Transcribed from the 1912 Longmans, Green and Co. edition by David Price,email
[email protected] ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKSby Andrew Lang
Contents:
PrefaceAdventures Among BooksRecollections of Robert Louis StevensonRab's FriendOliver Wendell HolmesMr. Morris's PoemsMrs. Radcliffe's NovelsA Scottish Romanticist of 1830The Confessions of Saint AugustineSmollettNathaniel HawthorneThe Paradise of PoetsParis and HelenEnchanted CigarettesStories and Story-tellingThe Supernatural in FictionAn Old Scottish Psychical ResearcherThe Boy
PREFACE
Of the Essays in this volume "Adventures among Books," and "Rab'sFriend," appeared in _Scribner's Magazine_; and "Recollections of RobertLouis Stevenson" (to the best of the author's memory) in _The NorthAmerican Review_. The Essay on "Smollett" was in the _Anglo-Saxon_,which has ceased to appear; and the shorter papers, such as "TheConfessions of Saint Augustine," in a periodical styled _Wit and Wisdom_.For "The Poems of William Morris" the author has to thank the Editor of_Longman's Magazine_; for "The Boy," and "Mrs. Radcliffe's Novels," theProprietors of _The Cornhill Magazine_; for "Enchanted Cigarettes," andpossibly for "The Supernatural in Fiction," the Proprietors of _TheIdler_. The portrait, after Sir William Richmond, R.A., was done aboutthe time when most of the Essays were written--and that was notyesterday.
CHAPTER I: ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
I
In an age of reminiscences, is there room for the confessions of aveteran, who remembers a great deal about books and very little aboutpeople? I have often wondered that a _Biographia Literaria_ has soseldom been attempted--a biography or autobiography of a man in hisrelations with other minds. Coleridge, to be sure, gave this name to awork of his, but he wandered from his apparent purpose into a world ofalien disquisitions. The following pages are frankly bookish, and to thebookish only do they appeal. The habit of reading has been praised as avirtue, and has been denounced as a vice. In no case, if we except theperpetual study of newspapers (which cannot fairly be called reading), isthe vice, or the virtue, common. It is more innocent than opium-eating,though, like opium-eating, it unlocks to us artificial paradises. I tryto say what I have found in books, what distractions from the world, whatteaching (not much), and what consolations.
In beginning an _autobiographia literaria_, an account of how, and inwhat order, books have appealed to a mind, which books have ever aboveall things delighted, the author must pray to be pardoned for the sin ofegotism. There is no other mind, naturally, of which the author knows somuch as of his own. _On n'a que soi_, as the poor girl says in one of M.Paul Bourget's novels. In literature, as in love, one can only speak forhimself. This author did not, like Fulke Greville, retire into theconvent of literature from the strife of the world, rather he was born tobe, from the first, a dweller in the cloister of a library. Among thepoems which I remember best out of early boyhood is Lucy Ashton's song,in the "Bride of Lammermoor":--
"Look not thou on beauty's charming, Sit thou still when kings are arming, Taste not when the wine-cup glistens, Speak not when the people listens, Stop thine ear against the singer, From the red gold keep thy finger, Vacant heart, and hand, and eye, Easy live and quiet die."
The rhymes, unlearned, clung to my memory; they would sing themselves tome on the way to school, or cricket-field, and, about the age of ten,probably without quite understanding them, I had chosen them for a kindof motto in life, a tune to murmur along the _fallentis semita vitae_.This seems a queer idea for a small boy, but it must be confessed.
"It takes all sorts to make a world," some are soldiers from the cradle,some merchants, some orators; nothing but a love of books was the giftgiven to me by the fairies. It was probably derived from forebears onboth sides of my family, one a great reader, the other a considerablecollector of books which remained with us and were all tried, perseveredwith, or abandoned in turn, by a student who has not blanched before the_Epigoniad_.
About the age of four I learned to read by a simple process. I had heardthe elegy of Cock Robin till I knew it by rote, and I picked out theletters and words which compose that classic till I could read it formyself. Earlier than that, "Robinson Crusoe" had been read aloud to me,in an abbreviated form, no doubt. I remember the pictures of Robinsonfinding the footstep in the sand, and a dance of cannibals, and theparrot. But, somehow, I have never read "Robinson" since: it is apleasure to come.
