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Title: Books and You
Author: Maugham, W. Somerset [William Somerset] (1874-1965)
Date of first publication: 1940
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London and Toronto: Heinemann, 1940
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 7 March 2016
Date last updated: 7 March 2016
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1304

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.






  BOOKS
  AND
  YOU

  W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM



  WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD
  LONDON :: TORONTO




  FIRST PUBLISHED 1940



  PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN AT THE WINDMILL PRESS
  KINGSWOOD, SURREY




  To
  BARBARA ROTHSCHILD




_Preface_

I was commissioned to write the three articles which make up this
little book by The Saturday Evening Post.  They are now reissued to
satisfy the large number of persons who have expressed their desire to
possess them in a form of somewhat greater permanence and in the hope
that they will be useful to many who did not chance to come across them
when they appeared in the pages of the magazine.  I was limited to four
thousand words, and though I think I slightly exceeded this, it must be
plain that in that space I could not hope to deal with my subject
otherwise than in the most cursory manner.  There was in truth in each
of my articles matter for a fat volume.  My object was to give to such
readers as are confused by the great riches which we have inherited
from the authors of the past a list of books which anyone who is
interested in the things of the spirit could read with pleasure and
profit; but since I had to take care to make my list short enough not
to dismay, I had to leave out a great many works of high significance.
With few exceptions I have only mentioned one book by each author, but
there are many authors, Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, Balzac and
Dostoevsky, to name but a handful of novelists, who have written
several books which have all the qualifications for a place in my list.
I had to leave out certain authors of merit, such as Charlotte Bront,
because I had no room for anyone not quite of the first class, and I
had to omit all reference to lesser books, such as Izaak Walton's Lives
and James Morier's The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, books
delightful to read, because I could not afford to ask you to occupy
yourself with any but recognized masterpieces.  So, if I were taking a
friend, who had enthusiasm but not much time, round a gallery of
antique sculpture, I would ask him to direct his attention not to Roman
portraiture, though I would not deny its interest, nor even to the
statuary of the archaic period, exciting as I find it, but to give all
his powers of apprehension to the great works that have come down to us
from the golden age of Greece.

This little book is necessarily slight, but I trust you, the reader,
will not find it superficial.  I have written its chapters not as a
critic (which indeed I am not) nor even as a writer by profession (for
in that capacity my interest in literature would tend to be special)
but as the plain man with a proper interest in humanity.  The first
thing I have asked of a book before I put it on my list was that it
should be readable; for I want you to read these books, and readability
is something which I have a notion the professors of literature and the
critics whom they have trained take for granted.  But it is not a thing
to be taken for granted at all.  There are many books important in the
history of literature which it is now unnecessary for anybody but the
student to read.  Few people have the time to-day to read anything but
what immediately concerns them.  My claim is that the books I have
mentioned in the following pages concern everybody.  By readability I
do not mean that it should be possible to read the book without
attention.  The reader must bring something of his own; he must have at
least the capacity of interesting himself in human affairs and he must
have at least some imagination.  I know a number of people who say they
cannot read novels, and I have noticed that they are apt to suppose
that it is because, their minds being busy with important matters, they
cannot trouble to occupy themselves with imaginary events; but I think
they are deceived; it is either because they are so absorbed in
themselves that they cannot take an interest in what happens to others,
or because they are so devoid of imagination that they have not the
power to enter into the ideas and sympathize with the joys and sorrows
of the characters of fiction.  No book is readable if you have neither
curiosity nor fellow-feeling.  To be readable a book must mean
something to you here and now, it is but one quality among the others
it may have, and it is a quality relative to the interests of the
reader.  I am confident that on the whole the books I have recommended
will appeal to the person of ordinary interests because they have that
humanity which is common to us all.

You will notice that I have written the chapter on the classic books of
America on slightly different lines from those on which I wrote the
other two, and I think I should explain the reason of this.  When I
dealt with European literature the mass of material was so great that I
could afford to speak only of books which all right-minded men have
agreed are masterly.  I had nothing to do but commend them.  If a book
did not seem to me to deserve almost unqualified praise, I had no need
to mention it.  But when I came to American books I was in a different
situation.  The history of American literature is short.  If I had
adopted the same standard I should have had no more than perhaps four
writers to speak of.  I did not think that would be very useful.  It
seemed to me that I should be of greater service to you if I told you
what I feel about certain writers who because they are American rightly
demand your attention, but whom now that American literature has found
its feet it is sensible to regard without national bias.  I have asked
you to read them for yourselves and decide their value for you
regardless of the opinions of authority.  I repeat here what you will
find in my first chapter, that the only thing that signifies to you in
a book is what it means to you, and if your opinion is at variance with
that of everyone else in the world it is of no consequence.  Your
opinion is valid for you.  In matters of art people, especially, I
think, in America, are apt to accept willingly from professors and
critics a tyranny which in matters of government they would rebel
against.  But in these questions there is no right and wrong.  The
relation between the reader and his book is as free and intimate as
that between the mystic and his God.  Of all forms of snobbishness the
literary is perhaps the most detestable, and there is no excuse for the
fool who despises his fellow-man because he does not share his opinion
of the value of a certain book.  Pretence in literary appreciation is
odious, and no one should be ashamed if a book that the best critics
think highly of means nothing to him.  On the other hand it is better
not to speak ill of such books if you have not read them.  To go back
to American literature: because it has been in existence so short a
time and its products are scanty, sundry authors have attained an
eminence and their works are regarded with a reverence which are to my
mind undeserved.  America can well afford now to look at them without
the prejudice of patriotism and, viewing them as citizens of the world,
which great artists are, rather than as Americans, esteem them at their
proper value.

The narrow limits to which I was confined obliged me in my article on
English literature only to name a certain number of novels, and for my
own satisfaction I propose to take advantage of this preface to say
something more about three of these.  They are Trollope's The Eustace
Diamonds, Meredith's The Egoist and George Eliot's Middlemarch.  When I
wrote I had not read them for many years, but since then I have done so
again.  I suggested that you should read The Eustace Diamonds rather
than Barchester Towers, which is Trollope's best-known novel, because
it is complete in itself.  It seemed to me that really to appreciate
Barchester Towers you would have to read the series of which it is a
part.  Neither the motives of the characters nor the results of their
activities are quite clear unless you read the novels that come before
and after, and I did not think that Trollope was important enough,
keeping in view my object of asking you to read books which would be
pleasant and profitable, to justify me in asking you to read half a
dozen closely-printed volumes.  And I remembered that there was in
Barchester Towers a good deal of that caricature which to us now seems
a tiresome feature of Victorian fiction.  But now that I have read The
Eustace Diamonds once more, I should recommend you even with these
slight drawbacks to read the more celebrated book.  The Eustace
Diamonds is by way of being a detective story and it has two very
ingenious surprises, but it is told at inordinate length.  We have
learnt a good deal about the manner of writing fiction of this kind
since then, and a modern writer could have made a much better story of
it by compressing it into three hundred pages.  The characters are
soundly observed, but they are not very interesting, and most of them
are the stock figures of Victorian fiction.  You have the impression
that Trollope was trying to write the sort of novel that was bringing
Dickens so much success, and not making a very good job of it.  The
most human character is Lizzie Eustace, but Trollope had apparently, or
at least wished his readers to have, so great an antipathy for her that
he treats her unfairly, and just as when a lawyer browbeats a prisoner
in court your sympathies regardless of his crime go out to him, so you
feel that Lizzie wasn't really so much worse than anybody else and
therefore scarcely deserved the hard knocks the author has given her.
The novel can, however, be read without difficulty, and for anyone
interested in Victorian England there is a good deal of entertainment
to be got by observing the manners and customs of that long-past day.
This is cold commendation.  But though I advise you in place of The
Eustace Diamonds to read Barchester Towers, I am constrained to add
that you would be unwise to expect too much from it.  The merit of
Trollope has of late years been somewhat exaggerated.  For a generation
he was almost forgotten, and when he was rediscovered, having in the
interval acquired the charm of a period piece, greater praise was
awarded him than he deserves.  He was an honest and industrious
craftsman with a considerable power of observation.  He had some gift
of pathos and he could tell a straightforward story in a
straight-forward, though terribly diffuse, way; but he had neither
passion, wit nor subtlety.  He had no talent for revealing a character
or resuming the significance of an episode in a single pregnant phrase.
His interest now lies in his unaffected, accurate and sincere portrayal
of a state of society which has perished.

Fifty years ago every intelligent young man with pretensions to culture
read Meredith with enthusiasm.  He was read as a generation later young
men read Shaw and as ten years ago they read T. S. Eliot.  Now he has,
I believe, few readers among the young.  But The Egoist is a fine
novel.  It is true that it deals with a class of society which we no
longer regard with the awe which George Meredith thought was its due.
We no longer accept these country gentlemen, these opulent ladies who
drive about in barouches, as the salt of the earth, and their behaviour
too often strikes us as vulgar and trivial.  The world has changed
since Meredith wrote, and it is hard for us now to be seriously
impressed when Clara Middleton, a high-spirited girl of independent
mind and ample fortune, makes such a to-do about breaking her
engagement with Sir Willoughby Patterne after she has discovered that
she no longer cares for him.  The girls of our own time would have
found it easy to deal with the situation.  We demand plausibility in
our novels nowadays and we are only impatient with difficulties which
can be avoided by the exercise of common sense.  When at last Clara
makes up her mind to run away to London she slips out of the house with
trepidation and walks to the station, but, a storm arising, she gets
her feet wet and so misses the train, whereupon she is persuaded to
return.  She showed little of the wiliness which is supposed to be
characteristic of her sex.  It is strange that it never occurred to her
that as she was going to be married she would need some clothes and no
one could think it odd that she should go to London to try them on.

Meredith wrote in a manner which does not make his books easy to read.
This posturing of his, this cutting of capers and jumping through
verbal hoops, is very tiresome.  You would think that he found it
almost impossible to make a plain statement plainly, and his wit, on
which he seems to have prided himself, is tortured.  But he had a gift
for creating characters of such vitality that you can never quite
forget them.  They are not, like for instance the characters of Moby
Dick, a little larger than life size, but they are something more than
ordinary human beings.  They have the artificiality of the persons in a
comedy by Congreve, but it is not a dead artificiality; Meredith has
inspired them with his own gusto and they live, like the puppets in
Hoffmann's old story which the magician brought to life, with a
radiance all their own.  They are truly creations and only a real
novelist could have invented them.  It is this gusto which enables you
to read Meredith, if you can read him at all, with delight
notwithstanding the coruscations of his style, the falseness of his
values and the occasional clumsiness of his intrigue; he carries on his
story with a fine swing and you are hurried along with him on the wings
of his high spirits and boisterous, windswept joy in the exercise of
his creative faculty.  The Egoist is Meredith's best novel because his
subject here was universal.  Egoism is the mainspring of human nature.
It is the one quality from which we can never escape (I do not like to
call it a vice, though it is the ugliest of our vices, because it is
also the marrow of our virtues), for it determines our existence.
Without it we should not be what we are.  Without it we should be
nought.  And yet our constant effort must be to check its claims and we
can only live well if we do our best to suppress it.  In Sir Willoughby
Patterne, Meredith has drawn such a portrait of an egoist as has never
been drawn before or since.  But I think no one can read this book
without some qualms of conscience, for he must be even a greater egoist
than Sir Willoughby if he does not see in himself some of the traits at
least which make Sir Willoughby at once odious and absurd.  Meredith
was right when he said that his wretched hero was not this man or that
man but all of us.  So when I recommend you to read The Egoist it is
not only because it is a lively, entertaining novel, but because it may
teach you something about yourself that it is good for you to know.

