
that we see, and feel, and are, and hope
to be. She is the gentle Spirit that rati-
fies and sanctifies for us the poet's act. It
is to keep her alive that the poet is so much
needed to-day.
But we must go out to meet her or she
will not stay with us. She will not come
where she is not invited, and where there
is no place prepared for her. For this
also the poet is needed—to prepare a
place for her in our hearts by the music
of his songs. She brings joy-both the
pleasure and the pain of joy. We can-
[106]
READING POETRY
.
not be joyous if we are busy with dead
things, with the things that chain us to the
mortar-wheel of life's round. These
things, as I have already said, are good
and desirable in their time and place; but
they are not good and not desirable for
all the time and in every place. If we
accept them as a means to living and not
as the end of living, they will serve us,
and not we them. Let them then serve
us to make some room, in our little space
of years, for this bringer of joy, this
vivifying spirit in poetry. And when
she comes to us, let us not question her
with our words. Joy is its own lan-
guage, and speaks no other. If we will
question, let us question her interpreter,
the poet. What his answers will be, we
may read in Homer, in Virgil, in Dante,
in Chaucer, in Spenser, in Shakespeare,
in Milton, in Goethe, in Burns, Byron,
LI
[107]
THE PLEASURE OF
Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson,
Browning, and in the songs of all the
singers who have walked with her and
were most glad in serving her.
It is far from my purpose to enter on
an analysis of the works of the poets. I
shall have accomplished all I set out to
do if I succeed in suggesting in a gen-
eral way the kind of music they gave us.
The reader must do the rest for himself.
My purpose is only to awaken the desire
and not to satisfy it. We are not all
gifted alike; and what one may find in a
song another may not, but may find
something else; for the peculiar quality
of the poet's work lies in the universality
of its appeal, so that each of us may ob-
tain pleasure in his own way.
We have seen what the poet's temper
is. We have also seen what our temper
should be in listening to him. If now we
[108]
READING POETRY
DI
turn to the poet Homer who sang in a
language strange to our ears and lived
in an age millenniums distant from
ours, and ask what can this poet do for
us; what special pleasure is he offer-
ing to humanity; what revelation has he
made, we shall find ourselves transported
into a world altogether different from
that in which we live. Its atmosphere,
its landscapes, its people, its play of life
are of a time when the world was young;
when men and women were still naïve
and simple; when, to their child-like won-
der and creative imaginations, wind and
rain and thunder and ocean and sun and
stars had human voices and spoke a human
language; when there was so much room
for life that the earth seemed to laugh
and cry with her children. They were not
exempt from the experiences of sorrow
and the pain of life; but they treated
[109]
THE PLEASURE OF
them, as all children will, as temporary
obstructions on the broad flowing river,
which could be set aside through cour-
age and endeavour and faith in the abid-
ing deities. If events happened other-
wise than they wished or hoped, it was
well, for the gods knew best, and they
had played their part bravely and truly.
If death came, it was well also; for if
the spear had been cast by Diomede or
by Hector it was Athene or it was Hera
who had guided it. They lived simply
but sternly; they were passionate lovers
and passionate friends; noble fathers
and splendid husbands: they were good
haters and good fighters, loyal heroes in
peace or in war. And they bred Homer.
What Achilles and Agamemnon and
Patroclus and Ajax and Diomede did in
many acts, Homer accomplished in one
transcendent act in the Iliad. In this
[110]
READING POETRY
poem he not only sang his song of
praise for the heroic souls of Achilles
and his companions, but he precipitated
a national life in everlasting words. He
embodied the gods of his land and set
the standard for the heroic life which
inspired the Greeks for a millennium.
And he established the reality of the
ideal in art and life. All that Greece has
given us, and all she gave that has not been
recovered, both in art and thought, had
its fount of inspiration in this almost mar-
vellous achievement in poetry; in the
spirit of suggestion which blooms in al-
most every line, and in the poet's dra-
matically embodying genius. His men
and women live, whether in sorrow or
anger, in passion or play. They are not
coloured shadows flitting across a white
page, but creatures of flesh and blood,
moving under sunny skies. From an-
[111]
THE PLEASURE OF
LS
other side Homer's poem was to the an-
cient Greeks what the Old Testament
was to the ancient Jews-their moral
code and standard of conduct. The les-
sons taught by the anger of Achilles
against Agamemnon and its dire result
on the Grecian army; by the overwhelm-
ing love of Achilles for his friend Pa-
troclus; by his noble sympathy for Priam
in his sorrow; by the pathos of his com-
ing doom in spite of his great heart;
by the sublime serenity of spirit in which
all Homer's heroes accept life and fate;
—the lessons the Greeks derived from
these became bountifully manifest in
their later life as a nation, in the trag-
edies of Æschylus, the comedies of Aris-
tophanes, the dialogues of Plato, the
sculptures of Praxiteles and Phidias, the
campaigns of Alexander, the building of
the Acropolis and the Parthenon, and in
[112]
READING POETRY
their worship of beauty. And what we
ourselves owe to the Greeks no one man
can adequately express.
If you now ask what Homer, the poet,
will do for you, I can only answer that
what he did three thousand years ago he is
doing to-day. If you do not know this
it is because you have been occupying
yourself with dead things, and have not
realized the living power of poetry. In-
deed, though you may not know it, what
is best in yourself and in your life has
grown there nurtured by the hidden in-
fluences that the stream of thought has
carried down the ages from these same
Hellenic springs.
One thing, however, Homer will cer-
tainly do for you, if you read him for
pleasure: he will keep you young. You
will miss the magnificent music of his
language if you do not know Greek; but
IN
[113]
THE PLEASURE OF
read him in the prose version of Butcher,
Lang and Myers, and follow that with
Lord Derby's version in order to taste
a little of the flavour of the poetry.
When you have done this, begin again:
and then begin all over again, and con-
tinue until you feel heroic presences
about you, and become imbued with what
Matthew Arnold called his “high seri-
ousness.” Young people, especially,
should read Homer. He has made even
more heroes than he has sung. The glory
of him is catching to the youthful mind,
which sees the fact ideally and surrounds
it with what we are pleased to call a ro-
mantic atmosphere. That is just what
Homer did; that is what makes his facts
alive; and that is why his interpretation
comes to us as a revelation.
Some six hundred years after Homer
sang, there was born at Eleusis the man
[114]
READING POETRY
“ who picked up the fragments from the
mighty feasts of Homer," and remoulded
them into poems of tragedy which have
never been surpassed, and have been
equalled by our own Shakespeare alone
in one or two of his plays. People in
those days said that Æschylus had been
inspired by Dionysus in a dream; other-
wise they could not explain how he wrote
his wonder-working masterpieces. So-
phocles told him that “he did what he
ought to do, but he did it without know-
ing.” What they meant may be appre-
ciated if we have read our Shakespeare
as we ought to read him, and if we have
felt the sublime imaginative power of
Job. The tragedies of Æschylus have
occupied the thoughts of many writers;
but the English reader will do wisely if
he read Symonds' “ The Greek Poets,”
before he attempts the plays, either in the
[115]
THE PLEASURE OF
NN
originals or in translations. Symonds'
exposition of the trilogy of the Oresteia
is masterly. I wish I had his knowledge
and gifts to suggest even what Æschylus
means as a tragic poet. The concen-
trated pathos with which we are over-
whelmed in witnessing the suffering
brought about by human passion in play
against the forces which hold the uni-
verse, is realized in these tragedies with
an art so consummate, that as art it is
unique in literature. We can but bow
our heads in fear and trembling as be-
fore some awful deity. What Swin-
burne says of attempting to compare
King Lear with Othello may be quoted
to express the sense of helplessness in
trying to estimate the special quality of
the poetry of Æschylus. “The result,
for any reader of human intelligence
and decent humility in sight of what is
YTY
LILI
[116]
READING POETRY
.
highest in the spiritual world, must al-
ways be a sense of adoring doubt and ex-
alting hesitation.” Moved by this sense,
let us accept Æschylus for whatsoever
we may find in him. The pleasure he
can give us is poignant, but, rightly
taken, bracing and purifying as an Al-
pine climb.
What Homer is to epic, and Æschylus
to tragic poetry, that is Aristophanes to
comic poetry. Here, again, if we would
taste the real flavour of this rampant and
lyric spirit, Shakespeare will help us.
But, as Mr. Symonds points out:
“We must not expect to find the gist
of Aristophanes in vivid portraits of
character, in situations borrowed from
every-day life, in witty dialogue, in care-
fully constructed plots arriving at felici-
tous conclusions. All these elements, in-
deed, he has; but these are not the main
[117]
THE PLEASURE OF
points of his art. His plays are not
comedies in the sense in which we use the
word, but scenic allegories. Titanic
forces in which the whole creation is
turned upside down; transcendental trav-
esties, enormous orgies of wild fancy
and unbridled imagination; Dionysiac
dances in which tears are mingled with
laughter, and fire with wine; choruses
that, underneath their oceanic merriment
of leaping waves, hide silent deeps of
unstirred thought.”
There is pleasure in this man, if you
like, but you must come well filled with
the spirit of Greek life to enjoy him as
he should be enjoyed. Symonds tried to
suggest the secret of his strength and
charm, but confessed his inability to do
him justice: “The epithets which con-
tinually rise to our lips in speaking of
him-radiant, resplendent, swift, keen,
[118]
READING POETRY
cheerful, flashing, magical-carry no real
notion of the marvellous and subtle spirit
that animates his comedy with life pecul-
iar to itself.”
If you would know the Athens and
the Athenians of that day as you know
London and Londoners through Fal-
staff, read these comedies. They are all
alive here, high and low, rich and poor,
bad and good, mostly bad and somewhat
good, but all on pleasure bent and care-
less of the kind they get. If you read
him, then for your soul's sake, read him
aright, and not for what may seem to
you at first the lewd license of a reckless
“sport” whose mouth is continually
filled with bawdy jests. This is not
Aristophanes as it is not Rabelais, though
some nice people have the nasty minds
to think it is. Aristophanes laughed his
mighty laughter because he felt in the
[119]
THE PLEASURE OF
depths of his great heart and saw with
the power of his keen brain what fools
we mortals be. Take his pleasure cleanly.
If we turn with disgust from pictures of
Bacchic frenzy, let us remember that hu-
man nature is still human nature, and
that what Aristophanes laughed at may
still be lurking in our midst, and all the
worse because lurking. Let our politi-
cians read the Knights, our lawyers the
Clouds and Wasps, and our literary men
the Frogs, and our women the Lysistrata;
and if they do not laugh at themselves,
then is the sense of humour in them dead;
or else, it may be, they have turned aside
to laugh in their sleeves. Well, with Aris-
tophanes, we can also afford to laugh,
both with them and at them; he is good
to live with.
The splendid resounding music of the
Greek epic produced its echo in Rome,
READING POETRY
in Virgil's poem reciting the adventures
of Æneas of Troy. This is not the Iliad,
nor even the Odyssey, though it carries
the pathetic note of the latter; but it is a
beautiful poem, nevertheless. Its music
beat and trembled in the heart of many a
noble Roman and sent him proudly walk-
ing the Appian Way in conscious dig-
nity of his descent from the gods, and in
a conviction of their special protection.
The genius of Rome, however, lay not
in poetry; it found its best expressions in
other ways in the prose of Livy and
Cicero, in statesmanship and generalship
and governorship.
The language of the Latins had to be-
come the language of the Italian people,
and the religion of Jupiter had to give
way to the religion of Christ, before the
genius of Italy partook of the “high
seriousness” of Homer's poetic genius.
[121]
THE PLEASURE OF
When Dante expressed it the voice was a
new voice altogether, clear, solemn, im-
pressive, with a music all its own. It
sang the epic of the life of thought, not
of the life of action, and of that side of
thought which concerns itself with the
religious emotion, and of that phase of
the religious emotion which finds its
highest longings satisfied in Catholicism.
Dante's epic is philosophy, history,
prophecy expressed with a poetic quality
that is classic; but its poetry is overshad-
owed by the power of one of the pro-
foundest intellects the world has known.
It should be read as the Bible should be
read-in parts; for its appeal is to many
moods. It is a deeply moving and a
deeply arresting poem, filled with the
suggestive spirit, and demanding of us
our best intellectual powers as well as our
imagination. Dante's awful power rises,
[122]
READING POETRY
to adopt Wordsworth's language of the
effect on him of the Alps, “from the
mind's abyss like an unfathered vapour
that enwraps, at once, some lonely trav-
eller”; we are in danger of being lost in
it. Few English readers can enjoy him
in his own Tuscan Italian; and not many
native Italians have fathomed all his
meanings. Bulky commentaries have been
compiled by devoted students to explain
him, and the end is not yet. Some take
the poem as a satire, others as a proph-
ecy, others again as the revelation of a
great soul's profound insight into life.
In whichever way it be taken its power is
such that it can fulfil almost any high de-
mand we make of it. What most we mar-
vel at is the man, Dante, himself-his
self-mastery, his artistic restraint, his
wonderful ability to transmute passion
into living, singing words. These quali-
[123]
THE PLEASURE OF
ties have never before or since been ex-
emplified in anything approaching the de-
gree of perfection of the Divine Comedy.
“Serenest of the progeny of God,”
Browning calls him:
“ Pacer of the shore
Where glutted hell disgorgeth filthiest gloom,
Unbitten by its whirling sulphur-spume-
Or whence the grieved and obscure waters slope
Into a darkness quieted by hope;
Plucker of amaranth, grown beneath God's eye,
In gracious twilight, where His chosen lie."
Scarce a century after Dante's death,
and contemporary with Dante's first com-
mentator, Boccaccio, an altogether new
and fresh poetic voice sang, and in a
language that had up to then but lisped
in numbers. The voice was the English
voice of Geoffrey Chaucer. It had not
the sonority of the Greek nor the liquid-
ness of the Italian; but its musical qual-
ity was very pleasant to the ears of the
UL
U
[124]
READING POETRY
1
tough and rough Englishmen of dale
and dell who had scarce heard of the ex-
istence of Homer or Dante. The printer
was still playing with his craft, or ex-
perimenting with moulding molten metal;
and scholars were still busy searching the
dusty scriptoria of the monasteries on
the continent. Chaucer came just when
people were awaking from a deep sleep.
His songs and tales helped to open their
eyes more widely, so that they began to
see how goodly a thing it was for breth-
ren to dwell together; to feel that life
was good also, and that the land was
kindly and sweet and lovely in many
ways. Chaucer's heart was big and
warm. He had a smiling face and a
cheery word for the poor man, and an
Englishman's respectful reverence for
the nobleman. He did his daily work
like an honest citizen, but when that was
[125]
THE PLEASURE OF
done he would walk in the fields, or read
in his books, or sit down to the making
of his “songes and ditties.” He tells
us himself he was “ small and fair of
face,” stout, “a puppet in an arm to em-
brace for any woman,” and “elfish by
his countenance.” He was a fair scholar,
had travelled, and spoke both French
and Italian. He had read Dante and
met Boccaccio. He wrote as he felt,
from the full sense of his joy in living.
He reverenced Virgil, Ovid, Homer,
Lucan and Statius, and hoped he had
done some little himself which might earn
a place for him beside them:
“ And I come after, gleaning here and there,
And am full glad if I can find an ear
Of any goodly word that ye have left."
He held women in esteem, though his
married life had not been a happy one.
His love for them, however, had in it a
[126]
READING POETRY
decided flavour of kindly acceptance of
their “nice vanity.” Yet he could say,
“in truthfulness”:-
“No man in humbleness can him acquit
As women can, nor can be half so true
As women are.”
He possessed a deeply religious nature,
but his religion enriched, it did not thin,
a character naturally fruitful in im-
pulses of charity, affection and kindli-
ness. He had known the trials and sor-
rows of life and came to learn wisdom
without becoming soured. If he loved
to read his “bookes " he loved better to
commune with nature, especially in the
springtime:-
“When that the month of May
Is come, and that I hear the fowlës sing,
And see the flowers as they begin to spring,
Farewell my book, and my devotion.”
M
So wide were his sympathies and so
[127]
THE PLEASURE OF
large his field of enjoyment that his
poems are a living panorama of the life
of England of his day. Men and women
in all stations and of all degrees—knight,
nun, monk, clerk, franklin, squire, pri-
oress, pardoner, shipman, and merchant,
parson and lawyer, miller and reeve—all
live again by the magic of his creative
imagination. “Here is God's plenty,"
exclaimed Dryden; that is the very
phrase to sum up Chaucer's work,
“God's plenty.” Partake of this plenty,
if you seek for the pleasure of poetry,
in the Canterbury Tales, the House of
Fame, the Legend of Good Women.
They exude the juices of fat beeves, full
kine and ripe fruits. The atmosphere
in which we realize them is that of “mel-
low fruitfulness," as if they had grown
to ripeness as “close-bosomed friends of
the maturing sun." The light that is re-
YYS
[128]
READING POETRY
flected from them is like the droppings
of honeycombs.
Chaucer is properly the founder of
the English language; he broadened its
stream and sent it flowing in volume
and fulness to Spenser and Marlowe and
Shakespeare. An example of his use of
it which may also serve to illustrate the
temper of the man is well worth quoting.
It is the Englishman, Chaucer's Good
Counsel:
“ Flee from the press, and dwell with soothfast-
ness;
Suffice thee thy good, though it be small;
For hoard hath hate, and climbing tickleness:
Press hath envy, and wealth is blinded all.
Savour no more than thee behovë shall;
Do well thyself that other folk canst rede;
And truth thee shall deliver, it is no dread.
“Painë thee not each crooked to redress
In trust of her that turneth as a ball.
Greatë rest stands in little business.
Beware also to spurn against a nail.
[129]
THE PLEASURE OF
Strive not as does a pitcher with a wall.
Deemë thyself that deemest others' deed;
And truth thee shall deliver, it is no dread.
“ That thee is sent receive in buxomness;
The wrestling of this world asketh a fall.
Here is no home, here is but wilderness.
Forth, pilgrime! forth, beast out of thy stall!
Look up on high, and thankë God of all.
Waivë thy lust, and let thy ghost thee lead,
And truth shall thee deliver, it is no dread.”
What Shakespeare did with this lan-
guage and this beginning of the wisdom
of life, I hope to suggest in the next
chapter. Shakespeare received it from
Chaucer through Spenser and Marlowe
and gave it still more enriched to Milton,
who sent it sounding through organ
pipes and made such music as brought
Homer back living in memory. With
the power of an imagination akin to
Dante's, and an insight made clear and
pure by the sacred flame of the Bible,
[130]
READING POETRY
Milton spread eagle's wings and almost
touched heaven's heights in Paradise
Lost. We stand in exulting humility
before heroic Lucifer as we stood in
heartfelt homage before heroic Achilles.
It was a new experience for the people
of Milton's day, who felt the human
quality of Satan's spirit. But here is
truly one of those “music-makers,”
those "dreamers of dreams,” those
“world-lovers and world-forsakers,” who
could rebuild a Nineveh and overthrow
it with his prophesying. With Milton
singing to them they could go forth and
conquer a crown, for he placed in them
the very spirit of the Lord. This was
Milton the prophet. But Milton was
more than a prophet, he was a poet, with
a man's heart and a man's love in it.
Look for both in Il Penseroso, in L’Al-
legro and in Lycidas, and your own
[131]
THE PLEASURE OF
hearts will be touched so that your in-
ward ear will catch something to hold
dear for the rest of life. And it will be
borne to you in exquisite music:
“ Weep no more, woful Shepherds, weep no
more,
For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the waťry floor,
So sinks the day-star in the Ocean bed,
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new spangled
ore
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky:
So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high,
Through the dear might of him that walk'd
the waves,
Where other groves, and other streams along,
With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves,
And hears the unexpressive nuptial song,
In the blest Kingdoms meek of joy and love.
“ Thus sang the uncouth swain to the oaks and
rills,
While the still morn went out with sandals
grey,
[132]
READING POETRY
He touch'd the tender stops of various quills,
With eager thought warbling his Doric lay:
And now the sun had stretch'd out all the
hills,
And now was dropt into the western bay;
At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue:
To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new."
UU
“ To-morrow to fresh woods and pas-
tures new.” The to-morrow broke, the
sun“ flaming the forehead of the morn-
ing sky” with the “new spangled ore”
of Blake, Burns, Keats and Shelley.
Wordsworth also came, but the dawn of
his advent was clouded, and only now is
his sun filling a new day with its efful-
gent light.
The mystery of this enchanter spirit
of poetry grows with the growing line
of the poets themselves. We ask our-
selves: how comes this spirit? Whence
comes it?
[133]
THE PLEASURE OF
“What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain?
What fields, or waves, or mountains?
What shape of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? What igno-
rance of pain?”
It is not created by science, nor does
it evidently spring from philosophy.
Neither Blake nor Burns nor Keats was
taught in any great school of learning.
How did Blake come to write the Cradle
Song?
“ Sleep, sleep, beauty bright,
Dreaming in the joys of night:
Sleep, sleep; in thy sleep
Little sorrows sit and weep.
Sweet babe, in thy face
Soft desires I can trace,
Secret joys and secret smiles,
Little pretty infant wiles.
As thy softest limbs I feel,
Smiles as of the morning steal
[134]
READING POETRY
O'er thy cheek, and o’er thy breast
Where thy little heart doth rest.
O the cunning wiles that weep
In thy little heart asleep!
When thy little heart doth wake,
Then the dreadful night shall break."
Or this, Love's Secret?
“Never seek to tell thy love,
Love that never told can be;
For the gentle wind doth move
Siently, invisibly.
I told my love, I told my love,
I told her all my heart,
Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears,
Ah! she did depart!
Soon after she was gone from me,
A traveller came by,
Silently, invisibly:
He took her with a sigh."
These tear-compelling, heart-breaking
songs, in which we seem to see and feel
[135]
THE PLEASURE OF
the soul of pain glowing in the joy of
love, as a ship-wrecked sailor on a stormy
sea might see and feel the glowing ball
of light, thrown to him by an approach-
ing ship, rising out of the darkness,
these songs leave us staring with wide
eyes. There is nothing to say. All that
we would say and cannot say reverber-
ates in the mind and lingers in the heart.
The secret of the mystery of pain seems
for a moment to unfold itself; but the
next moment it is gone. But the poem
is still there; so that we may, if we will,
recover the experience to spell out, for
our soul's sake, the meaning of the mys-
tery that surrounds us.
Perhaps we touch the heart of the
spirit of poetry, if we say, with Plato,
that she is born of divine power, and that
all good poets compose their beautiful
poems when inspired and possessed.
