which the important moments and persons can be rightly set down; but
the shortest is the best, and if one lacks stomach for Mr. Grote’s
voluminous annals, the old slight and popular summary of Goldsmith or
of Gillies will serve. The valuable part is the age of Pericles and the
next generation. And here we must read the “Clouds” of Aristophanes,
and what more of that master we gain appetite for, to learn our way
in the streets of Athens, and to know the tyranny of Aristophanes,
requiring more genius and sometimes not less cruelty than belonged to
the official commanders. Aristophanes is now very accessible, with much
valuable commentary, through the labors of Mitchell and Cartwright. An
excellent popular book is J. A. St. John’s “Ancient Greece”; the “Life
and Letters” of Niebuhr, even more than his Lectures, furnish leading
views; and Winckelmann, a Greek born out of due time, has become
essential to an intimate knowledge of the Attic genius. The secret of
the recent histories in German and in English is the discovery, owed
first to Wolff, and later to Boeckh, that the sincere Greek history
of that period must be drawn from Demosthenes, especially from the
business orations, and from the comic poets.
If we come down a little by natural steps from the master to the
disciples, we have, six or seven centuries later, the Platonists,--who
also cannot be skipped,--Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, Synesius,
Jamblichus. Of Jamblichus the Emperor Julian said, “that he was
posterior to Plato in time, not in genius.” Of Plotinus, we
have eulogies by Porphyry and Longinus, and the favor of the
Emperor Gallienus,--indicating the respect he inspired among his
contemporaries. If any one who had read with interest the “Isis and
Osiris” of Plutarch should then read a chapter called “Providence,” by
Synesius, translated into English by Thomas Taylor, he will find it one
of the majestic remains of literature, and, like one walking in the
noblest of temples, will conceive new gratitude to his fellow-men, and
a new estimate of their nobility. The imaginative scholar will find
few stimulants to his brain like these writers. He has entered the
Elysian Fields; and the grand and pleasing figures of gods and dæmons
and dæmoniacal men, of the “azonic” and the “aquatic gods,” dæmons
with fulgid eyes, and all the rest of the Platonic rhetoric, exalted
a little under the African sun, sail before his eyes. The acolyte has
mounted the tripod over the cave at Delphi; his heart dances, his
sight is quickened. These guides speak of the gods with such depth and
with such pictorial details, as if they had been bodily present at the
Olympian feasts. The reader of these books makes new acquaintance with
his own mind; new regions of thought are opened. Jamblichus’s “Life
of Pythagoras” works more directly on the will than the others; since
Pythagoras was eminently a practical person, the founder of a school
of ascetics and socialists, a planter of colonies, and nowise a man of
abstract studies alone.
The respectable and sometimes excellent translations of Bohn’s Library
have done for literature what railroads have done for internal
intercourse. I do not hesitate to read all the books I have named,
and all good books, in translations. What is really best in any book
is translatable,--any real insight or broad human sentiment. Nay,
I observe that, in our Bible, and other books of lofty moral tone,
it seems easy and inevitable to render the rhythm and music of the
original into phrases of equal melody. The Italians have a fling at
translators,--_i traditori traduttori_; but I thank them. I rarely read
any Latin, Greek, German, Italian, sometimes not a French book in the
original, which I can procure in a good version. I like to be beholden
to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives
tributaries from every region under heaven. I should as soon think
of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of
reading all my books in originals, when I have them rendered for me in
my mother-tongue.
For history there is great choice of ways to bring the student through
early Rome. If he can read Livy, he has a good book; but one of the
short English compends, some Goldsmith or Ferguson, should be used,
that will place in the cycle the bright stars of Plutarch. The
poet Horace is the eye of the Augustan age; Tacitus, the wisest of
historians; and Martial will give him Roman manners,--and some very
bad ones,--in the early days of the Empire: but Martial must be read,
if read at all, in his own tongue. These will bring him to Gibbon, who
will take him in charge, and convey him with abundant entertainment
down--with notice of all remarkable objects on the way--through
fourteen hundred years of time. He cannot spare Gibbon, with his vast
reading,--with such wit and continuity of mind, that, though never
profound, his book is one of the conveniences of civilization, like
the new railroad from ocean to ocean,--and, I think, will be sure to
send the reader to his “Memoirs of Himself,” and the “Extracts from my
Journal,” and “Abstracts of my Readings,” which will spur the laziest
scholar to emulation of his prodigious performance.
Now having our idler safe down as far as the fall of Constantinople in
1453, he is in very good courses; for here are trusty hands waiting for
him. The cardinal facts of European history are soon learned. There
is Dante’s poem, to open the Italian Republics of the Middle Age;
Dante’s “Vita Nuova,” to explain Dante and Beatrice; and Boccaccio’s
“Life of Dante,”--a great man to describe a greater. To help us,
perhaps a volume or two of M. Sismondi’s “Italian Republics” will be
as good as the entire sixteen. When we come to Michel Angelo, his
Sonnets and Letters must be read, with his Life by Vasari, or, in our
day, by Herman Grimm. For the Church, and the Feudal Institution, Mr.