Now I come to Middlemarch.  Judged simply as a piece of fiction it
seems to me better than either of the novels I have just been
discussing.  It is an excellent piece of craftsmanship.  It cannot have
been easy to construct, for George Eliot has taken as her subject not
one group of persons in one social sphere, but different groups in
different spheres, giving you a picture of the landed gentry who live
on their estates round the town of Middlemarch, and the professional
men, merchants and tradesmen who inhabit it.  You are not asked, as you
are by so many novelists, to concern yourself with the fortunes of two
or three people who live in a vacuum, as it were, so that the world
outside them is of no moment, but with the fortunes of all the sorts
and conditions of men who make up the world in which we all live; and
their various stories are managed with consummate skill.  Nor, as often
happens when less skilful writers attempt this complicated form of
fiction, is your interest confined to one set of characters so that
when you are asked to transfer it to another you do so with
disinclination; George Eliot enlists your sympathies equally with them
all, and she passes from one lot of people to another as naturally as
in real life we pass from the people who are associated with one side
of it to the people who are associated with another.  This gives the
novel a singular air of reality.  Although the action begins when
George the Fourth was still King of England we say to ourselves that
this is the sort of thing we know life to be.  The characters, and
there are a great many of them, are wonderfully natural; they are
observed with precision, so that each one stands on his own feet, a
human being with his own idiosyncrasies; but George Eliot had no glow
and she could not give the creatures of her invention the quality of
the archangel which George Meredith was so often able to give his (and
it occurs to me that this is a legitimate excuse for Clara Middleton
never giving a thought to her trousseau, for doubtless an archangel
would not consider the need of a wedding-gown); George Eliot saw them
coolly, accurately, but with sympathy.  Her heroes are no more heroic
than we are and her villains no more villainous.  She got so into the
skin of her personages that we see them not only as others see them but
as they see themselves, and thus even Mr. Casaubon is not only a
hateful figure but also a pitiable one.  They have a modern air, for
they are not solely occupied with their emotions; they are concerned
with politics and interest themselves in the problems of the day;
economic questions enter into their lives as they enter into ours: they
have heads as well as hearts.  They are in short very much the same
sort of people as we are.  I should be inclined to sum up my judgment
of Middlemarch by saying that George Eliot had every gift of the great
novelist but fire.  No English author has given an ampler and more
reasonable interpretation of life; the one quality that escaped her
sensible and sympathetic observation was romance.

Before I close this preface I should like to repair an omission.  When
I was speaking of anthologies I forgot to mention Robert Bridges' The
Spirit of Man.  A critic of my article objected to my inclusion of the
Oxford Book of English Verse, which to his mind was very bad.  I think
he was wrong, but I am willing to admit that the later parts of that
book contain a number of poems that one could do without.  That is
inevitable; an anthology is an expression of the anthologist's choice,
and it may well be that his taste, sure enough when he is dealing with
the writers of the past, falters when he is confronted with those of
his own day.  Time has a ravaging effect on the work of our
contemporaries.  None can be certain that what thrills us now will
thrill a generation that comes after.  But I think it would be a
carping critic indeed who found fault with The Spirit of Man; it is a
very definite statement of a personal attitude, so that the reader will
not find in it pieces that do not accord with that attitude; but it
contains much of excellence that will be unfamiliar to most readers,
for Robert Bridges had wide learning, sound judgment and a passion for
beauty.  The Spirit of Man is a magnanimous and uplifting book.

I close with a quotation from a letter of Doctor Johnson's to Miss
Thrale.  "They who do not read," he writes to her, "can have nothing to
think, and little to say."




BOOKS AND YOU



_I_

One isn't always as careful of what one says as one should be.  When I
stated in a book of mine called The Summing Up that young people often
came to me for advice on the books they would do well to read, I did
not reckon with the consequences.  I received a multitude of letters
from all manner of persons, asking me what the advice was that I gave.
I answered them as best I could, but it is not possible to deal fully
with such a matter in a private letter; and as many people seem to
desire such guidance as I can offer, it has occurred to me that they
might like to have a brief account of what suggestions I have to make
from my own experience for pleasant and profitable reading.

The first thing I want to insist on is that reading should be
enjoyable.  Of course, there are many books that we all have to read,
either to pass examinations or to acquire information, from which it is
impossible to extract enjoyment.  We are reading them for instruction,
and the best we can hope is that our need for it will enable us to get
through them without tedium.  Such books we read with resignation
rather than with alacrity.  But that is not the sort of reading I have
in mind.  The books I shall mention in due course will help you neither
to get a degree nor to earn your living, they will not teach you to
sail a boat or get a stalled motor to run, but they will help you to
live more fully.  That, however, they cannot do unless you enjoy
reading them.

The "you" I address is the adult whose avocations give him a certain
leisure and who would like to read the books which cannot without loss
be left unread.  I do not address the bookworm.  He can find his own
way.  His curiosity leads him along many unfrequented paths and he
gathers delight in the discovery of half-forgotten excellence.  I wish
to deal only with the masterpieces which the consensus of opinion for a
long time has accepted as supreme.  We are all supposed to have read
them; it is a pity that so few of us have.  But there are masterpieces
which are acknowledged to be such by all the best critics and to which
the historians of literature devote considerable space, yet which no
ordinary person can now read with enjoyment.  They are important to the
student, but changing times and changing tastes have robbed them of
their savour and it is hard to read them now without an effort of will.
Let me give one instance: I have read George Eliot's Adam Bede, but I
cannot put my hand on my heart and say that it was with pleasure.  I
read it from a sense of duty: I finished it with a sigh of relief.

Now of such books as this I mean to say nothing.  Every man is his own
best critic.  Whatever the learned say about a book, however unanimous
they are in their praise of it, unless it interests you it is no
business of yours.  Don't forget that critics often make mistakes, the
history of criticism is full of the blunders the most eminent of them
have made, and you who read are the final judge of the value to you of
the book you are reading.  This, of course, applies to the books I am
going to recommend to your attention.  We are none of us exactly like
everyone else, only rather like, and it would be unreasonable to
suppose that the books that have meant a great deal to me should be
precisely those that will mean a great deal to you.  But they are books
that I feel the richer for having read, and I think I should not be
quite the man I am if I had not read them.  And so I beg of you, if any
of you who read these pages are tempted to read the books I suggest and
cannot get on with them, just put them down; they will be of no service
to you if you do not enjoy them.  No one is under an obligation to read
poetry or fiction or the miscellaneous literature which is classed as
belles-lettres.  (I wish I knew the English term for this, but I don't
think there is one.)  He must read them for pleasure, and who can claim
that what pleases one man must necessarily please another?

But let no one think that pleasure is immoral.  Pleasure in itself is a
great good, all pleasure, but its consequences may be such that the
sensible person eschews certain varieties of it.  Nor need pleasure be
gross and sensual.  They are wise in their generation who have
discovered that intellectual pleasure is the most satisfying and the
most enduring.  It is well to acquire the habit of reading.  There are
few sports in which you can engage to your own satisfaction after you
have passed the prime of life; there are no games except patience,
chess problems and crossword puzzles that you can play without someone
to play them with you.  Reading suffers from no such disadvantages;
there is no occupation--except perhaps needlework, but that leaves the
restless spirit at liberty--which you can more easily take up at any
moment, for any period, and more easily put aside when other calls
press upon you; there is no other amusement that can be obtained in
these happy days of public libraries and cheap editions at so small a
cost.  To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a
refuge from almost all the miseries of life.  Almost all, I say, for I
would not go so far as to pretend that to read a book will assuage the
pangs of hunger or still the pain of unrequited love; but half a dozen
good detective stories and a hot-water bottle will enable anyone to
snap his fingers at the worst cold in the head.  But who is going to
acquire the habit of reading for reading's sake, if he is bidden to
read books that bore him?

It is more convenient to take the books of which I am now going to
speak in chronological order, but I can see no reason why, if you make
up your mind to read them, you should do so in that order.  I think you
would be much better advised to read them according to your fancy; nor
do I see even why you should read them one by one.  For my own part, I
find it more agreeable to read four or five books together.  After all,
you aren't in the same mood on one day as on another, nor have you the
same eagerness to read a certain book at all hours of the day.  We must
suit ourselves in these matters, and I have naturally adopted the plan
that best suits me.  In the morning before I start work I read for a
while a book, either of science or philosophy, that requires a fresh
and attentive brain.  It sets me off for the day.  Later on, when my
work is done and I feel at ease, but not inclined for mental exercise
of a strenuous character, I read history, essays, criticism or
biography; and in the evening I read a novel.  Besides these, I keep on
hand a volume of poetry in case I feel in the mood for that, and by my
bedside I have one of those books, too rarely to be found, alas, which
you can dip into at any place and stop reading with equanimity at the
end of any paragraph.

Now, the first book on my list is Defoe's Moll Flanders.  No English
novelist has ever achieved a greater verisimilitude than Defoe; it is
hard, indeed, when you read him, to remember that you are reading a
work of fiction; it is more like a consummate piece of reporting.  You
are convinced that his people spoke exactly as he made them speak, and
their actions are so plausible that you cannot doubt that this is how,
in the circumstances, they behaved.  Moll Flanders is not a moral book.
It is bustling, coarse and brutal, but it has a robustness that I like
to think is in the English character.  Defoe had little imagination and
not much humour, but he had a wide and varied experience of life and,
being an excellent journalist, he had a keen eye for the curious
incident and the telling detail.  He had no sense of climax, he
attempted no pattern; and so the reader is not swept away by a power
that he does not seek to resist; he is carried along in the crowd, as
it were, and it may be that when he comes to a side street he will slip
down it and get away.  He may, to put it plainly, after a couple of
hundred pages of very much the same sort of thing feel that he has had
enough.  Well, that's all right.  But for my part I am quite willing to
accompany my author till he brings his ribald heroine to the haven of
respectability tempered with penitence.

Then I should like you to read Swift's Gulliver's Travels.  I am going
to deal with Doctor Johnson later on, but here I must note that,
speaking of this book, he said: "When once you have thought of big men
and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest."  Doctor Johnson
was an excellent critic and a very wise man, but here he talked
nonsense.  Gulliver's Travels has wit and irony, ingenious invention,
broad humour, savage satire and vigour.  Its style is admirable.  No
one has ever written this difficult language of ours more compactly,
more lucidly and more unaffectedly than Swift.  I could wish that Dr.
Johnson had said of him what he said of another: "Whoever wishes to
attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not
ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison."
He could then have added a third to his pairs of adjectives: virile but
not overweening.

