American nights entertainment
student have been held in mind; the books represent a sane departure
from the heavily annotated texts of a few years ago. The books have
been edited, and introductions to them have been provided by such
authorities as William Dean Howells, Stuart P. Sherman, William Lyon
Phelps and Carl Van Doren. Bacon’s _Essays_, Boswell’s _Life of
Johnson_, Browning, Carlyle’s _Sartor Resartus_, Emerson’s _Essays_,
Hardy’s _The Return of the Native_, Hawthorne’s _The Scarlet Letter_,
Meredith, Ruskin, Scott, Stevenson, Thackeray, Thoreau and Whitman are
among those already included.
The Murray Hill Library, commencing with modern fiction, will probably
enlarge its scope to include some of the best modern non-fiction. Its
very handsome binding now covers twelve books, picked works by Arnold
Bennett, Somerset Maugham, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Irvin S. Cobb,
Walpole, G. A. Birmingham, John Buchan, Stephen McKenna, Swinnerton and
Richard Dehan.
Of an entirely different character but not less valuable are the very
large volumes of the Nature Library--those volumes by Neltje Blanchan,
Julia Ellen Rogers, Nina L. Marshall and others called (for the most
part) _The Butterfly Book_, _The Shell Book_, _The Tree Book_, and so
on. Fairly expensive books, these, but cheap at any price with their
many and wonderful colour plates and photographs from life. In their
outdoor field they are not to be surpassed.
iv
Books of a biographical character we have considered already (Chapter
8) but it ought to be emphasised that, for the investor in literature,
they hold a position quite as enviable and altogether desirable as
does the class of securities known as municipals for the investor of
moneys. Time will not match for us a book like Booker T. Washington’s
_Up From Slavery_, nor will literature furnish us with a more strangely
suggestive career than that related in Raymond Weaver’s _Herman
Melville: Mariner and Mystic_. It was C. Alphonso Smith’s _O. Henry
Biography_ that first gave the world the facts on which to base a true
understanding of that extraordinary writer. The tale of unwearied
courage in Edward Livingston Trudeau’s _Autobiography_ cannot lose
either its freshness nor its strength of inspiration. To read P. P.
Howe’s _Life of William Hazlitt_ and then to turn to his little book of
selections called _The Best of Hazlitt_ is to enter into a permanently
valuable share of the English literary inheritance. _The Letters of
Henry James_, selected and edited by Percy Lubbock, and James’s own
_Notes of a Son and Brother_; Sir Sidney Colvin’s _John Keats_ and
his _Memories and Notes of Persons and Places_; the _Letters of James
Huneker_ and Huneker’s autobiography, _Steeplejack_; and the _Letters
and Papers of John Addington Symonds_, edited by Horatio F. Brown, are
all of the class of books whose content is a permanent acquisition,
an actual “property” of which the reader, in legal language, becomes
seized and possessed.
One’s investment in an ample author should be allowed to ramify in
all directions natural to the lines of human interest. About Walt
Whitman, for example, there is by now a cluster of books which the
reader of _Leaves of Grass_ or of Whitman’s prose cannot afford,
in their entirety, to neglect. Whether he will want one or all, or
what ones he will want, will depend upon the relation he establishes
with Whitman himself. The best brief biography is _Walt Whitman: The
Man and His Work_, translated from the French of Leon Bazalgette by
Ellen FitzGerald. Personally I do not think one can feel himself
acquainted with Whitman unless he has read, or read in, the three
massive volumes of Horace Traubel’s _With Walt Whitman in Camden_.
_The Letters of Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman_, edited by Thomas B.
Harned, form an unusual and engrossing chapter in the lives of both.
Those keenly interested will explore further yet in the two volumes of
the _Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman_, edited by Emory
Holloway, who is now at work on a long and comprehensive biography of
the poet.
The book with beautiful illustrations is a true investment, since now
such illustrations are seldom if ever wasted on a second-rate text. To
a great extent these illustrated books are ones appreciable by children
as well as by their elders--things like _Westward Ho!_ and _The Last
of the Mohicans_--and came up for our consideration in Chapter 9. But
there are certain classics, like the editions of _A Midsummer Night’s
Dream_ and Milton’s _Comus_ with pictures by Arthur Rackham, which are
adult throughout. One of the most splendid is the Vierge Edition of
_Don Quixote_, in four volumes, illustrated with 260 drawings by Daniel
Vierge and provided with an introduction by Royal Cortissoz. The same
work, illustrated by Jean de Bosschere, may be had in one large volume;
and other treasures of the sort are _The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam_ and
Shakespeare’s _The Tempest_, both illustrated by Edmund Dulac. I must
not omit the edition of Scott’s _Quentin Durward_, with illustrations
in color by the American artist, C. Bosseron Chambers.
When, in Chapter 2, we discussed books of essays, it was with the
thought of their beguiling qualities pretty much forward in our minds.
I hope I do not derogate the essay, a literary form raised to the
highest eminence by Bacon, Emerson, Lamb and so many others, when I say
that its widest and most useful office resembles the form of investment
known as short-term notes. Investors of money are constantly in receipt
of funds for which, at the moment, they have no suitable repository;
and investors in literature are frequently in the same fix. The man
with money buys high grade commercial paper with an early maturity and
watches for his long-term investment. The reader with time on his hands
may often most profitably do likewise. But in one respect he is the
more favoured person. If his brief-lived investment is well-chosen, the
chances are great that it will lead him to some author or some group of
books to which he can gladly commit his reading hours for a month or
several months or a year.
