So many grateful and impetuous spirits have recently come forward to
tell to an approving world how they have been benefited by their early
reading, and by their wisely chosen favorites in literature, that the
trustful listener begins to think, against his own rueful experience,
that all books must be pleasant and profitable companions. Those who
have honored us with confidence in this matter seem to have found their
letters, as Sir Thomas Browne found his religion, “all pure profit.”
Edward E. Hale, for instance, has been “helped” by every imaginable
writer, from Marcus Aurelius to the amiable authoress of “The Wide,
Wide World.” Moncure D. Conway acknowledges his obligations to an
infinite variety of sources. William T. Harris has been happy enough to
seize instinctively upon those works which aroused his “latent energies
to industry and self-activity;” and Edward Eggleston has gathered
intellectual sustenance from the most unexpected quarters,--the Rollo
Books, and Lindley Murray’s Reader. Only Andrew Lang and Augustus
Jessop are disposed, with an untimely levity, to confess that they have
read for amusement rather than for self-instruction, and that they have
not found it so easily attainable.
Now when a man tells us that he has been really “helped” by certain
books, we naturally conclude that the condition reached by their
assistance is, in some measure, gratifying to himself; and, by the same
token, I am disposed to argue that my own unsatisfactory development
may be the result of less discreetly selected reading,--reading for
which, in many cases, I was wholly irresponsible. I notice particularly
that several persons who have been helped acknowledge a very pleasing
debt of gratitude to their early spelling-books, to Webster’s
Elementary, and to those modest volumes which first imparted to them
the mysteries of the alphabet. It was not so with me. I learned my
letters, at the cost of infinite tribulation, out of a horrible little
book called “Reading Without Tears,” which I trust has long since
been banished from all Christian nurseries. It was a brown book, and
had on its cover a deceptive picture of two stout and unclothed Cupids
holding the volume open between them, and making an ostentatious
pretense of enjoyment. Young as I was, I grew cynical over that title
and that picture, for the torrents of tears that I shed blotted them
both daily from my sight. It might have been possible for Cupids,
who needed no wardrobes and sat comfortably on clouds, to like such
lessons, but for an ordinary little girl in frock and pinafore they
were simply heart-breaking. Had it only been my good fortune to be
born twenty years later, spelling would have been left out of my early
discipline, and I should have found congenial occupation in sticking
pins or punching mysterious bits of clay at a kindergarten. But when I
was young, the world was still sadly unenlightened in these matters;
the plain duty of every child was to learn how to read; and the more
hopelessly dull I showed myself to be, the more imperative became
the need of forcing some information into me,--information which I
received as responsively as does a Strasbourg goose its daily share
of provender. For two bitter years I had for my constant companion
that hated reader, which began with such isolated statements as “Ann
has a cat,” and ended with a dismal story about a little African boy
named Sam; Mr. Rider Haggard not having then instructed us as to what
truly remarkable titles little African boys enjoy. If, to this day, I
am disposed to underrate the advantages of education, and to think but
poorly of compulsory school-laws and the march of mind, it is because
of the unhappy nature of my own early experiences.
