THE ART OF LIVING
THE ART OF LIVING
It is an easy phrase, “the art of living,” and one which, like any
cliché, is rather of the tongue than of the mind, yet in a general way
we know well enough what we mean to signify by it. It means primarily
an intelligent ordering of experience, and, to that end, an intelligent
ordering of the relations between ourselves and the outer world of
things or the inner world of possible emotions and thoughts. As one
moves about the world in order to test life in its great foci, in New
York or Washington, London or Paris, Prague or Vienna, one cannot
but be struck by the differing degrees in which various peoples have
attained to the practice of this most difficult of all the arts. In
America, indeed, there seems to be hardly any appreciation at all on
the part of most people that such an art exists. Any discussion of it
is relegated by them to that sphere of nonsensical moonshine that may
be indulged in by billionaires or by those inefficient Europeans who do
not realize that time is money. It is not without significance that in
Europe the ordering of our existence is spoken of as “the art of life,”
whereas when any such discussion takes place in America it is usually
under the caption, “the business of life.”
There is, of course, a business of life. A man must have some financial
means of support; he must have some sort of shelter; some sort of
clothing; he must put a certain amount of food into his body daily.
The business of life, however, is much the same for man as it is for
the animals, although it may be more complicated. It is only when
man attempts to rise above the mere business of life, and order the
experiences of his life, that he becomes man. An architect cannot do
without bricks and steel, but the workman who spends his life puddling
molten steel in the furnace or putting clay in the ovens is not an
architect. Machines will some day do the work as well, but no machine
will ever design a cathedral of Amiens, arrange the glass in a rose
window of Chartres or daringly raise the choir at Beauvais. Just as the
art of building is utterly different from the business of building, so
does the art of life differ from the business of life. The difference
extends throughout the whole domain of experience. It is not concerned
merely with the highbrow. Eating at a lunch counter in New York belongs
to the business of life; eating at a café in France belongs to the art
of life; though one may put as many calories into one’s body in the one
as in the other.
The primary concern of every artist of every sort must be a vision
of that to which he would attain, of that which he would make. The
sculptor sees the finished statue before he begins to mould the clay;
the painter sees his picture before he adds touch to touch of color
upon his canvas; the poet knows what he would say before he begins to
weave the magic of his words; and the composer has heard his symphony
before he struggles with the writing of his notes. Obviously, if
there is a parallel art of living, the artist in life must have some
conception of his finished product, of what sort of life he is trying
to make.
For any artist, again, there are the materials and tools with which he
works, and just as the material of the musician is sound, that of the
sculptor marble or bronze, that of the poet words, so the material
with which the artist in life deals must be thought and emotion,
using the terms in their very widest senses. The range of these is
practically unlimited, infinitely more so than the materials available
to any other artist. So again we find a far more varied assortment
among what we may call the tools with which the artist in life may work
as compared with those of other artists.
Any art is circumscribed by its technique. Marble must be chiselled
with a limited number of tools in certain ways, sound must be produced
by a similarly limited number of instruments, and so in the other arts.
But the artist in life is confronted by an almost infinite number of
“tools” which for him consist of all those things by which thought and
emotion can be brought into being. For example, he has the finished
product of every other art—statues, poems, music, paintings. There
is also the whole world of practical appliances—houses, clothes,
automobiles, money, telephones, all the innumerable contrivances for
man’s comfort or ostentation. There are, further, the endless forms
of activity of work or play—business, the professions, travel, sport.
There are the individualized relationships of parenthood, acquaintance,
friendship, love. In a word, everything, tangible and intangible, is a
“tool” with which the artist in life may produce thought or emotion,
and so modify the life itself conceived as a product of art. It is
evident that whoever would practice an art of living is likely to be
overwhelmed by the wealth of his material and by the unlimited choice
of tools with which to mould it into specific forms.