[136]
READING POETRY
Perhaps the strings, so to speak, of the
poet's soul are sometimes so stretched by
emotion that, like the Æolian harp, mu-
sic flows from them at the least breath
of the winds of circumstance. But if we
accept either suggestion we are still face
to face with the problem of the poet's
art, with the fact that the poet does con-
sciously shape his songs. Plato would
not acknowledge that the poet did com-
pose his poems as works of art; he con-
sidered poetic inspiration akin to mad-
ness. Æschylus may have been mad
when he wrote the Agamemnon; if so,
it was a remarkable form of madness to
give us what is acknowledged to be the
perfect type of tragic dramatic art.
They said Blake also was mad; it must
have been some divine madness, then, that
produced the Songs of Innocence. Was
Burns also mad when he wrote Ye
[137]
THE PLEASURE OF
banks and braes o' bonnie Doon, High-
land Mary, Tam O'Shanter, and The
Jolly Beggars? Was Keats mad when
he sang his Ode to a Nightingale, his
Ode to Autumn, his Ode to a Grecian
Urn? Was Shelley mad in the Epipsy-
chidion, the Ode to the West Wind and
the Triumph of Life?
I have already touched on this mys-
tery of poetry, and I am compelled to
the only satisfying explanation in as-
suming that the poet as man and the poet
as artist are two different beings; that
what the man lives is gathered in by the
poet for the stuff of his poetry, which he
consciously weaves, with the aid of his
creative imagination, into poems. Fur-
ther, that the purpose of his art, as of all
art, is fulfilled by our creative imagina-
tion, which refashions the poet's experi-
ences and suggestions into forms of our
[138]
READING POETRY
own emotions. Here we tap the springs
of the pleasure derived from the read-
ing of poetry: we taste the poet's joy in
creating. This is the pleasure we feel.
That poetry can affect different people
in different ways is due to the fact that
what the poet reveals is truth in the form
of beauty. I am not using these words
in any transcendental sense. It is beauty,
because of the power of his art to make
its appeal universal; and it is truth, be-
cause of its power to call forth a univer-
sal response. That is why the poet sings
of love, of joy, of sorrow, of nature, of
the struggle between the forces of pas-
sion and the forces of circumstance.
This is what the poet means, and all that
he means. The value of his poetry is for
us to determine. If we have found
pleasure in the songs, then it is for us to
do our part; and that part is to re-ex-
[139]
THE PLEASURE OF READING
press what the poet said in music, in
terms of life-in doing and being. It is
we who must justify the poet. It is what
we are unconsciously doing all the time;
and that is why the poet is content to la-
bour and to wait. But we would do bet-
ter by responding more quickly. We
miss so much joy by our procrastination;
and life is not too long.
“O Wind!
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”
[140]
IV
THE PLEASURE OF
READING SHAKESPEARE
THE PLEASURE OF READING
SHAKESPEARE
S
MGF I were asked what books
R he should be read, by way of prep-
a ration, before entering on the
reading of Shakespeare's plays, I should
answer unhesitatingly, Lamb's “Tales
from Shakespeare," and a few essays
Lamb wrote, in particular the essay
“On the Tragedies of Shakespeare,
Considered with Reference to their Fit-
ness for Stage Presentation.” I single
out Lamb, in this connection, though he
is not what may be termed a professional
writer on Shakespeare, because of the
sanity and sureness of his critical in-
sight, perhaps the sanest and surest of
all the critics who have expounded the

[143]
THE PLEASURE OF
master. And, in saying this, I am not
forgetting the valuable “whole volumes
in folio ” which have been indited, from
Dryden and Pope to Johnson and Cole-
ridge, down to Dowden, Brandes and
Bradley. Of course, no student of
Shakespeare can afford to ignore Cole-
ridge. He did such splendid pioneer
work, in this now much-travelled land,
that the roads he made must be the
highways for all who would follow to
study. But the general reader will not
concern himself so seriously; he is read-
ing for pleasure, and the experience
which is to come to him by the wayside.
For him Lamb is a charming and de-
lightful guide. He himself went to en-
joy the Promised Land, and he enjoyed
it thoroughly. I need hardly say that he
knew how to tell us of what he saw.
Lamb was quite a different being from
[144]
READING SHAKESPEARE
the worthy gentleman who dissects and
analyzes texts, useful and harmless as
such work must be; nor was he given to
drawing “out the thread of his verbosity
finer than the staple of his argument.”
He had a love for literature and, gifted
as he was with a fine discrimination and
sympathetic power of insight, he came to
know and to love Shakespeare and his
plays. In knowing them he found that
his mind had become enriched, his spirit
refreshed and his nature enlarged. Such
an experience was too good to keep to
himself—that was not Lamb's way-so
Lamb sat himself down to tell us how he
got it; and in telling us this, he tries to
make us go and do likewise. His way is
not his friend Coleridge's way; but he
“ gets there," as they say in the market-
place, notwithstanding. In the essay I
have named Lamb is upholding the ar-
[145]
THE PLEASURE OF
gument that Shakespeare's plays are in-
compatible with stage representation. I
take leave to quote one paragraph, from
which it will be seen that Lamb knew his
subject to the centre, and that he could
rise to its dignity in dignity.
“We talk,” he says, “ of Shakespeare's
admirable observation of life, when we
should feel that, not from a petty inqui-
sition into those cheap and every-day
characters which surrounded him, as
they surround us, but from his own mind,
which was, to borrow a phrase of Ben
Jonson's, the very sphere of humanity,'
he fetched those images of virtue and of
knowledge, of which everyone of us,
recognizing a part, think we comprehend
in our natures the whole; and oftentimes
mistake the powers which he positively
creates in us for nothing more than the
indigenous faculties of our minds, which
[146]
READING SHAKESPEARE
only waited the application of corre-
sponding virtues in him to return a full
and clear echo of the same.”
Two other books I would also recom-
mend: the first for its value as a sum-
mary of Shakespeare's life and his work
as poet and dramatist; the second for its
new and remarkable presentment of
Shakespeare the man as evinced by his
work.
Mr. Walter Raleigh's short mono-
graph on Shakespeare is the best thing
of its kind in the language. It is quite
free from academic pedantry or biblio-
graphic dryasdustry, failings which mar
so many of the works devoted to Shake-
speare. Mr. Raleigh is an enthusiast,
but he is self-possessed, ably apprecia-
tive, and gently judicious; and he is also
gifted with a style of writing at once
captivating and suggestive.
[147]
THE PLEASURE OF
ST
Mr. Frank Harris's The Man Shake-
speare is profoundly interesting as an
original attempt to create the man out of
the material collected from the plays and
sonnets. Whether we agree or no with
Mr. Harris's conclusions, there can be
no question of the extraordinary interest
excited in us by the unique treatment he
has given his subject. He has given a
new, and living, and, I might almost say,
a sacred value to the writings of Shake-
speare. No reader can part from this
book without obtaining, at the same time,
a vivid mental picture of what Shake-
speare may have been, and, perhaps,
must have been like. It is a remarkable
achievement.
Having made himself familiar, by
means of these books, with the general
outlines of Shakespeare's life, and thus
obtained an impression of the spirit in
[148]
READING SHAKESPEARE
which he wrote, the reader will be pre-
pared to open Shakespeare's own book.
He may now try and find out for him-
self what the world sees in this man that
is so transcendent, and what of truth
there is in the judgment which declares
him to be the finest flower of human
genius, and in the praise that descants of
his infinite power to delight and make
wise.
Opinion has so dignified Shakespeare
that he “sits ’mongst men like a de-
scended god.” Opinion is not quite wise
in this attitude. We shall never receive
from Shakespeare what his writings have
to give us if we give way to the tempta-
tion, strong as it undoubtedly is with us
common folk, to apotheosize the man.
We are somewhat overfond of doing
this, and we lose thereby far more than
we gain. If Mr. Harris's book do no
[149]
THE PLEASURE OF
more than shake us from this bad habit,
it will have accomplished much. Shake-
speare was a man, and spoke our lan-
guage. He knew joys similar to those
we know, and lived through sorrows
common to humanity. That he dealt
with these joys and sorrows in the fash-
ion he did, proves him to have been a re-
markably uncommon man—but still a
man. Then why set him on an Olympus
and dream of him as though he were a
god's disembodied spirit “out-topping
knowledge"? He would not have asked
us for such worship had we known him
in the flesh. Ben Jonson said he was
“ of an open and free nature," and Ben
Jonson knew him better than did any
other man of his time. Was he not also
called “the gentle Shakespeare "? He
may have been prone to melancholy; his
disposition was such that “above all
[150]
READING SHAKESPEARE
other strifes ” it “contended especially
to know himself,” and the knowledge
brought him its wisdom. He says so
himself, speaking out of the mouth of
Edgar in King Lear, and the beautiful
words reveal Shakespeare to us:
“A most poor man, made tame to fortune's
blows,
Who by the art of knowing and feeling sor-
rows
Am pregnant to good pity.”
With the Duke in Measure for Meas-
ure, he rather rejoiced “to see another
merry, than merry at anything which
professed to make him rejoice.” Like
his Hamlet, he was “most generous and
free from all contrivings.” There was
that within him which “passeth show,"
but his genius was equal to the task of
revealing it, and he took us into his se-
crets, treating us as equals, and hiding
[151]
THE PLEASURE OF
nothing from those who have eyes to see
and hearts to feel:
“When he speaks,
The air, a charter'd libertine, is still,
And the mute wonder lurketh in men's ears
To steal his sweet and honey'd sentences."
His life was spent in the midst of the
busy world, wearing his motley as an
actor, eating his meals with friends, and
drinking with them also. It may be he
was speaking of himself when he tells
us of Henry V:
“... his addiction was to courses vain;
His companions unletter'd, rude, and shallow;
His hours fill'd up with riots, banquets, sports;
And never noted in him any study,
Any retirement, any sequestration
From open haunts and popularity."
Actors and actor-companions, in those
days, were not of the best society, and
few of them could be called cultured.
[152]
READING SHAKESPEARE
Nor were actors then in the happy cir-
cumstances they are in to-day. They did
not knight actors in the Elizabethan and
Jacobean times. He knew a nobleman
or two, but they were patrons, not
friends. He knew better the Bardolphs,
the Nyms, the Pistols, and a Falstaff;
and these he could know only in taverns
and in “open haunts.” He was a gen-
erous, virile lover, loving well if not
wisely. He was a wit among his friends
at the Mermaid tavern. If he did foolish
things in the heyday of his young man-
hood, he was no fool.
It is to do Shakespeare a grievous
wrong and ourselves also, to relegate
him, as we do, to an Alpine loneliness of
royal state. We take him away from
where he belongs; from the press of the
world's fight, and from the hearts of the
people. His book also we have wronged.
[153]
THE PLEASURE OF
As we have treated the Bible, so we have
made an idol of his book, and have sinned
the sin of idolatry. Ben Jonson wor-
shipped him “this side idolatry,” but we
overstep the line. Our conduct would be
less open to criticism did we really act
from awful conviction; but we rarely
read his book. We prefer to subscribe
for a sumptuous edition of his works-
the more sumptuous the better for our
purpose—and place it in a gilded cage
to decorate our rooms. Instead of know-
ing the man and filling ourselves from
the springs of his wisdom and joy, we
accept authority's word, and take for
granted the man's greatness and his
book's worth. We are content to repeat
the scraps of borrowed wisdom which
fall from the lips of teachers and players.
Were we acquainted with the living set-
tings from which these scraps have been
M
SEL
[154]
READING SHAKESPEARE
stolen we might, perhaps, be touched to
fine issues. We worship in blindness and
ignorance; and because of this we lose
the helping sympathy and the enriching
experience of the lordliest joy-giver, the
wisest spirit, and the greatest-hearted
man who ever trod this earth. It is time
we left off reading what other people
have to say about Shakespeare, and be-
gan to read what Shakespeare has to say
for himself. Let us give up atoning for
our neglect in raising monuments to him
and his book. We never can build a
finer monument than the one he has built
for himself:
“ Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme."
Let us atone by reading his book. Let
us all-poor and rich and ignorant as
well as those who are wise-justify him
in what he said to his friend:
[155]
THE PLEASURE OF
“ Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o'er read;
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead;
You still shall live—such virtue has my pen
Where breath most breathes--even in the
mouths of men.”
In reading Shakespeare we must al-
ways bear in mind that we are reading
poems. Shakespeare was far more a
poet than he was a dramatist. We are
apt to forget this because of the drama-
forms, and because the persons of the
play, in proportion as they are alive for
us, for the moment, interest us more by
what they are doing than by what they
are saying. A second or a third reading
may help to dispel this illusion, and leave
us free to enjoy the poem, or, in other
words, to obtain the poetic experiences.
Reading will give us these experiences,
when acting would not. Lamb con-
[156]
READING SHAKESPEARE
tended that “the plays of Shakespeare
are less calculated for performance on a
stage than those of any other dramatist
whatsoever.” And he was right. “Their
distinguished excellence is a reason
that they should be so. There is so
much in them, which comes not under
the province of acting, with which eye,
and tone, and gesture have nothing to
do.”
Exactly. And the “so much in them”
is the poetry; the spirit of suggestion
which is the life of poetry; the spirit that
we ourselves must alone realize and ex-
perience. The actor interferes with us in
this work; indeed he actually opposes us.
And he is but doing what he must do, if
his art be anything to him. His business
is to express as perfectly as he can his
own art, not the poem. The art of act-
ing is directed mainly to the eye, and but
[157]
THE PLEASURE OF
slightly to the imagination. Where it
does affect the imagination it is taken up
with suggestions made by the acting and
not by the poem, and the experiences we
have from these suggestions are not po-
etic experiences. The two are entirely
different. When we try to obtain both
at the same time we find that the more
immediate coarser impression on the eye
made by the players, overpowers the
more delicate impression on the mind
made by the poem. Scenery also is an-
other distracting influence, though we
are not affected by this in reading.
Lamb said, that scenery “works quite a
contrary effect to what is intended.
That which in comedy, or plays of fa-
miliar life, adds so much to the life of
the imitation, in plays which appeal to
the higher faculties, positively destroys
the illusion which it is intended to aid."
[158]
READING SHAKESPEARE
The more realistic the scenery the more
is the eye taken up with it. There is no
time in the quick progress of the play
for the mind to do more than respond to
what the eye gives it. The poem as poem
is scarcely realized at all. So that we
leave the theatre with an impression of
the performance and not of the poem.
An audience in Shakespeare's time had
the advantage over us. All it saw of the
scene was a placard reading the stage
directions now printed in the book of
the plays, thus: “Belmont, Avenue to
Portia's House," "A Room in Petru-
chio's House," “ The Forest of Arden.”
The imagination was appealed to, and
left the mind less disturbed in its work
of experiencing the poet's art. The ac-
tors, of course, had to be there. But I
would go so far as to do away even with
these, at any rate as visible to the au-
[159]
THE PLEASURE OF
dience. A properly lighted theatre with
a thin dark-tinted curtain covering the
stage opening, and the actors reading
the play behind the curtain, invisible to
the eye, would be all that were necessary.
I believe that audiences would be most
deeply impressed by thus listening to,
say, King Lear, Othello, The Tempest,
Cymbeline, or even Henry IV and Rich-
ard III, if competent readers were se-
lected for the fine quality of their voices.
The plays would come as revelations.
Moreover, we could then hear them all,
and in their entirety, not emasculated
and shorn of half their virtue by igno-
rant managers. We exercise ourselves
to a pitch of almost rabid excitement
in devising clean and uplifting pleasures
to be enjoyed on our deadly Sundays. I
can conceive of no more delightful way
in which to spend three hours out of the
[160]
READING SHAKESPEARE
barren twelve of a Sunday's daylight,
than in listening to such a reading of one
of Shakespeare's plays. The plays to
be known must be lived as poems. Since
we cannot do this in the theatre, let us do
it in our own homes.
In the previous chapter I tried to sug-
gest what was the pleasure poetry gave
us. I tried to show that the poet's aim, if
he had any aim at all, was to express ex-
perience so that we, reading the poem,
should live the experience as he lived it.
In other words, the measure of his crea-
tive imagination was found to be in the
vividness with which we realized the
poet's relation with the ideal, and in the
strength of the impulse imparted to our
imaginations toward the realization of
truth as beauty. This, I thought, was
the purpose of poetry, if poetry had any
purpose.
[161]
THE PLEASURE OF
How does Shakespeare fulfil this in
us?
If the sonnets tell us anything they
tell us that Shakespeare lived through a
tragedy of his own. To think of the
sonnets otherwise is to reckon him a
dilettante in verse. The tragedy must
have shaken him in every fibre of his
being—the sonnets show us that. It af-
fected a naturally gentle nature to a
sweet melancholy that found its expres-
sion through those higher natures he
created in his plays, for whom life of-
fered problems to be solved. In the
sonnets, this tragedy expresses itself first
as the agonizing cry of a deeply wounded
man; in the end it affected the man to
a beautiful confession of the grace that
Love had blessed him with. Love had
been his sin, he said, but Love had re-
deemed him. In the process of this
[162]
READING SHAKESPEARE
min
redemption the supreme lyric power in
him had “ changed the tear to a pearl,
which remains to decorate new sorrows.”
In this exquisite sentence Professor Ra-
leigh holds the sonnets in solution. His
continuing words most finely precipitate
their spirit: “ Their occasion is a thing of
the past: their theme is eternal. The
tragedy of which they speak is the topic
and inspiration of all poetry, it is the
triumph of Time, marching relentlessly
over the ruin of human ambitions
and human desires." Shakespeare was
made of no common stuff. He had a
resolved spirit in him, and the work he
did later justified him in the defiance
and resolution expressed in the son-
net:-
“No, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do
change:
Thy pyramids built up with newer might
[163]
THE PLEASURE OF
To me are nothing novel, nothing strange;
They are but dressings of a former sight.
Our dates are brief, and therefore we admire
What thou dost foist upon us that is old;
And rather make them born to our desire
Than think that we before have heard them
told.
Thy registers and thee I both defy,
Not wondering at the present nor the past,
For thy records and what we see doth live,
Made more or less by thy continual haste.
This I do vow and this shall ever be;
I will be true, despite thy scythe and thee."
His love shall endure, he avers, in the
sonnet previous to this, because it is not
“subject to Time's love or to Time's
hate.” No, “it was builded far from ac-
cident,” and will not fall “under the
blow of thralled discontent”; nor does
it fear policy, “ that heretic, which works
on leases of short-number'd hours,"
“But all alone stands hugely politic,
That it nor grows with heat nor drowns with
showers.
[164]
READING SHAKESPEARE
To this I witness call the fools of time,
Which die for goodness, who have lived for
crime."
“When I was a child, I spoke as a
child, I felt as a child, I thought as a
child: now that I am become a man, I
have put away childish things.” Shake-
speare, in his sonnets, had sung himself
into manhood. This is the way of the
poet—to accept the bludgeonings of cir-
cumstance and to remain captain of his
soul. Then out of his sorrow to create a
joy, a living object, “ a wonderful death-
less ditty” to move us to fashion our
glory also; "the tear changed to a pearl,
which remains to decorate new sorrows.”
The poet is greater than his poems;
for a poem is but one moment's orna-
ment, while the poet, impregnated by
every emanation of nature's activity, is
ever conceiving. He only waits that he
[165]
THE PLEASURE OF
lew
may deliver the new life as a thing of
beauty. So fecund is he that the body
becomes worn out long before the spirit
has completed its song cycle. The man
Shakespeare died young, as we count
years, yet his last work was greater than
his first, and all were the product of a
spirit that seemed to revel in its super-
human power of combining elements
into new and beautiful compounds. Al-
ways it is the poet singing—of love and
its joys and sorrows, of the play of cir-
cumstance on the human effort, of vic-
tory and defeat, of emancipation from
the thraldom of sense and of the thral-
dom itself—but always singing. This
lyric character in him is important, be-
cause it is Shakespeare's own voice. The
lyrical voice is always the personality it-
self speaking. He imparts it to the men
and women of his plays. In whatsoever
[166]
READING SHAKESPEARE
circumstances they may be, they no
sooner feel the stress of life or the joy
of it, than the poet asserts himself in
them and they speak the lyrical lan-
guage. Othello in the net of Iago's
TIephistophelian weaving literally chants
his agony:
“ Like to the Pontic Sea,
Whose icy current and compulsive course
Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on
To the Propontic and the Hellespont,
Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace,
Shall ne'er look back, ne'er ebb to humble love,
Till that a capable and wide revenge
Swallow them up."
Then, later, when he has realized the
weakness of his own soul before a com-
mon intriguer's suggestions:
“ Are there no stones in heaven
But what serves for the thunder . . . .
I am not valiant neither,
But every puny whipster gets my sword.
[167]
THE PLEASURE OF
Who can control his fate?
O cursed, cursed slave!
Whip me, ye devils,
From the possession of this heavenly sight!
Blow me about in winds! Roast me in sulphur!
Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!
O Desdemona! dead, Desdemona, dead!"
King Lear, in his terrible madness,
rises to the height of the poet's Voice
from the Whirlwind, which spoke to Job: -
“ Blow winds, and crack your cheeks! rage!
blow!
You cataracts and hurricanes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drown'd
the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white beard. And thou, all-shak-
ing thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity of the world!
Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at
опсе,
That make ingrateful man.”
[168]
READING SHAKESPEARE
And Edgar's words:
Make instruments to plague us.”
Macbeth, after he has killed Duncan,
asks his wife why he could not say
“Amen” to the prayers he heard in the
second chamber. He scarcely hears her
answer, but wanders off into a song in
praise of sleep:
“Methought I heard a voice say 'Sleep no
more!
Macbeth does murder sleep,' the innocent
sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravelld sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labour's
bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second
course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast."
When Macbeth hears of his wife's death,
the news sends him soliloquizing a psalm:
[169]
THE PLEASURE OF
“ To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty space from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief
candle!
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
Hamlet is always singing under the
stress of conflicting thoughts. Jaques,
the melancholy onlooker at life's merry-
making, sings his reflections. Duke
Vincentio, in Measure for Measure,
waiting expectantly for Isabel and
Mariana to come to an understanding,
is moved to a chanting exclamation
against the city, so full of wickedness,
over which he reigns:
“O place and greatness! millions of false eyes
Are stuck upon thee: volumes of report
[170]
READING SHAKESPEARE
Run with these false and most contrarious
quests
Upon thy doings: thousands escapes of wit
Make thee the father of their idle dreams
And rack in thee their fancies."
This same lyrical impulse seizes Shake-
speare when he writes of what moves him
deeply, of what affected his nature most
profoundly. Music, women, love ap-
pealed to him so strongly that the strings.
of his heart-lyre were instantly set vibrat-
ing. He never refers to music, but his
language expresses the very refinement
of poetic experience:
“ How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this
bank!
Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica: Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold.
There's not the smallest orb which thou bem
holdest
[171]
THE PLEASURE OF
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims,
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.”