Hallam’s “Middle Ages” will furnish, if superficial, yet readable and
conceivable outlines.
The “Life of the Emperor Charles V.,” by the useful Robertson, is
still the key of the following age. Ximenes, Columbus, Loyola, Luther,
Erasmus, Melanchthon, Francis I., Henry VIII., Elizabeth, and Henry
IV. of France, are his contemporaries. It is a time of seeds and
expansions, whereof our recent civilization is the fruit.
If now the relations of England to European affairs bring him to
British ground, he is arrived at the very moment when modern history
takes new proportions. He can look back for the legends and mythology
to the “Younger Edda” and the “Heimskringla” of Snorro Sturleson, to
Mallet’s “Northern Antiquities,” to Ellis’s “Metrical Romances,” to
Asser’s “Life of Alfred” and Venerable Bede, and to the researches of
Sharon Turner and Palgrave. Hume will serve him for an intelligent
guide, and in the Elizabethan era he is at the richest period of the
English mind, with the chief men of action and of thought which that
nation has produced, and with a pregnant future before him. Here he has
Shakspeare, Spenser, Sidney, Raleigh, Bacon, Chapman, Jonson, Ford,
Beaumont and Fletcher, Herbert, Donne, Herrick; and Milton, Marvell,
and Dryden, not long after.
In reading history, he is to prefer the history of individuals. He will
not repent the time he gives to Bacon,--not if he read the “Advancement
of Learning,” the “Essays,” the “Novum Organum,” the “History of
Henry VII.,” and then all the “Letters” (especially those to the
Earl of Devonshire, explaining the Essex business), and all but his
“Apophthegms.”
The task is aided by the strong mutual light which these men shed
on each other. Thus, the works of Ben Jonson are a sort of hoop to
bind all these fine persons together, and to the land to which they
belong. He has written verses to or on all his notable contemporaries;
and what with so many occasional poems, and the portrait sketches in
his “Discoveries,” and the gossiping record of his opinions in his
conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden, he has really illustrated
the England of his time, if not to the same extent, yet much in the
same way, as Walter Scott has celebrated the persons and places of
Scotland. Walton, Chapman, Herrick, and Sir Henry Wotton write also to
the times.
Among the best books are certain _Autobiographies_: as, St. Augustine’s
Confessions; Benvenuto Cellini’s Life; Montaigne’s Essays; Lord
Herbert of Cherbury’s Memoirs; Memoirs of the Cardinal de Retz;
Rousseau’s Confessions; Linnæus’s Diary; Gibbon’s, Hume’s, Franklin’s,
Burns’s, Alfieri’s, Goethe’s, and Haydon’s Autobiographies.
Another class of books closely allied to these, and of like interest,
are those which may be called _Table-Talks_: of which the best are
Saadi’s Gulistan; Luther’s Table-Talk; Aubrey’s Lives; Spence’s
Anecdotes; Selden’s Table-Talk; Boswell’s Life of Johnson; Eckermann’s
Conversations with Goethe; Coleridge’s Table-Talk; and Hazlitt’s Life
of Northcote.
There is a class whose value I should designate as _Favorites_: such
as Froissart’s Chronicles; Southey’s Chronicle of the Cid; Cervantes;
Sully’s Memoirs; Rabelais; Montaigne; Izaak Walton; Evelyn; Sir Thomas
Browne; Aubrey; Sterne; Horace Walpole; Lord Clarendon; Doctor Johnson;
Burke, shedding floods of light on his times; Lamb; Landor; and De
Quincey;--a list, of course, that may easily be swelled, as dependent
on individual caprice. Many men are as tender and irritable as lovers
in reference to these predilections. Indeed, a man’s library is a sort
of harem, and I observe that tender readers have a great pudency in
showing their books to a stranger.
The annals of bibliography afford many examples of the delirious
extent to which book-fancying can go, when the legitimate delight in a
book is transferred to a rare edition or to a manuscript. This mania
reached its height about the beginning of the present century. For an
autograph of Shakspeare one hundred and fifty-five guineas were given.