For centuries past the problem for professing Christians at least
was theoretically simple. This life did not count at all save as a
preparation for an eternal one, entrance to the happiness of which was
possible only by following certain rules of conduct. Today, however,
the problem for most people is what is the most perfect or satisfying
life for our few years on earth, with no fixed rules to guide. Just as
the breaking down of so many barriers of thought at the time of the
Renaissance freed all the other arts and allowed them to flower, so
the breaking down of barriers today would seem to give the art of life
its opportunity as never before. As far as the tyranny of old ideas is
concerned we are freer than at any other period of history to order our
lives according to art. Moreover, we have infinitely more tools to do
it with. They are being thrust into our hands with amazing rapidity,
though we play with them without thinking what we are doing or making.
The result, it must be confessed, is a haphazard existence instead of
an art of living.
Indeed, it may be asked if this sudden wealth of new tools has not
overwhelmed us. Are not most of us in the position of being provided
with undreamed of resources for an artist but with no ideas and no
technique? It is a platitude to say that we are at the beginning of a
new era facing a wholly altered world. If there is no art of living,
then all we can do is to bungle along. But if there is any such art,
then evidently the first thing of all is to decide what we want to
make, what sort of life is worth while, what sort of thoughts and
emotions. What with the lack of time, the pressure of community opinion
and the insistence of standardized advertising, most of us take the
easiest way by thinking that what we want is what our neighbors have.
But just as standardized machine production has killed the arts of the
old crafts, so standardized living quickly kills any art of living.
If there can be any art of living, any ordering of life to yield us
the richest and deepest experiences from this strange adventure into
self-consciousness, it is evident that the individual has got to decide
what for him or her are the abiding values in life. As it is, our minds
are apt to be like the first page of a newspaper in which a home run
by Babe Ruth may get the same space as the fall of an empire. If we
stopped to consider sanely what for each of us are the real values in
life, ranging them in order of significance and importance for _us_,
might not many of us find that they do not consist at all in the things
we are striving for? Might we not throw away many of the tools which
everyone is using thoughtlessly and habitually merely because everyone
else is? We would have seen that they do not produce any such thought
or emotion as should fit into that unique production which is our own
individual life. For one of the fundamental differences between a
work of art and a machine product is that the former is unique. All
art involves a selection according to a scale of values. The camera
may render the total detail of a landscape with more exactitude than
a painter, but the latter selects the details and then through his
technique and his own personality he produces a work of art which has a
unique and artistic quality.
Is it, perhaps, that the material for an art of life is so vast and
our tools have become so numerous that there is no possibility of an
artistic ordering of our experience? Has it all become too complex
and are we reduced to a chaotic and disordered succession of thoughts
and emotions? If not, then the artist in life must do just as any
other does, learn his technique of production, the proper use of his
tools and material to produce a definite result at which he aims, and
rigidly reject all which does not contribute to the one work of art of
which he has seen the vision.
That is, perhaps, one of the greatest difficulties in the way of
an art of life in America. We mix up our money and motor cars and
relationships and all the rest of our “tools” as thoughtlessly as a
painter might squeeze all his tubes of color onto his canvas, and we
get as a result the same sort of daub, in terms of life. Or we are like
children striking the notes of a piano at random and achieving the same
jangle in life that they do in sound. We select and reject mainly as
governed by income. We do so because we have no scale of values, and we
have no values because we have no idea what sort of life we really wish
to live to express our individuality.
But we cannot select unless we can place comparative values on the
various things life offers us, and we cannot value them unless we have
arrived at some _standard_ of value. The only standard is what we
consider a worthwhile life for each of us individually. For various
reasons the tyranny of crowd opinion has always been greater in America
than in most civilized countries, but it is, of course, one of the
great dangers of democracy everywhere. Many people seem to believe that
the life of the savage is one of delightful independence, of doing
what suits himself all day long. No idea could be further from the
truth. The savage is hemmed and circumscribed at almost every point
in his personal life by the _mores_ of his tribe. Liberty, freedom of
speech and action, the right and opportunity for free self-expression,
are among the highest products of civilization, not of savagery, and
the belief that the reverse is the case is merely an example of the
present day tendency to exalt the ideal of savagery and to return on
our tracks, evident in all the arts.