Having at last struggled into some acquaintanceship with print, the
next book to which I can trace a moral downfall is “Sandford and
Merton,” left on the nursery shelves by an elder brother, and read
many times, not because I especially liked it, but because I had so
little to choose from. Those were not days when a glut of juvenile
literature had produced a corresponding indifference, and a spirit of
languid hypercriticism. The few volumes we possessed, even those of
a severely didactic order, were read and re-read, until we knew them
well by heart. Now up to a certain age I was, as all healthy children
are, essentially democratic, with a decided preference for low company,
and a secret affinity for the least desirable little girls in the
neighborhood. But “Sandford and Merton” wrought a pitiable change. I do
not think I ever went so far as to dislike the Rev. Mr. Barlow after
the very cordial and hearty fashion in which Dickens disliked him,
and I know I should have been scandalized by Mr. Burnand’s cheerful
mockery; but, pondering over the matter with the stolid gravity of a
child, I reached some highly unsatisfactory conclusions. It did not
seem to me then, and it does not seem to me now, exactly fair in the
estimable clergyman to have refused the board which Mr. Merton was
anxious to pay, and then have reproached poor Tommy so coldly with
eating the bread of dependence; neither did it seem worth while for a
wealthy little boy to spend his time in doing--very inefficiently, I am
sure--the work of an under-gardener. Harry’s contempt for riches, and
his supreme satisfaction with a piece of bread for dinner, struck me as
overdrawn; Tommy’s mishaps were more numerous than need be, even if he
did have the misfortune to be a gentleman’s son; and the complacency
with which Mr. Barlow permitted him to give away a whole suit of
clothes--clothes which, according to my childish system of ethics,
belonged, not to him, but to his mother--contrasted but poorly with the
anxiety manifested by the reverend mentor over his own pitiful loaf of
bread. Altogether, “Sandford and Merton” affected me the wrong way;
and for the first time my soul revolted from the pretentious virtues
of honest poverty. It is to the malign influence of that tale that I
owe my sneaking preference for the drones and butterflies of earth. I
do not now believe that men are born equal; I do not love universal
suffrage; I mistrust all popular agitators, all intrusive legislation,
all philanthropic fads, all friends of the people and benefactors of
their race. I cannot even sympathize with the noble theory that every
man and woman should do their share of the world’s work; I would gladly
shirk my own if I could. And this lamentable, unworthy view of life
and its responsibilities is due to the subtle poison instilled into my
youthful mind by the too strenuous counter-teaching of “Sandford and
Merton.”
A third pitfall was dug for my unwary feet when, as a school-girl of
fifteen, I read, sorely against my will, Milton’s “Areopagitica.” I
believe this is a work highly esteemed by critics, and I have even
heard people in private life, who might say what they pleased without
scandal, speak quite enthusiastically of its manly spirit and sonorous
rhetoric. Perhaps they had the privilege of reading it skippingly
to themselves, and not as I did, aloud, paragraph after paragraph,
each weighted with mighty sentences, cumbrous, involved, majestic,
and, so far as my narrow comprehension went, almost unintelligible.
Never can I forget the aspect of those pages, bristling all over with
mysterious allusions to unknown people and places, and with an armed
phalanx of Greek and Roman names which were presumably familiar to my
instructed mind, but which were really dug out bodily from my Classical
Dictionary, at the cost of much time and temper. I have counted in
one paragraph, and that a moderately short one, forty-five of these
stumbling-blocks, ranging all the way from the “libertine school of
Cyrene,” about which I knew nothing, to the no less libertine songs
of Naso, about which I know nothing now. Neither was it easy to trace
the exact connection between the question at issue, “the freedom of
unlicenc’d printing,” and such far-off matters as the gods of Egypt
and the comedies of Plautus, Isaiah’s prophecies and the Carthaginian
councils. Erudition, like a bloodhound, is a charming thing when held
firmly in leash, but it is not so attractive when turned loose upon a
defenseless and unerudite public. Lady Harriet Ashburton used to say
that, when Macaulay talked, she was not only inundated with learning,
but she positively stood in the slops. In reading Milton, I waded
knee-deep, utterly out of my element, and deeply resentful of the
experience. The liberty of the press was, to my American notions, so
much a matter of course, that the only way I could account for the
continued withholding of so commonplace a privilege was by supposing
that some unwary members of Parliament read the “Areopagitica,” and
were forthwith hardened into tyranny forever. I own I felt a savage
glee in reflecting that Lords and Commons had received this oppressive
bit of literature in the same aggrieved spirit that I had myself,
and that its immediate result was to put incautious patriots in a
more ticklish position than before. If truth now seems to me a sadly
overrated virtue; if plain-speaking is sure to affront me; if the
vigorous personalities of the journalist and the amiable indecencies
of the novel-writer vex my illiberal soul, and if the superficial
precautions of a paternal government appear estimable in my eyes, to
what can I trace this alien and unprogressive attitude, if not to
the “Areopagitica,” and its adverse influence over my rebellious and
suffering girlhood?
As these youthful reminiscences are of too mournful a nature to be
profitably prolonged, I will add only two more to the list of books
which have hindered my moral and intellectual development. When I was
seventeen, I read, at the earnest solicitation of some well-meaning
friends, “The Heir of Redclyffe,” and my carefully guarded theories
of life shivered and broke before the baneful lesson it conveyed.