Note the reflective, melancholy Shake-
speare coming in at the close of the poet's
rhapsody. Compare this again with the
Duke’s words, in Twelfth Night, on the
same subject, and note the delicacy of
the appetite which will not be cloyed:-
“If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that surfeiting
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again;—it had a dying fall:
Oh, it came o'er my ears like the sweet south
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour,-Enough! No
more,
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before."
Woman and the beauty in woman were,
perhaps, Shakespeare's most potent in-
[172]
READING SHAKESPEARE
spirations. He delighted to sing her
praise, and revelled in every manifesta-
tion of her grace and fine spirit. There
is such feeling in his language that “his
words are bonds” binding him to the
thing, and “his oaths oracles" telling of
his heart's deepest pulses:-
“O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
Her beauty hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear;
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!”
Thus Romeo of Juliet. Then Othello of
Desdemona:
“ Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume. When I have
pluck'd the rose,
I cannot give it vital growth again,
It needs must wither:~I'll smell it on the
tree.
Ah, balmy breath, that dost almost persuade
Justice to break her sword.”
[173]
THE PLEASURE OF
What Cleopatra's beauty was like may
be imagined from Enorbarbus's words:
“ Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety: other women cloy
The appetites they feed: but she makes
hungry
Where most she satisfies."
Iachimo, in Imogen's sleeping-chamber,
turns poet at the sight of the beauty and
purity of the lovely lady lying asleep:
“ Cytherea,
How bravely thou becomest thy bed, fresh lily,
And whiter than the sheets. That I might
touch!
But kiss; one kiss! Rubies unparagon'd
How dearly they do't! 'Tis her breathing
that
Perfumes the chamber thus! the flame o' the
taper
Bows toward her, and would under-peep her
lids,
To see the enclosed lights, now canopied
Under these windows, white and azure-laced
With blue of heaven's own tint."
[174]
READING SHAKESPEARE
Shakespeare must have had a large
slice of his mother in him; for if there is
one characteristic in his writings that is
stronger than the many others they dis-
play, it is his finely delicate appreciation
of women. He writes of them in living
words, and they talk living words. Iago
is a piece of intellectualization, astonish-
ingly realized and terribly clever; but we
feel instinctively that this villain is an
elaboration and not a creation. Imogen
springs, like Aphrodite from the foam,
straight out of the poet's throbbing
heart. She comes, inevitable, splendid
in all her beauty of form and soul, as
though she had stepped out of a living
past into the living present. All Shake-
speare's women, except perhaps Lady
Macbeth, possess this radiance of im-
mortality. They seem as if they had
never been dead, as if Shakespeare had
[175]
THE PLEASURE OF
just simply recovered them for us. This
supreme power came from something
more than the workings of the mere
imagination with the stuff of experience
-though experience, of course, was
vital. The man's own nature, it must
have been, that contributed to the crea-
tion of such women as Marina, Imogen,
Cordelia, Rosalind, Miranda, and Cleo-
patra. Shakespeare's women bear wit-
ness to Shakespeare's transcendent
creative might; but they give more, a
golden - tongued testimony for Shake-
speare's kindly, tender and sympathetic
heart—the large slice of Mary Arden
that was in him. As the poet of love
Shakespeare is peerless. There is no se-
cret recess in it that he has not rifled of
its riches with which to fill the chalices of
his flowers of love. A volume might be
made of these flowers alone. I need
[176]
READING SHAKESPEARE
quote but two: in the first, Biron, in
Love's Labour's Lost, is speaking for
Shakespeare:
“ Other slow arts entirely keep the brain;
And therefore, finding barren practisers,
Scarce show a harvest of their heavy toil:
But love first learned in a lady's eyes,
Lives not alone immured in the brain;
But, with the motion of all elements,
Courses as swift as thought in every flower,
And gives to every power a double power,
Above their functions and their offices.
It adds a precious seeing to the eye;
A lover's eyes will gaze an eagle blind;
A lover's ear will hear the lowest sound,
When the suspicious head of theft is stoppid;
Love's feeling is more soft and sensible
Than are the tender horns of cockled snails;
Love's tongue proves dainty Bacchus gross in
taste;
For valour, is not Love a Hercules,
Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?
Subtle as Sphinx; as sweet and musical
As bright Apollo's lute, strung wth his hair;
And when Love speaks, the voice of all the
NU
gods,
[177]
THE PLEASURE OF
Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.
Never durst poet touch a pen to write
Until his ink were temper'd with Love's sighs;
0, then his lines would ravish savage ears
And plant in tyrants mild humility.”
Phebe says to Silvius, in As You Like
It: “Good shepherd, tell this youth what
'tis to love,” and Silvius answers:
“It is to be all made of sighs and tears;
It is to be all made of faith and service;
It is to be all made of fantasy,
All made of passion and all made of wishes,
All adoration, duty, and observance,
All humbleness, all patience and impatience,
All purity, all trial, all observance."
I dwell on Shakespeare the poet because
it helps us to realize the man. Poets are
poets because they have been men first;
men who have known sorrow and were
acquainted with grief. Here we touch
[178]
READING SHAKESPEARE
SUL
hands with them, and the touch is en-
couraging; because how great spirits have
met fate is good for us lesser spirits to
know. In his poetry also the poet feels
himself freer to confess; his art permits
him a larger liberty to lay bare the hid-
den springs of his nature with dignity
and without egotism. It is nothing to
the purpose to say that a poet might as-
sume an experience and write from the
assumption as if it were native to him.
Such writings have sent many poets into
“ the wastes of time.” The experience
must be personal and real or the poem is
a dead thing. It is in his poems that the
man Shakespeare is to be found, and
there is a fine pleasure in searching for
him there, and rare treasures are to be
found by the way.
I dwell particularly on the lyric qual-
ity of Shakespeare's poetry, because, as
[179]
THE PLEASURE OF
I have already said, it points to the per-
sonal note. It is even more encourag-
ing to see the profoundest searcher of
life singing, not alone of his joy, but of
his sorrows also. This debonair grace is
heartily impressing. Heavy-laden as we
are, we can here find rest. Surely there
shall be time to listen and take heart if
such a man finds the time to sing to give
us heart! So that there is a fine pleasure
also in listening. This world may be
foul in body and infected in nature, but
give Shakespeare the opportunity and he
will cleanse the one and heal the other.
What says his friend Jaques ?—
S“ Invest me in my motley; give me leave
To speak my mind, and I will through and
through
Cleanse the foul body of the infected world,
If they will patiently receive my medicine."
Mr. Frank Harris, in his richly sug-
[180]
READING SHAKESPEARE
gestive book to which I have referred,
writing of this lyric character in Shake-
speare's earlier plays, goes on to re-
mark:
“There is no intenser delight to a lover
of letters than to find Shakespeare sing-
ing, with happy unconcern, of the things
he loved best-not the Shakespeare of
Hamlet or Macbeth, whose intellect
speaks in critical judgments of men and
life, and whose heart we are fain to di-
vine from slight indications; nor Shake-
speare the dramatist, who tried now and
again to give life to puppets like Corio-
lanus and Iago, with whom he had little
sympathy—but Shakespeare the poet,
Shakespeare the lover, Shakespeare whom
Ben Jonson called the gentle, Shake-
speare the sweet-hearted singer, as he
lived and suffered and enjoyed.” This
is the Shakespeare we want to know-
[181]
THE PLEASURE OF
the man with the gentle heart, not the
man with the mighty intellect; the man
who, out of the deeps of his life's tur-
moil, could rise to be joyous; and to do
this not in any specious way, but because
he truly made his joy out of the very
wreck of experience.
Much has been written on the pessim-
ism of Shakespeare; but the student of
his works will easily convince himself
that the pessimism was but a temporary
phase and was not organic in the man's
nature. Melancholy he may have been,
and reflective and retiring; but a pes-
simist, never. There was that period in
his life in which he wrote the Sonnets,
and the great tragedies of Hamlet,
Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. But
he had written Henry IV, As You Like
It, Much Ado About Nothing, and The
Tempest. What had happened to him
[182]
READING SHAKESPEARE
n
was not a change of heart, but a change
of experience. It is true, the experience
opened his eyes to the meanness, the base-
ness, the hypocrisy, the infidelity in men
and women, the corruption in political
life, and the wretched falsity in friend-
ship; but these did not sour him; they
rather helped to ripen his great soul.
The trials over, he resumed the divine se-
renity of his gracious nature.
The tragic experiences that befell
Shakespeare are common to humanity.
It is the cross we all have to bear. Some
are not able to bear it, and fall by the
wayside; others go on stumbling, with an
ill grace, under the load and reach the
goal with spirits worn out and nature
crabbed. The poet's fine nature, how-
ever, is touched to finer issues. He
marches to his music and puts his agony
into a song. It is well for us that he can
SS
[183]
THE PLEASURE OF
so control the tendencies of his passions
that they flow into the moulds of art and
take on the forms of beauty. Otherwise
we should never have learned how to look
up. Lesser spirits can but cry out inar-
ticulately, so that we rarely understand
what they say; but a poet like Shake-
speare is eloquent to the ages. He rouses
us by the reverberating might of his re-
silient words, and the sound is sent echo-
ing along the corridors of Time.
To me the tragedies of Shakespeare
are not so much criticisms of life in gen-
eral, as they are criticisms of Shake-
speare himself. Each of them turns on
some weakness in the character of the
protagonist; and weakness in character
is, after all, at the foundation of all hu-
man tragedies. In Hamlet I see “gen-
tle” Shakespeare's unstableness which
shall not prevail. In Othello I find love-
[184]
READING SHAKESPEARE
impassioned Shakespeare sending the
jealousy in his nature to ride alone to
the ultimate destruction of the whole
man. In Timon, I see let loose an un-
bridled rage against the falseness and
the sycophancy in the world experienced
by a man who was “of a free and open
nature.” In King Lear I meet the trust-
ful Shakespeare and the lover Shake-
speare, made mad by the world's ingrati-
tude, by the evil in it, by the wretchedness
and misery in it, by the terrible suffer-
ing in it. His heart is so filled with mixed
feelings of compassion and rage that the
tears from his eyes scald him like molten
lead. Even a woman's love comes too
late for him. The voice that “was ever
soft, gentle and low” also goes “into the
wastes of time.”
Shakespeare saved himself from any
one of the catastrophes he pictures, by
[185]
THE PLEASURE OF
SI
the qualities of his nature——in particular
by his poetic genius. What he might
have done without this genius, we may
read in the biographies of the world's
lesser men who were also finely touched.
Shakespeare's genius sent him working
with the stuff of his experience and self-
knowledge into forms of art, so that he
objectified his passions as poems of trag-
edy. He precipitated his own tragedy in
imagination, and thus recovered himself
from himself. In this recovery he saw
himself as the protagonist of these im-
aginatively created dramas of life, and
thus realized what part he might have
played in life's own play had he given
way and become Time's fool. He thus
also found himself,
TL
“A most poor man, made tame to fortune's
blows;
[186]
READING SHAKESPEARE
Who, by the art of known and feeling sorrows,
Am pregnant to good pity.”
0, rare virtue! He saw with a clearness
of insight such as only he possessed the
supreme virtue to cultivate, if life is to
be lived in masterly self-possession and
yet be fruitful in joy:-
“Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither:
Ripeness is all.”
“Ripeness is all!” That is the splen-
did jewel in Shakespeare's crown. From
its myriad facets the light radiates to dis-
sipate the darkness in which we all grope
through life's way.
We may be “such stuff as dreams are
made on ”; yet, after all, if the dreams
are all we know of life, they are real to
us. If
“The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous pal-
aces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,"
[187]
THE PLEASURE OF
the ever-changing beauty of landscape
and of sky, the ever-drawing powers of
human sympathy and human love; if all
these things be but a vision in a sleep; yet
if we know no awakening, the vision is
the reality. Are we then really dream-
ing? Is it all a vision? Shakespeare's
own life answers the question in the
negative. He, the poet, the awakened
dreamer, came and touched us and bade
us rise and look around and see whether
or no this insubstantial pageant has in
truth vanished and left not a wrack be-
hind. We rub our eyes and in conscious
astonishment begin to realize that here is
a new revelation of things; that our
dreams were not a tithe as real as are
these wonderful beauties we see. Their
outlines are the same as those we saw in
our dream-visions, but they have taken
on living glories, as it were. Landscape
[188]
READING SHAKESPEARE
and sky, towers and palaces and temples,
friend and lover and brother, all are
transfigured in a new and magical light.
What has happened? Only this—the
poet has recreated our dream-visions by
the power of his creative imagination, so
that what we saw in our dreams as sepa-
rate, are now in living relation—we are
beginning to realize the poet's experience
in our own experience. Then we saw as
in a glass darkly, now we know the joy of
living.
Shakespeare was right, however. We
are dreaming. We allow the procession
of Time's glory to march past us to the
music of a Dead Man's March in us. It
moves before us as a Dance of Death;
we the while looking on as shadowy spec-
tres, or sleep-walkers. It is all dark,
meaningless, unlovely. And it will re-
main thus for us so long as we remain
[189]
THE PLEASURE OF
deaf to the voice of the poet. Let him
be no longer as one crying in the wilder-
ness. Let him not abjure his service, or
break his staff, or drown his book. Let
us accept his service and the help of his
support, and let us treasure the book in
our hearts, that it may fill us with its
joyous spirit. He offered all with the
royal freedom of his bounteous nature:
“Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove :-
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height
be taken;
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and
cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out ev'n to the edge of doom:-
[190]
READING SHAKESPEARE
YT
If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.”
Would you search further into this man's
worth; into this poet's pleasure-giving
power? If you would, there is but one
thing for you to do-read what he has
written.
If I were looking for a foundation on
which to build a faith in the existence of
the soul and its immortality, I should not
seek for it in the fine-spun arguments of
schoolmen and philosophers. I should
find it at once in the living power of the
poet's creative imagination. All Plato's
reasonings pale into insignificance beside
Plato himself. He is himself the most
convincing of all arguments. And Plato
was less than Shakespeare.
[191]
THE PL E A SU RE OF
READING NOVELS
THE PLEASURE OF READING
NOVELS
T
IO
VI
H E novelist, in so far as his
work is the product of his
creative imagination, is, more
or less, a poet. His method, how-
ever, is quite different from the poet's.
The poet sings; he is a musician as well as
a creator. The poet reveals visions; he
relates the separated things of life in a
unity with an ideal. His art is to pro-
duce in us his own experiences of har-
mony and beauty. The novelist is not a
singer; he is a narrator. He is not con-
cerned with an ideal. His language is
the prose of the single voice speaking of
what is now, or picturing what was once
so that it shall seem to be now. His aim

[195]
THE PLEASURE OF
is to tell the facts of common experience
in such wise as to produce in us an illu-
sion-an illusion that shall affect us as
the reality, and that may so work on the
imagination as to give pleasure. This is,
or should be, his only aim; other aims
must tend to deteriorate his art. He
may point a moral-political, social, re-
ligious—but if his moral obtrude itself
so that it overshadows his picture of life
or his presentation of character, he is no
longer the artist, he is the moralist or re-
former. A teller of tales must be a giver
of pleasure through the power and charm
of his illusions.
Before language had freed itself from
the fetters of sense; that is to say, when
men and women still called things by
names which reflected their personal re-
lationship to them, the poetical experi-
ence was the common experience. As
[196]
READING NOVELS
with children, the ideal qualities ascribed
to things were associated with the words
which stood for the things; so that lan-
guage was poetry. The poet, or the
minstrel, was then the teller of tales.
His songs told of the deeds of great
heroes, their loves, their sorrows, their
joys, their battles and conquests. He
tried to make them as real as he knew
how. That the creative imagination in
him sent him doing other things with his
facts and made poems out of his tales
was inevitable, since that was the only
way in which he could tell his tale at all.
His child-like imagination weaved make-
believes that were the reality. The Bib-
lical writers, Homer, Virgil, the authors
of the Scandinavian Sagas and Beowulf
were tellers of tales. So were the trou-
badours, the authors of the Romaunt of
the Rose and the Song of Roland, Chau-
[197]
THE PLEASURE OF
cer and Spenser. As tale-tellers they
charmed the listener or the reader to the
experience of pleasure, by producing an
illusion which the imagination accepted
as the reality.
Since those days language has under-
gone a complete change. As life became
more real and stern words lost their po-
etic associations. The relations they
originally suggested to things were di-
vorced, just as have been divorced the
relations in which we ourselves stood to
the world of things. The word in itself
is apparently lifeless, even as the thing
in itself is apparently lifeless. This di-
vorce between what I might call spirit
and matter has thrown us back on our
own imaginations. It has compelled us
to evolve a method of relating words to
each other, so that in the relation there
shall come back to our minds the sugges-
[198]
READING NOVELS
tions the words themselves once aroused.
This relating of words in unison with
the things they stand for, is prose. The
original simple homogeneity of speech,
to employ the Spencerian terminology,
has become a complex heterogeneity; but
in this process of evolution it has ac-
quired almost infinite possibilities of ar-
rangement by which it fulfils its work
of fitting itself to our larger experiences
of life.
In its earlier forms this prose, as was
to be expected, was uncouth and halting.
It was the language of the common
people, and took very roundabout ways
to get at things. It said in chapters
what we should now say in paragraphs.
It had not yet acquired the quality, which
comes from mere collocation, of appeal-
ing to the reader's imagination. We
need but to compare the mediæval ro-
[199]
THE PLEASURE OF
mances, such as Malory's Morte D'Ar-
thur, and Berner's Huon of Bordeaux,
with Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Trav-
els and The Vicar of Wakefield, to see
what a difference there is between the
prose of that time and the prose of a
few centuries later; to become aware of
the remarkable facility of arrangement
of words acquired in that comparatively
short interval—a short interval, when
we remember that people were making
themselves into nations as well as learn-
ing how to speak and write. Yet De
Foe, Swift and Goldsmith were only the
founders of our English prose. Since
their days it has developed even more
remarkably, so that in the hands of a
Thackeray or a George Meredith it ex-
presses the most delicate shades and
nuances of thought and experience and
emotion. The change has been equally
[200]
READING NOVELS
remarkable in French prose, from the
“long - winded” romances like Sir
Launcelot du Lac to the delicate, crisp,
and brilliant writing of Pierre Loti and
Anatole France.
If, as I say, we have lost the original
poetic suggestiveness in words, we have
certainly made ample compensation by
creating prose, and especially the full
and rich and meaningful prose of the
English language. Our language is
freer, more accomplished in its qualities
of flexibility and urbanity. It is more
responsive to the delicate calls made
upon it. We are no longer dependent
on the speaker's personality for the full
meaning; we receive it from the lan-
guage itself. We use it for the most
delicate ends. It enables us to approach
and embrace any subject that lends it-
self to interpretative and imaginative
[201]
THE PLEASURE OF
treatment. We picture the march of
events in living colours; we narrate the
lives of heroes and working men so that
these live again; we precipitate emotions
and trace them back to their sources.
The consequent benefits of such an in-
strument are incalculable. It gives us
the inestimable power of intercommu-
nication. Example and precept may no
longer depend on memory's tablets; they
have been indelibly inscribed as litera-
ture. Ambitions that we feel, need not
be thwarted by the contemplation of the
clash of circumstance, because ambitions
realized have been recounted in inspirit-
ing words. The past is no longer a dead
past, but has been recalled from its grave
and made to live again. We find joy in
looking forward in this pleasure of look-
ing backward. It is this prose that the
novelist uses for the purpose of his art.
[202]
READING NOVELS
The story-teller is as old as the home.
He was as welcome in the halls of the
vikings by the Scandinavian fiords and
in the tents of the Arab chieftains in the
desert, as he is to-day in the ranch of the
Texan cattleman or the log-cabin of the
Maine woodsman, and as he is to every
child that is born of honest and true-
hearted parents.
“Tell me a story, please,” says the
tired child to its mother; and the child
will sit rapt as the tale is unfolded to its
beatitude of a climax. Its little heart
will beat with excitement of a danger to
be overcome, and its tender eyes fill with
tears for a trial to be suffered; and what
a joy comes to it when it learns that
" they were married and lived happily
ever after.”
Men and women, grown as we are, we
are still Tam Samson's bairns, and most
[203]
THE PLEASURE OF
of us very tired. “Tell us a story," we
say to the novelist, “and we will endow
you with riches and bless you with
thanksgiving. Make us forget our sor-
rows; lighten our hearts; give us new
interests and new meanings for things;
brighten our dreams; give us hope; and
you shall abide in our midst as one of
the great ones.” Is it any wonder that
so many writers have taken to the telling
of tales?
The remarkable fact in modern litera-
ture is the growth of the novel. Of all
the forms of literary expression, it is the
one most practised. Indeed, the most
distinguished writers of our time are
those who are novelists by professioih
It would seem as if the history of the
literature of Europe and America of the
last half century is a history of the de-
velopment of the art of story-telling. A
[204]
READING NOVELS
roll-call of the great writers of this
period would include the names of
Thackeray, Dickens, George Meredith,
George Eliot, George Sand, Balzac,
Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas, Henri
Beyle, Turgénieff, Tolstoi, Björnson,
De Maupassant, Gustave Flaubert,
Anatole France, Valdés, Thomas Hardy,
Emily and Charlotte Brontë, Robert
Louis Stevenson, Henry James, Na-
thaniel Hawthorne, Conan Doyle, Rud-
yard Kipling, George Gissing, Henry
Seton Merriman, James Lane Allen,
Mark Twain, George Du Maurier and
Mrs. Humphry Ward. And all these
names are become household words.
Why is this?
The answer would seem to be that
these writers have found the tale to be the
one form of literary art which they were
certain would appeal; or, at any rate, be
[205]
THE PLEASURE OF
read. Speaking in this form they were
assured of a hearing. The hearing ob-
tained, the novelist could take a digni-
fied position in the life of the commu-
nity. He need not wait in depressing
indigence or oppressing poverty, as once
upon a time writers have been compelled
to wait, for a posterity to raise, after
they were dead, monuments to their
greater glory. They can sit at their
ease in comfortable affluence and enjoy
the reward of their labours, and taste
the fruits of fame while still walking
the pleasant places of the good earth.
The man of letters is, after all, but a
mortal, and the nature of him, as, in-
deed, of all of us, is to be pleased and
encouraged to do better, because of the
praise in doing well. He grows in his
art, and he also becomes a wiser man, a
richer companion, and a riper fellow.
[206]
READING NOVELS
He may begin by aiming to live highly,
but he will end by living to aim highly.
Of course, many writers are tempted by
success to assume virtues which they do
not possess; but even this has its good
side. The habit of assumption must tell
in the long run and, if he respect his art,
the novelist will remain to pray, even
though he came to scoff.
Another answer to the question lies in
the fact that the world always has its
teachers, preachers, prophets, poets and
jesters, who are moved by the natural
impulse in them for expression. In
times past each of these had his own way
of life and his own field of operation.