Democracy, a certain weariness of the complexities of that very process
of civilization that has made freedom possible, and the misunderstood
teachings of scientific research, all three are tending to make the
tyranny of the crowd greater and an art of life more difficult. In a
recent American prize contest for definitions of morality, for example,
one of the three which won prizes was as follows: “Morality is that
form of human behavior conceded to be virtuous by the conventions of
the group to which the individual belongs,” and we are told that among
all the definitions submitted there was little disagreement as to the
general concept. Of course this is the muddiest sort of thinking. The
particular social forms which morality takes among the crowd at any
given time is confused with morality itself, and, if the definition
were true, any advance in moral concepts on the part of either society
or the individual would become impossible, as no society ever changed
its “moral” opinions unanimously overnight. That such a definition
should have become the general one in America is merely an interesting
example of the difficulty amongst us of disentangling one’s individual
self from the glutinous mass of all one’s compatriots and fellow
Rotarians and Christian Endeavorers.
To practise an art of living it is essential, as I have said, to arrive
at some standard of values for ourselves. If we may judge from this
contest, and from other evidences, the standard of value arrived at by
the American people in the broad sphere of ethics or morality is merely
the standard of what the overwhelming mass of Americans of all sorts
consider applicable to themselves. There can be no individuality in
conforming to such a standard so arrived at. Moreover, such a standard
is bound to be beastly low. The mass of men has never risen without
individuals to make it rise any more than a mass of dough will rise
without the tiny bit of yeast in it. Our concern here, however, is
with the individual who would manage his life with art, not with the
mass, and for him no art of life is possible if he is merely going to
make his life conform to the opinions of the majority. It is as absurd
as it would be to think of Keats, preparing to write an “Ode to a
Nightingale,” taking a vote of all his fellow apothecary apprentices as
to what they thought he ought to say about a nightingale.
But we have also got to consider carefully what tools to use in our
art. Limiting ourselves for the moment to what are usually called
“things,” it is obvious, though generally overlooked, that the effect
upon ourselves of “things” is both varied and profound. This is a theme
which is rarely treated, but the reader will recall the effect upon
Lee Randon of the French doll on his mantelpiece in Hergesheimer’s
“Cytherea.” It is, perhaps, the best illustration I can offer of the
idea worked out to its conclusion in all completeness. The other day
I happened to be visiting the exhibition of the _Arts Decoratifs_ at
the _Grand Palais_ in Paris. The new art in France, and elsewhere over
here in Europe, is producing a wholly new form of interior decoration
and furnishing, sometimes of great beauty and nearly always of much
interest. As I stood in one bedroom in which the bed of ivory and
ebony of indescribable design had its covering of leopard skins, I
could not help musing on what subtle differences in one’s spiritual
and intellectual character would come from living one’s life amid such
furnishings, as contrasted, we will say, with bedrooms of complete
and perfect Queen Anne or Louis Quatorze. In the room I mention, the
atmosphere, due to the furnishing, was an almost maleficent blending of
the perfection of twentieth century civilization with the savagery of
the jungle. As one stood there, in a room designed as the last word in
French art and craftsmanship for a millionaire of 1929, one was aware
in part of one’s soul of the faint booming of tom-toms and of the odor
of black and sweaty jungle flesh. A man could not live in that room
without strange things happening in the depths of his being.