Such, among literary profit-producers, are books like Stuart P.
Sherman’s _The Genius of America_ and his _Americans_, the first
devoted to “studies in behalf of the younger generation” of such
subjects as Puritanism, shifting morals, popular education and American
critical writing; the second a series of presentations of individual
figures--Roosevelt, Emerson, Whitman, Carnegie, Paul Elmer More,
Franklin, and others. Either his _On_ or his fictional satire, _The
Mercy of Allah_, should lead the chance reader some ways further in
the conquest of Hilaire Belloc. Dr. Joseph Collins’s _The Doctor
Looks at Literature_ has, in a very few months, created and aborted
some thousands of readers of James Joyce, Fyodor Dostoievski, Marcel
Proust, D. H. Lawrence, May Sinclair, Rebecca West, Stella Benson,
Katherine Mansfield and the other contemporary writers whose pathology
it inquires into. Books about books have all the range from Jesse Lee
Bennett’s invaluable reader’s Baedeker, _What Books Can Do for Me_
(with priceless reading lists of every variety) to Maurice Francis
Egan’s delightful _Confessions of a Book-Lover_ and Henry van Dyke’s
_Companionable Books_. What will you try? John Corbin’s _The Return of
the Middle Class_ with its impulsion toward other social studies? J. H.
Gardiner’s _The Bible as English Literature_ or William Lyon Phelps’s
_Human Nature in the Bible_ with their lights upon ancient thinking and
racial character? Corbin’s book may lead you back to Edward Carpenter’s
_Civilization: Its Cause and Cure_. Gardiner and Phelps may send you
to Horace G. Hutchinson’s _The Greatest Story in the World_, which is
the story of mankind from the beginnings of history to the time of the
firm establishment of the Roman Empire. From that picturesque history
of the civilisations that succeeded each other in the Mediterranean
lands would you be led in the direction of Henry Fairfield Osborn’s
_Men of the Old Stone Age_ and Madison Grant’s _The Passing of the
Great Race_, or toward the recent books by Lothrop Stoddard, or into
the fascinations of Edwyn Bevan’s _Hellenism and Christianity_ and G.
Lowes Dickinson’s _The Greek View of Life_, I wonder? As one wishful of
your enjoyment and satisfaction, I hope you wonder, too.
Here, of all things, is _A History of Chinese Literature_, by Herbert
A. Giles, professor of Chinese in the University of Cambridge (you
didn’t know they had one, did you?). It begins with Confucius (born
B.C. 551) and is divided into eight parts according to dynasties. One
sees easily that while each age had its poets and writers, the drama
and the novel did not develop in China until the Mongol Dynasty (A.D.
1200) and the famous Ming Dynasty (A.D. 1368-1544). From all the
important writers Dr. Giles quotes at length in excellent translation;
he summarises plays and explains the curious technique of the Chinese
theatre. The book is rounded off with examples of Chinese wit and
humour.
Here is George H. McKnight’s _English Words and Their Background_, with
facts only recently recognised about the relation and differences of
American English and British English; with a good chapter on slang;
with new light on the changes word meanings have undergone, and why;
with stuff about personal names and place names.
The general reader has perhaps tried to find out about Dante, and
found, on the one hand, some work by the scholar and for the scholar,
on the other, books full of technical and controversial idiom. Behold,
here is Mary Bradford Whiting’s _Dante: The Man and the Poet_ with its
simple and memorable account of the student, lover and statesman, the
exile and wanderer, the poet and seer. Or he has wondered if it were
impossible for anyone to write about sex with beauty and sanity--and
then has had the miracle of getting hold of Havelock Ellis’s _Little
Essays of Love and Virtue_ wrought in his behalf. He has been the
victim all his life of such stuff as Freudians are made on, and some
benignant fate has put into his hands Basil King’s convincing account
of _The Conquest of Fear_. He has wearied over the Younger Generation
and been comforted as he read Brander Matthew’s _The Tocsin of Revolt_;
contemporary criticism--too contemporary--has set his teeth on edge
until he found a more ripened wisdom in the books of W. C. Brownell. A
sense of futility and a dark brown taste of boredom have resulted from
the perusal of the usual kind of book on How to Live; and the sparkling
and nutritious antidote has proved to be Arnold Bennett’s _How to
Make the Best of Life_. For that condition in which one cannot endure
concentration on a single topic for the duration of a book--what?
Perhaps either volume of Bennett’s _Things That Have Interested Me_, or
some such book as Basil Anderton’s _Sketches From a Library Window_,
in which one may read about a French gourmet, a sixteenth century
humanist, holiday joys in Northumberland, the art of the translator,
the adventures of an English seaman in the Napoleonic wars, or Sir
Thomas Browne.
v
“I never read fiction.”
The next time I meet him I shall not place in his hands a novel,
not even one of the great masterpieces among the novels. I shall
hand him _My Best Story_, to which thirty-one English authors have
contributed (though we may claim John Russell for America). Here in
a single book are such perfect tales as Stacy Aumonier’s “The Great
Unimpressionable,” one from Ernest Bramah’s _Kai Lung’s Golden Hours_,
Quiller-Couch’s “Statement of Gabriel Foot, Highwayman,” Galsworthy’s
“Courage,” Perceval Gibbon’s “The Connoisseur,” Cunninghame Graham’s
“The Lone Wolf,” Elinor Mordaunt’s “The Gold Fish,” John Russell’s “The