The first books which vividly impressed me were, naturally, fairy tales,and chap-books about Robert Bruce, William Wallace, and Rob Roy. At thattime these little tracts could be bought for a penny apiece. I can stillsee Bruce in full armour, and Wallace in a kilt, discoursing across aburn, and Rob Roy slipping from the soldier's horse into the stream. Theydid not then awaken a precocious patriotism; a boy of five is more athome in Fairyland than in his own country. The sudden appearance of theWhite Cat as a queen after her head was cut off, the fiendish malice ofthe Yellow Dwarf, the strange cake of crocodile eggs and millet seedwhich the mother of the Princess Frutilla made for the Fairy of theDesert--these things, all fresh and astonishing, but certainly to becredited, are my first memories of romance. One story of a WhiteSerpent, with a woodcut of that mysterious reptile, I neglected tosecure, probably for want of a penny, and I have regretted it ever since.One never sees those chap books now. "The White Serpent," in spite ofall research, remains _introuvable_. It was a lost chance, and Fortunedoes not forgive. Nobody ever interfered with these, or indeed with anyother studies of ours at that time, as long as they were not prosecutedon Sundays. "The fightingest parts of the Bible," and the Apocrypha, andstories like that of the Witch of Endor, were sabbatical literature, readin a huge old illustrated Bible. How I advanced from the fairy tales toShakespeare, what stages there were on the way--for there must have beenstages--is a thing that memory cannot recover. A nursery legend tellsthat I was wont to arrange six open books on six chairs, and go from oneto the others, perusing them by turns. No doubt this was what peoplecall "desultory reading," but I did not hear the criticism till later,and then too often for my comfort. Memory holds a picture, more vividthan most, of a small boy reading the "Midsummer Night's Dream" byfirelight, in a room where candles were lit, and some one touched thepiano, and a young man and a girl were playing chess. The Shakespearewas a volume of Kenny Meadows' edition; there are fairies in it, and thefairies seemed to come out of Shakespeare's dream into the music and thefirelight. At that moment I think that I was happy; it seemed anenchanted glimpse of eternity in Paradise; nothing resembling it remainswith me, out of all the years.
We went from the border to the south of England, when the number of myyears was six, and in England we found another paradise, a circulatinglibrary with brown, greasy, ill-printed, odd volumes of Shakespeare andof the "Arabian Nights." How their stained pages come before the eyesagain--the pleasure and the puzzle of them! What did the lady in theGeni's glass box want with the Merchants? what meant all theseconversations between the Fat Knight and _Ford_, in the "Merry Wives"? Itwas delightful, but in parts it was difficult. Fragments of "TheTempest," and of other plays, remain stranded in my memory from thesereadings: _Ferdinand_ and _Miranda_ at chess, _Cleopatra_ cuffing themessenger, the asp in the basket of figs, the _Friar_ and the_Apothecary_, _Troilus_ on the Ilian walls, a vision of _Cassandra_ inwhite muslin with her hair down. People forbid children to read this orthat. I am sure they need not, and that even in our infancy themagician, Shakespeare, brings us nothing worse than a world of beautifulvisions, half realised. In the Egyptian wizard's little pool of ink,only the pure can see the visions, and in Shakespeare's magic mirrorchildren see only what is pure. Among other books of that time I onlyrecall a kind of Sunday novel, "Naomi; or, The Last Da
ys of Jerusalem."Who, indeed, could forget the battering-rams, and the man who cried onthe battlements, "Woe, woe to myself and to Jerusalem!" I seem to hearhim again when boys break the hum of London with yells of the latest"disaster."
We left England in a year, went back to Scotland, and awoke, as it were,to know the glories of our birth. We lived in Scott's country, withinfour miles of Abbotsford, and, so far, we had heard nothing of it. Iremember going with one of the maids into the cottage of a kinsman ofhers, a carpenter; a delightful place, where there was sawdust, where ourfirst fishing-rods were fashioned. Rummaging among the books, of course,I found some cheap periodical with verses in it. The lines began--
"The Baron of Smaylhome rose with day, He spurred his courser on, Without stop or stay, down the rocky way That leads to Brotherstone."