Two novels come next.  Fielding's Tom Jones is, perhaps, the healthiest
novel in English literature.  It is a dashing, brave and cheerful book,
sturdy and generous; it is, of course, very frank, and Tom Jones, with
his good looks and vitality, a friendly fellow whom we should all like
to have known, does certain things which the moralist will deplore.
But do we care?  Not unless we are solemn prigs, for he is
disinterested and his heart is golden.  Fielding was, unlike Defoe, a
conscious artist; his scheme gave him the opportunity to describe a
multitude of incidents and to create a great number of personages.
They are splendidly alive in a world that is pungent with the bustle
and turmoil of reality.  Fielding took himself seriously--as, of
course, every author should--and there were many subjects of importance
on which he felt called upon to deliver himself.  At the beginning of
each part he puts a dissertation in which he discusses one thing and
another.  These have humour and sincerity, but for my part I think they
can be skipped without disadvantage.  I have a notion that no one can
read Tom Jones without delight, for it is a manly, wholesome book,
without any humbug about it, and it warms the cockles of your heart.

Sterne's Tristram Shandy is a novel of very different character.  You
might say of it what Doctor Johnson said of Sir Charles Grandison: "If
you were to read it for the story, you would hang yourself."  It is a
book that, according to your temperament, you will find either as
readable as anything you have ever read, or tiresome and affected.  It
has no unity.  It has no coherence.  Digression follows upon
digression.  But it is wonderfully original, humorous and pathetic; and
it increases your spiritual possessions with half a dozen characters so
full of idiosyncrasy and so lovable that once you have come to know
them, you feel that not to have known them would have been an
irreparable loss.  Nor would I have anyone fail to read Sterne's A
Sentimental Journey; I have nothing to say of it except that it is
enchanting.

Now let us leave fiction for a little.  I suppose it is universally
acknowledged that Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson is the greatest
biography in the language.  It is a book that you can read with profit
and pleasure at any age.  You can pick it up at any time, opening it at
random, and be sure of entertainment.  But to praise such a work at
this time of day is absurd.  I should like, however, to add to it a
book that, to my mind undeservedly, is less well known.  This is
Boswell's The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.  The purchase by
Colonel Isham of the Boswell manuscripts has resulted in a new and
unexpurgated edition of it, for, as I suppose everyone knows, Boswell's
manuscript was edited by Malone, who thought proper to tone it down in
accordance with the primly elegant taste of the day, and so left out
much that gave the book flavour.  It enlarges your knowledge both of
Johnson and of Boswell, and if it increases your love and admiration
for the sturdy old doctor, it adds also to your respect for his poor
biographer who has been so much abused.  This is not a writer to be
despised, who had such a quick eye for an amusing incident, so much
appreciation of a racy phrase, and such a rare gift for reproducing the
atmosphere of a scene and the liveliness of a conversation.

The figure of Doctor Johnson towers over the eighteenth century, and he
has been accepted as representing the English character, with its
sterling merits and unhappy defects, at its best.  But if we have all
read his biography, so that we know him more intimately than we know
many of the people we have passed our lives with, few of us have read
any of his writings; and yet he produced one work at least which is in
the highest degree enjoyable.  I know no better book to take on holiday
or to keep at one's bedside than Johnson's Lives of the Poets.  It is
written with limpidity.  It has pungency and humour.  It is full of
horse sense.  Though sometimes his judgments startle us--he found Gray
dull and had little good to say of Milton's Lycidas--you delight in
them because they are an expression of his own personality.  He was as
much interested in the men he wrote of as in their works, and though
you may not have read a word of these, you can hardly fail to be
diverted by the shrewd, lively and tolerant observation with which he
portrays their authors.

I come next to a book that I name with hesitation, for, as I must
remind the reader, I wish to speak here only of books that one would be
the poorer for not having read, and though I have a great fondness for
Gibbon's Autobiography, I am not quite sure that it would have made
much difference to me not to have read it.  I should certainly have
lost a keen pleasure, but if I mention it I feel that I should mention
also a large number of other works, not so great as the greatest, to be
judged by a different standard, and they would need a chapter to
themselves.  But Gibbon's Autobiography is very readable; it is short,
written with the peculiar elegance of which he was master, and it has
both dignity and humour.  Of the latter I cannot resist giving an
example.  When he was at Lausanne he fell in love, but his father
threatening to disinherit him, he prudently gave up the thought of
marrying the object of his affections.  He ends his recital of the
episode with these words: "I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son; and
my wound was insensibly healed by time, absence, and the habits of a
new life."  I think if the book contained nothing else, it would be
worth reading for that delicious sentence.

Now I want to abandon the chronological order to which I have till now
roughly adhered, in order to speak of two great novels, David
Copperfield and Butler's The Way of All Flesh.  This I do, not only
because they are to a notable degree in the great tradition of the
English novel, but also because they have eminently the features which,
when I think of the works I have hitherto summarily considered, seem
characteristic of English literature.  With the possible exception of
Tristram Shandy, all these books have in common something robust,
straightforward, humorous and healthy which, I like to think, is
representative of the race.  There is no especial subtlety in them and
they are somewhat wanting in delicacy.  It is a literature of men of
action rather than of men of thought.  There is a lot of common sense
about it, some sentimentality and a great deal of humanity.  Of David
Copperfield there is nothing to be said but that it is Dickens' best
novel.  His defects are here least noticeable and his merits most
remarkable.  Many long novels have been written since The Way of All
Flesh, but I think it is the last English novel to have been written in
the grand manner; it is the last, of any importance, that owes nothing
to the great novelists of France and Russia.  It is a worthy successor
of Tom Jones, and its author had in him something of the old
lexicographer whom we have agreed to regard as the typical Englishman.

Then I go back to Jane Austen.  I would not claim that she is England's
greatest novelist; with all his faults of exaggeration, vulgarity,
wordiness and sentimentality, Dickens remains that.  He was prodigious.
He did not describe the world as we know it; he created a world.  He
had suspense, drama and humour, and thus was able to give the feel of
the multifariousness and bustle of life as, so far as I know, only one
other novelist, Tolstoy, has done.  Out of his immense vitality he
fashioned a whole series of characters, diverse, individual, and
tremulous--no, "tremulous" isn't the right word--turbulent with life.
He managed his complicated and often highly improbable stories with a
dashing skill that perhaps you must be a novelist thoroughly to
appreciate.  But Jane Austen is perfect.  It is true that her scope is
restricted; she deals with a little world of country gentlefolk,
clergymen and middle-class persons; but who has equalled her insight
into character or surpassed the delicacy and reasonableness with which
she probed its depths?  She does not need my praise.  The only
characteristic I would like to impress upon your attention is one which
she exhibits with so much ease that you might well take it for granted.
Though, on the whole, nothing very much happens in her stories, and she
mostly eschews dramatic incident, you are inveigled, I hardly know how,
to turn from page to page by the urgent desire to know what is going to
happen next; and that is the novelist's essential gift.  Without it he
is done.  I can think of no one who possessed it more fully than Jane
Austen.  My only difficulty now is to decide which of her few novels
especially to recommend.  For my part, I like Mansfield Park best.  I
recognize that its heroine is a little prig and its hero a pompous ass,
but I do not care; it is wise, witty and tender, a masterpiece of
ironical humour and subtle observation.

At this point I would draw your attention to Hazlitt.  His fame has
been overshadowed by that of Charles Lamb, but to my mind he was the
better essayist.  Charles Lamb, a charming, gentle, witty creature whom
to know was to love, has always appealed to the affections of his
readers.  Hazlitt could hardly do that.  He was rude, tactless, envious
and quarrelsome; a man, in truth, of an unpleasing character; but,
unfortunately, it is not always the most worthy men who write the best
books.  In the end it is the personality of the artist that counts, and
for my part I find more to interest me in the tormented, striving,
acrimonious soul of Hazlitt than in Charles Lamb's patient but somewhat
maudlin amiability.  As a writer, Hazlitt was vigorous, bold and
healthy.  What he had to say, he said with decision.  His essays are
full of meat, and when you have read one of them you feel, not as you
do when you have read one of Lamb's, that you have made a meal of
savoury kickshaws, but that you have satisfied your appetite with
substantial fare.  Much of his best work can be found in his Table
Talk, but there have been published a number of selections from his
essays, and none of these can fail to contain My First Acquaintance
With Poets, which, I suppose, is not only the most thrilling piece he
ever wrote but the finest essay in the English language.

Now, two more novels: Thackeray's Vanity Fair, and Emily Bront's
Wuthering Heights.  I can say little about them, for my space is
growing short.  Critics nowadays are inclined to carp at Thackeray.
Perhaps he was unfortunate in his period.  He should have lived and
written in our own time, when he would not have been hampered by the
conventions which prevented the Victorian novelist from telling the
truth, however bitter, as he saw it.  His point of view was modern.  He
was deeply conscious of the mediocrity of human beings and he was
interested in the contradictions of their natures.  And however much
you may deplore his sentimentality and his sermonizing or regret the
weakness that led him to defer unduly to the demands of the public, the
fact remains that in Becky Sharp he created one of the most real,
living and forcible characters in English fiction.

Wuthering Heights is unique.  It is an awkward novel to read, because
sometimes it so outrages probability that you are completely
bewildered; but it is passionate and profoundly moving; it has the
depth and power of a great poem.  To read it is not like reading a work
of fiction, in which, however absorbed, you can remind yourself, if
need be, that it is only a story; it is to have a shattering experience
in your own life.

I can but name three novels which I think it would be a pity to have
left unread.  They are George Eliot's Middlemarch, Trollope's The
Eustace Diamonds and Meredith's The Egoist.

The reader will have noticed, perhaps with surprise, that hitherto I
have said nothing of poetry.  I do not think our race has produced
either painters, sculptors or composers who can rank with the best of
other countries; their achievements have been respectable rather than
pre-eminent; but I do not believe it is a racial or national bias that
leads me to claim that our poets are supreme.  But because poetry is
the flower and crown of literature, it cannot afford to be mediocre.  I
remember Edmund Gosse telling me that he would much rather read a
volume of minor verse than an average novel; it took less time, he
said, and required no mental effort.  Well, I have no use for verse,
however accomplished; to me, unless poetry is great, it is nothing, and
I would sooner read a newspaper.  I cannot read poetry at all times and
in all places.  I want to be in a particular mood and I want a
favourable environment.  I like to read poetry in a garden towards the
end of a summer day; I like to sit on a cliff with a view of the sea or
to lie on a mossy bank in a wood and take out the volume I have brought
in my pocket.  But even the greatest poets have written a great deal
that is tedious to read; many versifiers have written endless volumes
and in the end produced no more than two or three poems.  I think that
is enough to justify them, but I do not want to read so much to gain so
little.  I like anthologies.  The critics, I understand, have a
contempt for them; they say that in order to appreciate an author you
must read him in full.  But I do not read poetry as a critic; I read it
as a human being in need of solace, refreshment and peace.  I am
thankful to the sensitive scholar who has taken the trouble to weed out
from the great mass of English poetry what is not so good and has left
for my perusal only what is to my purpose.  The three best anthologies
I know are Palgrave's Golden Treasury, The Oxford Book of English
Verse, and the admirable English Galaxy of Shorter Poems, by Gerald
Bullett.  But we live in the world of today and we should not neglect
the writings of the poets of our own time.  They, too, may have
something important to give us.  Unfortunately, the only anthology
that, to my knowledge, has been made of them is so inadequate that I
forbear even to name it.