In May, 1812, the library of the Duke of Roxburgh was sold. The sale
lasted forty-two days,--we abridge the story from Dibdin,--and among
the many curiosities was a copy of Boccaccio published by Valdarfer,
at Venice, in 1471; the only perfect copy of this edition. Among
the distinguished company which attended the sale were the Duke of
Devonshire, Earl Spencer, and the Duke of Marlborough, then Marquis
of Blandford. The bid stood at five hundred guineas. “A thousand
guineas,” said Earl Spencer: “And ten,” added the Marquis. You might
hear a pin drop. All eyes were bent on the bidders. Now they talked
apart, now ate a biscuit, now made a bet, but without the least thought
of yielding one to the other. But to pass over some details,--the
contest proceeded until the Marquis said, “Two thousand pounds.” The
Earl Spencer bethought him like a prudent general of useless bloodshed
and waste of powder, and had paused a quarter of a minute, when Lord
Althorp with long steps came to his side, as if to bring his father a
fresh lance to renew the fight. Father and son whispered together, and
Earl Spencer exclaimed, “Two thousand two hundred and fifty pounds!”
An electric shock went through the assembly. “And ten,” quietly added
the Marquis. There ended the strife. Ere Evans let the hammer fall, he
paused; the ivory instrument swept the air; the spectators stood dumb,
when the hammer fell. The stroke of its fall sounded on the farthest
shores of Italy. The tap of that hammer was heard in the libraries of
Rome, Milan, and Venice. Boccaccio stirred in his sleep of five hundred
years, and M. Van Praet groped in vain among the royal alcoves in
Paris, to detect a copy of the famed Valdarfer Boccaccio.
Another class I distinguish by the term _Vocabularies_. Burton’s
“Anatomy of Melancholy” is a book of great learning. To read it is
like reading in a dictionary. ’Tis an inventory to remind us how
many classes and species of facts exist, and, in observing into
what strange and multiplex by-ways learning has strayed, to infer
our opulence. Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is
no cant in Germans, it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of
suggestion,--the raw material of possible poems and histories. Nothing
is wanting but a little shuffling, sorting, ligature, and cartilage.
Out of a hundred examples, Cornelius Agrippa “On the Vanity of Arts
and Sciences” is a specimen of that scribatiousness which grew to be
the habit of the gluttonous readers of his time. Like the modern they
read a literature while other mortals read a few books. They read
voraciously, and must disburden themselves; so they take any general
topic, as, Melancholy, or Praise of Science, or Praise of Folly,
and write and quote without method or end. Now and then out of that
affluence of their learning comes a fine sentence from Theophrastus,
or Seneca, or Boëthius, but no high method, no inspiring efflux. But
one cannot afford to read for a few sentences; they are good only as
strings of suggestive words.
There is another class, more needful to the present age, because
the currents of custom run now in another direction, and leave us
dry on this side;--I mean the _Imaginative_. A right metaphysics
should do justice to the co-ordinate powers of Imagination, Insight,
Understanding, and Will. Poetry, with its aids of Mythology and
Romance, must be well allowed for an imaginative creature. Men are
ever lapsing into a beggarly habit, wherein everything that is not
ciphering, that is, which does not serve the tyrannical animal, is
hustled out of sight. Our orators and writers are of the same poverty,
and, in this rag-fair, neither the Imagination, the great awakening
power, nor the Morals, creative of genius and of men, are addressed.
But though orator and poet be of this hunger party, the capacities
remain. We must have symbols. The child asks you for a story, and is
thankful for the poorest. It is not poor to him, but radiant with
meaning. The man asks for a novel,--that is, asks leave for a few
hours to be a poet, and to paint things as they ought to be. The youth
asks for a poem. The very dunces wish to go to the theatre. What
private heavens can we not open, by yielding to all the suggestion of
rich music! We must have idolatries, mythologies,--some swing and verge
for the creative power lying coiled and cramped here, driving ardent
natures to insanity and crime if it do not find vent. Without the great
arts which speak to the sense of beauty, a man seems to me a poor,
naked, shivering creature. These are his becoming draperies, which warm
and adorn him. Whilst the prudential and economical tone of society
starves the imagination, affronted Nature gets such indemnity as she
may. The novel is that allowance and frolic the imagination finds.
Everything else pins it down, and men flee for redress to Byron, Scott,
Disraeli, Dumas, Sand, Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, and Reade. Their
education is neglected; but the circulating-library and the theatre, as
well as the trout-fishing, the Notch Mountains, the Adirondack country,
the tour to Mont Blanc, to the White Hills, and the Ghauts, make such
amends as they can.
The imagination infuses a certain volatility and intoxication. It has a
flute which sets the atoms of our frame in a dance, like planets; and,
once so liberated, the whole man reeling drunk to the music, they never
quite subside to their old stony state. But what is the imagination?
Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of
the reason. And books that treat the old pedantries of the world,
our times, places, professions, customs, opinions, histories, with a
certain freedom, and distribute things, not after the usages of America
and Europe, but after the laws of right reason, and with as daring a
freedom as we use in dreams, put us on our feet again, enable us to
form an original judgment of our duties, and suggest new thoughts for
to-morrow.