A rustic tea-table was spread for us, with scones and honey, not to beneglected. But they _were_ neglected till we had learned how--
"The sable score of fingers four Remains on that board impressed, And for evermore that lady wore A covering on her wrist."
We did not know nor ask the poet's name. Children, probably, say verylittle about what is in their minds; but that unhappy knight, Sir Richardof Coldinghame, and the Priest, with his chamber in the east, and themoody Baron, and the Lady, have dwelt in our mind ever since, and hardlyneed to be revived by looking at "The Eve of St. John."
Soon after that we were told about Sir Walter, how great he was, howgood, how, like Napoleon, his evil destiny found him at last, and he worehis heart away for honour's sake. And we were given the "Lay," and "TheLady of the Lake." It was my father who first read "Tam o' Shanter" tome, for which I confess I did not care at that time, preferring to takewitches and bogies with great seriousness. It seemed as if Burns weretrifling with a noble subject. But it was in a summer sunset, beside awindow looking out on Ettrick and the hill of the Three Brethren's Cairn,that I first read, with the dearest of all friends, how--
"The stag at eve had drunk his fill Where danced the moon on Monan's rill, And deep his midnight lair had made In lone Glenartney's hazel shade."
Then opened the gates of romance, and with Fitz-James we drove the chase,till--
"Few were the stragglers, following far, That reached the lake of Vennachar, And when the Brig of Turk was won, The foremost horseman rode alone."
From that time, for months, there was usually a little volume of Scott inone's pocket, in company with the miscellaneous collection of a boy'streasures. Scott certainly took his fairy folk seriously, and the MauthDog was rather a disagreeable companion to a small boy in wakeful hours.{1} After this kind of introduction to Sir Walter, after learning one'sfirst lessons in history from the "Tales of a Grandfather," nobody, onehopes, can criticise him in cold blood, or after the manner of Mr. LeslieStephen, who is not sentimental. Scott is not an author like another,but our earliest known friend in letters; for, of course, we did not askwho Shakespeare was, nor inquire about the private history of Madamed'Aulnoy. Scott peopled for us the rivers and burnsides with hisreivers; the Fairy Queen came out of Eildon Hill and haunted Carterhaugh;at Newark Tower we saw "the embattled portal arch"--
"Whose ponderous grate and massy bar Had oft rolled back the tide of war,"--
just as, at Foulshiels, on Yarrow, we beheld the very roofless cottagewhence Mungo Park went forth to trace the waters of the Niger, and atOakwood the tower of the Wizard Michael Scott.
Probably the first novel I ever read was read at Elgin, and the story was"Jane Eyre." This tale was a creepy one for a boy of nine, and Rochesterwas a mystery, St. John a bore. But the lonely little girl in herdespair, when something came into the room, and her days of starvation atschool, and the terrible first Mrs. Rochester, were not to be forgotten.They abide in one's recollection with a Red Indian's ghost, who carried arusty ruined gun, and whose acquaintance was made at the same time.