This, perhaps, may be said to be an extreme example, as was
Hergesheimer’s, but is it? Do not all our surroundings and things
affect us? The social effects of such things as automobiles, radios
and so on have now become commonplaces, but what of the effects on
the individual? In many ways a man or woman with a motor car is a
different creature from one without one. Think how many lives have been
altered by the reading of a single book. The laboring man who lives
in a Sixth Avenue room in New York facing on the elevated railroad is
a different man from one who lives in a cottage and garden in Devon
or amid quiet and roses in the Vaucluse. All this would seem to be
so self-evident as to call for no elaboration, and yet do we pay any
attention to it? When we try to live as everyone else does, when we buy
something because “everybody has one,” are we not using our tools with
an utter lack of discrimination? There is a similar decadence in some
directions in the arts other than that of life, a tendency to put “any
old thing” on canvas, to clutter up a novel with irrelevant details on
the plea of realism. We might as well try to eat everything as have
everything, regardless of our own taste or the idiosyncrasies of our
own digestions. A painter does not use his scarlet or blue or orange
brushes regardless of the effect, merely because they are “there.” He
selects his colors as he does his objects, for their final influence
on his work, or he merely produces a daub. If we are to have an art
of life, must we not exercise equal care in trying to discriminate
between the influences and values of all the tools that we use in
making the infinitely more complex work, an individual human life of
significance and happiness and worth? We have got to think what all
these tools—things, situations, surroundings, relationships—may mean
for our own individual selves, for our own private lives, regardless
of the standards of the majority, before we can begin to live as human
beings and develop an art of life. Otherwise we are mere telephone
switchboards, like animals, receiving stimuli and sending out reactions.
Until we have given thought to this, we can use all our tools and
material only at random and with no idea of the result we are
producing. If we can decide what we want to make of ourselves and what
tools will best assist the result, then we can vastly simplify our
lives by a wholesale rejection of all those things which may be well
enough for our neighbors but do not conduce to the one desired end
for ourselves. We would then no longer wear ourselves out in the mere
living of standardized lives and keeping up with the Joneses. We would
not only simplify our lives but we would introduce variety into the
deadly monotony of the national life. No two artists would have exactly
the same conception of a subject or treat it in exactly the same way.
If it is true that our lives are increasingly frustrate and commonplace
and standardized because we do not take time and trouble to think
out what is the worthwhile life and achieve a scale of values is it
not because we lack the courage to be different from the Joneses and
to give to our lives that precise quality of uniqueness which is
characteristic of the products of art?
The three qualities, therefore, which would seem to be essential to any
artistic ordering of our lives are courage, thought and will. We have
got to acquire that rarest form of courage in America, the courage to
be considered different from our neighbors and the rest of our set.
If Mrs. Jones’s greatest joys in life are the perfectly appointed
dinners she delights in being known to give, and riding in her
Rolls-Royce, then let her have them if she can afford them. But if
your greatest joys are simple hospitality and the good talk around
the board, and if you care far more for books than the sort of car
that affords you transportation, then in the name of Art give simple
dinners, line your shelves with books and drive a Ford.
If you love Elizabethan drama and detest the current fiction, read
your drama; and when someone asks you if you have read _The Mauve
Petticoat_, tell him candidly that you have not and that you do not
intend to. If you are intelligent enough to be bored stiff with the
absurd social life of ninety-nine clubs in a hundred, refuse to join
the things and amuse yourself in your own way.