Of course, everyone must read the great tragedies of Shakespeare.  He
is not only the greatest poet that ever lived but the glory of our
race.  But knowing, as I do, these plays pretty well, I wish that
someone with taste, knowledge and discretion could be found who would
make an anthology of Shakespeare's plays and poems, putting in not only
the famous passages with which we should all be familiar but also
fragments, single lines even; so that I might have in a convenient
volume a book to which I could always turn when I wanted the cream of
all poetry.[1]



[1] Since I wrote these lines George Rylands has produced an anthology
under the title of "The Ages of Man," which comes as near fulfilling
the wish I have here expressed as, I suppose, anyone can expect.  It is
a welcome gift to a troubled world.




_II_

In my first chapter I confined myself to the works of English authors.
They are the common inheritance of the English-speaking peoples.  Now I
want to tell you about some books in other languages, but for the sake
of your convenience, only of such as can be read in translations: and
that makes my pleasant task simpler, for it obliges me to leave poetry
on one side.  That you must read in the original or not at all.  I am
not a poet, and I speak of poetry with diffidence, but it seems to me
that its sound is so inextricably part of the satisfaction it affords
that no translation, however skilful, can do more than suggest its
quality.  I would go farther; and since words have for us associations
that we have come by with our mother's milk, with recollections of our
childhood, with our first love, we can to the full only appreciate
poetry in our own native tongue.

Let us then deal only with prose.  The first book I wish to speak of is
Don Quixote.  Shelton made a translation of it early in the seventeenth
century, but you may not find it very convenient to read; and since I
want you to read with delight, I suggest that you should read it in
Ormsby's more recent version, published in 1885.  But I should like to
warn you of one thing: Cervantes was a poor man and he was paid to
provide a certain amount of work; he had by him, one may presume, some
short stories, and it seemed to him a very good notion to use them to
fill out his book.  I have read them, but I read them as Doctor Johnson
read Paradise Lost--as a duty rather than with pleasure--and if I were
you, I would skip them.  In Ormsby's version, in order to make it easy
to do this, they are printed in smaller type.  After all, it is Don
Quixote himself you want--Don Quixote with his faithful Sancho Panza;
he is tender, loyal and great-hearted; and though you cannot but laugh
at his misadventures (less now than his contemporaries did, for we are
more squeamish than they were and the jests that were played on him are
sometimes too cruel to amuse us), you must be very insensitive if you
do not feel for the Knight of the Rueful Countenance not only affection
but respect.  The fantasy of man has never created a personage that so
deeply appeals to a generous nature.

I do not want to speak of French literature just yet, because it is so
rich, and contains so many books which I should like at least to name,
that I am afraid if I once start upon it I shall leave myself no space
to deal with certain books in other languages that I am sure it would
be a real loss never to have read.  But I should like here to mention
one, since it, too, offers the portrait of a man, a man of a very
different sort from Don Quixote, who insinuates himself into your
affections in such a way that when you have once made his acquaintance
he becomes your treasured friend.  This is Montaigne, who in the course
of his essays painted so complete a picture of himself, with his
tastes, his oddities, his frailties, that you come to know him more
intimately than you are likely ever to know any of your own friends.
And in getting to know him you discover not a little about yourself,
for in his patient and humorous examination of his own nature he threw
a searching light on human nature in general.  Much has been said of
Montaigne's scepticism, and if to see that there are two sides to a
question, and that when certainty is impossible it is sensible to keep
an open mind, is scepticism, I suppose he was a sceptic.  But his
scepticism taught him tolerance--a virtue our own day more than ever
needs--and his interest in human beings, his enjoyment of life, led him
to an indulgence that, could we but possess it, would help us not only
to be happy ourselves but to make others happy also.

Montaigne was magnificently translated by Florio, but perhaps the later
translation of Cotton, edited by William Carew Hazlitt, will be found
more readable by those who do not much care for the flamboyance of
Elizabethan English.  You can choose any of the essays at random and be
sure of entertainment, but to get Montaigne at his best you would do
better to read the third book as a whole.  The essays it contains are
longer, and so give greater scope for the charming discursiveness which
is characteristic of him; they are more serious, though not less
amusing; and in them, master as he was by then of his medium and
confident in his readers' interest, he gives you the quintessence of
his vagabond spirit.  Do not think from the title that an essay will
not interest you, for his titles have generally very little to do with
the contents.  In the essay entitled On Some Verses of Virgil, for
instance, you will find a disquisition on the French language which is
one of the most enchanting things he ever wrote, and also a variety of
remarks frank enough to bring a blush even to a cheek that is not
prudish.

Now I want to leap across a couple of centuries and try to persuade you
to read a book which most people will tell you, if they have ever heard
of it, is unreadable.  This is Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, and it was
very conscientiously translated by Carlyle.  Goethe is under a cloud in
Germany just now; he aimed at being a citizen of the world rather than
a citizen of the state, and that is an attitude which finds small
favour with the present rulers of his country; but even before they
attained power Wilhelm Meister was little read even in Germany.  Once,
in Berlin, finding myself in a circle of intellectual persons, I
aroused the utmost surprise by expressing my admiration for it.  Not
one of them had read it, for they had been given to understand that it
was of unsurpassed dullness.  I besought them to see for themselves,
and when, a few months later, I met some of them again, I was not
displeased to hear that they had listened to me and, having read the
neglected book, were disposed no longer to mock at my admiration.  My
opinion is that it is a very interesting and significant work.  It is
the last of the eighteenth-century novels of sentiment, it is the first
of the romantic novels of the nineteenth century, and it is the
forerunner of the autobiographical novels of which there has been in
our own day such a plentiful crop.  The hero is as colourless as are
the heroes of most autobiographical novels.  I do not quite know why
this should be.  Perhaps it is because when we write about ourselves we
are disconcerted by the contrast between our aims and our achievements,
and insensibly dwell on the disappointment we feel with ourselves for
having made so much less of our opportunities than we had hoped to, and
thus present the reader with a frustrated, rather than with a
fulfilled, character.  Perhaps it is that, just as when we walk down
the street all the exciting things seem to happen on the other side,
our own experiences appear so commonplace to us that we cannot describe
them without making ourselves commonplace too; and it is only the
experiences of others that have the thrilling quality of what is
strange and romantic.  But on the thread of this feckless creature
Goethe has strung a great number of curious incidents; he has
surrounded him with unusual, varied and fantastic persons, and he has
used him as a mouthpiece for his own ideas on all manner of subjects.
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship--I cannot recommend the Travels, which
are intolerable--is at once poetical, absurd, profound and dull.  Well,
the dull parts you can skip.  Carlyle said that he had not got so many
ideas out of any book that he had read for six years, but it is only
honest to add that he said also: "Goethe is the greatest genius that
has lived for a century and the greatest ass that has lived for three."

Then, after another leap across the years, I must draw your attention
to three Russian novels of the nineteenth century: Turgenev's Fathers
and Sons, Tolstoy's War and Peace, and Dostoevsky's The Brothers
Karamazov.  Of the three authors, Turgenev is the least considerable.
But he was an artist, with a delicate sense of the poetry of life, and
he had charm, pathos and humanity.  He does not greatly move, but
neither does he bore; and in Fathers and Sons, by far his best novel,
he has depicted for the first time in fiction the Nihilist who was the
forerunner of the Communist of our own day.  It is curious to recognize
in Bazarov, his hero, many of the traits which we have seen in men who,
according to our political opinions, have wrought havoc or opened new
vistas on the world we now live in.  Bazarov is a brutal creature, but
he is strangely impressive and not altogether unsympathetic; his power
is manifest, and though he has no opportunity for action and so expends
himself in words, you cannot but be convinced that, given propitious
circumstances, he is capable of translating into deeds the ideas which
his audacious mind has formulated.  He has a dark and pitiful greatness.

When I began to write these pages I intended to recommend you to read
Tolstoy's Anna Karenina rather than War and Peace, for in my
recollection it was the better novel of the two; but I took the
precaution to read both books again, and now I have no doubt that War
and Peace is incomparably the greater.  In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy
painted a rich and vivid picture of Russian society during the last
half of the nineteenth century, but the story he had to tell has too
much the aspect of a moral tract entirely to please me.  Tolstoy
strongly disapproved of Anna's love for Vronsky, and in order to bring
it home to the reader that the wages of sin is death he loaded the dice
against her.  There is no reason, except that Tolstoy had it in for
her, why Anna shouldn't have divorced her husband, whom she had never
loved and who cared nothing for her, married Vronsky and lived happily
ever after.  To bring about the tragic ending on which he had set his
mind, Tolstoy had to make his heroine stupid, tiresome, exacting and
unreasonable; and though, heaven knows, I would never deny that there
are plenty of women who are all these, I do not find it possible
greatly to sympathize with the troubles their folly has brought upon
them.

If I hesitated about War and Peace, it is because it seems to me
sometimes tedious.  There are too many battles narrated in too great
detail, and the experiences of Pierre with Freemasonry are exceedingly
dull.  But all this can be skipped.  It remains a great novel.  It
describes in epic proportions the growth and development of an entire
generation.  The scene of action is all Europe from the Volga to
Austerlitz; a vast number of persons, wonderfully realized, march
across the huge stage; and this immense amount of material is
consummately handled, with the minute attention to detail of a Dutch
picture when the occasion demands, and then, when a different treatment
is needed, with the breathless sweep of Michael Angelo's frescoes in
the Sistine Chapel.  You get an overwhelming impression of the
confusion of life and of the pettiness of individuals in contrast with
the dark forces that mould the fate of nations.  War and Peace is a
thrilling, tremendous novel.  War and Peace is a work of genius.  In
it, by the way, Tolstoy did one of the most difficult things a novelist
can do: he drew a perfectly natural, charming, lively portrait of a
young girl; she is perhaps the most enchanting heroine of fiction; but
then he did a thing that none but a great novelist would have thought
of: in an epilogue he shows her to you as she has become when, happily
married, she is the mother of a family.  That exquisite creature has
grown fussy, commonplace and a trifle too fat.  You are shocked, but
you have only for a moment to consider the matter to realize how likely
this was to happen.  It adds a last note of verisimilitude to this
amazing novel.