But times have changed, “ trade's un-
feeling train " has dispossessed them of
their heritages. We will no longer be
joked at, preached at, or taught with the
ferule and fool's-cap. We are still chil-
[207]
THE PLEASURE OF
dren, but we can choose now, and we
prefer the pleasure-giver to the school-
master. We turn our backs on the sat-
irist, and tell him “he is a fool in his
folly”; we make ugly faces at the
teacher and preacher, because they are
so serious they do not know how to play
with us; we gaze in ignorant wonder at
the poet, understanding little and caring
less for what he sings. No, these do not
catch us. There was nothing left for the
preacher and teacher but to take to the
novel; and this is what they have done.
They now beguile us with tales while in-
sinuating their lessons. Like the child at
its mother's knees, we are taken un-
awares, caught by the more or less en-
chanting visions of a fairyland and,
before we are aware of it, we have swal-
lowed the moral. I do not say that such
novels are distinguished literary achieve-
wa
[208]
READING NOVELS
ments. I am but stating the fact to
illustrate the attracting power of a tale
well told:
“ Truth in closest words will fail,
While Truth embodied in a Tale
May enter in at lowly doors."
The trouble is, this kind of novel
threatens to pervert and destroy the art
of story-telling. In these days of moral-
izing and preaching, the novel would ap-
pear to be an easy way for anyone cursed
with a grievance, or oppressed by the re-
forming spirit, or afflicted with“ an itch-
ing leprosy of wit,” to erect his own pul-
pit from which he may rail at men and
women for their bad dispositions and
their wicked ways. We ought to mend
our ways if only to put a stop to this
overflowing stream of moralizing elo-
quence. And yet, if we did, the enthu-
siastic and ingenious missionary would
[209]
THE PLEASURE OF
probably find some other devil in us that
needed exorcising. We may, however,
take a large satisfaction in the knowl-
edge that Time’s waste-paper basket is
ample.
Fiction, said Lord Bacon, “raises the
mind by accommodating the images of
things to our desires, and not, like his-
tory and reason, subjecting the mind to
things.” If Bacon be right, then have
our aforesaid preachers and teachers
good authority for using the novel for
the moral purpose. We are more moved
by our imaginations than we are by our
ratiocinative faculties, and if the ap-
peal to reason fail, why should not the
appeal be made to the imagination?
Even Dickens found this a pleasant way
in which to disport his reforming and
moralizing spirit. Well, I do not say
that a moral purpose is not good; but I
[210]
READING NOVELS
I
do say it is a very bad motive, and not
at all conducive to the best art. In the
first place, it is inimical to the finer play
of the creative power. This should be
directed to nothing other than its own
fulfilment within the limits of the art.
If truth be the novelist's tale, let it ap-
pear in the forms of beauty. If we are
really anxious for a moral, we shall get
it here; for there is no finer moralizer
than the pleasure which is experienced
in a perfect creation. In the second
place a public hungering for moral tales
is a public that is oppressed by circum-
stance and chained to the conditions im-
posed on it by the struggle for existence.
A free people, free in mind as well as
body, concerns itself least with consider-
ations about good and bad. Life is too
full of joy, and there is delight in living
for mere living's sake, and there is no
[211]
THE PLEASURE OF
time for questionings as to their neigh-
bours' conduct, or their own immortal
souls. The authors of Daphnis and
Chloe and The Golden Ass knew this
high wisdom; and these delightful tales
still delight, and will delight the more,
as we grow to live in a wise innocence
made richer by experience.
Therefore, to point morals at us is to
appeal to what is lowest in us and not to
what is highest. It is to heap a Pelion
of rhetorical derision on an Ossa of the
scorn and weight of circumstance. Life,
as we live it, is a sufficient castigator
without the aid of the schoolmaster's rod
or the preacher's whip. What we want
is not to be bowed down under the con-
sciousness of our wickedness; but to be
uplifted by a realized ideal within us.
We want the novel to give us what, per-
haps, we are too poor in spirit to find for
[212]
READING NOVELS
ourselves; what we have not the time to
imagine for ourselves. We want it to
tell us of life so that life shall be allur-
ing and not despairing; to make us real-
ize that there is more virtue in being joy-
ous than there is in being fearful and
cunning. We want it to embody the
best and so to present it that that best
shall live in us as our virtues. These
given, we shall be helped to a surer hope,
a stronger and worthier ambition, a
fuller charity, and a wiser innocence in
our daily doings. For it is a character-
istic of human nature that it grows like
unto what it loves.
Finally, a work of art is itself a moral
influence, the choicest of moral influ-
ences. It is not, of course, a categorical
imperative; it is much more, for it is the
essential perfume of all imperatives, the
atmosphere in which what we call life
[213]
THE PLEASURE OF
blossoms and flowers. The sun, we can
well imagine, troubles itself not a jot as
to whether or no the apple on the tree it
warms will be fit to eat. If we dare
ascribe a thoughtful purpose to its work
of radiation, we should say it was aiming
to produce a perfect apple, regardless
of what we afterwards did with it. So
that the moral of a novel should lie not
in any set purpose of the novelist, but in
the impression it leaves on our imagina-
tion and the use we make of the impres-
sion. As with the poet we supplement
the tale and complement the teller.
The business of the novelist, there-
fore, is to tell of life. His success in the
telling will depend on the strength of the
illusion he creates; and this illusion will
bring pleasure and through pleasure any
other impulse that is for us fulfilling.
He may write of people long ago dead,
I
[214]
READING NOVELS
11
or of people now living: the events he
narrates may have taken place years ago
or are taking place to-day; it matters
little so long as the illusion he creates in
us is strong enough and direct enough
to be acceptable to our imaginations.
And this illusion shall be so real that
there will be no question as to past or
present; it must be now. Thackeray's
Henry Esmond is a signal example of
what I mean. Apart from its admirably
achieved eighteenth - century English,
which, of course, helps to heighten the
illusion, Thackeray conceives and pre-
sents his actors in this drama of a past
life as if he had personally known them.
They are as real to him as the friends
he met at his club every day. In the
truest sense they must have been, or they
would not be real to us. This illusion
of reality is so powerfully achieved that
NT
[215]
THE PLEASURE OF
when we have finished reading the story
and know that we have been beguiled,
the men and women of this imaginary
world refuse to leave us. This, of course,
is a rare achievement, and stamps the
writer as a master in his art. Scott, in
Ivanhoe, and Hawthorne, in The Scar-
let Letter, were almost as successful.
Charles Reade in The Cloister and the
Hearth, and Blackmore, in Lorna
Doone, came very near this high reach.
I mention these novels in connection with
Henry Esmond only to point out the
common quality they possess of perma-
nence in their power of illusion.
A writer of a so-called “historical”
novel may easily please if he possess
but a fair power of narration. The sub-
ject-matter and the background are
easily obtainable, and he has a large
store of heroes to choose from. In read-
[216]
READING NOVELS
ing such a novel we are not a whit
fooled; no more than we would be in
reading Gibbon or Macaulay or Froude.
It is quite another thing, however, to re-
create the past and keep it living by the
very force of the imaginative impulse.
Fine as are The Cloister and the Hearth
and Lorna Doone, they are less creations,
in this sense, than splendid narrations in
the historian's sense. We do not feel
this of Henry Esmond, Ivanhoe and
The Scarlet Letter. Henry Esmond is
far more real to us than either William
of Orange or Bolingbroke. What Ma-
caulay could not do Thackeray did. Es-
mond has the quality of being perma-
nent for experience, and the experience
is, moreover, delightful.
To make the past live again is a rare
achievement; but the novelist is not alone
in the possession of this power. Boswell
"ma,
[217]
THE PLEASURE OF
1.
showed it in his Life of Doctor John-
son, and Boswell was not gifted with
any undue share of imagination. What
helped Boswell, and in the result sur-
prised him, was an abject devotion to his
hero; a devotion that made him utterly
reckless of himself, if only he could pic-
ture his friend as he knew him. This
devotion is another quality the novelist
must possess if he is to do work that shall
abide—and devotion with the novelist
spells sincerity. What strikes us most
in the writings of the great tale-tellers
is their sincerity. Balzac, with all his
faults, is so sincere, that we forgive him
much for this one quality alone. It is
that which makes Le Père Goriot the
masterpiece it is. It dignifies even the
sordid and shabby surroundings of Ma-
dame Vauquer's boarding-house. No
detail was too insignificant for Balzac;
[218]
READING NOVELS
his incomparable power moved every-
where. We are often terribly bored by
his minutiæ; but we are convinced by
his earnestness and faithfulness. His
art may be faulty, but his sincerity is al-
ways true. Dickens, in spite of his ar-
tifices, was sincere. So were Gustave
Flaubert, George Eliot, Turgénieff,
Oliver Goldsmith and Daniel De Foe.
Sincerity alone, however, will not avail.
Much may be accomplished by an imagi-
nation working in sincerity; but the final
result will depend on the novelist's tem-
perament and character. This sounds as
if I were repeating myself; but I do not
intend a repetition. When I speak of
the novelist's temperament, I mean his
disposition to observe life; the patience
to gather details that are so necessary to
the production of illusion. And when I
say the final test of his art will depend on
[219]
THE PLEASURE OF
IN
character, I refer to that quality in him
which stamps his work as individual-
not his style altogether, though that is
characteristic; nor his treatment, though
that, too, is characteristic, but his point
of view, his interpretation. It is here
that the novelist differs from the poet.
The poet's experience is immediate; the
novelist's is mediate. The poem is a
revelation; the novel is an interpretation.
Revelations may be independent of char-
acter (the profoundest always are); in-
terpretations are necessarily dependent
on character. Émile Zola is in every line
of his Rougon-Macquart series of tales;
Henri Beyle Stendhal fills La Char-
treuse de Parme and Rouge et Noir;
Balzac overflows the Comédie Humaine;
Thackeray is never absent from Vanity
Fair; Dickens was acting in almost
every story he wrote; Scott fought bat-
[220]
READING NOVELS
tles and chanted war songs through half
the Waverley Novels; Emily Brontë is
really known only in her Wuthering
Heights.
This that I call character is not in-
jected bodily into the tale; it is what the
author cannot help from getting into
the tale, and what he cannot keep the
tale from giving out. It is the subtle in-
fluence that emanates from the total
product and impregnates us in some such
way as we feel the indefinite sensations
stirred in us by summer's lovely dawns
or the soft, golden twilights of autumn's
evenings, or thunderstorms, or any of
nature's arresting processes. It is the
author himself reappearing in spiritual
form. And on his character will stand
or fall the thing he has made.
All these qualities of the writer com-
bine to receive the stuff of life-its in-
2
THE PLEASURE OF
cidents, its characters, its environment-
into the crucible of his creative imagina-
tion, and, by a secret alchemy, of which
the novelist himself can give no explana-
tion, produce a thing called the novel-
the thing embodied as literature that shall
answer to the reality we know as life.
It will be found on reading the best
novelists that those who have been men
of action rather than onlookers in the
game of life, have a more virile style,
they give a sense of impressive certainty
and speak as if the thing or the incident
jumps into its word-symbol. It is a
quality which distinguished those Eliza-
bethan writers who were travellers, sol-
diers and sailors. Bunyan, Fielding and
Smollett (in Roderick Random) give
this sense. I seem to trace De Foe's
mastery of imaginative realism to the
fact that he had busied himself in the
[222]
READING NOVELS
making of pantiles. I am not saying
that style depends on an author's work-
ing for a living at some trade other than
that of writing; but I do say that his
having played the game of life in this
way tends to enrich his style and give
precision to his images. The onlooker, so
to speak, will be more or less stiff and
artificial. Even Stevenson's writing
reads as if it had been very carefully
elaborated. Most modern French novel-
ists display this artificiality; and the
large majority of living English and
American novelists, especially the women-
novelists, are amoebic and flabby in
their styles. This, however, may be due
to their “professionalism.” The so-
called novelist who “gets up” his sub-
ject, and is ever on the lookout for plots,
is not creating, he is merely "pot-boil-
110
ing."
[223]
THE PLEASURE OF
It would appear as if I were writing
a treatise on what the late Sir Walter
Besant called “The Art of Fiction.”
That, however, is far from my inten-
tion; there are already many estimable
works (including one by Sir Walter
himself) written by professional gen-
tlemen who are far more intimately ac-
quainted with the methods for “ success”
in writing fiction than I am. I am try-
ing to say, not how a novel should be
written, but how a novel should be un-
derstood and appreciated. I am doing
this that my readers may realize that the
best novels are not to be read merely to
pass the time; and that there are novels
from which may be derived a pleasure
that is energizing and not enervating.
A few years ago it was considered im-
proper to read this form of literature. I
have no doubt there is still much justifi-
[224]
READING NOVELS
cation for this attitude—it depends on
the reader as well as the writer. People
who are shocked at seeing a child rolling
over on the floor will not find much in
Tristram Shandy. They will miss a lot
of fun; but then such people do not find
the necessity for that savoury; possibly
because they are funny in themselves.
There are also many homes in which a
novel is still forbidden fruit. I am afraid
that bar is responsible for many of the
so-called moral tales that are being so
generously written by those who have
“acquired the art of fiction.” Not that
the moral tale may not have its rightful
place in our scheme of things; but it is
not conducive to pleasure. As a conse-
quence we do not breed Fieldings. Our
modern novelists have one eye on their
royalties and the other on the circulating
library and the librarian-oracle; and they
[225]
THE PLEASURE OF
find it more profitable and more repu-
table to “subject the mind to things”
rather than uplift desires and accommo-
date things to them. If they are really
anxious to achieve greatness I would
recommend them to read a pleasant and
pretty essay on the subject of their art
by Mr. Henry James. I promise them a
delightful half-hour.
When I speak of the pleasure of read-
ing novels and romances I am not, of
course, thinking of the works of the ex-
cellent craftsmen to whom I have just
referred. I am thinking of those writers
for whom expression is an art and a
faith, for those master-workers in life's
materials who mean no more than to pro-
duce a self-revealing whole, as perfectly
as they can. I am thinking of Cer-
vantes, Fielding, Sterne, Jane Austen,
Sir Walter Scott, Thackeray, Dickens,
[226]
READING NOVELS
Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Thomas
Hardy, George Meredith, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Henry James, Turgénieff,
Balzac, Stendhal, Alexandre Dumas,
Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, Guy
de Maupassant, Anatole France. Some-
times Robert Louis Stevenson and An-
thony Trollope come into view; some-
times James Lane Allen and W. J.
Locke; sometimes Charles Reade and
William de Morgan; sometimes George
Gissing and Henry Seton Merriman. I
think of all these for the splendid pleas-
ure they have given me—the pleasure
that comes from sheer freedom of the
spirit. For it is a mark of genius to
sadden the spirit and to uplift the heart
at the same time, as I have found in
Turgénieff and Hardy and Thackeray.
But in the great wide space of the world,
opened up by these interpreters of life
[227]
THE PLEASURE OF
and magicians in illusion, there is room
for every phase of imaginative exercise.
I think especially of the great humor-
ists; those gifted beings who could touch
the very heart of the mystery of life into
laughter — Cervantes, Fielding, Sterne,
Thackeray and Dickens—the laughter
that is also so close to tears, in which
Thackeray especially dissolves us. Hu-
mour is the rope on which wisdom dances,
and wise indeed is he who can balance
himself in laughter on the strands of
truth. Dickens and Cervantes and
Fielding are of the wise men in this re-
spect. Fielding and Dickens are broth-
ers-Englishmen in their natures, their
points of view, their sincerity, and in
what I may call the non-intellectuality
of the basis from which their humour
played. Fielding had a larger grasp of
character. His creations are types;
[228]
READING NOVELS
Dickens's are individuals. Fielding's
was a generous, large, and amply ful-
filling power; Dickens's power lay in his
vivid presentation of a special individ-
ual, odd characters, single individuali-
ties. He is the perfect showman. The
men and women he presents to our eyes
are of the common people of the com-
mon day, all near to mother earth, and
all redolent of the smoke of every-day
human strife. Dickens himself was of
the common, and I do not say this to his
disparagement; rather the contrary. He
was true to the truth of his experience,
even if that experience was transfigured
in the golden light of his imagination.
Exaggeration is abundant in him, but its
over-indulgence is softened and lost in
the richness of his colouring. His hu-
mour is not intellectual-humour rarely
is intellectual—it belongs to the levels of
W
-
OV
ASS
[229]
THE PLEASURE OF
11
experience, and finds its real home in the
highways and byways, in the narrow,
crowded streets where people jostle each
other, rub each other's shoulders, and
touch the risibilities to the quick by un-
courteous selfishness. The other side of
humour is pathos, where laughter melts
into tears. This is Dickens's humour as
it is Dickens's pathos. Dickens is laugh-
ter-moving, and he is also tear-compell-
ing. Like his humour, his pathos is also
non-intellectual. It smacks even of vul-
garity, so true is it to the common life.
Dickens had been bred in a hard school;
his wisdom came from suffering. It is
this which tinges so many of his wise
words with the dun colours of a London
day. But he knows that suffering can
be best mitigated by joy, so that a Mi-
cawber, a Joe Gargery, a Doctor Mari-
gold, a Tom Pinch are blessed with the
TULE
[230]
READING NOVELS
gift of humour and the power of smiling
through tears.
In reading Dickens don't assume the
superior attitude. It is getting to be the
fashion to look down on him; it will be to
our misfortune if the fashion prevail.
But whether he be fashionable or no, he
must ever remain the most widely read
of English novelists. His appeal is not
to any particular age or to any special
order of mind; it is to all ages and to the
common mind. I can conceive of no
time in which the sons and daughters of
men and women shall not be crowing and
crying at the play of Dickens's great
pantomime of life.
If I can say all this of Dickens I
should say far more of Henry Fielding,
whose Tom Jones is one of the master-
pieces of English literature. He tells us
his book is to treat of “Human Nature,”
[231]
THE PLEASURE OF
and there never was a saner book writ-
ten in any language. Had Dryden lived
to read it he would assuredly have placed
it by the side of his Chaucer, and ex-
claimed, “ This, also, is God's Plenty.”
With all his profound knowledge of
men and women and life, and in spite of
his hatred of shams, hypocrisy and in-
sincerity, there is such a magnificent
magnanimity in Fielding, such a great
heart, such a sympathy for human frail-
ties, and such a wise and keen eye. Gen-
erations to come of the best minds will
drink their most refreshing draughts
from this reservoir of wit and humour.
Fielding's genius is nearest to Shake-
speare's of any writer I know in the
English language. If any of my read-
ers, and I doubt not there will be many,
have heard that Fielding's Tom Jones is
an improper book, I shall best answer
[232]
READING NOVELS
them by a quotation from Fielding's
farewell to his reader, which may be
found in its entirety at the beginning of
the eighteenth book of that immortal
novel :-
“And now, my friend, I take this op-
portunity (as I shall have no other) of
heartily wishing thee well. If I have
been an entertaining companion to thee,
I promise thee it is what I have desired.
If in anything I have offended, it was
really without any intention. Some
things, perhaps, here said, may have hit
thee or thy friends; but I do most sol-
emnly declare that they were not pointed
at thee or them. I question not but thou
hast been told, among other stories of
me, that thou wast to travel with a very
scurrilous fellow; but whoever told you
so did me an injury. No man detests
and despises scurrility more than my-
[233]
THE PLEASURE OF
II
self; nor hath any man ever been treated
with more."
To this I would add, in all sincerity, a
few lines from William Caxton's pref-
ace to Malory's Morte D’Arthur:
“And for to pass the time this book
shall be pleasant to read in, but for to
give faith and belief that all is true that
is contained herein, ye be at your liberty;
but all is written for our doctrine, and
for to beware that we fall not to vice
nor sin, but to exercise and follow vir-
tue; by the which we may come and at-
tain to good fame and renown in this
life, and after this short and transitory
life to come unto everlasting bliss in
heaven.”
It is curious that a work like Tom
Jones should have been followed, in less
than a quarter of a century, by such a
prose idyll as Goldsmith's Vicar of
[234]
READING NOVELS
In
Wakefield. The two are poles apart in
every sense, except that both are won-
derful realizations of life written by hu-
morists. Such a conjunction of differ-
ences but goes to illustrate the richness
of the material that lies ready for the
novelist's art, and the infinite possibilities
of expression.
One can scarcely realize that George
Meredith, who is but just dead, wrote
contemporaneously with Thackeray and
Dickens. What is still more remarkable
is the difference in the character of the
art that distinguishes Thackeray and
Dickens and Meredith-all three humor-
ists from each other. There is a mid-
Victorian flavour in the satirist and
comedian, that lingers in spite of their
individuality of treatment. In Meredith
there is absolutely no trace of a period.
He is as fresh and new as the morning's.
1
[235]
THE PLEASURE OF
sunrise; and, though but just passed
away, is as ready for judgment as a
Greek classic. We need not wait for
time to give us our perspective; the
qualities in Meredith are the qualities of
the greatest masters in art; and his style,
which some find irksome, will be found
to yield the properties that belong to
genius.
Meredith is not the supreme raconteur
that Alexandre Dumas was; but he has
what compels our homage in Dumas, the
magical power of illusion. I am not in-
stituting a comparison between the two;
no comparison is possible. I am simply
ascribing to Meredith the same power
that we find at its highest expression in
another novelist, whom we distinguish
for that power. As a novelist Dumas
holds no high place; he was really what
may be called a romantic historian; but
[236]
READING NOVELS
he had what no historian has as yet
dared to indulge in if he possessed it, for
fear of being accused of exaggeration,
namely, an astonishing power to make
vivid the past. He might be likened to a
very clever scene painter who knew how
to place his lights so that the moving
panorama should show and seem the very
march of events in their mise-en-scène.
Scott had Dumas' power; but he had in
addition the novelist's genius for relat-
ing incidents and scenery and character
to the purpose of the complete novel. In
a word, he was an artist as well as a ro-
mancer. Dumas was less artist than ro-
mancer.
Meredith is an artist to his finger tips.
Incident and character and background,
so to speak, are seen by him as fluid, each
melting into the other, each assisting the
other in their contributory flow to the
VO
[237]
THE PLEASURE OF
TOC
one splendid stream of his novel. He
is a great novelist because he is so emi-
nently successful in solidifying, embody-
ing, and shaping all the elements of his
ideal world so that they fuse into a
whole that appears actual, and real, and
living. His men and women do not
walk across a room, or hold a conversa-
tion, or meet each other anywhere, inde-
pendent of their surroundings. As he
tells it incident and environment become
one thing, make one impression—an im-
pression absolutely necessary to the illu-
sion. If he describes a lady's dress,
the dress is not objective; it is one
of the many subjective experiences of
which the novel as a whole is the total
unity.
“She wore a dress cunning to embrace
the shape and flutter loose about it, in
the spirit of a summer's day. Calypso-
[238]
READING NOVELS
clad, Dr. Middleton would have called
her. See the silver birch in the breeze;
here it swells, there it scatters, and it is
puffed to a round, and it streams like a
pennon, and now gives the glimpse and
shine of the white stem's line within, now
hurries over it, denying that it was vis-
ible, with a chatter along the sweeping
folds, while still the white peeps through.