Americans pride themselves on their courage and individuality and brag
of the frontier virtues, but the fact is we are the most cowardly race
in the world socially. Read Emerson’s essay on _Self Reliance_ and
ask yourself honestly how much you dare to be yourself. He has been
called the most essentially American of our authors, but would he
be so today? The old phrases have a familiar ring. “Trust thyself:
every heart vibrates to that iron string.” “Whoso would be a man
must be a nonconformist.” “My life is not an apology, but a life. It
is for itself and not for a spectacle.” “What I must do is all that
concerns me, not what the people think.” “Life only avails, not the
having lived.” “Insist on yourself; never imitate.” Every schoolboy
knows them, but how many mature Americans dare to practise them? Take
the matter of clothes as a simple touchstone of individuality. Every
American woman who goes to London is either shocked, interested or
amused by the variety of women’s dress there. Most of it, except sports
clothes, is, I admit, extremely bad, but the point is that a woman
dresses just as she pleases. Little girls may have long black stockings
or legs bare to their full length; older women may have skirts that
display the knee or drag the ground; hats of the latest mode from
Paris, or from Regent Street when Victoria was a girl. Watching the
passing crowd on the Broad Walk is like turning the pages of Punch for
half a century. A man may wear any headgear from a golf cap to a pearl
satin “topper.” Compare this, for example, with New York and the mass
antics of the Stock Exchange where if a man wears a straw hat beyond
the day appointed by his fellows they smash it down over his eyes,
and where he is not safe from similar moronic hoodlumism even in the
streets. I mention clothes not as a _Sartor Resartus_ but merely as a
simple instance of that mass-mindedness which permeates all American
life. One has to fight to be one’s self in America as in no other
country I know. Not only are most Americans anxious to conform to the
standards of the majority, but that majority, and the advertisers,
insist that they shall. I recall some years ago when living in a small
village and when I was spending many hundreds of dollars more than I
could well afford on books and also putting money into travel, that
more than one of the village people actually suggested to me that it
was rather disgraceful for a man in my position not to drive a better
car than a Ford. My answer, of course, was that I did not give a rap
about a car except as a means to get about, and I did care about books
and travel. Another man, one from the city, speaking of the same sore
point, said that _I_ could afford to use a Ford because everyone knew
who my grandfather was, but _he_ had to have something better to meet
his guests with. In another community, a moderately wealthy friend of
mine who had a large house, also a country place, and did a good deal
of traveling, was taken to task by a yet wealthier neighbor on the
score that, again, “a man in his position” owed it to his wife to give
her a better car than a Dodge sedan to make calls in, though both my
friend and the wife preferred to spend their money in other ways than
in running a Packard or a Cadillac. Spending one’s money in one’s own
way in America—that is, trying to use the tools of life with sanity and
discrimination—is a good deal like running the old Indian gauntlet. The
self-appointed monitors of society to tell other people how they should
live, ran, in the cases above, all the way from village store-keepers
to a successful New York business man worth many millions, but they are
merely typical of that pressure, express or implied, that is brought to
bear on any individual who attempts to think out and live his own life.
But if our lives are to be based on any art of living, if our souls are
not to be suppressed and submerged under a vast heap of standardized
plumbing, motor cars, crack schools for the children, suburban social
standards and customs, fear of group opinion, and all the rest of
our _mores_ and taboos, then the first and most essential factor is
courage, the simple courage to do what you really want to do with your
own life.
But if courage, especially in America, is essential to an art of
living, thought is fundamental. A man has got to think out what sort of
life he really wants, what life he is going to try to make for himself.
If he refuses to face that problem and merely drifts, he abandons
himself to the mould that his neighbors provide for him. He will become
both for himself and others the utterly uninteresting nonentity that so
many Americans are, simply because they have taken the line of least
resistance and become mere replicas of thousands of their fellows. When
you have seen one Ford car turned out any year, you have seen the whole
four million, or whatever the number is. They may be very good and very
useful and very sturdy, but they cannot have the slightest interest as
individual specimens for anyone.
You will not find it so easy a task as you may think to decide what
sort of life you really do want to make. To do so requires a clear
mind, independent thinking, and a knowledge of what the infinite
variety of goods and values in life are. Most people dream idly a good
deal of what they might like but few have either the ability or power
to think through what they really do want, given all the conditions
of their own selves and their possibilities. It is not only the young
girl who does not know what she wants, who dreams one day of becoming
an author because “it must be thrilling to live in Greenwich Village
and talk to real writers,” and another of becoming a clerk in a
store because “it must be wonderful to feel you are really _doing_
something.” The hardheaded business man who has fought his way up from
a shoestring to millions, knows often just as little what he wants,
as any number of rich men bored to death with power and leisure can
testify. Perhaps as useful a task of education as any would be to teach
young people what the possibilities of life are.