You will remember that in my first chapter I pointed out that it was
useless, in my opinion, to read books that you did not enjoy; but now
that I come to The Brothers Karamazov I hesitate; for I wonder whether
it is possible to read this long, powerful and tragic work with
enjoyment.  It depends on what you get enjoyment from.  If you can get
it from the sight of a storm at sea, from the fearful splendour of a
forest fire or from the tumult of a great river in flood, then you will
get it from The Brothers Karamazov.  But I said also that I would speak
only of books that you would be the poorer for not having read, only of
books that in one way or another increased your spiritual riches and
enabled you to live your life with greater fullness; and I have no
doubt that The Brothers Karamazov rightly takes its place, perhaps a
supreme place, in this list.  There is nothing in fiction that remotely
resembles the novels of Dostoevsky except the Wuthering Heights of our
own Emily Bront and Melville's Moby Dick, and The Brothers Karamazov
is the most tremendous of all Dostoevsky's works.  But you must not
read it as though you were reading a novel about ordinary human beings
such as you meet in the ordinary course of life.  It is not for nothing
that I spoke just now of a storm at sea or a forest on fire.
Dostoevsky's characters have an affinity with the dark forces of
nature.  They are not common mortals; passionate and intensely
spiritual, excruciatingly sensitive, capable of the extremity of
suffering, they are in everything inordinate.  They are tormented by
God.  Their actions are the actions of madmen in a madhouse, but there
is something strangely significant in their extravagance; and it is
borne in upon you that in this agonized revealing of themselves they
reveal hidden depths and terrible powers of the human soul.

The Brothers Karamazov is a shapeless book, of great length, and in
parts diffuse; but except for certain chapters towards the end, it
holds you with a firm grip; if it contains scenes of great horror, it
contains others of great beauty.  I know no novel in which the
sublimity and the vileness of man are so wonderfully portrayed, none in
which the tragic adventures and the shattering experiences of which his
soul is capable are depicted with so much compassion and so much force.
Dostoevsky had the deep tenderness for suffering human beings that only
suffering can bring.  "Be no man's judge," he says; "love men and do
not be afraid of their sins; love man in his sin."  It is with no sense
of despair that you close the book, but with exhilaration, for the
beauty of goodness shines forth through the ugliness of crime.

Upon looking back on what I have written, I notice that I have more
than once suggested to you that you would be wise now and then to skip.
Perhaps it was unnecessary.  I surmise that only scholars will fail to
exercise that useful art with the quotations from the Latin with which
Montaigne, following the fashion of his day, plentifully peppered his
essays; and it would be an assiduous reader indeed who could read in
full the last few chapters of The Brothers Karamazov.  I know that I
found myself content to glance at rather than to peruse the speeches
which Dostoevsky put into the mouths of counsel at the trial.  I think
all the books I have mentioned are important enough to be read
thoroughly, but even they are more enjoyable if you exercise your right
to skip.  Change of taste has rendered certain parts of even great
works tedious.  We no longer want to be bothered with the moral
dissertations of which the eighteenth century was so fond, nor with the
lengthy descriptions of scenery which were favoured in the nineteenth.
When the novel became realistic authors fell in love with detail for
its own sake, and it took them a long time to discover that detail is
interesting only if it is relevant.  To know how to skip is to know how
to read with profit and pleasure, but how you are to learn it I cannot
tell you, for it is a trick I have never acquired.  I am a bad skipper;
I am afraid of missing something that may be of value to me, and so
will read pages that only weary me; when once I begin to skip, I cannot
stop, and end the book dissatisfied with myself because I am aware I
have not done it justice, and then am apt to think that I might just as
well never have read it at all.

Now let me get back to French literature.  It is the richest and most
varied in the world except in one respect; the French on the whole are
indifferent poets.  They have on the other hand cultivated all the arts
of prose with abundance and the most brilliant success.  It is only
proper that they should have had for so long so great an influence on
the writers of our own nation, for till recently, in prose composition
the French had almost everything to teach us and we almost everything
to learn.  France, of course, had manifest advantages: its central
position in Europe, its dense population, its wealth, its civilization,
were favourable to the growth of a great literature; and the natural
bent of the French mind towards lucidity, moderation and
reasonableness--qualities more useful to the writer of prose than to
the poet--was favourable to the emergence of great talent.  French
became a precise and logical language, enabling writers to express
themselves with grace and clarity, when English, not yet having
assimilated the languages it had been for centuries absorbing, was
still muddled and cumbersome.  From the immense wealth of this
literature it is plain that in the small space at my disposal I can
pick out but a handful of books.

The first one to which I would draw your attention is very short.  It
is The Princess of Cleves, by Madame de la Fayette.  It was published
in 1678, and the historians will tell you that it is the earliest
psychological novel.  That, of course, is interesting, but what is more
to the point is that it is a very singular and a very modern story.
The scene is the court of Henri II.  The heroine, a very great lady and
a virtuous woman, respects but does not love her husband, and when she
meets the Duke of Nemours at a court ball, falls deeply in love with
him.  But she is determined not to dishonour herself; and so that she
may with her husband's help more easily resist the temptation that
distracts her, she confesses her passion to him.  He is a man of fine
character and he trusts his wife, he knows that she is incapable of
betraying him; but human nature is weak, and against his will he is
racked with jealousy.  He becomes suspicious, irritable, exasperating;
I know nothing in fiction more natural than the way in which his
character, under the strain, gradually deteriorates.  It is a moving
tale, for the personages concerned are desirous of doing what they
consider their duty and are defeated by circumstances beyond their
control.  The moral seems to be that you should ask of no one more than
it is in his power to give.  It is an instructive book to read
nowadays, when it seems generally accepted that love knows no law and
that duty must in all cases yield to inclination.

Next I would have you read another novel, but of a very different sort.
This is Prvost's Manon Lescaut.  Its persons have none of the nobility
of soul which enables those of The Princess of Cleves to face their
tragic situation in the grand manner; they are but frail, erring human
beings, and our hearts go out to them because we recognize in them our
own weakness.  Here is a human story.  I envy anyone who reads this
delicious book for the first time.  How fresh, how natural and how
charming is Manon, for all her faults; and how moving is Des Grieux's
constant love for the faithless creature!  Weak?  Of course he is weak.
A baggage?  Of course she is a baggage.  She is inconstant, mercenary
and cruel, and she is loving, generous and tender; the type is
immortal, and I think it will be long before the memory of pretty Manon
fades from the hearts of men.

Now let us speak of another short novel, Voltaire's Candide, within
whose few pages are contained more wit, more mockery, more mischievous
invention, more sense and more fun, than ever man compressed in so
small a space.  It was ostensibly written, as everyone knows, to
ridicule the philosophical optimism which was then in fashion, and at a
moment when the earthquake of Lisbon, with its widespread destruction
and great loss of life, had given a nasty jar to the worthy people who
believed that the world we live in is the best of all possible worlds.
Never has a man had a more versatile and lively mind than Voltaire, and
in this novel he exercised his cynical gaiety at the expense of most
subjects which men have agreed to take seriously--religion and
government, love, ambition and loyalty--and its moral, such as it is
(and not a bad one either) is: Be tolerant and cultivate your garden:
that is, do whatever you have to do with diligence and fortitude.

Then I come to a very important work--The Confessions of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau.  It is a book that few, I should imagine, will read without
interest, though many will read it with disgust.  But if you find the
study of human nature the most absorbing of all studies, you cannot
fail to find this book rewarding, for here you have a man who has laid
bare his soul with candour.  He does not, like many who have written of
themselves, merely exhibit frailties which after all are rather
engaging; he does not hesitate to show himself ungrateful,
unscrupulous, dishonest, base and mean.  You can have little sympathy
with him, since he is despicable; and yet such is his love of natural
beauty, so tender is his sentiment, so miraculous his narrative gift
that, however great your repulsion, you are fascinated; and I don't
know who, if he is completely honest with himself, can read the
confessions of this weak-willed, petulant, vain and miserable creature
without saying to himself: "After all, is there so much to choose
between him and me?  If the whole truth were known about me, should I,
who turn away shocked from these revelations, cut so pretty a figure?"
So I warn you, I think no one can read this book without some
disturbance to the self-complacency which is our chief defence in our
dealing with this difficult world.

During the nineteenth century France was wonderfully rich in fiction.
Its three greatest novelists were Balzac, Stendhal and Flaubert.
Taking him all in all, I suppose Balzac is the greatest novelist who
ever lived.  Like Dickens, he was more at his ease with the
extraordinary than with the usual, and he depicted the vile with
greater force than the deserving; but he was a creator even more
prodigious than Dickens, and his scope was greater.  He sought to write
the history of society in his own time, and in some measure he
succeeded.  When you read him you do not feel that you are concerned
with a limited group of persons, but with the commonweal at large, in
which bigger issues than the fate of individuals are involved.  I think
he was the first novelist to realize the importance of affairs; his
people have shops or go to business, make fortunes or lose them; and
though love--as with all novelists--plays a large part in his novels,
money is the motive force in the world of his invention.  He wrote
badly, he was excessive, he had no taste, but he had a passion and a
vigour which enabled him to create characters, extravagant and abnormal
doubtless, who are violently and magnificently alive.  He is often
blamed for the melodramatic nature of his stories, but I ask myself how
it is possible to expect that these exceptional persons should move in
a world of measure and restraint.  The storm needs the mountains and
the sea for its grandeur.  It is hard to choose one among the many
deeply interesting novels that Balzac wrote, but since to my mind
Father Goriot shows most completely his thrilling and varied power, I
think that is the one I would recommend to your attention.

Stendhal wrote two novels which I would have you read; first, The Red
and the Black, and then, if you like it as much as I do, The
Charterhouse of Parma.  For I must tell you that he is my favourite
novelist.  I like the plain and exact manner in which he wrote and the
cool precision of his psychological analysis.  He scrutinized the
workings of the human heart with perspicacity.  Energy was the quality
that he most admired in men, and the creatures of his fancy that he has
studied with most elaborate and anxious care are those who will allow
no obstacle to prevent them from exercising their forceful will and who
will hesitate at no crime to achieve the end on which they have
determined.  To my mind, The Red and the Black is for its first two
thirds one of the best novels ever written; I think it fails then, and
for a very singular reason.  Stendhal founded it on fact, but the
character he invented, Julien Sorel, ran away with him, as the
characters of our invention often do, and when Stendhal forced him to
behave in such a way as to fit the actual circumstances which had been
the inspiration of his story, you are disconcerted, for you cannot
believe that the unscrupulous, ambitious and resolute man whom he has
drawn would act with such a foolish disregard of consequences.  Now I
come to Flaubert's Madame Bovary.  It is a landmark in the history of
modern fiction.  On reading it again recently I could not but feel that
Flaubert's desire to be unshrinkingly objective had resulted in a
certain frigidity of tone, a certain dryness, and this somewhat
qualified my admiration; but I still thought it a great and powerful
work.  The characters are described with minuteness and verisimilitude.
It leaves you, when you have finished it, with a feeling of profound,
yet half-contemptuous, pity for those commonplace people for whom life
has proved so cruel.  The persons that the author has set before you
are so real, they suffer so desperately, that they cease to be merely
individuals, they become typical of humanity; and if you must extract a
moral from a novel, you may extract from Madame Bovary the
not-unimportant one that idle dreams, reveries that have no chance of
fulfilment, can lead only to disaster; and oddly enough you return to
the moral of Candide--take things as they come and do your duty with
good will.