She had the wonderful art of dressing to
suit the season and the sky..., Mil-
linery would tell us that she wore a fichu
of thin white muslin crossed in front on
a dress of the same light stuff, trimmed
with a deep rose. She carried a grey-
silk parasol, traced at the border with
green creepers and across the arm de-
voted to Crossjay, a length of trailing
ivy, and in that hand a bunch of the first
long grasses. These hues of red rose and
green and pale green, ruffled and pouted
[239]
THE PLEASURE OF
in the billowy white of the dress balloon-
ing and volleying softly, like a yacht be-
fore the sail bends low; but she walked
not like one blown against; resembling
rather the day of the South-West driv-
ing the clouds, gallantly firm in commo-
tion; interfusing colour and varying in
the features from laugh to smile and
look of settled pleasure, like the heavens
above the breeze."
“All this,” you say, “ to tell merely
how, a pretty young lady looked when
going out for a walk with a boy?” Yes,
all this. Why? Because all this is part
of the story, and an essential part. Wil-
loughby Patterne must see Clara Mid-
dleton thus; at the sight his heart will
dissolve into a sea of passionate emotion.
You, the reader, must feel as Wil-
loughby Patterne feels, or you will not
understand his later agony; and you
[240]
READING NOVELS
must be brought not merely to under-
stand, but literally to live the agony with
Willoughby Patterne. That is why all
this is necessary. The description is not
mere description; it is the object seen in
the atmosphere of emotion. If Meredith
describes even so unimportant a thing as
the hair on the back of the young lady's
neck, he dare not “pad.” You may be
sure there will be no description without
the presence of one of the persons of his
play who is experiencing the thing de-
scribed:
“He placed himself at a corner of the
doorway for her to pass him into the
house, and doated on her cheek, her ear,
and the softly dusky nape of her neck,
where this way and that the little light-
coloured irreclaimable curls running tru-
ant from the comb and the knot-curls,
half-curls, root-curls, vine-ringlets, wed-
[241]
THE PLEASURE OF
ding rings, fledgeling feathers, tufts of
down, blown wisps – waved or fell,
waved over or up or involutedly, or
strayed, loose and downward, in the
form of small silken paws, hardly any
of them much thicker than a crayon
shading, cunninger than long round
locks of gold to trick the heart."
You dare swear that this was just how
the lover noted these minute details.
Could anything be more exquisitely ap-
pealing than this “ aside ” which comes
as a whispered chorus to let us into the
secret pulses of the very soul of the
lover standing by, and who is himself
hardly conscious, but only mistily aware
of his own emotional state? This is the
work of the consummate artist, who sees
values in the most delicate lines, and neg-
lects not even the caress of his brush if
he knows that the caress will heighten the
[242]
READING NOVELS
IN
effect and assist in the perfection of the
impression.
It is this exquisite sense and use of de-
tail that is, probably, the distinguishing
mark of Meredith's genius as a novelist.
Both his temper and character appear
here. That is why we dare not "skip”
in reading him; if we do we shall surely
miss some vital, revealing phrase-often
a word even. Meredith's phrases are
packed with attributes, they are full of
suggestive power. A living picture may
be in a line:
“She seized her anger as if it were a
curling snake and cast it off”; “she
had at times the look of the nymph that
had gazed too long at the faun, and has
unwittingly copied his lurking lip and
long sliding eye ”; “he saw the Goddess
Modesty guarding Purity ”; “ a dainty
rogue in porcelain”; “her incandescent
[243]
THE PLEASURE OF
reason”; “she went down stairs like a
cascade”; “she was fleet; she ran as
though a hundred little feet were bear-
ing her onward smooth as water, so
swiftly did the hidden pair multiply one
another to speed her... her flight
wound to an end in a dozen twittering
steps, and she sank.” Is it any wonder
that the boy Crossjay, seeing this fleet-
ing vision, should translate his admira-
tion, as the author tells us he did, “into
a dogged frenzy of pursuit"? He
would have been deserving of a spank-
ing had he merely looked and not moved.
I am quoting from Meredith's The
Egoist, the greatest novel in the Eng-
lish language, with its superb mastery of
the stuff of life and its consummate art.
It is a comedy and a tragedy so inter-
woven that we cannot say where one be-
gins and the other ends. It is human
10
[244]
READING NOVELS
nature playing the game of life, with
none of the “dust of the struggling
outer world, no mire, no violent crashes,
to make the correctness of the represen-
tation convincing.” The game played
here is that played in the so-called higher
social circles, where Meredith tells us,
the Comic Spirit has quite a good time
of it. But the stage might just as well
be the great stage of life itself. Mere-
dith's is no suburban genius. His mi-
crocosm instantly spreads itself out to
the size of the great globe itself. The
gentleman, the student, the scholar, the
soldier, the boy, the country dame, the
maiden sisters, the lovely heroines of
this book are really making believe on
the stage of Patterne Hall. The names
they are given here are mere marks for
identification, so that we may the more
easily follow the scenes and acts to the
[245]
THE PLEASURE OF
dénouement. In reality the stage is life's
stage anywhere on the earth where men
and women gather together to live what
is called the social life. The specific
names of the dramatis personæ have but
to be thought of in the generic terms I
have given, and the book becomes a
macrocosm. It is gorgeously amusing,
splendidly laughter-moving; and yet we
would not be surprised if we saw peep-
ing at us from the side-wings the pained
mask of Tragedy. Meredith, of course,
would not commit such a bêtise; but we
do not forget that there is this tragic
other-side to this smiling face of Com-
edy. We experience strange twinges
and our smiles suddenly stiffen. A pa-
thos of emotion envelops us, and our
laughter disappears into the sterner
lines. 'All this comes from our realiza-
tion of life under the spell of this arch-
[246]
READING NOVELS
NI
magician. We have been told that the
people in “real life” never talk as do
the people in George Meredith's books,
and that The Egoist, in particular, sins in
this respect. Surely this is childish petu-
lancy. The question is not whether the
people of The Egoist talk like the peo-
ple we know in “real life”; the ques-
tion is do they talk like the people we
know in The Egoist? When we know
the people in The Egoist we won't ask
the question. It is Meredith's business
to raise the mind by accommodating the
images of things to our desires, and not
to lower the mind by subjecting it to
things. And he accomplishes this busi-
ness superbly.
Meredith's men and women are types,
not individuals. Sir Willoughby Pat-
terne, Richard Feverel, Harry Rich-
mond, Tony Gammon, Dr. Middleton,
[247]
THE PLEASURE OF
Vernon Whitford, Clara Middleton,
Rhoda Fleming, Lucy Feverel, Lætetia
Dale, Janet Ilchester, Diana (wonder-
ful Diana!) of the Crossways, and a
host of others, are of the great world of
life. We recognize them instantly now
that Meredith has recreated them for us.
His heroes and heroines are character-
ized by one supreme quality—the quality
of courage. Courage to dare to be one's
self in the face of all odds, that was
Meredith's medicine for the ills of life.
It was his solution of its problem also.
Meredith had had to solve that problem
for himself, not without great agony of
soul. He had known poverty, had ex-
perienced sorrows, and had lived and
laboured in loneliness and neglect. But
courage helped him—-courage and the
poetic spirit in him. Meredith was a
poet, perhaps, more than he was a nov-
[248]
READING NOVELS
w
elist. Life was a revelation to him; he
saw it in visions and in relations. The
poet in him made him a greater artist as
novelist; and this it is, perhaps, which
imposes on his readers a harder task in
order to receive all the suggestions by
which he is trying to reveal what he sees.
But then is not that what life itself asks
of us? And life imposes this task with
but occasional glimpses of joy; Mere-
dith, however, bathes us in the atmos-
phere of his splendid wisdom and rest-
ful humour.
I am afraid I have exceeded the limits
of space permitted for this chapter,
which has already extended to greater
length than I intended; but, indeed, I
can but touch the fringes of so magnifi-
cent a subject. I have said almost noth-
ing of Cervantes, of Bunyan, of Sterne,
of Stendhal, Flaubert, Thomas Hardy
[249]
THE PLEASURE OF
IASI
and Henry James. Don Quixote might
have a book to itself; The Pilgrim's
Progress, though hardly a novel, is a
beautiful expression of an experience of
life; and the wit of Tristram Shandy is
an abiding glory of English literature.
All these books are so differently appeal-
ing and yet each in its way so graciously
pleasure giving. I have but touched on
the Chartreuse de Parme, that masterly
analysis of human love. I have but
hinted at the great genius of Turgénieff,
that tender spirit of Russia, whose pa-
thos is like a balm or a perfume, and to
whom his native land was an inspiration.
I might have found space for Victor
Hugo's Les Misérables and spoken of
the noble spirit it breathes in spite of its
questionable art. I ought to have said
a word or two for George Eliot's Mid-
dlemarch and The Mill on the Floss, two
[250]
READING NOVELS
books that may be read again and again.
Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Na-
tive, The Woodlanders and Tess of the
D'Urbervilles are alone enough to make
their writer's fame immortal. And what
could I say of Dumas's D'Artagnan
stories that has not been better said by
the thousands of their readers who have
basked in the sunshine of their glorious
air? If my readers are curious to know
more of him, I recommend them to read
Stevenson's essay on Dumas's Le Vic
comte de Bragelonne, and if they do not
take to the Vicomte instantly, then-
well, it will be a pity. Flaubert's mas-
terpiece, Madame Bovary, and Anthony
Trollope's Barchester stories, must re-
ceive special mention from me, and I
must again name Reade's The Cloister
and the Hearth, that splendid panorama
of mediæval days. All these books and
[251]
THE PLEASURE OF
ne
many others whose authors I have but
indicated by name, I can only beg my
readers to read with the assurance that
there are happy hours in store for them
in their companionship.
A few words of Nathaniel Haw-
thorne and The Scarlet Letter, and this
chapter must end. Hawthorne pos-
sessed what few writers possessed in
equally high degree, the power to realize
an impression of the supernatural by
creating its atmosphere without in any
other way defining it. His greatest
novel, however, is not touched by this
atmosphere, it is placed in the open air
of Puritan New England. Professor
Woodberry has amply dealt with The
Scarlet Letter in his Life of Hawthorne,
and my readers will find the chapter de-
voted to it most instructive reading.
Professor Woodberry, however, does not
[252]
READING NOVELS
consider this novel as Hawthorne's best,
because, in his opinion, it distorts the
spiritual life. In Hawthorne's story, he
says, “mercy is but a hope,” and “evil
is presented as a thing without remedy,
that cannot change its nature," and be-
cause of these faults, as they are deemed,
the book is not true to life. I would' beg
a moment in which to justify Haw-
thorne. To my mind, it is just because
“mercy is but a hope” and “evil is a
thing without remedy that cannot change
its nature” that Hawthorne in realizing
this, saw profoundly into the truth of
life. A theory of universal government
might fit things more in accordance with
our hopes, but Hawthorne was not con-
sidering our hopes; he was telling of
life. And in life as we live it, the hope
for mercy can only be realized, in any
true sense of realization, by making of
S
[253]
THE PLEASURE OF
evil a stepping-stone to good. Virtue
means a conquest over evil; and those
who attempt the struggle do so because
of the demands of their nature. A
theory rarely helps us in our tragic mo-
ments. We have then to fall back on
ourselves, and we are moved by a power
as much within us as without us. Our
issue from our afflictions depends, in a
large measure, on our habits of thought
and life, and in the harmony of these
with the highest social life. In Hester's
life the power without her was greater
than the power within her; hence the piti-
fulness of her story. If Hester's life
had been fulfilled of love and not with
the spirit of Puritan Christianity, love
would have saved her where her creed
could not, and Hawthorne's story might
never have been written. But Haw-
thorne's The Scarlet Letter must be
ULT
[254]
READING NOVELS
judged, not from the sectarian's stand-
point, but from the standpoint of art.
The question is not, does it tally with any
creed? The question is, does it succeed
in making us realize what Hawthorne
attempted? Speaking for myself I
must answer with a profound affirmation.
The impression Hawthorne leaves on
us is the impression made by all great
imaginative writers. The contemplation
of creation is always inspiring; the con-
templation of art must surely affect us
with a sense of grateful humility, if only
in the thought that these master-workers
have laboured for our sakes; that it was
for us they lived strenuous days and
walked the rugged steeps of experience.
What they gathered in pain they have
brought to us for our pleasure. In this
largesse the novelist is the most boun-
teous of givers.
[255]
VI
THE PLEASURE OF
READING HISTORY
AND BIOGRAPHY
THE PLEASURE OF READING
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY

E-
OUR schools of learning do not
Mi les provide chairs of fiction and
2 biography, and even poetry
has been almost overlooked. The read-
ing of novels and biographies is yet free
for the pleasure-seeker, and poetry may
still continue to flower by the wayside.
History, however, has long been received
into monastic hospitals, nursed by devout
ascetics, and compelled to don the melan-
choly robes of their order. She now
looks sternly and coldly at us from be-
hind barred gates; and woe betide the
bold adventurer who dares enter unper-
mitted and unaccompanied her cloistered
walks.
[259]
THE PLEASURE OF
YOYO
ISSN
“History is Truth,” exclaim these
augurs. Truth must be kept chaste, at
any cost, even at the cost of itself, from
the polluting touch of the imaginative
and impassioned layman. She must be
guarded by her high priests and kept
sacred, and only visible through iron
railings. People have been too familiar
with her; they dressed her so that she was
quite unlike her real self. It is different
now. Now she is the handmaiden of
science and philosophy. Well, ye men
of science and philosophy, show us Truth
as History!
They have responded to the demand
and revealed her. There she is, in all
her nakedness! Not a sight, I am afraid,
to stir the pia mater of the true lover
who looks long and wonderingly at this
starved and bony apparition. “Is this
Truth?” he murmurs; “ then give me the
[260]
READING HISTORY
other thing. I think she would look more
presentable, at least, if she were a little
draped.” And he turns aside, carefully
replacing the hundred and fifty-first vol-
ume of the famous History of the World
by that eminent scholar of Heidelberg
or Bonn or Jena (I forget, for the mo-
ment, which), and smilingly takes down
Dumas' Le Vicomte de Bragelonne.
I suppose it must be the old childish in-
stinct in us that still continues to draw
us back from school and permits us but
to creep like snails unwillingly to it; but
the histories of our pedagogues and pro-
fessors are, truly, not very attractive.
When I come to think on it I believe the
child's instinct was right, after all, in
turning its head away from the unin-
viting and unsavoury information offered
it as food for its mind. The mental in-
digestion that invariably followed fully
A
[261]
THE PLEASURE OF
justified its aversion. And we, who are
no longer children, surely we waste much
precious time in attempting to devour
the bulky, spiceless, unripe chunks served
up as History. What a time we might
be having instead with Homer and Lu-
cian and Shakespeare! This modern
worship at the feet of the goddess Fact,
is certainly robbing us of our virtues.
Already the boy of ten is an expert
mathematician and can even calculate his
chances on a bet. If you speak to him
of George Washington he is ready with
dates; if of Benjamin Franklin, he will,
probably, quote you the oracles of Poor
Richard's Almanack. But ask him, aye,
or her, of Achilles or Siegfried, or King
Arthur, or Proserpine or Helen of Troy
or even of Cinderella, and he will look
at you with a wise eye and perhaps tell
you, "You're joshing.” “What is Hec-
[262]
READING HISTORY
uba to him or he to Hecuba,” that he
should spend an hour with her instead of
earning a prize for selling “ The Satur-
day Evening Post”? He is too busy
with Fact.
There is, probably, no denying the fact
that Julius Cæsar landed in England in
the year 55 B.C., or the fact that William
of Normandy fought and overcame
Harold the Saxon in the year 1066 A. D.,
but I confess, I never could, and cannot
yet, see what of Truth there is in either
of these facts. Yet it is not exaggera-
tion to say that history as taught in the
schools is little more than tables of such
facts, garnished occasionally if you like,
but gritty when the teeth get into them.
Truth is surely more than Fact! If it
were not history as literature would be
impossible and there would, probably,
be fewer marriages than there are. To
[263]
THE PLEASURE OF
the lover the truth is not the fact; the
truth is in his relation to the woman he
loves. In that truth there are infinite
possibilities of delightful experiences.
In the fact, woman, there is none. The
truth of history, likewise, is not in the
facts, but in their relations to us; and in
those relations there are also infinite pos-
sibilities of delightful experiences. It is
the business of the historian who is pos-
sessed of the facts and who is, presum-
ably, in experiential relation to them,
to relate them to us so that we shall have
these delightful experiences. Unfortu-
nately, the historian has not often seen
his business from that point of view; or
else he has not been able to acquit him-
self as artist; for the result is not a ban-
quet, but a Barmecide feast. The facts
of history, as he tells them, look to us
somewhat like the imitation candy we
[264]
READING HISTORY
often see displayed in shop windows to
attract the passer-by. The thing looks
like candy, has all the outward seeming
of candy, and might even pass for candy
were we not moved to taste it. When we
do taste it we become disappointingly
aware that it is but a piece of wood
painted to look like the real thing. The
reading of history offers a parallel ex-
perience. There is no true pleasure in
looking at the thing in the window; the
pleasure is in tasting it. There is no
real pleasure in reading the histories of
the schools; the pleasure comes from liv-
ing the past over again; and that, unfor-
tunately, is not what we are invited to
do.
What historians have been accustomed
to do is to lay before us, for our inspec-
tion, as it were, all the facts they could
vouch for or that they had authority for.
[265]
THE PLEASURE OF
Our schoolmasters are doing exactly the
same thing for the children at school.
Take any school manual of history and it
will be found to consist of a mass of more
or less accurate facts arranged in tabu-
lated form-either under the heads of
Kings and Queens, or under the captions
of presidential administrations. The
child is expected to get “ chock full” of
this science, so-called, and what is worse,
to be able “ to pass examinations” by
displaying a species of mental agility in
remembering “the stuff.” What it all
means the child cannot know, even if the
teachers themselves had the ability to tell
it—there is no time for that. As to
the pleasure to be derived from this
study, the less said about it the better;
the children's nightly agonies at home
are a sufficient condemnation of the
“ method.” The writers of these text-
[266]
READING HISTORY
books might answer by saying that the
teachers are to blame for their misuse
of their manuals which were intended
only as notes for the teachers' own more
inviting and more interesting explana-
tions; that the teachers' duty is to
make the study the delight and the in-
spiration it ought to be. I reply that
teachers, never having experienced the
pleasure themselves, would probably,
know nothing about it. And few of
them do. History, which is life in story,
may be a prose epic; it should be a
delight to the young; it should be an
inspiration to every child for noble
thoughts and noble ambitions; it should
sow in him the seeds of a pure love for
his native land and stir in him a pride in
its citizenship; and it should bring him
lovingly near his fellow-men all the
world over. When history is written
[267]
THE PLEASURE OF
as it ought to be, teachers in schools will
find in them the real matter for countless
texts, and then, perhaps, education com-
mittees will see the wisdom of giving to
history its important place in their
schemes of instruction, instead of, as
now, relegating it to a subordinate posi-
tion.
I confess, I prefer Macaulay's His-
tory of England to Gardiner's Great
Civil War, even though I am perfectly
aware that the facts in Macaulay are not
what the professors say they ought to be.
I have had many delightful experiences
in his account of the Siege of London-
derry, that only a truth-teller like Alex-
andre Dumas could give me in that mov-
ing account of the siege of Belle Isle, in
which great-hearted Porthos met his fate
like a Titan. In saying this I am not in-
tending any disparagement of Professor
[268]
READING HISTORY
Samuel Rawson Gardiner's learning, nor
do I wish to question his own personal
relation to the truth. His book is the
fact-authority on the period. I do not
doubt he had himself very many experi-
ences of pleasure from his private re-
lation to Truth. But that only makes
me regret all the more that he did not let
me share them with him. You seem to be
serving an apprenticeship to Gardiner's
profound knowledge. With Macau-
lay, on the other hand, you are jour-
neyman with him on the old roads—mas-
ter and man working together, eating
and drinking together, and fighting and
living together. Hang his Whiggish
politics! You care not a rap for them,
even when he shoves them under your
nose. You are too rapt in the enjoy-
ment of marching to the splendid music
of his resounding sentences. You rather
U
[269]
THE PLEASURE OF
enjoy being a Tory, if you are one, and
are ready to cry out:
“ King Charles, and who'll do him right now?
King Charles, and who's ripe for fight now?
Give a rouse, and here's in hell's despite now,
King Charles!”
17
This is living history; this is what his-
tory should compel us to do; the dead
past must be resurrected and made to live
again in us. “ Time," said Emerson,
“ dissipates to shining ether the angu-
larity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no
fences avail to keep a fact a fact. Baby-
lon and Troy and Tyre, and even early
Rome, are passing already into fiction.
The Garden of Eden, the Sun standing
still in Gibeon, is poetry thenceforward
to all mankind. Who cares what the
fact was, when we have thus made a con-
stellation of it to hang in heaven an im-
[270]
READING HISTORY
mortal sign?” Our writers of history
must take example from Time and dissi-
pate their facts into shining ether; they
must help us to hang immortal signs in
heaven. Only thus will history repeat it-
self in our lives with fuller fruitfulness,
and so help us to march with the proces-
sion erect and debonair.
Of late, however, the splendid possi-
bilities of History as a pleasure-giver
have been discovered by a few prose
writers of real imaginative power. These
have broken ground, so to speak, to the
making of open roads where sky may be
seen touching the earth. Green's His-
tory of the English People and McMas-
ter's History of the People of the
United States have done much to lay out
the line of travel. Gregorovius's His-
tory of the City of Rome is an unusual
achievement for a German which should
IT
[271]
THE PLEASURE OF
prove an excellent example for his coun-
trymen to follow. Froude's History of
England is a master's work, perhaps the
best history of the period it deals with
in the English language. Froude has
been contemptuously spoken of by the
professors—a certain sign that the true
spirit was in him—but even these are be-
coming aware that there is more in
Froude than they give him credit for.
Carlyle, also, came in for a share of pro-
fessional patronage and academic con-
descension, if not disdain, and Carlyle's
French Revolution is a mighty conjurer
of the imagination to the free play of
the gay spirit; it is better than a cycle of
Cathay. Scott's Tales of a Grandfather
is scorned by our guardians of the god-
dess History; but I am much mistaken if
these same Tales have not done far bet-
ter service for the children of the Gram-
[272]
READING HISTORY
pians and the Lowlands than Buchanan
or Robertson or Burton.