I fancy I was rather an industrious little boy, and that I had minded mylessons, and satisfied my teachers--I know I was reading Pinnock's"History of Rome" for pleasure--till "the wicked day of destiny" came,and I felt a "call," and underwent a process which may be described asthe opposite of "conversion." The "call" came from Dickens. "Pickwick"was brought into the house. From that hour it was all over, for five orsix years, with anything like industry and lesson-books. I read"Pickwick" in convulsions of mirth. I dropped Pinnock's "Rome" for good.I neglected everything printed in Latin, in fact everything that one wasunderstood to prepare for one's classes in the school whither I was nowsent, in Edinburgh. For there, living a rather lonely small boy in thehouse of an aged relation, I found the Waverley Novels. The rest istransport. A conscientious tutor dragged me through the Latin grammar,and a constitutional dislike to being beaten on the hands with a leatherstrap urged me to acquire a certain amount of elementary erudition. But,for a year, I was a young hermit, living with Scott in the "Waverleys"and the "Border Minstrelsy," with Pope, and Prior, and a translation ofAriosto, with Lever and Dickens, David Copperfield and Charles O'Malley,Longfellow and Mayne Reid, Dumas, and in brief, with every kind of lightliterature that I could lay my hands upon. Carlyle did not escape me; Ivividly remember the helpless rage with which I read of the Flight toVarennes. In his work on French novelists, Mr. Saintsbury speaks of adisagreeable little boy, in a French romance, who found Scott_assommant_, stunningly stupid. This was a very odious little boy, itseems (I have not read his adventures), and he came, as he deserved, to abad end. Other and better boys, I learn, find Scott "slow."Extraordinary boys! Perhaps "Ivanhoe" was first favourite of yore; youcannot beat Front de Boeuf, the assault on his castle, the tournament. Noother tournament need apply. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, greatly daring, hasattempted to enter the lists, but he is a mere Ralph the Hospitaller.Next, I think, in order of delight, came "Quentin Durward," especiallythe hero of the scar, whose name Thackeray could not remember, Quentin'suncle. Then "The Black Dwarf," and Dugald, our dear Rittmeister. Icould not read "Rob Roy" then, nor later; nay, not till I was forty. NowDi Vernon is the lady for me; the queen of fiction, the peerless, thebrave, the tender, and true.
The wisdom of the authorities decided that I was to read no more novels,but, as an observer remarked, "I don't see what is the use of preventingthe boy from reading novels, for he's just reading 'Don Juan' instead."This was so manifestly no improvement, that the ban on novels was tacitlywithdrawn, or was permitted to become a dead letter. They were far moreenjoyable than Byron. The worst that came of this was the suggestion ofa young friend, whose life had been adventurous--indeed he had served inthe Crimea with the Bashi Bazouks--that I should master the writings ofEdgar Poe. I do not think that the "Black Cat," and the "Fall of theHouse of Usher," and the "Murders in the Rue Morgue," are very goodreading for a boy who is not peculiarly intrepid. Many a bad hour theygave me, haunting me, especially, with a fear of being prematurelyburied, and of waking up before breakfast to find myself in a coffin. Ofall the books I devoured in that year, Poe is the only author whom I wishI had reserved for later consideration, and whom I cannot conscientiouslyrecommend to children.
I had already enjoyed a sip of Thackeray, reading at a venture, in"Vanity Fair," about the Battle of Waterloo. It was not like Lever'saccounts of battles, but it was enchanting. However, "Vanity Fair" wasunder a taboo. It is not easy to say why; but Mr. Thackeray himselfinformed a small boy, whom he found reading "Vanity Fair" under thetable, that he had better read something else. What harm can the storydo to a child? He reads about Waterloo, about fat Jos, about littleGeorge and the pony, about little Rawdon and the rat-hunt, and is happyand unharmed.
Leaving my hermitage, and going into the very different and verydisagreeable world of a master's house, I was lucky enough to find acharming library there. Most of Thackeray was on the shelves, andThackeray became the chief enchanter. As Henry Kingsley says, a boyreads him and thinks he knows all about life. I do not think that themundane parts, abo
ut Lady Kew and her wiles, about Ethel and the Marquisof Farintosh, appealed to one or enlightened one. Ethel was a mystery,and not an interesting mystery, though one used to copy Doyle's picturesof her, with the straight nose, the impossible eyes, the impossiblewaist. It was not Ethel who captivated us; it was Clive's youth and art,it was J. J., the painter, it was jolly F. B. and his address to the maidabout the lobster. "A finer fish, Mary, my dear, I have never seen. Doesnot this solve the vexed question whether lobsters are fish, in theFrench sense?" Then "The Rose and the Ring" came out. It was worthwhile to be twelve years old, when the Christmas books were written byDickens and Thackeray. I got hold of "The Rose and the Ring," I know,and of the "Christmas Carol," when they were damp from the press. KingValoroso, and Bulbo, and Angelica were even more delightful than Scrooge,and Tiny Tim, and Trotty Veck. One remembers the fairy monarch morevividly, and the wondrous array of egg-cups from which he sippedbrandy--or was it right Nantes?--still "going on sipping, I am sorry tosay," even after "Valoroso was himself again."