I have reached the limits of my space, and though there are other
books, of smaller consequence, which I should have liked to talk to you
about, I must content myself with only briefly mentioning a few more.
Benjamin Constant wrote a short novel called Adolphe in which,
reversing the practice of most authors who are more inclined to
describe the beginnings of a love affair, he has analyzed with rare
power its decline.  It is a real human document.  In The Three
Musketeers you have a grand romantic novel.  It may not be literature,
the characters may be sketchy and the plot ill-contrived, but it is
wonderfully readable; and to be that, I may remind you, is the
novelist's indispensable faculty.  Anatole France had a small but
exquisite talent, which he displayed with rare felicity in a volume of
stories called The Mother-of-Pearl Case.  He was at one time too highly
esteemed, but the neglect which has now befallen him is unjust.

Finally, I must remind you that our own time has produced in Marcel
Proust a novelist who can stand comparison with the greatest.  His work
has been so well translated that I am inclined to think it alone, of
all those I have mentioned, loses nothing in its English dress.  He
wrote one novel only, but that in fifteen volumes.  When first they
were made known to an astonished world, they were praised out of all
reason.  I myself wrote that I preferred being bored by Proust to being
amused by any other writer.  A second reading has made most of us
assume a more sensible attitude.  He is often repetitive, his
self-analyses grow wearisome, and his obsession with the tedious
emotion of jealousy fatigues in the long run even his most willing
readers; but his defects are far more than compensated by his merits.
He is a great and original writer.  He has subtlety, creative power and
psychological insight; but I think the future will hail him above all
as a wonderful humorist.  So I recommend you to start at the beginning
of this copious novel, read till you are bored, skip and start reading
again; but to take care to miss nothing of Madame Verdurin or the Baron
de Charlus.  They are the richest creations of the comic fancy our time
has seen.

One word more.  In these two chapters I have drawn your attention to
various books, and I have had little but good to say of them; for if I
had not thought them in their various ways valuable, I would not have
recommended you to read them.  I have by the way said something of
their authors; and I am conscious that it must seem rather absurd for
me, as though I were a prospective Member of Parliament trying to get
on good terms with voters, to give Jane Austen a chuck under the chin,
as it were, a pat on the head to Goethe and a friendly nod to
Dostoevsky.  But I do not know what else I could have done.  Merely to
have given you a list of books would have been dull.  In the short
space allowed to me I could treat of them only summarily, but because I
wanted to interest you in them I had to say at least something about
them.  All I can hope now is that if you read them, or any of them, you
will find them enjoyable as well as spiritually profitable; and I
should be glad to think that when afterwards you look back on them you
will feel, as I do, that you are the better for having read them, and
that they have given you something of value that you would not be
without.




_III_

When the two articles on books, English and foreign, which I wrote for
The Saturday Evening Post appeared, a number of readers expressed the
desire that I should write a third on American books.  Thinking well of
the suggestion, the editor passed it on to me; but I replied that this
task was one that should evidently be entrusted to an American author.
This, however, was apparently not what his readers wanted and so, not
without misgiving, I agreed to do the best I could in the matter.  I
want to make my position clear.  Though in the course of a long life I
have read a great many American books--indeed I could not have been
more than ten when with gales of laughter I read Artemus Ward and
Helen's Babies--I cannot pretend that I have read nearly as widely as
any American fond of reading will certainly have done.  There is no
reason why I should.  I have read at random.  There are books in every
country that have only a local interest, and the native of another
country cannot be expected to find in them much to his purpose.  I have
not for example felt any need to read the works of Jonathan Edwards,
and I have found the dialect of Uncle Remus a stumbling-block too
difficult for me to cope with.  I claim no authority for any of the
opinions I shall here express; I shall state why I hold them; but I
freely acknowledge that they are those of an Englishman who has read
from his national standpoint and whose opinions thus have a certain
bias.  I am aware that some of them, disagreeing with the common
judgments of critical authority in the United States, may arouse
disapproval.  I have sought what was most American in American
literature and have felt little inclination to concern myself with such
writers as found their inspiration in England.  To interest me an
American book must smack of the soil.  I cannot think that I shall be
able to tell Americans anything they do not know about the books I
propose shortly to discuss, but it may be that I shall be able to give
foreigners, including my own countrymen, a list of books which will
give them an inkling of the Americanism of America and so enable them
to get an understanding of the influences which have gone to form the
character of a people with which the future must bring them into
ever-increasing communication.

I propose to deal only with those works which may be justly regarded as
classics.  I shall omit all mention of recent productions, partly from
an inadequate knowledge of them and partly because it is too soon to
tell what in the immense output of the last fifty years will prove to
be of permanent and characteristic value.  Contrary to some critical
opinion, it is no proof that because a great many people have wanted to
read a book and so made it a best seller, it is worthless; David
Copperfield, Father Goriot and War and Peace have all been best
sellers; but neither is it proof that it is a masterpiece; it may
appeal for any one of a dozen reasons and when those reasons no longer
obtain it may be unreadable.  My own plan is never to let myself be
persuaded to read a best seller for two or three years after
publication; it is astonishing then how many books that have been
received with acclamation I find I can without loss leave unread.

I must remind you here of something that I have already insisted upon,
namely that I am very strongly of opinion that you should read for
enjoyment.  To my mind it is very ill-advised to look upon reading as a
task; reading is a pleasure, one of the greatest that life affords, and
if these books of which I am now going to speak to you do not move,
interest or amuse you, there is no possible reason for you to read
them.  It is from this consideration, indeed, that I set out to write
my article with somewhat less diffidence than, since I was treating of
matters in which I could not pretend to be expert, I might reasonably
be supposed to have felt.  For, conscious that my knowledge was
imperfect, when I set about gathering my materials, I read two or three
standard histories of American literature.  I wanted to compare my
views with those of the highest authorities, and when I found that
these did not agree with mine, consider whether my own should be
modified.  But I was very much surprised to discover that they were
almost exclusively concerned with matters that I thought had nothing to
do with literature.  They enlarged, often in an interesting fashion and
I have no doubt with sound judgment, upon the social conditions which
prevailed when such and such an author wrote, and upon the political
circumstances which influenced his work; they discussed his ideas on
the burning questions of the day and examined the philosophical
implications of his thought.  And what not.  But they did not seem to
think it worth while to say much about his style; they showed small
interest in the solidity of his construction, the ingenuity of his
invention or the originality of his characterization; they did not
trouble to say whether he was readable or not.  So far as I could see,
it had entirely escaped the attention of these conscientious gentlemen
that a book may be read for delight and that literature is an art.

But literature is an art.  It is not philosophy, it is not science, it
is not social economy, it is not politics; it is an art.  And art is
for delight.

There is but one more thing to say before I get down to the business of
commenting on the books I have chosen to speak of.  It must not be
expected that they will make such a show as those I have briefly
discussed in my previous chapters.  Genius is a word often loosely
applied; I would not myself apply it to the author of three or four
successful plays or of two or three successful novels; genius to my
mind is something that arises very rarely, and I am not sure that I
should be comfortable in applying it to any of the authors I shall
presently mention.  It is well enough to have talent.  Some of these
men had great talent; others had less.  Most of them had formidable
difficulties to contend with; whether they were conscious of it or not,
in order to create a national literature they had to fight their way
through the obstruction of the foreign influences to which they were
subjected, not only by their own upbringing but also by their readers'
prejudices; they were living in a new country, in process of forming
its own civilization, and practical matters had naturally an importance
which thrust the arts into the background.  As we know, some writers
felt themselves unable to cope with the situation and fled to what they
thought was the happier environment of Europe.  It may be that those
who wisely remained would have created more perfect works if
circumstances had been more favourable; it speaks well for the vigour
of their minds and the authenticity of their talents that they should
notwithstanding everything have produced works of uncommon merit.
American literature is not much more than a hundred years old.  It is
only just to remember that English literature would not be the
magnificent monument to the English spirit that it is if you left out
of it (to say nothing of Chaucer, Shakespeare and the great poets and
prose writers of the seventeenth century) the whole of the eighteenth;
if it had no Pope, no Swift, no Fielding, no Doctor Johnson and no
Boswell.

Yet it is with a book written in the eighteenth century that I propose
to begin.  The histories of literature contain few autobiographies;
they contain none more consistently entertaining than Benjamin
Franklin's.  It is written plainly, as befitted its author, but in
pleasant easy English, for Franklin, as we know, had studied under good
masters; and it is interesting not only for its narrative but for the
vivid and credible portrait which the author has succeeded in painting
of himself.  I cannot understand why in America Franklin is often
spoken of with depreciation.  Fault is found with his character; his
precepts are condemned as mean and his ideals as ignoble.  It is
obvious that he was not a romanticist.  He was shrewd and industrious.
He was a good business man.  He wished the good of his fellow-men, but
was too clear-sighted to be deceived by them, and he used their
failings with pawky humour to achieve the ends, sometimes selfish, it
is true, but as often altruistic, that he had in view.  He liked the
good things of life, but accepted hardship with serenity.  He had
courage and generosity.  He was a good companion, a man of witty and
caustic conversation, and he liked his liquor; he was fond of women,
and being no prude, took his pleasure of them.  He was a man of
prodigious versatility.  He led a happy and a useful life.  He achieved
great things for his country, his state and the city in which he dwelt.
To my thinking he is as truly the typical American as Doctor Johnson is
the typical Englishman, and when I ask myself why it is that his
countrymen are apt to grudge him their sympathy, I can only think of
one explanation.  He was entirely devoid of hokum.

Now let us come without further delay to the nineteenth century.  The
outstanding figures are Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan
Poe, and if I were constrained to ascribe genius to three American
writers I would unhesitatingly choose these names.  But I will not
speak of them yet.  What I want to trace in this article, so far as my
limited knowledge extends and my space permits, is the emergence of
Americanism in American literature; for that, I repeat, is what chiefly
interests me and should, I think, interest you; and so I shall attempt
no chronological order.  I may add, to save repetition, that I shall
only speak of books which I think are for one reason or another
eminently readable.  No one can afford not to read them; no educated
person can read them without both profit and pleasure.