It may as well be confessed that most people cannot become artists in
living. That is not snobbery. It is simple truth. The day may come, if
democracy insists on continuing to debase all our spiritual coinage,
when anyone may aspire to call himself a poet or a musician or a
sculptor. However, that won’t make him one. There is no more reason
to expect that anyone can be a genuine artist in life than to expect
everyone to be an artist in words or sounds or colors. If we all cannot
aspire to become great artists of any sort, however, there is happily
room for us as amateurs in any art, if we care about it; and our own
happiness, as well as our interest for others, is greatly increased by
trying to express, in any art, our own individuality. The other arts
are merely tools for the great all-embracing art, that of living, and
we cannot refuse to become amateurs in that art without confession of
failure as civilized beings. If all this complex, delicate, and, it may
as well be confessed, burdensome thing we call civilization is merely
to be used to make us more intricate switchboards of automatic stimuli
and reactions, then we might as well smash it and be done with it. Its
only excuse is in increasing our liberty of choice, our chance to be
more individual among a wider range of goods than can the savage or the
barbarian.
Moreover, if one would practise the art of living, he must have the
artistic spirit. I do not mean the æsthetic in its narrower meaning,
but the spirit of the man who finds joy in his own creating of
something beautiful or noble or lovely. Life, as Emerson says, must be
for itself and not for a spectacle. Artists may get great pay for their
work, but if they have spent their lives with their minds on the pay
and not on the work, they have not been artists. It is the work, indeed
the working, that counts and that is its own best reward. Nor must we
defer the practice of our art. A poet or a painter or a musician does
not say to himself, “I will make a million first, and then I will write
poetry or paint pictures or compose music.” His art is life itself, the
best of life, for the genuine artist. Money and freedom may be pleasant
and useful but they are not the essence of any art, that of life any
more than any other. Keats did not postpone writing his poetry until he
could retire from mixing drugs and find a cottage in the country. If
he had, there would have been no poetry to make his name immortal. And
if anyone says of the art of life, that he will try to order his life
artistically when he has another five thousand a year, or when he is
vice-president instead of sales manager or when he can quit, he will
never so order it at all. He does not understand and has not got it in
him. He will simply take his place in the American procession with the
other four million Fords of the year.
If you decide that you have the courage to “be different,” if you
can decide what you really want of life, then you may achieve an art
of living if you have the will to see it through. And you will find,
incidentally, that in place of the sheep-like flocks of country-club
Joneses you will have as friends and guests a far more interesting
group, that your life will have attained to a depth and a richness of
experience that is denied to the standardized Joneses and all their
kith and kin, and that you are no longer an automaton with inhibitions
but a human being expressing your own unique personality: loving,
enjoying, experiencing, suffering perhaps, but _alive_. Your life will
not be a machine-made product identical with millions of others turned
out by the same firm, but a work of art which will give joy to yourself
and others because it is like no other.
But if you merely settle down, unthinkingly and uncourageously, in the
mould provided for you by your neighbors, if you accept as standards
and values merely those of the majority, you will not be an individual
or even the useful citizen you may think yourself though you attend
every meeting of your association in the year. America can count such
men, as she can her motor cars, by the tens of millions. What she needs
as useful citizens today are men and women who dare to be themselves,
who know with Emerson that “life only avails, not the having lived,”
who can conceive how rich and varied life can be, and who, with the
spirit of the artist and at least an amateur’s knowledge of tools and
technique, will defy the crowd and show what an art of living may be.