But, of all Thackeray's books, I suppose "Pendennis" was the favourite.The delightful Marryat had entertained us with Peter Simple and O'Brien(how good their flight through France is!) with Mesty and Mr. MidshipmanEasy, with Jacob Faithful (Mr. Thackeray's favourite), and withSnarleyyow; but Marryat never made us wish to run away to sea. That didnot seem to be one's vocation. But the story of Pen made one wish to runaway to literature, to the Temple, to streets where Brown, the famousreviewer, might be seen walking with his wife and umbrella. The writingof poems "up to" pictures, the beer with Warrington in the mornings, thesuppers in the back-kitchen, these were the alluring things, not society,and Lady Rockminster, and Lord Steyne. Well, one has run away toliterature since, but where is the matutinal beer? Where is the back-kitchen? Where are Warrington, and Foker, and F. B.? I have never metthem in this living world, though Brown, the celebrated reviewer, isfamiliar to me, and also Mr. Sydney Scraper, of the Oxford and CambridgeClub. Perhaps back-kitchens exist, perhaps there are cakes and ale inthe life literary, and F. B. may take his walks by the Round Pond. Butone never encounters these rarities, and Bungay and Bacon are no longerthe innocent and ignorant rivals whom Thackeray drew. They do not givethose wonderful parties; Miss Bunnion has become quite conventional;Percy Popjoy has abandoned letters; Mr. Wenham does not toady; Mr. Waggdoes not joke any more. The literary life is very like any other, inLondon, or is it that we do not see it aright, not having the eyes ofgenius? Well, a life on the ocean wave, too, may not be so desirable asit seems in Marryat's novels: so many a lad whom he tempted into the navyhas discovered. The best part of the existence of a man of letters ishis looking forward to it through the spectacles of Titmarsh.
One can never say how much one owes to a school-master who was a friendof literature, who kept a houseful of books, and who was himself agraceful scholar, and an author, while he chose to write, of poetic andhumorous genius. Such was the master who wrote the "Day Dreams of aSchoolmaster," Mr. D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, to whom, in this place, Iam glad to confess my gratitude after all these many years. While wewere deep in the history of Pendennis we were also being dragged throughthe Commentaries of Caius Julius Caesar, through the Latin and Greekgrammars, through Xenophon, and the Eclogues of Virgil, and a depressingplay of Euripides, the "Phoenissae." I can never say how much I detestedthese authors, who, taken in small doses, are far, indeed, from beingattractive. Horace, to a lazy boy, appears in his Odes to have nothingto say, and to say it in the most frivolous and vexatious manner. ThenCowper's "Task," or "Paradise Lost," as school-books, with notes, seemsarid enough to a school-boy. I remember reading ahead, in Cowper,instead of attending to the lesson and the class-work. His observationson public schools were not uninteresting, but the whole English school-work of those days was repugnant. One's English education was all gotout of school.
As to Greek, for years it seemed a mere vacuous terror; one invented forone's self all the current arguments against "compulsory Greek." Whatwas the use of it, who ever spoke in it, who could find any sense in it,or any interest? A language with such cruel superfluities as a middlevoice and a dual; a language whose verbs were so fantastically irregular,looked like a barbaric survival, a mere plague and torment. So onethought till Homer was opened before us. Elsewhere I have tried todescribe the vivid delight of first reading Homer, delight, by the way,which St. Augustine failed to appreciate. Most boys not wholly immersedin dulness felt it, I think; to myself, for one, Homer was the realbeginning of study. One had tried him, when one was very young, in Pope,and had been baffled by Pope, and his artificial manner, his "fairs," and"swains." Homer seemed better reading in the absurd "crib" which Mr.Buckley wrote for Bohn's series. Hector and Ajax, in that disguise, wereas great favourites as Horatius on the Bridge, or the younger Tarquin.Scott, by the way, must have made one a furious and consistentLegitimist. In reading the "Lays of Ancient Rome," my sympathies werewith the expelled kings, at least with him who fought so well at LakeRegillus:--
"Titus, the youngest Tarquin, Too good for such a breed."