Motley's Dutch Republic, Prescott's
Conquest of Peru, his Conquest of
Mexico and Parkman's historical writ-
ings have, none of them, received the
affirmative praise of professional ap-
proval, yet there are few historical writ-
ings in any language that have their
power to send the mind disporting in ex-
alting pleasure. Prescott is to be “re-
vised” for his “ facts!” Let us hope the
reviser will content himself in the mod-
esty of notes and appendices, and not
obtrude his pointed features in Prescott's
own clothes. We have to thank our stars
that Motley's stately and picturesque
sentences are still permitted to pleasure
us.
The right mind for the writing of his-
tory might be somewhat careless of what
[273]
THE PLEASURE OF
became of the facts if it would picture
the truth; it would be apt to transgress
every deep-rooted convention and to
break every established law. The con-
ventional historian, bound by rule and
careful of tradition, does not realize that
the relation of Cromwell's life, for in-
stance, is not completed by the account
of his birth, education, incidents dealing
with his entrance into national affairs,
and the many other facts which are de-
tailed in manuals. All these things to-
gether do not make up the Cromwell who
lived and subverted a kingdom and con-
verted a people. There is a Cromwell in
history who was all these and something
more—a radiating and energizing spirit
--that is the Cromwell we want to know,
because that Cromwell will be alive for
us. But that Cromwell we do not get.
Every fact that was related to him and
[274]
READING HISTORY
to which he was related is given so
much prominence (as if the facts could
explain the man) that the man himself
is lost in the mass of the lifeless rubbish;
for rubbish it is, if it hampers the
man's movements on the pictured pages
of his “life.” If facts are to be insisted
on, let them be revealed in the influences
they had on his conduct, his thought, his
spoken words, his living relation with the
men of his time; do not weigh him down
with their apparel. Perhaps Froude
was right, and what I am asking for is
beyond the scope of the historian's art,
is outside the field of prose, and belongs
properly to poetry. If this be so, then
is there no real pleasure to be obtained
from the reading of history—nothing
but a casual interest from a more or less
well-strung catalogue of names, dates,
events, more or less important and use-
[275]
THE PLEASURE OF
ful. But I am not quite convinced of
Froude's opinion :-
“We compare,” he says, “ the man as
the historian represents him with the
track of his path through the world.
The work is the work of a giant; the
man, stripped of the vulgar appendages
with which the stunted imagination of
his biographer may have set him off, is
full of meannesses and littlenesses, and
is scarcely greater than one of ourselves.
Prose, that is, has attempted something
to which it is not equal. It describes a
figure which it calls Cæsar; but it is not
Cæsar, it is a monster. For the same
reason, prose fictions, novels and the like,
are worthless for more than a momentary
purpose. The life which they are able to
represent is not worth representing.
There is no person so poor in his own
eyes as not to gaze with pleasure in a
tyc
OLD
n
[276]
READING HISTORY
looking-glass; and the prose age may
value its own image in the novel. But
the value of all such representations is
ephemeral. It is with the poet's art as
with the sculptor's—sandstone will not
carve like marble, its texture is too loose
to retain a sharply moulded outline.
The actions of men, if they are true,
noble, and genuine, are strong enough to
bear the form and bear the polish of
verse; if loose or feeble, they crumble
away into the softer undulations of
prose.”
Excellently well put; and yet I feel as
if Froude had allowed himself to be car-
ried away by his metaphor. The lan-
guage the poet uses is the same language
the historian employs; it is the one me-
dium in which both work. It depends on
something which is not in the medium
whether it shall carve like marble or
[277]
THE PLEASURE OF
IN
crumble away like sandstone. These
qualities are not in the nature of lan-
guage; they appear in the use made of
language; they depend on the quality of
the writer's creative imagination, and on
the degree of his power to embody it in
his medium. The fault is not with the
prose; the fault is in the historian with
his “stunted imagination.” The writer
with the imagination and the power does
not complain of his medium; indeed, it
is a large part of his pleasure to compel
his medium to yield to the demands he
makes on it in order that it should shape
itself to his ideal images. I might quote
Froude himself against himself by cit-
ing his beautiful essay on “England's
Forgotten Worthies,” or his fine picture
of Alexander of Abonotichus, or his
masterly studies of Erasmus and Cæsar.
To say that novelists are worthless for
S
[278]
READING HISTORY
more than a momentary purpose is to
forget De Foe's History of the Plague,
his History of the Great Fire, Fielding's
Tom Jones and Thackeray's Esmond.
Had Froude been aware when he wrote
his essay on Homer, from which I have
quoted, of Pater's Marius the Epicu-
rean, George Meredith's The Egoist and
Harry Richmond and Charles Reade's
The Cloister and the Hearth, I am sure
he would have hesitated to estimate the
novel so lowly. I cannot well conceive
a poet satisfying me more amply of his
heroes than these prose writers have suc-
ceeded in doing for theirs.
Facts! There are more facts now at the
disposal of the historian than he knows
what to do with. There are more facts
in archives and repositories about Oliver
Cromwell than Walter Pater possessed
for his Marius. And yet Marius, who
[279]
THE PLEASURE OF
IT
LUL
may have lived a millennium before
Cromwell, is a living man to the reader;
whereas no historian who has subjected
Cromwell to the heroic treatment, has so
far succeeded in making him live as the
novelist makes Marius live. Even in
Carlyle's stupendous story Cromwell has
not that abiding living value to us that
Marius has. What has any historian
done for Alexander the Great, Julius
Cæsar or Napoleon, that Dumas did for
D'Artagnan? Does Erasmus stand out
in history as his father does in Charles
Reade's romance? Is Mark Antony as
real to us in any history of Rome as
Meredith has made real Roy Richmond?
It is not to the point to say that Marius
and D'Artagnan and Gerard and Roy
Richmond never really lived and are but
creatures of the novelist's imagination.
What more are Alexander the Great,
[280]
READING HISTORY
MA
Julius Cæsar, Erasmus of Rotterdam,
and Mark Antony, to any historian?
Does he know anything more of them
than what his imagination tells him?
Legend and story and document and
painted likeness are, when all is said and
done, but hints and helps to the better
realization of the man; they are not the
man. If anything, these should advan-
tage the historian and enable him to
reach a higher degree of excellence. The
trouble with the historian is, not that his
prose is sandstone, but that he has no
vitalizing imagination. A great man
greatly conceived will live in prose that
will carve like marble, as he lives in po-
etry, if his creator can use his medium.
What the historian shall do is to imagine
him greatly, conceive him greatly, and
realize him greatly.
The historian, probably, is not alto-
ny
[281]
THE PLEASURE OF
gether to blame; for he is but following
the traditions. What would be said of
him were he to make of the Duc de Lau-
zun what Dumas made of D'Artagnan,
even could he afford the necessary space?
Did the historian dare to write history
after such a fashion, or after the fashion
of Thackeray with Esmond or Scott
with Rob Roy and Nigel, I venture to
assert that he would be overwhelmed
with derision and obloquy. He would
be told that his imagination had got the
better of his judgment; that he had no
sense of proportion, and that he had de-
graded history to the level of fiction.
Froude himself passed through such an
experience; even Green is being looked
at askance for his patriotic enthusiasm,
and Herodotus, of course, has always
been smiled at condescendingly. The
historical manner and method are not
[282]
READING HISTORY
conducive to pleasure; that would seem
to be the conclusion of the matter. Yet
I cannot help believing that were an An-
tony to rise up with the spirit of a Brutus
in him he would make Cæsar live again.
“ There is no great and no small,
To the Soul that maketh all;
And where it cometh all things are;
And it cometh everywhere.
“I am owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
Of Cæsar's hand, and Plato's brain,
Of Lord Christ's heart and Shakespeare's
strain.”
N
Our classic historians were not creative
artists; they did not conceive their art
from the artist's point of view. They
mastered and marshalled the facts of the
past; gave them colour and dignity and
the pomp of glorious circumstance, and
marched them past us like some magnifi-
cent pageant. Looking on at this splen-
[283]
THE PLEASURE OF
did show there is a pleasure to be ex-
perienced. It is not the highest form of
pleasure; but it is worth having, even at
the price we have to pay for it. Gib-
bon's supreme mastery over his facts,
and his splendid ability to order and ar-
range them to advantage are very im-
pressive in the dignified sentences of The
Roman Empire. There is pleasure here,
though I should hesitate to urge the
reading of this work for the sake of the
pleasure. I would say, rather, that it
was a duty to read it. I would say the
same of Thucydides, Livy, Grote's His-
tory of Greece and Mommsen's History
of Rome. And I would say it was
neither a pleasure nor a duty to read
Hume and Smollett's History of Eng-
land, or Robertson's History of Scot-
land, or Josephus' History of the Jews,
or Guicciardini's History of Italy. or
[284]
READING HISTORY
Alison's History of Europe, or Burnet's
History of the Reformation. I would
suggest that these meritorious and use-
ful compendiums be permitted to occupy
dignified seats in public institutions
where, occasionally, they could be ap-
pealed to for judgment.
To come to the bed-rock of the matter,
history has value and meaning only, or
very largely, in so far as it is biography.
It is the life lived that counts, that brings
the response from us, and that sets the
old, dead world dancing again. There is
much in Carlyle’s “heroes”; for in our
realization of them we get an insight
into the people and the events that precip-
itated them. The English Revolution
centres in Hampden and Pym and Crom-
well; the American Civil War revolves
around Abraham Lincoln; the French
Revolution surges and boils about Mira-
[285]
THE PLEASURE OF
beau, Danton, Robespierre and the rest;
Frederick the Great and Gustavus
Adolphus gather the clouds of their age
like mountains; Cæsar and Hannibal,
Cyrus and Alexander, Moses and Ma-
homet focus in themselves the triumphal
marches of nations. Paul and Savona-
rola and Luther and Loyola and Wesley
are the people's pilots over the great
ocean of thought. The writers who
could realize for us these men would be
the true historians. Cellini in his Auto-
biography has told us more of Florence
and the life of his day than we could get
from any history. The pulsating heart
of the city is in the book—all its mighty
impulses and all its passion. And what
an inspiration may come from Plutarch's
Lives! History may enlarge our hori-
zon of the laws of the universe, but it
narrows our ideas of the individual.
IN
[286]
READING BIOGRAPHY
Biography in magnifying the individual
to the heroic size“ hitches him to a star,"
and the life-point spreads circles into in-
finity. It would seem as if the histories
of peoples were the biographies of its
heroes, so tremendous are the powers of
nature when concentrated in one great
mind. A nation is latent in a man.
What was doing in America on the eve
of Abraham Lincoln's appearance on
the scene? A meaningless vortex of
mighty forces pushing and straining and
swirling in a seeming gigantic whirlpool.
Then Lincoln comes, and immediately
the line of direction is laid down, the
channel formed, and the great cataract
sweeps over the precipice to resume its
placid course, a highway of progress,
toward the ocean of life.
I would ask, nay beg, my readers to
take up Richard Hakluyt's Voyages and
VV
[287]
THE PLEASURE OF
Travels—“travails,” Hakluyt writes the
word, and it is the more significant of the
two to us to-day—a most heartening and
uplifting piece of literature and a glory
to the devotional spirit of its compiler.
Read there what England's sailors did
in the reign of good Queen Bess. You
will realize the meaning of history then,
in the lives of the brave-spirited and
stout-hearted adventurers who laid the
foundations of England's later greater
empire. And read also Froude's beauti-
ful essay on “England's Forgotten
Worthies” as an introduction to Hak-
luyt.
“Those five volumes ” (Froude is re-
ferring to the edition of Hakluyt pub-
lished in 1811) “may be called the Prose
Epic of the modern English nation.
They contain the heroic tales of the ex-
ploits of the great men in whom the new
[288]
READING BIOGRAPHY
era was inaugurated; not mythic, like the
Iliads and the Eddas, but plain, broad
narratives of substantial facts, which
rival legend in interest and grandeur.
What the old epics were to the royally
and nobly born, this modern epic is to the
common people. We have no longer
kings or princes for chief actors, to
whom the heroism like the dominion of
the world had in time past been confined.
But, as it was in the days of the Apos-
tles, when a few poor fishermen from an
obscure lake in Palestine assumed, under
the Divine mission, the spiritual au-
thority over mankind, so, in the days of
our own Elizabeth, the seamen from the
banks of the Thames, and the Avon, the
Plym and the Dart, self-taught and self-
directed, with no impulse but what was
beating in their own royal hearts, went
out across the unknown seas fighting,
[289]
THE PLEASURE OF
discovering, colonizing, and graved out
the channels, paving them at last with
their bones, through which the commerce
and enterprise of England has flowed
out over all the world. We can conceive
nothing, not the songs of Homer him-
self, which would be read among us with
more enthusiastic interest than these
plain massive tales; and a people's edi-
tion of them in days when the writings
of Ainsworth and Eugène Sue circulate
in tens of thousands, would perhaps be
the most blessed antidote which could be
bestowed upon us. The heroes them-
selves were the men of the people—the
Joneses, the Smiths, the Drakes, the
Davises; and no courtly pen, with the
one exception of Raleigh, lent its polish
or its varnish to set them off. In most
cases the captain himself, or his clerk or
servant, or some unknown gentleman
[290]
READING BIOGRAPHY
11a
IN
volunteer sat down and chronicled the
voyage which he had shared, and thus in-
organically arose a collection of writings
which, with all their simplicity, are for
no thing more striking than for the high
moral beauty, warmed with natural feel-
ing, which displays itself through all
their pages. With us, the sailor is
scarcely himself beyond his quarter-deck.
If he is distinguished in his profession,
he is professional merely; or if he is more
than that, he owes it not to his work as a
sailor, but to independent domestic cul-
ture. With them, their profession was
the school of their nature, a high moral
education which most brought out what
was most nobly human in them; and the
wonders of earth, and air, and sea, and
sky, were a real intelligible language in
which they heard Almighty God speak-
ing to them.”
[291]
THE PLEASURE OF
This is what the Bible did for the early
Christian adventurers who came after
Paul, and what it still means to those
who are moved to-day to carry the torch
of truth and the gracious benignancy of
its kindly light to the uttermost corners
of the earth. This is how Homer's Iliad
and Odyssey inspired the Greeks to living
heroic lives and doing great deeds; this
is why minstrels sang the Song of Roland
and the Sagas on the eve of battles. Ex-
ample is more potent than precept, and
what man has once dared man may again
dare. It is in biography that history re-
veals its true philosophy—the philosophy
that consists, not in a formulation of
laws which govern the rise and fall of
nations, nor yet in the classification of
the forces which precipitate species out
of their genera, but the philosophy that
is a revelation of man's spirit and its
[292]
READING BIOGRAPHY
energizing activity to its highest asser-
tion and fulfilment.
Compared with Biography, History
is dust; Biography is the living clay.
“What to me is this quintessence of
dust?” Show us living men who have
highly resolved and highly achieved;
men who dared anything, even to the
unbinding of “the cluster of the Plei-
ades.” It matters not if they failed.
What does matter is that they dared.
Davis, Frobisher, Parry, Franklin, Ma-
clintock, Baffin, Scott, Nansen, are
names that ring again of the joy of dar-
ing, in spite of their failures to attain
their goal; and Peary, with his final suc-
cess, remains the indomitable voyager of
earlier years. Sir Richard Grenville, in
that last fight of the good ship “Re-
venge," at Flores, left a name behind
him that is a trumpet-blast calling to
111
[293]
THE PLEASURE OF
YT
honour. He and his hundred men and
his little forty-ton frigate fought, for a
day and a night, against fifty-three
Spanish ships of war manned with ten
thousand men, such a fight as not even
the pass of Thermopylæ witnessed. For
fifteen hours they withstood the attack,
sinking two galleons and killing fifteen
hundred men. Finally, with powder
spent, pikes broken and eight hundred
cannon balls riddled in the hull, and the
“Revenge” sinking like a sieve, Sir Rich-
ard ordered his master-gunner to scuttle
her, so that the Spaniards might not
boast of her capture. The man that could
die like Grenville is a man worth know-
ing. Read of him in Hakluyt, in Sir
Walter Raleigh's beautiful and simple
narrative and John Higgins's plain and
touching prose, and the heart in you
must swell in a joyful and tearful pride
LC
[294]
READING BIOGRAPHY
in this great soul, whose last dying words
have been lovingly preserved for us:
“Here die I, Richard Grenville, with a
joyful and quiet mind, for that I have
ended my life as a true soldier ought to
do, that hath fought for his country,
queen, religion, and honour. Whereby
my soul most joyfully departeth out of
this body, and shall always leave behind
it an everlasting fame of a valiant and
true soldier that hath done his duty as he:
was bound to do.”
Is it any wonder that a Blake and a
Collingwood and a Nelson and a Far-
ragut should follow him? We stand
bowed in profound and humble rever-
ence before such an embodiment of the
human spirit. Surely, this soul sprang
from something other than a mere har-
monious correlation of atoms! We re-
quire no philosophy to explain to us this
[295]
THE PLEASURE OF
valiant and true soldier; he asks for no
explanation; he is as inevitable as the
ocean he sailed on, and as fulfilling.
To read of heroic deeds done in the
name of honour, or of religion, or of
love, or of country, or of any ideal, must
always be profoundly moving. It should
be a matter for gladness and hope that
so many heroes have been made immor-
tal for us in story. Literature shines
with the glory reflected from them, and
biography specially. Buddha and Christ,
Savonarola and Luther; Bruno and Co-
pernicus, Columbus and Henry Hud-
son, Grenville and Nelson, Shakespeare
and Wordsworth, Erasmus and Knox,
Newton and Charles Darwin, Socrates
and Plato, George Fox and John Wes-
ley, Livingstone and Cook, William Pitt
and Abraham Lincoln, and all the others
among the host of noble martyrs and
T
[296]
READING BIOGRAPHY
noble workers who contributed to the hap-
piness and the liberty we enjoy to-day,
all these have received devoted attention
from poets and lovers. Any biography,
however crudely written, of these men
must delight us—their lives are in them-
selves inspirations to their writers.
Let me recommend Mr. Fielding
Hall's The Soul of a People for the life-
story of Prince Theiddatha the Buddha,
"he who pointed out the way to those
that had lost it,” the Newton of the
spiritual world, Mr. Hall calls him, “ the
man who drew men to him by love and
held them so forever.” Read the New
Testament again and again and fill your-
self with the perfume of Christ's great
heart. Plato himself is Socrates' best
biographer; read especially the Apology
in Jowett's fine translation, and also the
Phædo and the Crito. Luther and Eras-
[297]
THE PLEASURE OF
mus and Cæsar have been splendidly
realized for us by Froude; the first in
an essay in his Short Studies on Great
Subjects, and the other two in separate
books. It is remarkable that Froude's
book on Cæsar is the only attempt to deal
adequately with this extraordinary man.
George Fox's Journals is a masterpiece
of direct and simple English; the fine-
souled Quaker is a heartening friend.
Carlyle has written an essay on John
Knox which must not be forgotten.
Robert Southey's Life of Nelson has
deservedly passed into a classic. Lord
Rosebery's Pitt is the best summary of
the great statesman's life in the language.
I regret I know of no life of Abraham
Lincoln I can recommend as distin-
guished; the book has yet to be written
that shall be worthy of this wonderful
man who, in his spirit and character, was
[298]
READING BIOGRAPHY
brother to the few great select of this
world's heroes.
In the English language there exist
three biographies that stand out, head
and shoulders, above all the rest. I refer
to Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson,
Trevelyan's Life and Letters of Macau-
lay and Lockhart's Life of Scott. Bos-
well's book is a signal instance of what
literature can do for a personality. Had
it not been for Boswell we should never
have realized the manliness, the piety,
the wise simplicity, the excelling upright-
ness of a character that now commands
our delight and our homage. And what
a piece of picturesque realism it is of
the literary life of the time! Burke and
Garrick, Gibbon and Goldsmith, Rey-
nolds and Langton and Beauclerk, all
live again in these faithful pages; and
in their midst stalks and rolls the dusty
[299]
THE PLEASURE OF
brown figure of Johnson himself—the
Great Cham of literature, Smollett
called him. Trevelyan's life of his uncle
and Lockhart's life of Scott are both
splendid monuments to two noble lives.
So much has been written about these
three books that it is unnecessary for me
to add more. They should form a part
of the library of the poorest home.
With Boswell I should advise the read-
ing of Forster's Life and Adventures
of Oliver Goldsmith, a book that de-
serves a wider recognition than it is re-
ceiving. There is no other life of this
kindly Irish and humanly vain traveller
on life's way that is comparable to it.
Goldsmith was a hero in Forster's eyes;
the enthusiasm and love for the hero
have combined to give us a book that is
as readable as a romance and as absorb-
ing as some of the best romances.
UNI-
[300]
READING BIOGRAPHY
Gibbon's Autobiography is, unfortu-
nately, a fragment, but it must be read,
fragment as it is. Walton's Lives is a
delight at any time. In their admirable
simplicity of style and loving treatment
of Donne, Wotton, Hooker, Herbert
and Sanderson, they appeal to our best
emotions. They should be read if only
to know Walton himself, whose own
sweet nature peeps out of every line of his
writing.
Carlyle’s Life and Letters of Oliver
Cromwell is the one book on this man
that counts. It is the only book that has
in any way realized the great English-
man and set him before the eyes of the
world as the man he really was—a stu-
pendous individual force in a nation's
history, a later Richard Grenville.
Thousands of “lives ” have been writ-
ten of Napoleon, but I can speak of
[301]
THE PLEASURE OF
actual acquaintance with only a few.
From what I have read and from what
I learn from the judgments of others
whose opinions are of value, I should
say that “the real life” of this remark-
able phenomenon has yet to be written.
If a working knowledge of the facts
and events of Napoleon's career be de-
sired, there is no more informing book
than Rose's Life of Napoleon I. Na-
poleon's secretaries, some of his mar-
shals, friends, mistresses, retainers and
hangers-on at his court have contributed
their “mémoires ” and “souvenirs” of
gossip and opinions, and those who are
interested in gossip will find enough to
amuse them for years to come. Bour-
rienne's Life of Napoleon is valuable
for its record of Napoleon's own words,
and what Napoleon had to say of him-
self or of anybody is worth reading.