Americans have never lacked courage on the fields of battle. It is time
they showed some on the golf links. We are more afraid of what our best
customer may think or what Mrs. Umpty Bullmarket-Jones may say than our
ancestors ever were of what the redskins might do. If I thought mottoes
and slogans did any good, I would replace the “God bless our happy
home” of a generation or two ago, and the “say it quick” of our offices
today, with old Emerson’s “Be yourself.” That is what every artist,
every civilized man and woman has got to be, as the very foundation
of an art of living. It is, indeed, only the foundation but it is
essential. Every art is social. It is the result of a relation between
the artist and his time. Music could not have developed as a result of
a succession of individual musicians composing for a society of the
deaf, and before we can develop an art of living in America and adjust
our machinery of life to its practice as it is adjusted in many ways in
Europe, we must develop a taste for individual living in thousands of
Americans who will refuse to bow the knee to the crowd, whether city,
suburban or village, and insist upon being themselves. The road of
conformity is merely the road back to savagery.
BONIBOOKS
Here is a list of books of solid and enduring literary value. With
the addition, from time to time, of new titles, the publishers pride
themselves that they have achieved their aim of making the Bonibooks’
imprint synonymous with literary and intrinsic excellence. The books
are attractive in appearance, with a sturdy full-cloth binding, stamped
in silver, printed on paper of good quality. $1.00 each.
1. AMERICAN OXFORD DICTIONARY F. G. and H. W. Fowler
2. EDUCATION AND THE GOOD LIFE Bertrand Russell
3. GREAT SHORT STORIES OF THE WORLD Clark and Lieber
4. OXFORD BOOK OF AMERICAN VERSE Bliss Carman
5. ISRAEL Ludwig Lewisohn
6. THIS EARTH OF OURS Jean-Henri Fabre
7. AGAINST THE GRAIN J. K. Huysmans
8. OUR BUSINESS CIVILIZATION James Truslow Adams
9. THE HIGH PLACE James Branch Cabell
10. WHAT IS WRONG WITH MARRIAGE Hamilton and MacGowan
11. SOUTH WIND Norman Douglas
12. MICHELANGELO Romain Rolland
13. THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY H. G. Wells
14. TAR: A Midwest Childhood Sherwood Anderson
15. THE WORLD’S BEST ESSAYS F. H. Pritchard
From Confucius to Mencken
16. THE WORLD’S BEST POEMS Van Doren and Lapolla
17. BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES Carolyn Wells
18. GREAT DETECTIVE STORIES OF THE WORLD J. L. French
19. GREAT SHORT BIOGRAPHIES OF ANCIENT TIMES Barrett H. Clark
The Middle Ages and the Renaissance
20. GREAT SHORT BIOGRAPHIES OF MODERN TIMES Barrett H. Clark
The Seventeenth, Eighteenth and
Nineteenth Centuries
21. GREAT SHORT NOVELS OF THE WORLD, Volume I Barrett H. Clark
22. GREAT SHORT NOVELS OF THE WORLD, Volume II Barrett H. Clark
23. MOBY DICK (Illustrated) Herman Melville
24. THE STORY OF THE BIBLE Hendrik Willem Van Loon
25. INDIAN TALES Rudyard Kipling
26. AN OUTLINE OF HUMOR Edited by Carolyn Wells
27. WORLD ATLAS
28. MARDI Herman Melville
Transcriber’s Notes
pg vii Changed: ground of attack than that instead of sayng
to: ground of attack than that instead of saying
pg 21 Changed: countrysides where no physican can now be found
to: countrysides where no physician can now be found
pg 50 Changed: the most expensiye “things” to acquire
to: the most expensive “things” to acquire
pg 138 Changed: to organize an almost hopless crusade
to: to organize an almost hopeless crusade
pg 161 Changed: I was eighteen or ninteeen
to: I was eighteen or nineteen
pg 217 Changed: refuge in a yet more ignominous surrender
to: refuge in a yet more ignominious surrender
pg 251 Changed: exhibition of paintings by colonial artisst
to: exhibition of paintings by colonial artist
pg 251 Changed: colonies in innumeragle instances held legislative
to: colonies in innumerable instances held legislative
pg 305 Changed: our ancesters ever were of what the redskins
to: our ancestors ever were of what the redskins