Where--
"Valerius struck at Titus, And lopped off half his crest; But Titus stabbed Valerius A span deep in the breast,"--
I find, on the margin of my old copy, in a schoolboy's hand, the words"Well done, the Jacobites!" Perhaps my politics have never gone muchbeyond this sentiment. But this is a digression from Homer. The verysound of the hexameter, that long, inimitable roll of the most variousmusic, was enough to win the heart, even if the words were notunderstood. But the words proved unexpectedly easy to understand, fullas they are of all nobility, all tenderness, all courage, courtesy, andromance. The "Morte d'Arthur" itself, which about this time fell intoour hands, was not so dear as the "Odyssey," though for a boy to read SirThomas Malory is to ride at adventure in enchanted forests, to enterhaunted chapels where a light shines from the Graal, to find by lonelymountain meres the magic boat of Sir Galahad.
After once being initiated into the mysteries of Greece by Homer, thework at Greek was no longer tedious. Herodotus was a charming andhumorous story-teller, and, as for Thucydides, his account of theSicilian Expedition and its ending was one of the very rare things inliterature which almost, if not quite, brought tears into one's eyes. Fewpassages, indeed, have done that, and they are curiously discrepant. Thefirst book that ever made me cry, of which feat I was horribly ashamed,was "Uncle Tom's Cabin," with the death of Eva, Topsy's friend. Then itwas trying when Colonel Newcome said _Adsum_, and the end of Socrates inthe _Phaedo_ moved one more than seemed becoming--these, and a passage inthe history of Skalagrim Lamb's Tail, and, as I said, the ruin of theAthenians in the Syracusan Bay. I have read these chapters in an oldFrench version derived through the Italian from a Latin translation ofThucydides. Even in this far-descended form, the tale keeps its pathos;the calm, grave stamp of that tragic telling cannot be worn away by muchhandling, by long time, by the many changes of human speech. "Otherstoo," says Nicias, in that fatal speech, when--
"_All was done that men may do_, _And all was done in vain_,"--
"having achieved what men may, have borne what men must." This is thevery burden of life, and the last word of tragedy. For now all is vain:courage, wisdom, piety, the bravery of Lamachus, the goodness of Nicias,the brilliance of Alcibiades, all are expended, all wasted, nothing ofthat brave venture abides, except torture, defeat, and death. No playnot poem of individual fortunes is so moving as this ruin of a people; nomodern story can stir us, with all its eloquence, like the brief gravityof this ancient history. Nor can we find, at the last, any wisdom morewise than that which bids us do what men may, and bear what men must.Such are the lessons of the Greek, of the people who tried all things, inthe morning of the world, and who still speak to us of what they tried inwords which are the sum of human gaiety and gloom, of grief and triumph,hope and despair. The world, since their day, has but followed in thesame round, which only seems new:
has only made the same experiments, andfailed with the same failure, but less gallantly and less gloriously.
One's school-boy adventures among books ended not long after winning thefriendship of Homer and Thucydides, of Lucretius and Catullus. One'sapplication was far too desultory to make a serious and accurate scholar.
I confess to having learned the classical languages, as it were byaccident, for the sake of what is in them, and with a provokinglyimperfect accuracy. Cricket and trout occupied far too much of my mindand my time: Christopher North, and Walton, and Thomas Tod Stoddart, and"The Moor and the Loch," were my holiday reading, and I do not regret it.Philologists and Ireland scholars are not made so, but you can, in noway, fashion a scholar out of a casual and inaccurate intelligence. Thetrue scholar is one whom I envy, almost as much as I respect him; butthere is a kind of mental short-sightedness, where accents and verbalniceties are concerned, which cannot be sharpened into true scholarship.Yet, even for those afflicted in this way, and with the malady of being"idle, careless little boys," the ancient classics have a value for whichthere is no substitute. There is a charm in finding ourselves--ourcommon humanity, our puzzles, our cares, our joys, in the writings of mensevered from us by race, religion, speech, and half the gulf ofhistorical time--which no other literary pleasure can equal. Then thereis to be added, as the university preacher observed, "the pleasure ofdespising our fellow-creatures who do not know Greek." Doubtless in thatthere is great consolation.