[302]
READING BIOGRAPHY
YT
17
Pepys's Diary is not a biography, but
it is a man and his times. Read it; it is
a feast of delight and a stream of living
pleasure. Lamb's Essays of Elia are
not biography, but they are filled with
Charles Lamb, and wherever he is there
is joy. Lamb could not help putting
himself in his writings; let us thank the
gods there be for his failing—he has
made of it an exquisite virtue. Mon-
taigne's Essays are not biography; but
they are the man, nevertheless, and where
this man is there are humour and pathos,
wisdom and kindliness of heart, gra-
ciousness of mind and richness of knowl-
edge of life. I will take leave to quote
what he himself has written of his es-
says:
“I erect not here a statue to be set up
in the market-place of a town, or in a
church, or in any other public place. It
[303]
THE PLEASURE OF
is for the corner of a library, or to amuse
a neighbour, or a friend of mine withal,
who by this image may haply take pleas-
ure to renew acquaintance, and to re-
converse with me. Others have been em-
boldened to speak of themselves, because
they have found worthy and rich subject
in themselves. I, contrariwise, because I
have found mine so barren, and so shal-
low, that it cannot admit suspicion of
ostentation. I find not so much good in
myself, but I may speak of it without
blushing. ... And if it happen no
man read me, have I lost my time, to
have entertained myself so many idle
hours, about so pleasing and profitable
thoughts? In framing this portrait of
myself, I have so often been fain to
frizzle and trim me, that so I might the
better extract myself, and the pattern is
thereby confirmed, and in some sort
[304]
READING BIOGRAPHY
pruned. Drawing myself for others, I
have drawn myself with pure and better
colours than were my first. I have no
more made my book than my book hath
made me: a book consubstantial with its
author: of a peculiar and fit occupation.
A member of my life; not of an occupa-
tion and end strange and foreign, as all
other books. Have I mis-spent my time,
to have taken an account of myself so
continually and so curiously?”
The world long since answered his
question, and the world would rather
lose the records of a nation than lose
this autobiography of Montaigne. “Je
suis moi-même la matière de mon livre,”
he said, and that is what makes his book
the enduring living thing it is. It is
what draws us often to Sir Thomas
Browne's Religio Medici, and, at other
times, to Amiel's Journal Intime, and
[305]
THE PLEASURE OF
at odd times to the Meditations of Mar-
cus Aurelius, and at most times to
George Borrow's Lavengro and his Ro-
many Rye. What we can understand
and love and feel in our hearts, that is
what appeals to us. The life lived,
whether in the spirit or in the body or in
the spirit and the body together, that is
what catches us and lifts us and sends
us travelling with light steps, singing
carols along the way of our earthly pil-
grimage. “Did not our hearts burn
within us while he talked with us by the
way?”
Every story rightly told, every biog-
raphy truly realized, is a friend walking
with us and talking with us by the way;
a friend telling us of trials suffered or
of trials overcome, of joy lived and of
joy given, of pleasure felt and of hap-
piness achieved. And in the telling he
n
1
[306]
READING BIOGRAPHY.
bids us take heart and be of good cour-
age, for there is a way to happiness
through all our afflictions. Sir Thomas
Browne put it in his way, in his prayer
at the conclusion of his Religio Medici,
and it is not a bad way:
“Bless me in this life with but the
peace of my conscience, command of my
affections, the love of Thyself, and my
dearest friends, and I shall be happy
enough to pity Cæsar!” George Bor-
row advised us to “Fear God, and take
your own part,” and there is much to be
said for this advice also. Samuel John-
son hoped he had attained nearer to vir-
tue through submission to God and be-
nevolence to man, and who shall say that
this is not a high hope and a noble
method?
It is a great deal easier to go down
hill than up. We can slip down by our-
[307]
THE PLEASURE OF
selves; but to go up is hard. We want
the helping example, even the strongest
of us; we want the cheering word, the
comforting laugh, the glad hand. All
these are offered us in literature in the
books I have been writing about. Read
them for this pleasure I have tried to de-
scribe. Permit yourself to be open to
their influence, and they will abide with
you always. Even if, in time, you for-
get particular features, the memory of
their companionship will always remain,
ready to thrill you again at every touch
of friendship or any play of fate. The
seasons of the year will recall them to
you in delightful surprises, and the very
air will murmur of their invisible pres-
ences. And you, yourself, if you do not
rest content in your own pleasure, may
become a radiating centre of pleasure
in the circle of your own home. Your
[308]
READING BIOGRAPHY
books are your best friends; do not keep
them to yourself; be proud of them.
“Of what shall a man be proud,” asked
Stevenson, “if he is not proud of his
friends?"
[309]
LIST OF BOOKS
LIST OF BOOKS
THE BIBLE. (Authorized Version)
The Oxford University Press publishes Helps to the Study of the
Bible with one of its editions of the Revised Version. This may be
bought separately, and will be found to be of great assistance to the
student.
THE MODERN READER'S BIBLE, presented in literary
form. Edited by Richard G. Moulton.
LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. By Richard G.
Moulton.
Professor Moulton's book is unquestionably the best book in the
language for the literary study of the Bible. I cannot recommend it
too highly. In The Modern Reader's Bible will be found notes,
and historical and literary introductions, which the student
will do well to read. Professor Moulton has also issued & Short
Introduction to the Literature of the Bible. The essential matter of
both these books, however, will be found contained in the appen-
dices to his The Modern Reader's Bible (one vol. edit.).
INTRODUCTION TO THE LITERATURE OF THE OLD
TESTAMENT. By S. R. Driver.
INTRODUCTION TO THE BOOKS OF THE NEW
TESTAMENT. By B. W. Bacon.
OUTLINES FOR THE STUDY OF BIBLICAL HISTORY
AND LITERATURE. By F. H. Sanders and H. T.
Fowler.
BIBLICAL INTRODUOTION. By W. H. Bennett and W..
F. Adeney.
INTRODUCTION TO THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. By T, K.
Oheyne.
HISTORY OF THE JEWISH CHURCH. By A. P. Stanley.
Stanley's work is not now considered the most authoritative, since
it does not include the results of the latest researches; but it is,
nevertheless, a delightful book, and is written in a captivating style.
Elis shortcomings could easily be supplemented from Hastings'
Bible Dictionary.
HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL. By Ernest
Ronan.
[312]
THE BIBLE
HISTORY OF NEW TESTAMENT TIMES. By Shailer
Mathews.
TRADITIONS AND BELIEFS OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
By T. K. Oheyne.
BIBLE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. By J. H. Gardiner.
BIBLE DIOTIONARY. By James Hastings and others.
THE LITERARY MAN'S BIBLE. By W. L. Courtney.
The author does not treat the Bible as a religious book. He con-
siders it as a storehouse of literature. He gives extracts to illustrate
the history, the poetry and the fiction it contains, and adds prefatory
remarks to each.
THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. By Samuel
McOomb, D.D.
A concise account of the English Bible from the time of its trang-
lation to the last revision.
THE SOUL OF THE BIBLE. Being Selections from the
Old and the New Testaments and the Apocrypha, Ar-
ranged as Synthetical Readings. Edited by Ulysses E.
B. Pierce.
LEOTURES ON ST. PAUL'S EPISTLE TO THE CORIN-
THIANS. By F. W. Robertson.
GENERAL VIEW OF THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH
BIBLE. By B. F. Westcott.
SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF ISRAEL AND JUDAH.
By Julius Wellbausen.
GOSPEL OF JOY. By Rev. Stopford A. Brooke.
OHRIST IN MODERN LIFE. By Rev. Stopford A. Brooke.
I include these two volumes of sermons not because they are
necessary to the literary study of the Bible, but in order that my
readers may see how a literary man extracts the value of life from
the thoughts and examples the Bible furnishes him. Mr. Brooke's
Sermons are among the best expressions he has given us.
[313]
LIST OF BOOKS
HOMER'S ILIAD. Translated by Walter Leal, Andrew Lang
and Ernest Myers.
HOMER'S ILIAD. Translated by Lord Derby.
HOMER'S ODYSSEY. Translated by S. Butoher and An-
drew Lang.
The Iliad and The Odyssey may also be read in Pope's and Chap-
man's verse translations. The English of Chapman is somewhat
archaic for a modern reader. Pope's version is Pope more than it is
Homer.
ÆSCHYLUS. Translated by A. W. Verrall.
The Oresteia. Trans. by G. O. W. Warr.
ARISTOPHANES. Comedies. Trans. by Gilbert Murray.
VIRGIL'S ÆNEID. Translated into prose by J. Donington,
There is no good verse translation of this poem.
DANTE'S DIVINE COMEDY. Translated by A. J. Butler,
The Inferno. Translated by John Carlyle.
THE NIEBELUNGENLIED. Edited by Edward Bell.
(Bohn's Library)
LOOKHART'S SPANISH BALLADS.
CHAUCER'S CANTERBURY TALES. Edited by A. W.
Pollard.
SPENSER'S FAERIE QUEENE. Edited by R. Morris.
(Globe edit.)
MILTON'S POETICAL WORKS. Edited by David Masson.
WORDSWORTH'S POETICAL WORKS. Edited by John
Morley. (Globe edit.)
The reader may begin Wordsworth in the little volume of selections,
in the Golden Treasury Series, edited by Matthew Arnold. Arnold's
introductory essay is well worth reading. Professor Raleigh's study
of Wordsworth is, however, the best in the language.
SHELLEY’S POETICAL WORKS. Edited by E. Dowden.
KEATS'S POETICAL WORKS. Edited by George Sampson,
BYRON'S POETRY. Selections in the Golden Treasury
Series, edited by Matthew Arnold.
[314]
POETRY
TENNYSON'S IN MEMORIAM and LYRIỢAL POEMS.
Both volumes are in the Golden Treasury Series.
BROWNING'S POETICAL WORKS.
BURNS'S POETICAL WORKS. Edited by A. Smith. (Globo
edit.)
BLAKE'S POETICAL WORKS. (Aldine Poets)
GOETHE'S FAUST. Translated by Anna Swanwick.
(Bohn's Library)
Abraham Hayward translated the first part into prose in an ele-
gant version.
CALDERON'S PLAYS. Translated by Edward Fitzgerald.
GOLDEN TREASURY OF LYRICAL POETRY. 2 vols.
Edited by F, T. Palgrave.
BOOK OF ELIZABETHAN VERSE. Edited by W. s.
Braithwaite.
BOOK OF RESTORATION VERSE. Edited by W. S.
Braithwaite,
BOOK OF GEORGIAN VERSE. Edited by W. S. Braith-
waite.
OXFORD BOOK OF ENGLISH POETRY. Edited by A. T.
Quiller-Oouch.
STUDIES IN POETRY. By Stopford A. Brooke.
Oontains lectures on Blake, Scott, Shelley and Keats.
WORDSWORTH. By Walter Raleigh.
OXFORD LECTURES ON POETRY. By A. O. Bradley.
STUDIES OF THE GREEK POETS. By John Addington
Symonds.
A STUDY OF DANTE. By John Addington Symonds.
DANTE, HIS TIME AND HIS WORK. By A. J Butler.
LIFE OF DANTE, By P. Toynbee.
[315]
LIST OF BOOKS: SHAKESPEARE
SHAKESPEARE'S WORKS. Edited by W. Aldis Wright.
(Cambridge edit.) 9 vols.
- Edited by I. Gollancz. (Temple edit.) 40 vols.
TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE. By Charles Lamb. (Gol-
den Treasury Series)
ESSAYS OF ELIA AND ELIANA. By Oharles Lamb.
LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE. By S. T. Coleridge.
(Bohn's Library)
CHARACTERS OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS. By
William Hazlitt. (Bohn's Library)
SHAKESPEARE: HIS MIND AND ART. By Edward
Dowden.
THE MAN SHAKESPEARE. By Frank Harris.
SHAKESPEARE. By Walter Raleigh.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: A CRITICAL STUDY. By
George Brandes.
SHAKESPEARIAN TRAGEDY. By A. O. Bradley.
HANDBOOK TO THE WORKS OF SHAKESPEARE. By
M. Luce.
SHORT SKETCHES OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLOTS. By
O. Ransome.
BARTLETT'S CONCORDANCE TO SHAKESPEARE.
[316]
LIST OF BOOKS: NOVELS
THE GOLDEN ASS. By Apuleius. Translated by William
Adlington.
THE STORY OF DAPHNIS AND OHLOE. Translated by
Walter Pater. (Mosher's edit.)
Longus's story was translated in the seventeenth century by G.
Thornley. This charming rendering was reprinted in a limited edi-
tion about ten years ago, but it is now out of print.
THE ARABIAN NIGHTS. Translated by W. Lane. 3 vols.
Sir Richard Burton's translation and the version made by John
Payne are the completest; but they are somewhat free, and the
editions would take ap too much space in a small library.
MORTE D'ARTHUR, Translated by Sir Thomas Malory.
(Temple edit.)
PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. By John Bunyan. (Golden
Treasury Series)
ROBINSON CRUSOE. By Daniel De Foe. (Golden Treasury
Series)
GULLIVER'S TRAVELS. By Jonathan Swift. (Bohn's
Library)
DON QUIXOTE. By M. de Cervantes. Translated by
Thomas Shelton. 3 vols. (Macmillan's Classics)
GIL BLAS. By A. R. Le Sage. Translated by Tobias Smol-
lett. (Bohn's Library)
TOM JONES. By Henry Fielding. 2 vols. (Bohn's Library)
TRISTRAM SHANDY. By Laurence Sterne.
THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD. By Oliver Goldsmith.
HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN. By Sir Walter Scott.
THE ANTIQUARY. By Sir Walter Scott.
IVANHOE. By Sir Walter Scott.
PEVERIL OF THE PEAK. By Sir Walter Scott.
KENILWORTH. By Sir Walter Scott.
GUY MANNERING. By Sir Walter Scott.
ROB ROY. By Sir Walter Scott.
WAVERLEY. By Sir Walter Scott.
QUENTIN DURWARD. By Sir Walter Scott.
[317]
LIST OF BOOKS
THE FORTUNES OF NIGEL. By Sir Walter Scott.
SENSE AND SENSIBILITY. By Jane Austen.
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. By Jane Austen.
MANSFIELD PARK, By Jane Austen.
EMMA. By Jane Austen.
NORTHANGER ABBEY. By Jane Austen.
PERSUASION. By Jane Austen.
HENRY ESMOND. By W. M. Thackeray.
VANITY FAIR. By W. M. Thackeray.
THE NEWCOMES. By W. M. Thackeray,
OHRISTMAS STORIES. Two Series. By Charles Dickens.
GREAT EXPEOTATIONS. By Charles Dickens.
PIOKWICK PAPERS. By Oharles Dickens.
DAVID OOPPERFIELD. By Oharles Dickens.
OUR MUTUAL FRIEND. By Oharles Dickens.
MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT. By Oharles Dickens.
A TALE OF TWO CITIES. By Charles Dickens.
NICHOLAS NIOKLEBY, By Charles Dickens.
WUTHERING HEIGHTS. By Emily Brontë.
JANE EYRE. By Charlotte Brontë.
THE EGOIST. By George Meredith.
ADVENTURES OF HARRY RICHMOND, By George Mere-
dith.
RHODA FLEMING. By George Meredith.
RICHARD FEVEREL. By George Meredith.
DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS. By George Meredith.
VITTORIA. By George Meredith.
EVAN HARRINGTON. By George Meredith.
BEAUCHAMP'S CAREER. By George Meredith.
THE OLOISTER AND THE HEARTH. By Charles Reade.
THE SCARLET LETTER. By Nathaniel Hawthorne.
THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. By Nathaniel
Hawthorne.
[318]
NOVELS
THE MILL ON THE FLOSS. By George Eliot.
MIDDLEMAROH. By George Eliot.
DR. THORNE. By Anthony Trollope.
THE SMALL HOUSE AT ALLINGTON. By Anthony
Trollope.
FRAMLEY PARSONAGE. By Anthony Trollope.
BAROHESTER TOWERS. By Anthony Trollope.
THE WARDEN. By Anthony Trollope.
THE LAST CHRONICLE OF BARSET. By Anthony
Trollope.
TREASURE ISLAND. By R. L. Stevenson.
KIDNAPPED. By R. L. Stevenson.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. By Walter Pater.
THE AMBASSADORS. By Henry James.
DAISY MILLER. By Henry James.
THE WINGS OF THE DOVE. By Henry James.
THE GOLDEN BOWL. By Henry James.
WITH EDGED TOOLS. By Henry Seton Merriman.
THE SOWERS. By Henry Seton Merriman.
THE KENTUOKY OARDINAL. By James Lane Allen.
MICAH OLARKE. By A. Oonan Doyle.
THE WHITE COMPANY. By A. Conan Doyle.
WITH FIRE AND SWORD. By Henry Sienkiewicz,
THE DELUGE. By Henry Sienkiewicz.
PAN MICHEL. By Henry Sienkiewicz.
NOVELS and TALES. By I. Turgenieff. Translated by O.
Garnett.
LES MISÉRABLES. By Victor Hugo.
MADAME BOVARY. By Gustave Flaubert.
PIERRE AND JEAN. By Guy de Maupassant.
PÈRE GORIOT. By H. de Balzac.
COUSINE BETTE. By H. de Balzac.
EUGÉNIE GRANDET. By H. de Balzac.
[319]
LIST OF BOOKS: NOVELS
LOST ILLUSIONS. By H. de Balzac.
THE THREE MUSKETEERS. By Alexandre Dumas.
TWENTY YEARS AFTER. By Alexandre Dumas.
THE VICOMTE DE BRAGELONNE. By Alexandre Dumas.
MONSIEUR BERGERET À PARIS. By Anatole France.
L'ÉTUI DE NAORE, By Anatole France.
LE CRIME DE SYLVESTRE BONNARD. By Anatole
France,
ORAINQUEBILLE. By Anatole France.
MADAME OHRYSANTHÈME. By Pierre Loti.
LE LIVRE DE LA PITIÉ ET DE LA MORT. By Pierre
Loti.
[320]
LIST OF BOOKS: HISTORY
THUOYDIDES—THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR. Trans-
lated by Benjamin Jowett.
HERODOTUS. Translated by G. O. Macaulay.
HISTORY OF GREECE. By George Grote.
HISTORY OF ROME. By T. Mommsen.
HISTORY OF THE CITY OF ROME. By F. Gregorovius.
DEOLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE. By
E. Gibbon. Edited by J. B. Bury.
SHORT STUDIES ON GREAT SUBJECTS. By James An-
thony Froude.
Essays on "Luther and Erasmus"; "Forgotten English Wor.
thies”; “Homer” and “Lucian."
HISTORY OF ENGLAND. By T. B. Macaulay.
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. By J. R. Green.
HISTORY OF ENGLAND. By James Anthony Froude.
This History deals with the Tudor Period.
HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES.
By J. B. McMaster.
HISTORY OF THE DUTCH REPUBLIC. By J. L. Motley.
HISTORY OF THE UNITED NETHERLANDS. By J. L.
Motley.
HISTORY OF THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO. By W. H.
Prescott.
HISTORY OF THE OONQUEST OF PERU. By W. H.
Prescott.
HISTORY OF CHARLES V. By W. H. Prescott,
THE CONSPIRACY OF PONTIAO. By Francis Parkman.
MONTCALM AND WOLFE. By Francis Parkmau.
COUNT FRONTENAO. By Francis Parkman.
THE CAMBRIDGE MODERN HISTORY. Edited by Lord
Acton.
[321]
LIST OF BOOKS: BIOGRAPHY
HISTORY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. By Thomas
Carlyle.
OÆSAR: A STUDY. By James Anthony Froude.
ERASMUS. By James Anthony Froude.
LIFE AND LETTERS OF OLIVER OROMWELL. By
Thomas Carlyle,
PLATO'S TRIAL AND DEATH OF SOCRATES. Translated
by F.J. Ohurch. (Golden Treasury Series)
This is a translation of Plato's Euthyphron, Apology, Crito and
Phaedo.
MEDITATIONS AND THOUGHTS. By Marcus Aurelius.
Translated by George Long.
ESSAYS. M. de Montaigne. Translated by John Florio.
(Temple edit.)
PLUTAROH'S LIVES. Translated by Thomas North.
(Temple edit.)
LIVES. By Izaak Walton. (Temple edit.)
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BENVENUTO CELLINI. Trans-
lated by John Addington Symonds.
DIARY OF SAMUEL PEPYS. Edited by H. B. Wheatley.
(Bohn's Library)
JOURNAL. By George Fox.
LIFE OF DR. JOHNSON. By James Boswell.
LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF OLIVER GOLDSMITH.
By John Forster.
LIFE AND LETTERS OF LORD MACAULAY. By Sir
G. O. Trevelyan.
LIFE OF SOOTT. By J. G. Lockhart.
RELIGIO MEDICI. By Sir Thomas Browne.
LAVENGRO and ROMANY RYE. By George Borrow.
AMIEL'S JOURNAL INTIME. Translated by Mrs. Hum.
phry Ward.
VOYAGES AND TRAVELS. By Richard Hakluyt.
[322]
INDEX
INDEX
ACTING, compared with the 117; Symonds's study of,
art of poetry, 158; ad 117-118; his comic spirit,
vantage possessed by au 118-119; his treatment
diences in Shakespeare's of Athens, 119-120;
time, 159
“The Knights,” 120;
ACTOR, the art of the, 157, "The Clouds," 120;
158
“ The Wasps, 120;
Actors, in Elizabethan “The Frogs,” 120; “ Ly-
days, 152-53
sistrata," 120
ÆSCHYLUS, his genius, 115- Art. Good art is itself a
116; Symonds's study of, moral influence, 215
116; his divine madness, As You LIKE IT. Quoted
137
to show Shakespeare as
ALEXANDER the Great, 280, the poet of love, 178
286
ALISON, History of Eu- BACON (Lord), on the
rope, 285
novel, 210
AMERICA, its foundation BALZAC (H. de), “Père
due to the Bible, 49-50 Goriot," 15, 218; his
AMERICAN Civil War, 285; character in his Comédie
Lincoln's position in, Humaine, 220.