I am bound to confess, however, that on rereading The Scarlet Letter
for my present purpose the profit and pleasure I gained were of a
limited character.  I see no harm in putting things in their proper
place, and I must point out to you that the last forty years have seen
the rise in America of at least half a dozen much better novelists than
Hawthorne ever was.  It is only prejudice and the fact that they are
alive and in our midst that can blind us to it.  But The Scarlet Letter
is a famous romance, and it has been read, I suppose, by every American
who has read anything at all.  For my part I found the introduction
entitled The Custom House, more interesting than the tale.  It has
charm, lightness and humour.  The first thing you ask of a novel is
that you should believe it; if you feel instinctively that the
characters do not behave with ordinary common sense the spell is broken
and the novelist has lost his hold on you.  Now, Hawthorne early in his
narrative was faced with a difficulty; a reason had to be found why
Hester Prynne, free to go anywhere, should decide to remain in the
place where the humiliation to which she had been exposed must make her
life intolerable; and he found it naturally enough in her love for
Arthur Dimmesdale, which was so great that she preferred,
notwithstanding the attendant shame, to remain where he was.  But
Hawthorne did not face a much greater difficulty, for if he had he
could never have written the story he did: the facts of life were not
unknown to the Puritans, who were as practical as they were pious, and
no stork brought the baby to a Hester who never suspected that such an
event was in prospect.  It is incredible that she should not have gone
to some distant place to be secretly delivered of her child, and if the
lovers could not bear to be separated, it is hard to understand why,
since on a later occasion they had no difficulty in arranging to sail
back to Europe together, they should not have adopted such an obvious
course when the occasion was so much more urgent.  For all they knew
Roger Chillingworth was dead and, like Benjamin Franklin with the
respectable Miss Read a century later, they could have effected a
common-law marriage.  Hawthorne did not possess the gift of creating
living characters; Roger Chillingworth is merely a bundle of
malignancies, not a human being, and Hester is but a fine piece of
statuary.  The Reverend Mr Dimmesdale comes to life only when, the pair
having finally decided on flight, he is anxious to know the precise
time at which the vessel on which they propose to sail may be expected
to depart.  He has composed his Election Sermon and is unwilling not to
deliver it.  That is a nice and human touch.  It is not then for its
story that I would have you read The Scarlet Letter and if you have
done so already to read it again, but for the impressive quality of its
language.  Hawthorne formed his style on the great writers of the
eighteenth century.  Such a phrase as: "there was never in his heart so
much cruelty as would have brushed the down off a butterfly's wing,"
might well have been written by Sterne, and he would have been pleased
with it.  Hawthorne had a delicate ear and great skill in the
construction of an elaborate phrase.  He could write a sentence half a
page long, rich with subsidiary clauses, that was resonant, balanced
and crystal clear.  He could be splendid and various.  His prose had
the sober opulence of a Gothic tapestry, but under the restraint of his
taste it never became turgid or monotonous.  His metaphors were
significant, his similes apt, and his vocabulary fitting to his matter.
Fashions come and go in literature and it may well be that the
hairy-chested, rough-neck prose which is in favour today will in the
future lose its vogue.  It may be that readers will ask for a more
formal, a more distinguished way of writing; authors then will be glad
to learn from Hawthorne how to manage a sentence of more than half a
dozen words, how to combine dignity with lucidity, and how without
pedantry to please both the eye and the ear.

Since Hawthorne belongs to what historians of literature call the
School of Concord, of which Emerson and Thoreau were distinguished
members, this seems a fitting place to speak of them.  The interest of
Walden must depend on the taste of the reader.  For my part I read it
without boredom, but without exhilaration.  It is very pleasantly
written, in a style without formality, with ease and grace; but if I
were snowbound on a Western prairie, with a deaf mute as my only
companion, I must admit that I should be dismayed to find that
Thoreau's Walden was the only book in the log cabin.  It is the kind of
work which needs an author of vigorous personality, with a background
of singular experience and a store of out-of-the-way learning; but
Thoreau was a man of supine character, his knowledge of the world was
small, and his reading, though respectable, followed a well trodden
path.  I do not think he had the emotional force to make the experiment
which is the theme of his book very important.  He discovered that if
you limit your wants you can satisfy them at small expense.  We knew
that.  "It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual
health," says Hawthorne, "to be brought into habits of companionship
with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and
whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate."
This is very true, and none should take it more to heart than the
writer of books.

Emerson, of course, is a figure of much greater substance.  I was first
led to read him many years ago by a fair-haired lady I met on the Lake
of Como.  On the excursions we took she always carried a volume of the
Essays with her and she had heavily underlined in blue pencil (perhaps
to bring out the colour of her eyes) the passages that particularly
struck her.  There were at least two or three on every page.  She told
me that she found Emerson a great solace.  She said that in all the
tribulations and difficulties of her life she went to him and found
something to her purpose.  I met her again many years later in Hawaii
and she very kindly asked me to lunch with her at a house she had
rented for the season.  She had always been wealthy, but since our last
meeting had come up in the world, for her husband had been raised to
the peerage and she was now a woman of title.  She received me in a
Callot dress (the Sisters Callot being then the most fashionable
dressmakers in Paris), wearing a pearl chain which must have cost fifty
thousand pounds, but no shoes or stockings.  "You see," she said,
pointing to her bare feet, "here we lead the simple life."  I thought
it a pity they had bunions on them.  At that moment a Chinese butler,
dressed very like one of the Ming emperors, brought in a tray of
cocktails.  I asked her if she still read Emerson.  She seized a volume
from the table and clasped it to her by this time withering bosom, and
told me, indeed yes, she never went anywhere without a volume of the
Essays; she waved a jewelled hand at the blue sea which you saw through
the open windows and said that except for Emerson she would never
really have grasped the spiritual significance of the Pacific Ocean.
She died a little while ago at a ripe old age, but a disciple of
Emerson to the last, and she left her yacht and her library to the
gigolo who had been the other solace of her declining years.  Since she
did not leave him enough money to run the yacht he sold it, but
secondhand books fetch little and it may be that he kept the library.
In that case I can only hope he found the Emerson a solace in his
bereavement.  I must admit that he has never been a solace to me.  I do
not wish to speak disrespectfully of a writer in whom his
fellow-countrymen take pride; I recognize the charm and benignity of
his character; when you read his journals you cannot but be impressed
by the thoughtfulness which possessed him, even when he was no more
than a young boy, and by the fluency with which he expressed himself;
and since he was a lecturer, with the platform in view when he wrote,
it may be that his voice and presence added a significance to his
discourse which is lost in the printed page; but I can only confess
that I cannot find much profit or entertainment in his celebrated
Essays.  Often he hardly escapes the commonplace by a hair's breadth.
He had a gift of the picturesque phrase, but too often it is empty of
meaning.  He is a nimble skater who cuts elegant and complicated
figures on a surface of frozen platitudes.  Perhaps he would have been
a better writer if he had not been quite so good a man.  But since in
the case of so famous an author one's natural curiosity impels one to
ask what it is that has given him such a position in the world of
letters, I should recommend you to read his English Traits.  In this
book he was bound down to the concrete and so there is less in it of
the vague, loose and superficial thinking which in his Essays he was
apt to indulge in; he thus managed to be more vivid, more actual and
more entertaining than in any of his other works.  I certainly read it
with pleasure.

It may be that the writers of the School of Concord have a value to
Americans which the foreigner cannot hope to comprehend; he must be
content to leave it and pass on.  This is not the case with Edgar Allan
Poe; indeed he is, I think, more honoured in Europe than in the land of
his birth, and in France, for example, his influence is still powerful
with his fellow-writers.  It may be that his moral character and the
unsatisfactory nature of his life have unjustly caused Americans to
hold him in less esteem than he deserves.  But neither an author's
character nor his life has anything to do with the reader, who is
concerned only with his works.  Poe wrote the most beautiful poetry
that has ever been written in America.  It is like some of those great
pictures of the Venetians whose sudden loveliness takes your breath
away so that, for the moment satisfied by the appeal to your senses,
you do not care that they can give you no matter for your fancy to work
upon.  They have nothing but their beauty to offer, but their beauty is
matchless.  Poe, furthermore, was an acute critic and his analysis of
the art of the short story for long governed the practice of his
successors.  His tales have never been excelled.  I need hardly remind
you that in The Gold Bug and the narratives in which Monsieur Dupin
figures he invented the detective story which has resulted in the flood
of books which we all of us at times are glad to read.  The field has
been cultivated by a great many writers with variety and success, but
in essentials no one has added anything to what he at his first attempt
accomplished.  It may be that his stories of horror and mystery owe
something to Hoffmann and to Balzac, but they wonderfully achieve the
end he set himself, for he was the most self-conscious of artists, and
they deserve their renown.  He wrote in a turgid style, and he was
lavish of romantic accessories; his dialogue was as bombastic as his
people were unreal; his range was narrow; but that you have to put up
with: what he has to give us is unique.  He wrote very little and
almost all he wrote can be read with enjoyment.  But there is nothing
peculiarly American in him; there is nothing that I can remember either
in his prose or his verse that could not have been written by an
Englishman, and if we are looking in American literature for something
that has in it a relish of the soil we must certainly seek further.

But before doing this I must speak of an author who turned his back
deliberately on the American scene.  Henry James was not the greatest
writer that America has produced, but surely the most distinguished.
His gifts were conspicuous; but there was some defect in his character,
one must suppose, that prevented him from making the most of them.  He
had humour, insight, subtlety, a sense of drama; but a triviality of
soul that made the elemental emotions of mankind, love and hatred, the
fear of death and the sense of life's mystery, incomprehensible to him.
No one ever plumbed the surface of things with a keener scrutiny, but
there is no indication that he was ever aware of the depths beneath it.
He looked upon The Ambassadors as his best novel; I read it again the
other day and I was appalled by its emptiness.  It is tedious to read
on account of its convoluted style; no attempt is made to render
character by manner of speech, and everyone speaks like everyone else,
in pure Henry James; the only living person in the book is Mrs Newsome
who never appears in the flesh; and Strether is a silly, meanly
inquisitive old woman.  It would be intolerable but for Henry James's
great gift (the novelist's essential gift) of carrying the reader on
from page to page by the desire to know what is going to happen next,
and by the wonderful atmosphere of Paris in spring and summer which no
one, to the best of my knowledge, has so exquisitely conveyed.  I much
prefer The American.  It is written with lucidity and elegance, with
some pomposity perhaps (people do not go away, they depart; they do not
go home, but repair to their domiciles; and they do not go to bed, they
retire); but that gives it a period flavour that I do not find
displeasing.  It is a curious novel in this respect, that it is a love
story in which there is no love.  Christopher Newman wishes to marry
Madame de Cintr because he wants a mother for his children and she
will grace the head of his table, and when the engagement is broken off
his pride is humiliated but his heart is unaffected.  The characters
are not human beings; the men are stuffed shirts and the women are
crinolines.  Madame de Cintr, though charming, graceful and elegant,
is a purely conventional figure who gives you the impression that she
is drawn not from nature, but from a diligent perusal of Balzac's
novels.  Balzac, however, was able to give his most conventional
creatures something of his own exuberant vitality; Henry James had
nothing of the sort to give, and she has no more life in her than a
fashion-plate in a Lady's Keepsake.  Newman, the American, is the
Western pioneer, and indeed, judging from the period at which the story
is set, he may well have taken part in the gold rush to California; but
Henry James seems to have known the sort of man he was trying to
portray too little to give his hero even a superficial plausibility.
Newman could scarcely have learnt his epistolary style in a pool-room
at St Louis or on the water front in San Francisco.  My own belief is
that he fooled Henry James, and that the real reason why the
aristocratic Bellegardes refused the projected alliance was not that
Newman had made his fortune in business, but that, as they fortunately
discovered in time, he was really an assistant instructor in English at
the University of Harvard.  But for all that The American is well worth
reading.  So great is Henry James's skill in telling a story, so rare
his sense of suspense and so sure his touch in working up to a dramatic
situation, that you are held from beginning to end.  It is as exciting
as a detective story and, after all, no more incredible; and you cannot
remain unconscious of the charm of contact with the author's amiable,
urbane and cultivated mind.  The American is not a great book, but it
is a very readable one: there are not many novels of which you can say
that sixty years after their appearance.