It would be interesting, were it possible, to know what proportion ofpeople really care for poetry, and how the love of poetry came to them,and grew in them, and where and when it stopped. Modern poets whom onemeets are apt to say that poetry is not read at all. Byron's Murrayceased to publish poetry in 1830, just when Tennyson and Browning werestriking their preludes. Probably Mr. Murray was wise in his generation.But it is also likely that many persons, even now, are attached topoetry, though they certainly do not buy contemporary verse. How did thepassion come to them? How long did it stay? When did the Muse say good-bye? To myself, as I have remarked, poetry came with Sir Walter Scott,for one read Shakespeare as a child, rather in a kind of dream offairyland and enchanted isles, than with any distinct consciousness thatone was occupied with poetry. Next to Scott, with me, came Longfellow,who pleased one as more reflective and tenderly sentimental, while thereflections were not so deep as to be puzzling. I remember how"Hiawatha" came out, when one was a boy, and how delightful was the freeforest life, and Minnehaha, and Paupukkeewis, and Nokomis. One did notthen know that the same charm, with a yet fresher dew upon it, was tomeet one later, in the "Kalewala." But, at that time, one had noconscious pleasure in poetic style, except in such ringing verse asScott's, and Campbell's in his patriotic pieces. The pleasure andenchantment of style first appealed to me, at about the age of fifteen,when one read for the first time--
"So all day long the noise of battle rolled Among the mountains by the winter sea; Until King Arthur's Table, man by man, Had fallen in Lyonnesse about their Lord."
Previously one had only heard of Mr. Tennyson as a name. When a child Iwas told that a poet was coming to a house in the Highlands where wechanced to be, a poet named Tennyson. "Is he a poet like Sir WalterScott?" I remember asking, and was told, "No, he was not like Sir WalterScott." Hearing no more of him, I was prowling among the books in anancient house, a rambling old place with a ghost-room, where I foundTupper, and could not get on with "Proverbial Philosophy." Next I triedTennyson, and instantly a new light of poetry dawned, a new music wasaudible, a new god came into my medley of a Pantheon, a god never to bedethroned. "Men scarcely know how beautiful fire is," Shelley says. Iam convinced that we scarcely know how great a poet Lord Tennyson is; usehas made him too familiar. The same hand has "raised the Table Roundagain," that has written the sacred book of friendship, that has lulledus with the magic of the "Lotus Eaters," and the melody of "Tithonus." Hehas made us move, like his own Prince--
"Among a world of ghosts, And feel ourselves the shadows of a dream."
He has enriched our world with conquests of romance; he has recut andreset a thousand ancient gems of Greece and Rome; he has roused ourpatriotism; he has stirred our pity; there is hardly a human passion buthe has purged it and ennobled it, including "this of love." Truly, theLaureate remains the most various, the sweetest, the most exquisite, themost learned, the most Virgilian of all English poets, and we may pitythe lovers of poetry who died before Tennyson came.
Here may end the desultory tale of a desultory bookish boyhood. It wasnot in nature that one should not begin to rhyme for one's self. Butthose exercises were seldom even written down; they lived a little whilein a memory which has lost them long ago. I do remember me that I triedsome of my attempts on my dear mother, who said much what Dryden said to"Cousin Swift," "You will never be a poet," a decision in which Istraightway acquiesced. For to rhyme is one thing, to be a poet quiteanother. A good deal of mortification would be avoided if young men andmaidens only kept this obvious fact well posed in front of their vanityand their ambition.
In these bookish memories I have said nothing about religion andreligious books, for various reasons. But, unlike other Scots of thepen, I got no harm from "The Shorter Catechism," of which I rememberlittle, and neither then nor now was or am able to understand a singlesentence. Some precocious metaphysicians comprehended and stood aghastat justification, sanctification, adoption, and effectual calling. These,apparently, were necessary processes in the Scottish spiritual life. Butwe were not told what they meant, nor were we distressed by a sense thatwe had not passed through them. From most children, one trusts,Calvinism ran like water off a duck's back; unlucky were they who firstabsorbed, and later were compelled to get rid of, "The ShorterCatechism!"
One good thing, if no more, these memories may accomplish. Young men,especially in America, write to me and ask me to recommend "a course ofreading." Distrust a course of reading! People who really care forbooks _read all of them_. There is no other course. Let this be areply. No other answer shall they get from me, the inquiring young men.