Brought up on a comfortable and wholesome diet of Miss Edgeworth’s
pleasant stories, I had unconsciously absorbed the genial doctrine that
virtue is its own reward, and that additional rewards are sure to be
forthcoming; that happiness awaits the good and affable little girl,
and that well-merited misfortunes dog the footsteps of her who inclines
to evil ways. I trusted implicitly to those shadowy mills where the
impartial gods grind out our just deserts; and the admirable songs
in “Patience” about Gentle Jane and Teasing Tom inadequately express
the rigidity of my views and the boundless nature of my confidence.
“The Heir of Redclyffe” destroyed, at once and forever, this cheerful
delusion, and with it a powerful stimulus to rectitude. Here are Sir
Guy Morville and poor little Amy, both of them virtuous to a degree
which would have put Miss Edgeworth’s most exemplary characters to
the blush; yet Guy, after being bullied and badgered through the
greater part of his short life, dies of the very fever which should
properly have carried off Philip; and Amy, besides being left widowed
and heart-broken, gives birth to a daughter instead of a son, and so
forfeits the inheritance of Redclyffe. On the other hand, Philip, the
most intolerable of prigs and mischief-makers, whose cruel suspicions
play havoc with the happiness of everybody in the story, and whose
obstinate folly brings about the final disaster,--Philip, who is little
better than his cousin’s murderer, succeeds to the estate, marries
that very stilted and unpleasant young person, Laura (who is after
all a world too good for him), and is left in a blaze of glory, a
wealthy, honored, and distinguished man. It is true that Miss Yonge,
whose conscience must have pricked her a little at bringing about this
unwarranted and unjustifiable conclusion, would have us believe that
he was sorry for his misbehavior, and that his regret was sufficient
to equalize the perfidious scales of justice; but even at seventeen
I was not guileless enough to credit the lasting quality of Philip’s
contrition. A very few years would suffice to reconcile him to Guy’s
death, and to convince him that his own succession was a mere survival
of the fittest, an admirable intervention on the part of Destiny to
remedy her former blunders, and exalt him to his proper station in the
world. But to me this triumph of guilt meant the downfall of my early
creed, the destruction of my most cherished convictions. Never again
might I look forward with hopeful heart to the inevitable righting of
all wrong things; never again might I trust with old-time confidence to
the final readjustment of a closing chapter. Even Emerson’s essay on
“Compensation” has failed to restore to me the full measure of all that
I lost through the “The Heir of Redclyffe.”
The last work to injure me seriously as a girl, and to root up the
good seed sown in long years of righteous education, was “Uncle Tom’s
Cabin,” which I read from cover to cover with the innocent credulity
of youth; and, when I had finished, the awful conviction forced itself
upon me that the thirteenth amendment was a ghastly error, and that the
war had been fought in vain. Slavery, which had seemed to me before
undeviatingly wicked, now shone in a new and alluring light. All
things must be judged by their results, and if the result of slavery
was to produce a race so infinitely superior to common humanity; if
it bred strong, capable, self-restrained men like George, beautiful,
courageous, tender-hearted women like Eliza, visions of innocent
loveliness like Emmeline; marvels of acute intelligence like Cassy,
children of surpassing precocity and charm like little Harry, mothers
and wives of patient, simple goodness like Aunt Chloe, and, finally,
models of all known chivalry and virtue like Uncle Tom himself,--then
slavery was the most ennobling institution in the world, and we had
committed a grievous crime in degrading a whole heroic race to our
narrower, viler level. It was but too apparent, even to my immature
mind, that the negroes whom I knew, or knew about, were very little
better than white people; that they shared in all the manifold failings
of humanity, and were not marked by any higher intelligence than
their Caucasian neighbors. Even in the matters of physical beauty and
mechanical ingenuity there had plainly been some degeneracy, some
falling off from the high standard of old slavery days. Reluctantly
I concluded that what had seemed so right had all been wrong indeed,
and that the only people who stood preeminent for virtue, intellect,
and nobility had been destroyed by our rash act, had sunk under the
enervating influence of freedom to a range of lower feeling, to baser
aspirations and content. It was the greatest shock of all, and the last.
I will pursue the subject no further. Those who read these simple
statements may not, I fear, find them as edifying or as stimulating
as the happier recollections of more favored souls; but it is barely
possible that they may see in them the unvarnished reflection of some
of their own youthful experiences.