I will speak of a great book now.  This is Moby Dick.  I read
Melville's South Sea books, Omoo and Typee, when I was myself on the
islands and I read them with interest and pleasure, but I have never
been tempted to read them again and I have not read Pierre, accepting
the opinion of good critics that Melville went to pieces when he wrote
it.  But Moby Dick is enough for any man's reputation.  Some critics
have complained of the flamboyance of its style.  To my mind it is
written in a manner that wonderfully suits the theme.  Grandiloquence
is an affair of hit or miss; when it comes off you may reach the
sublime, when it doesn't you descend to the ridiculous.  I must admit
that sometimes Melville does so descend; but it is beyond human powers
to walk always on the topmost heights, and his tumbles may be condoned
when you consider how splendidly, with what a noble force, with what a
sustained splendour of phrase, he writes his best passages.  There are
a number of chapters, the chapters of antiquarian lore mugged-up in a
library and those dealing with the natural history of the whale, which
I find tedious; but it is obvious that Melville set great store on his
recondite knowledge, and you have to accept the crotchets of an author
of great parts.  Homer sometimes nods and Shakespeare can write
passages of empty rhetoric.  But in the scenes at New Bedford, and when
he describes events, when he deals with men, above all of course with
the tremendous Ahab, then he is magnificent.  There is a throb, a
mystery, a foreboding, a passion, a sense of the horror and terror of
life, of the inevitableness of destiny and of the power of evil, which
take you by the throat.  You are left shattered, but strangely
uplifted.  And if you are a writer you are proud to think that you
cultivate an art which is capable of such altitudes and which can work
such wonderful effects on the hearts and senses and minds of men.

But though Melville began his story in New Bedford and the action takes
place in an American whaler, I do not find in his book that flavour of
the soil, valuable because it is specific, which I am looking for.  His
culture was European.  His prose gives you the impression of having
been founded on that of the great English stylists of the seventeenth
century.  And though his characters, at least the important ones, are
American, they are so by accident; they are a little larger than life
size and they are inhabitants really of no definite country, but native
to that thrilling and strange realm in which live and torture one
another the persons of Dostoevsky's novels and the stormy creatures of
Wuthering Heights.  It would be difficult in any case, and impossible
in the space allotted to me, to say exactly what I mean by the American
tang: it is in literature that characteristic which differentiates a
work from any that could possibly have been written in another country
and so marks it as the unmistakable product of its environment; but I
can point to a very good instance of it.  You have it conspicuously in
Mark Twain, and he gives it you in all its richness and savour in
Huckleberry Finn.  This book stands head and shoulders above the rest
of his work.  It is an authentic masterpiece.  At one time Mark Twain
was somewhat patronized because he was a humorist, and the pundits are
apt to look askance at contemporary humour; but his death has reassured
them and now he is, I think, universally accepted as one of the
greatest of American authors.  I need in consequence say little about
him.  I would only point out one circumstance.  When Mark Twain tried
to write in a literary manner he produced (as in Life on the
Mississippi) but indifferent journalese; but in Huckleberry Finn he had
the happy idea of writing in the person of his immortal hero and so
produced a model of the vernacular style which, I conjecture, has
proved a valuable stimulus to some of the best and most characteristic
American writers of the present day.  He showed them that a living
manner of writing is not to be sought in the seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century writers of England, but in the current speech of
their own people.  It would be foolish to suppose that the language in
which Huck Finn expresses himself is what painters call
representational; no illiterate small boy could have conceived such
neat phrases or made such an apt choice of epithets.  Perhaps because
he thought it beneath the dignity of literature to write thus
colloquially in the first person, Mark Twain, using a literary artifice
which we gladly accept, made believe that these were the actual
utterances of his little hero; and in so doing freed American style
from the shackles that had so long bound it.  Huckleberry Finn, with
its amazing variety of invention, its gusto and life, is in the
tradition of that great and celebrated variety of fiction, the
picaresque novel; and it holds its place bravely with the two greatest
examples of the genre, Gil Blas and Tom Jones; in fact, if Mark Twain
had not had the unfortunate notion of bringing in that boring little
muttonhead Tom Sawyer to ruin the last few chapters, it would have been
faultless.

My space is growing so short that I can do no more than mention The
Oregon Trail.  Parkman made his journey less than a hundred years ago,
and at that time buffaloes ranged the prairie in hundreds of thousands
and the danger from hostile Indians was still something to be reckoned
with.  He was a man of courage, resolution and dry humour; with these
qualities and a grand subject he wrote a book which is entertaining
from cover to cover.  It is so good that one cannot but regret that it
is written without grace.

I must also say a few words about Emily Dickinson.  I am afraid that I
shall offend many persons in America when I confess that to my mind she
has been accorded more praise than she deserves.  She has been hailed
as the great American poet.  But poetry has nothing to do with
nationality.  Poets inhabit the empyrean and belong to no country.  Do
we talk of Homer as a great Greek poet or of Dante as a great Italian
poet?  To do so would be to depreciate them.  Nor should our judgment
be affected by the circumstances of a poet's life.  That Emily
Dickinson had an unhappy love affair and lived for many years in
seclusion, that Poe tippled and was ungrateful to those who befriended
him, neither makes the poetry of the one any better nor that of the
other any worse.  Emily Dickinson is best read in anthologies.  There
her wit, her poignancy, her simplicity make their utmost effect, and it
may be that most anthologies would be the richer if they were less
niggardly in their selections; but when you read the whole body of her
work you are likely to be disappointed.  She is at her best when she
allows herself to sing; when her rhythm is modulated and varied, when
her language serves her emotion and when her invention is spontaneous.
But she is too rarely at her best.  Like Miss Emmeline Grangerford,
Emily Dickinson could rattle off poetry like nothing.  There is a great
deal of monotony in her constant use of the common or ballad metre in a
stanza of four lines; it is in itself a limiting form, and she narrows
it still more because her ear was not subtle and her language was
seldom simple enough for the measure.  She had a strain of
sophistication which induced her too often to sacrifice lyric beauty to
a desire to make a clever point.  In the short epigrammatic poems she
wrote it is a matter of hitting the nail accurately on the head; she
was very apt to give it a little tap slightly on one side.  She had a
gift, but a small one, and it is only confusing when claims are made on
her behalf which there is little in her work to justify.  Poetry is the
crown of literature, but we have the right to demand that its pearls
should not be cultured nor its rubies reconstructed.  America will
produce poets (indeed I am inclined to think it has already done so)
who will make the encomiums lavished on Emily Dickinson appear
extravagant.

Now I have but Walt Whitman to speak of.  I have kept him to the end,
because I think it is in Leaves of Grass that we at last get, free from
European influences, the pure and unadulterated Americanism which in
these pages we have sought.  Leaves of Grass is a work of immense
significance, but since I began by reminding you that I would recommend
you to read books which, whatever their other merits, were enjoyable, I
am constrained to tell you that few great poets have been more uneven
than Whitman.  I think many books are spoilt for readers because the
critics speak of them as though they had no defects.  Perfection is not
of this world, and generally merits can only be achieved at the cost of
shortcomings.  It is much better that the reader should know what to
expect; otherwise, finding himself at variance with the panegyrists, he
will unduly blame himself for not appreciating something that in fact
does not merit appreciation.  Whitman was a writer of splendid
beginnings, but either because he found his way of writing too easy or
because he was intoxicated with his own verbosity, often enough he went
on and on when he had nothing of significance to add to what he had
already said.  That you must put up with.  He wrote his poems partly in
the rhythmic language of the Bible, partly in the sort of blank verse
that was written in the seventeenth century, and partly in an uncouth
pedestrian prose that offends the ear.  Well, that you must put up with
too.  These defects are regrettable, but unimportant.  It is easy to
skip.  Leaves of Grass is a book to open anywhere, read on as long as
it pleases you, and then turn the pages and start at random elsewhere.
Whitman could write lines of pure and lovely poetry, he could turn
phrases that thrill, and often he hit upon ideas that were wonderfully
moving.  There can be no need for me to say that he is one of the most
exciting of all poets.  He had a vigour and a sense of life, in its
manifold variety, in its passion, beauty and exhilaration, which an
American may justly and with pride think truly American.  He brought
poetry home to the common man.  He showed that it was not only to be
found in moonlight, ruined castles and the pathos of lovesick maidens;
but in streets and trains and steamboats, in the labour of the artisan
and the humdrum toil of the farmer's wife, in work and ease; in all
life, in short, and the ways it is lived.  Just as Wordsworth showed
that you need not use poetic language to make poetry, but could make it
out of the common words of our everyday speech, so Whitman showed that
its subject matter was not only where the romantics had sought it, but
was all about you in the most usual circumstances of your daily round.
His was not a poetry of escape, but a poetry of acceptance.  It would
be a dull-spirited American who could read Whitman without receiving a
greater apprehension of the vastness of his country, the splendour of
its resources, and the illimitable hope that is contained in its
future.  I think it was really in Whitman that America became aware of
itself in literature.  It is a virile, democratic poetry; it is the
authentic battle cry of a new nation and the solid foundation of a
national literature.  In European museums you sometimes see the
genealogy of the house of Jesse depicted as a tree, with Adam massively
outlined in the trunk and the branches ending in figures of the
patriarchs and the kings of Israel.  If such a tree were made to
represent the development of American literature and the branches ended
with the shapes of O. Henry, Ring Lardner, Theodore Dreisser, Sinclair
Lewis, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Vachel Lindsay, Eugene O'Neill and
Edwin Arlington Robinson, the trunk would be rough-hewn in the
splendid, dauntless and original form of Walt Whitman.




      *      *      *      *      *      *      *      *




  By W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

  LIZA OF LAMBETH
  MRS. CRADDOCK
  THE MERRY-GO-ROUND
  THE EXPLORER
  THE MAGICIAN
  THE MOON AND SIXPENCE
  OF HUMAN BONDAGE
  THE TREMBLING OF A LEAF
  ON A CHINESE SCREEN
  THE PAINTED VEIL
  THE CASUARINA TREE
  ASHENDEN
  THE GENTLEMAN IN THE PARLOUR
  CAKES AND ALE OR, THE SKELETON IN THE CUPBOARD
  SIX STORIES WRITTEN IN THE FIRST PERSON SINGULAR
  THE NARROW CORNER
  AH KING
  ALTOGETHER (_Collected Short Stories_)
  DON FERNANDO
  COSMOPOLITANS
  THEATRE
  THE SUMMING UP
  THE MIXTURE AS BEFORE

  _Plays_

  JACK STRAW
  LADY FREDERICK
  THE EXPLORER
  MRS. DOT
  PENELOPE
  THE TENTH MAN
  SMITH
  LANDED GENTRY
  A MAN OF HONOUR
  THE UNKNOWN
  THE CIRCLE
  CSAR'S WIFE
  EAST OF SUEZ
  THE LAND OF PROMISE
  OUR BETTERS
  THE UNATTAINABLE
  HOME AND BEAUTY
  LOAVES AND FISHES
  THE LETTER
  THE CONSTANT WIFE
  THE SACRED FLAME
  THE BREADWINNER
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[End of Books and You, by W. Somerset Maugham]