287
BARCHESTER STORIES. Trol-
AMIEL, his Journal Intime, lope's novels, 251
305
BESANT, Sir W., on the art
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, of writing fiction, 224
quoted to show Shake- BIBLE, The, what it is, 33,
speare's love for wom-
en, 174
BIBLE, the pleasure of
ARISTOPHANES, his genius, reading the, 33-79
35
[325]
INDEX
BIBLE, The. Why it should BLAKE (W.), “The Cradle
be read, 36; what its Song," 134-35; “Love's
translation into English Secret,” 135; the effect
did, 36; its music, 39; of his poetry, 136; his
ministers of religion divine madness, 137
should be taught how to Boccaccio, 124
read, 41; loss of its BOOK, test of a real, 17
pleasure, 51; the spirit “Books in Books' Cloth-
of beauty in, 51; the ing" 18
Jew's reading of, 52; Books, good, 19-20; worth
how it is taught in
reading, 22-25; world of,
schools, 53; its devo-
25; what they can do for
tional poetry, 56; its
us, 25-27; companions
reading must not be
and friends, 29-30; the
compulsory, 57; its lyr pleasure and the value
ical poetry, 57-59; ar-
of, 308-9
ranged by Prof. Moul-
Books, Lamb on, 12-14
ton, 60; its optimism,
BORROW (George), his way
72; its secret, 72; its
to happiness, 307; his
value as literature, 77:
Lavengro and Romany
how to appreciate it, 78;
Rye, 306
its writers also novelists,
BOSWELL (J.), Life of
197; its influence as
biography, 292
Johnson, 218, 299-300
BIOGRAPHY, no chairs of,
f. BOURRIENNE, his Life of
in universities, 259; com-
Napoleon, 302
pared with history, 287,
BRONTË (Emily), her char-
293 ; history's true philos acter in Wuthering
ophy, 292, the record of Heights, 221
noble deeds, 295-96; BROWNE (Sir T.), his Re-
every good biography is ligio Medici, 305; his
a friend walking by the way to happiness, 307
way, 306
BROWNING (Robert), his
[326]
INDEX
and B+238; Hicame
faith biblical, 73; on CERVANTES (M. de), Don
Dante, 124
Quixote, 250
BUDDHA, the life of, 297 CHARACTER, what it is in
BUNYAN (John), 222; The the novelist, 221
Pilgrim's Progress, 250 CHARTREUSE DE PARME, LA,
BURNET, History of the 220, 250
Reformation, 285
CHAUCER (Geoffrey), his
BURNS, “The Jolly Beg character and life, 124-
gars,” 56; “Ye Banks 126; his love of books
and Braes O' Bonnie and nature, 127; “The
Doon," 138; “ Highland Canterbury Tales,"
Mary," 138; “Tam o 128; “ The House of
Shanter," 138; “The Fame," 128; “ The Leg-
Jolly Beggars,” 138
end of Good Women,"
BUTCHER, LANG & MYERS, 128; character of his
their prose version of poetry, 128; Dryden on,
Homer's “Iliad," 114 128; his influence on the
English language, 129;
“The Good Counsel,"
CÆSAR (Julius), 280, 286;
life by Froude, 298
129-130; a tale-teller,
197-98
CARLYLE (Thomas), His-
CHRIST, as revealed in the
tory of the French Rev-
New Testament, 297
olution, 272; his “he-
roes,” 285; his essay on
Cicero, 121
John Knox, 298; his Life CLASSIC, A, 24
and Letters of Oliver CLOISTER AND THE HEARTH,
Cromwell, 301 .
the, 216, 217, 251
CAXTON (W.), his preface COLERIDGE (S. T.), his
to Malory's Morte work on Shakespeare,
D'Arthur, 234
144
CELLINI (Benvenuto), his COMÉDIE HUMAINE, 220
Autobiography, 286 “COMING of Evil Days,"
[327]
INDEX
DON QUIXOTE, 250
DRYDEN (John), on Chau-
cer, 128
DUMAS, his D'Artagnan
Tales, 251; as raconteur,
236-37
lyric in “Ecclesiastes,"
69-71
CORINTHIANS, Epistle to,
73-76
COWLEY (A.), on books, 30
CROMWELL (Oliver), 274;
Carlyle's Life of, 279-
80, 285, 301
CYMBELINE. Quoted to
show Shakespeare's love
for women, 174
CYRUS, 286
OL
DANTON, 286
DANTE, his poetry, 122-23;
his temper, 123; Brown-
ing on, 124
DAPHNIS and Chloe, 212
DAVID and Jonathan, 15
DE FOE (Daniel), a foun-
der of English prose,
200; his sincerity, 219;
his realism, 222-23
DERBY (Lord), his verse
translation of Homer's
“Iliad," 114
DICKENS (Charles),
“Great Expectations,”
15; his moralizing, 210;
his sincerity, 219; acting
in his stories, 220; the
quality of his power as
a novelist, 229-231
ECCLESIASTICUS, Book of,
67, 69-72
EGOIST, The, its beauties,
238-45, 247
ELIOT (George), her sin-
cerity, 219; her Middle-
march, 250; her Mill on
the Floss, 200-1
EMERSON (R. W.), his view
of history, 270-71; on
history, 283
ENGLAND, greatness of,
due to the Bible, 49
ENGLISH Revolution, 285
ERASMUS, 280; life by
Froude, 298
Fact, the goddess of his-
tory, 262; the chief in-
gredient of history, 263;
the historian's relation to,
264-67
FACTS of little value in
true history, 274-75
FAITH, greater than wis-
dom, 63
FICTION, current, 16, 17;
[328]
INDEX
professionalism in, 223; on Erasmus and Cæsar,
art of writing, 224; 298
what people miss in not FREDERICK the Great, 286.
reading, 225; no chairs FRENCH Revolution, 285-86
of, in universities, 259
FIELDING (Henry), 222; GARDINER (S. R.), his
his power as a novelist, History of the Great
229, 231-234
Civil War, 268-269
FLAUBERT (Gustave), his GENESIS, the story of the
sincerity, 219; his Mad- creation in, 41-42
ame Bovary, 251
GIBBON, 217; The Roman
FORSTER (J.), his Life and Empire, 284; his Auto-
Adventures of Oliver biography, 301
Goldsmith, 300
GOETHE (J. W. von), his
Fox (George), his Jour “Faust,” 15.
nals, 298
GOLDEN Ass, The, 212
FRANCE (Anatole), his GOLDSMITH (O.), a foun-
prose, 201
der of English prose,
FRENCH NOVELISTS, the 200; his sincerity, 219;
modern, 223
Forster's Life of, 300.
FRIENDSHIP, essay on, from GREECE, its influence, 111
“Ecclesiasticus,” 67-69 GREEKS, the, as described
FROUDE (J. A.), 217; His- by Homer, 109-110
tory of England, 272; on GREEN (J. R.), History of
the historian's art, 275- the English People, 271;
77; criticism on, 277-81; criticized as historian,
criticized as historian, 282
282; his essay on “Eng- GREGOROVIUS (F.), History
land's Forgotten Worth- of the City of Rome,
ies,” 288; on Hakluyts
271
Voyages, 288-291; his GRENVILLE (Sir Richard),
Short Studies on Great the last fight of the
Subjects, 298; his books “Revenge," 293-96
[329]
INDEX
GROTE (G.), History of lustrative of Shake-
Greece, 284
speare's life in London,
GUICCIARDINI, History of 152
Italy, 284
HERODOTUS, criticized as
GULLIVER'S TRAVELS, 200 historian, 282
GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS, 286. HIGGINS (John), his ac-
count of the last fight of
HAKLUYT (R.), Voyages
the “Revenge," 294
and Travels, 287-96
HISTORIAN, the, his rela-
HALL (Fielding), The
tion to fact, 264-67; his
Soul of a People, 297
conventional method,
HAMLET, 170; the personal
274-75; Froude on his
element in the tragedy,
art, 275-277; not creative
184
artist, 283
HISTORICAL novel, 216-17
HAMPDEN, 285
HISTORY. The child of the
HANNIBAL, 286
university, 259; as truth,
HARDY (Thomas), his The
260-61; the mistaken
Return of the Native,
presentation of, 261-62;
The Woodlanders, and
its bad effect on chil-
Tess of the D'Urber-
dren, 261; how written,
villes, 251
263-64; Emerson's view
HARRIS (Frank), his book,
of, 270-71; the right
“The Man Shakespeare,” mind for the writing of,
148; on the lyric Shake-
273-74; the value of
speare, 181
facts to, 281; Emerson
HARRISON (Frederic), on on, 283; not much pleas-
the choice of books, 23 ure in reading, 284; has
value and meaning only
HAWTHORNE (N.), The as biography, 285; com-
Scarlet Letter, 252-255 pared with biography,
HENRY ESMOND, 216, 217 286-87; its true philos-
Henry V. Quoted as il- ophy in biography, 292;
24
[330]
INDEX
compared with biog- Jew, the, his reading of
raphy, 293
the Bible, 52
HOMER, 26, 109; his in- JOB, Book of, 60-67
fluence on Greece, 111- JOHNSON (Samuel), Bos-
12; his influence on us, well's Life of, 299-300;
113; translation of his his way to happiness,
“Iliad” by Butcher,
307
Lang and Myers, 114; JONATHAN and David, 15
translation of the JONSON, Ben, his worship
“Iliad" by Lord Derby, of Shakespeare, 154
114; his “high serious- JOSEPH, the story of, and
ness," 114; a tale-teller, his brethren, 45
197; the influence of the JOSEPHUS, History of the
Iliad and the Odyssey Jews, 284
as biography, 292
KEATS (John), his “Ode
HUGO (Victor), his Les
on a Grecian Urn,” 5-8,
Misérables, 250
138; his “Ode to a
Hume and Smollett, His-
Nightingale," 102 - 103,
tory of England, 284
138; “Ode to Autumn,"
HUON OF BORDEAUX, 200
138
KING LEAR, Edgar's words
IDEAL, the, what it is, 92
ILIAD, the, its influence as
in, applied to Shake-
speare, 151; quoted to
biography, 292
show Shakespeare as
ISRAEL, ode to its founders,
lyric poet, 168-69; the
46-47
personal element in its
IVANHOE, 216, 217
tragedy, 185
Knox (John), Carlyle's
JACOB, his blessing of his
essay on, 298
sons, 46-47
JAMES, Henry, on the art LAMB (Charles), on books
of fiction, 226
and reading, 12-13;
JAQUES, 170
Tales from Shake-
[331]
INDEX
speare," 143; essay “On appeal of the New
the Tragedies of Shake- Testament, 73
speare," 143; a guide to Love's LABOR's Lost.
Shakespeare, 144-45; ar- Quoted to show Shake-
gument against stage speare as the poet of
representation of Shake- love, 177-78
speare's plays, 146-47; LOYOLA (Ignatius), 286
his appreciation of LUTHER (Martin), 286
Shakespeare, 157; his
opinion on scenery, 158; MACAULAY, 217; History
his Essays of Elia, 303 of England, 268; his art
LANCELOT DU LAC, 201
as historian, 269-70;
LANGUAGE, its develop Trevelyan's Life of,
ment, 196-98
299-300
LAUZUN, Duc de, com- MACBETH. Quoted to show
pared with D'Artagnan, Shakespeare as lyric
282
poet, 169-70
LINCOLN (Abraham), 285; MAHOMET, 286
his position in the MADAME BOVARY, Flau-
American Civil War, bert's novel, 251
287; no real life of, 298- MALORY (Sir Thomas),
99
the Morte D'Arthur,
LITERATURE, the value of, 200; quotation from
48
Caxton's preface to
LIVY, 121
Morte D'Arthur, 234
LOCKHART (J. G.), his Life MARCUS AURELIUS, his
of Scott, 299-300
Meditations, 306
LORNA DOONE, 216, 217 MARK ANTONY, 280-81
LOTI (Pierre), his prose, MARIUS THE EPICUREAN,
201
Pater's novel, 279-80.
Love, Shakespeare as the McMASTER (J. B.), His-
poet of, 176-78
tory of the People of
Love, Gospel of, the final the United States, 271
[332]
INDEX
60
MEASURE FOR MEASURE, the 303; his own opinion on
Duke's words in, de his Essays, 303-305
scriptive of Shake- MORALITY, bad in novels as
speare's character, 151; a motive, 212
quoted to show Shake MORALS. Good art a mo-
speare as lyric poet, 170 ral influence, 215
1
MORLEY (John), on the
MERCHANT OF VENICE, habit of reading, 20-21
quoted to show Shake- MORTE D’ARTHUR, Cax-
speare's love for music, ton's preface to, 234
171-72
Moses, Song of, 50, 286
MEREDITH (George), his MOTLEY (J. L.), The
prose, 200; his difference Dutch Republic, 273
from Dickens and MOULTON (R. G.), his ar-
Thackeray, 235; the rangement of the Bible,
quality of his style, 235-
36; the artist, 237-38; MUSIC, Shakespeare's love
his writing, 238-40; The for, 171-72
Egoist, 238-45, 247; his
courage, 248-49, 280
NAPOLEON, no real life of,
MIDLEMARCH, 250
301-2; Rose's Life of,
MILL ON THE Floss, The, 302; Bourrienne's Life
250-51
of, 302
MILTON (John), his organ Nelson, Southey's Life of,
music, 130; “ Paradise 298
Lost," 131; “Il Pen- NEW TESTAMENT, The, as
seroso," 131; “L'Allegro," the Life of Christ, 297.
131; “ Lycidas,” 131-132 Noah, God's covenant
MIRABEAU, 286
with, 43-45
MISÉRABLES, Les, 250 NOVEL, the, its growth,
MOMMSEN (T.), History 204-5; the moral novel,
of Rome, 284
209; Lord Bacon on,
MONTAIGNE, his Essays, 210; moral purpose bad
[333]
INDEX
in, 212; what we want it sonal element in the
to give, 212-13; how it tragedy, 184-85
may be appreciated, 224;
the historical, 216-17; PAIN, 4
pleasure of reading the PALESTINE, the spirit in
great novelists, 226-27 which it was national-
NOVELIST, the, partly a ized, 48
poet, 195; his aim, 196; PARKMAN (F.), his his-
his art and aim, 205-9, torical writings, 273
211-12; devotion a neces- PATER (Walter), on books,
sary quality in, 218; 28; Marius the Epicu-
sincerity a necessary rean, 279-80
quality in, 219; tem- PATTISON (Mark), on a li-
perament and character, brary, 23
both necessary qualities PAUL, St., 286
in, 219-20; his experi- PEPYS (Samuel), his Diary,
ence of life compared 303
with the poet's, 220; how PÈRE GORIOT, Le, 218
he works, 221-22; the PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, THE,
best, 222
250
NOVELISTS, the modern, 223, PITT (William), Rose-
225-26; what they do bery's Life of, 298
for us, 255
PLATO, his Life of Socrates,
297
“ ODE TO THE WEST WIND,” PLEASURE, what it is; its
Shelley's poem, 94-99 effect on the mind, 3-4;
O'SHAUGHNESSY (Arthur), as transportation, 15
poem on the poet, 86 PLUTARCH, his Lives, 286
OTHELLO. Quoted to show POEM, ay what it is, 84
Shakespeare as lyric Poet, the, the duty of,
poet, 167-68; quoted to 49; poem on, by Arthur
show Shakespeare's love O'Shaughnessy, 86; as
for women, 173; the per- conceived by Words-
[334]
INDEX
worth, 88; what he is, madness, 137; its value
89-91; his work, 90-91; and meaning, 139; the
what he does for us, 93; pleasure of, 139, 161
completed by the reader, PRESCOTT, History of the
100; the universality of Conquest of Peru, 273;
the appeal, 108; as History of the Conquest
shaper and artist, 137; of Mexico, 273
the revealer of beauty PROSE, 199; the difference
as truth and truth as between early English
beauty, 139; our justifi- and later, 200-1; its use,
cation of, 140; the aim 201-2
of, 161; greater than his PSALMS, the, 52, 54-56
poems, 165; in his po- PYM, 285,
etry, 178-79; the pleas-
ure of reading him, RALEIGH (W.), his study
180; compared with the of Shakespeare, 147; his
novelist, 195; the first opinion on Shakespeare's
novelist, 197; his experi sonnets, 163
ence of life compared RALEIGH (Sir W.), his ac-
with the novelist's, 220 count of the last fight of
POETRY, devotional, 56; the “Revenge," 294
lyrical, in the Bible, 57- READE (C.), The Cloister
59; no defence necessary and the Hearth, 281
for, 83; is a personal ex- READING, the pleasure of,
perience, 83; the appeal 3-30
it makes, 83-84; its na- READING, casual; no pleas-
ture, 85; habit of read- ure in, 10-11; a stimula-
ing, 87-88; the spirit tion to the imagination,
of, 101, 136; as the joy- 11; an exercise for the
giver, 101; the spirit of mind, 12; Lamb on, 12-
suggestion in, 101-106; 13; a touching of hands,
the mystery of the spir- 14; Morley on the habit
it of, 133, 138; a divine of, 20-21; habit of read-
[335]
INDEX
ing poetry, 87-88; how ST. PAUL, 73-76
to read Shakespeare, SAVONAROLA, 286
156; suggestion for SCARLET LETTER, THE, 216,
reading Shakespeare's 217, 252-255
52-255
plays in public, 160-61 SCENERY, its effect on
RELIGION, the purpose of, Shakespeare's poems,
34; ministers of, should 158-59; Lamb's opinion
be taught how to read on, 158
the Bible, 41
SCOTT, fighting in his ro-
RETURN OF THE NATIVE, mances, 220-21; com-
THE, Hardy's novel, 251 pared with Dumas, 237;
“REVENGE," the, the last Tales of a Grandfather,
fight of, 293-96
272, 282; Lockhart's
REVOLUTION, the English, Life of, 299, 300
285; the French, 285-86 SERMON ON THE MOUNT,
ROBERTSON, History of THE, 34
Scotland, 284
SHAKESPEARE, 26; his “Mid-
ROBESPIERRE, 286
summer Night's Dream,”
ROBINSON Crusoe, 200
11; the spirit of his
RODERICK RANDOM, 222 poetry, 105; Lamb's
ROMAUNT OF THE ROSE, tales from, 143; Lamb
197-98
on the tragedies of, 143;
ROME, character of its Lamb as a guide to, 144-
genius, 121
45; Lamb's argument
ROMEO AND JULIET. against representing
Quoted to show Shake his plays on the stage,
speare's love for women, 146-47; Coleridge's work
173
on, 144; Raleigh's study
Rose (J. R.), his Life of of, 147; Harris's book
Napoleon I, 302
on, 148; public opinion
ROSEBERY (Lord), his Pitt, on, 149; the man, 150;
298
Edgar's words in King
ROUGE ET NOIR, 220
Lear applied to Shake-
[336]
INDEX
speare, 151; the Duke's 187; his final lesson, 187,
words in Measure for 189; his philosophy of
Measure descriptive of the universe, 188-89;
Shakespeare's character, how to accept him, 190;
151; how he spent his his offer of love, 190;
early life, 152; the kind his greatness, 191
of men he met, 153; be- SHELLEY (P. B.), as poet,
longs to the people, 153; 94-98; his “ Ode to the
Ben Jonson's worship West Wind,” 94-99
of, 154; our attitude to SMOLLETT (T.), 222.
Shakespeare a wrong SOCRATES, his life by Plato,
one, 154-55; what our
297
right attitude should be
SOLOMON, SONG OF, 9-10,
toward him, 155; how to
57-59
read, 156; Lamb's appre-
SONG OF ROLAND, 197-98
ciation of, 157; the po-
etry of, 157, 178-79; how
SONNETS, Shakespeare's,
162-64
his plays may best be
listened to, 160-61; his
SOUTHEY (R.), his Life of
sonnets, 162-63; the lyric Nelson, 298
poet, 166-67; his love for SPENSER, a tale-teller, 197-
music, 171-72; his love 98
for women, 173-75; as STENDHAL, his character in
the poet of love, 176-78; La Chartreuse de Parme,
as Jaques, 180; Frank 220
Harris on the lyric STEVENSON (R. L.), his
Shakespeare, 181; the style, 223; his essay on
man we want to know, Le Vicomte de Brage-
181-82; his pessimism, lonne, 251; on a friend,
182; the tragedy of his 309
life, 183; his influence STORY-TELLER, the, his value,
on us, 184; his tragedies, 202-3; our request of
184-86; his rare virtue, him, 203-4
[337]
INDEX
SUGGESTION, the spirit of,
in poetry, 101-6; the
joy-giver, 106-7
SWIFT, a founder of Eng-
lish prose, 200
SYMONDS (J. A.), his study
of Æschylus, 116; his
study of Aristophanes,
117-18
TROLLOPE (A.), his Bar-
chester stories, 251
TURGÉNIEFF, his sincerity,
219, 250
TWELFTH NIGHT. Quoted
to show Shakespeare's
love for music, 172
TENNYSON (A.), “In Me-
moriam," 56
TESTAMENT, NEW, its final
appeal, 73
TESS OF THE D'URBER-
VILLES, Hardy's novel,
251 .
THACKER AY (W. M.),
Vanity Fair, 15; bis
prose, 200, 217; his char-
acter in Vanity Fair,
220; 282
THUCYDIDES, 284.
TIMON OF ATHENS, the
personal quality of its
tragedy, 185
TOM JONES, its qualities,
231-34
TREVELYAN (0.), bis Life
"
and Letters of Macau-
lay, 299-300
TRISTRAM SHANDY, 225, 250
VANITY FAR, 220
VICAR OF WAKEFIELD, 200,
235
VIRGIL, the “ Æneid” of,
121; a tale-teller, 197
WALTON (Izaak), his
Lives, 301
WESLEY (John), 286
WOMEN, Shakespeare's
treatment of, 173-76
WOODLANDERS, THE,
Hardy's novel, 251
WORDS, the power of, 38;
relating of, 198-99
WORDSWORTH, "Tintern
Abbey,” 20, 104-105; his
conception of the poet,
88; his faith in the spir-
it in all things, 92-93;
his advent clouded, 133
WUTHERING HEIGHTS, 221
ZOLA (E.), his character in
his writings, 220
[338]
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
DATE DUE
APR 1 6 2004

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
IIIIII
1
3 9015 03365 0311
-
-
-

H
ithitit
1 buli
W
!!!!!!
2015
OD
:
100.
.
10
11
NUO
00000
16
.
11
:
COC
10
O
OD
100
ON
.00
.
0001
2006
V1.0
.
C1
10000
10.
OLT
1000
TOOL
60.1
10
020
DOVOL
UILO
1
HOOD
2011
1000
DO
11
1
2010
OONID
020
O
1
COUL
ou
0.0
LIO
LOS
CO0
:
.
UDO
ON
I.10
11.10
.
.
000
LOUI
.
OLO60.
10.
CA
100
DOO
ID
:
000
*
.
..10
LUCI
U01
01.
.
10
DAO
Snnnn
11
001
01.
610
000
OLO
000
LO..
UO.
.
BOLO
TUDO
.
1
DIAL !
DO
10.16
11.0
V
O
IUDI
.
.ID
.00
.
:
ODD
CLIO
. . .
OUVIL
R4.
12
1100
VOTU
LO
!
OOT
100
0
. 0
.000.00
21.
0000000
6 .
001 OO 000009
11
OIO
us
1. 1
CODE
. 0
.
U
.
01..
10.
:
001
.
.
are
JUD009
OU
1.
PO
.
1000
.
.
100
.
11
OL
OOO
UD
1
.
ON
.
.
:
O
DO
0
OOO
.
.
.
1. 0
InDONI
010101011
Ci 110
1
CA
2 .
OL
JI
.
10
:
0
01.10.
10
01.01
10.101
.
.
!
00.00.
.
.
TO
.
IOD
ORADO
.
.
.
..100
. . .
.
1
HOP
.
.
UO
POLO
CUOIO
TO
I
ON
1
.
2
OCUS
.
UA
1
116
IT
CULO
.
00
.
.
1
IA
LI
:
O
O2000
.
1
1
..
10
LU01
.
.
AU
1000
.
.
10
1000
NOI1
.
..
.
DOC
TO
1
.
;
.
1000
..00100
011
.
:
1
..
:
OD