“Lucrezia Floriani,” “Le Péché de M. Antoine,” “Jeanne,” and
“Consuelo,” of George Sand, are great steps from the novel of one
termination, which we all read twenty years ago. Yet how far off from
life and manners and motives the novel still is! Life lies about us
dumb; the day, as we know it, has not yet found a tongue. These stories
are to the plots of real life what the figures in “La Belle Assemblée,”
which represent the fashion of the month, are to portraits. But the
novel will find the way to our interiors one day, and will not always
be the novel of costume merely. I do not think it inoperative now. So
much novel-reading cannot leave the young men and maidens untouched;
and doubtless it gives some ideal dignity to the day. The young study
noble behavior; and as the player in “Consuelo” insists that he and his
colleagues on the boards have taught princes the fine etiquette and
strokes of grace and dignity which they practise with so much effect
in their villas and among their dependents, so I often see traces
of the Scotch or the French novel in the courtesy and brilliancy of
young midshipmen, collegians, and clerks. Indeed, when one observes
how ill and ugly people make their loves and quarrels, ’tis pity they
should not read novels a little more, to import the fine generosities,
and the clear, firm conduct, which are as becoming in the unions and
separations which love effects under shingle roofs as in palaces and
among illustrious personages.
In novels the most serious questions are beginning to be discussed.
What made the popularity of “Jane Eyre,” but that a central question
was answered in some sort? The question there answered in regard to a
vicious marriage will always be treated according to the habit of the
party. A person of commanding individualism will answer it as Rochester
does,--as Cleopatra, as Milton, as George Sand do,--magnifying the
exception into a rule, dwarfing the world into an exception. A person
of less courage, that is, of less constitution, will answer as the
heroine does,--giving way to fate, to conventionalism, to the actual
state and doings of men and women.
For the most part, our novel-reading is a passion for results. We
admire parks, and high-born beauties, and the homage of drawing-rooms,
and parliaments. They make us sceptical, by giving prominence to
wealth and social position.
I remember when some peering eyes of boys discovered that the oranges
hanging on the boughs of an orange-tree in a gay piazza were tied to
the twigs by thread. I fear ’tis so with the novelist’s prosperities.
Nature has a magic by which she fits the man to his fortunes, by
making them the fruit of his character. But the novelist plucks this
event here, and that fortune there, and ties them rashly to his
figures, to tickle the fancy of his readers with a cloying success,
or scare them with shocks of tragedy. And so, on the whole, ’tis a
juggle. We are cheated into laughter or wonder by feats which only
oddly combine acts that we do every day. There is no new element, no
power, no furtherance. ’Tis only confectionery, not the raising of new
corn. Great is the poverty of their inventions. _She was beautiful,
and he fell in love._ Money, and killing, and the Wandering Jew, and
persuading the lover that his mistress is betrothed to another,--these
are the main-springs: new names, but no new qualities in the men and
women. Hence the vain endeavor to keep any bit of this fairy gold,
which has rolled like a brook through our hands. A thousand thoughts
awoke; great rainbows seemed to span the sky,--a morning among the
mountains;--but we close the book, and not a ray remains in the memory
of evening. But this passion for romance, and this disappointment,
show how much we need real elevations and pure poetry: that which shall
show us, in morning and night, in stars and mountains, and in all the
plight and circumstance of men, the analogons of our own thoughts, and
a like impression made by a just book and by the face of Nature.
If our times are sterile in genius, we must cheer us with books of
rich and believing men who had atmosphere and amplitude about them.
Every good fable, every mythology, every biography from a religious
age, every passage of love, and even philosophy and science, when
they proceed from an intellectual integrity, and are not detached
and critical, have the imaginative element. The Greek fables, the
Persian history (Firdusi), the “Younger Edda” of the Scandinavians,
the “Chronicle of the Cid,” the poem of Dante, the Sonnets of Michel
Angelo, the English drama of Shakspeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, and
Ford, and even the prose of Bacon and Milton,--in our time, the Ode
of Wordsworth, and the poems and the prose of Goethe, have this
enlargement, and inspire hope and generous attempts.
There is no room left,--and yet I might as well not have begun as
to leave out a class of books which are the best: I mean the Bibles
of the world, or the sacred books of each nation, which express for
each the supreme result of their experience. After the Hebrew and
Greek Scriptures, which constitute the sacred books of Christendom,
these are, the Desatir of the Persians, and the Zoroastrian Oracles;
the Vedas and Laws of Menu; the Upanishads, the Vishnu Purana, the
Bhagvat Geeta, of the Hindoos; the books of the Buddhists; the
“Chinese Classic,” of four books, containing the wisdom of Confucius
and Mencius. Also such other books as have acquired a semi-canonical
authority in the world, as expressing the highest sentiment and hope of
nations. Such are the “Hermes Trismegistus,” pretending to be Egyptian
remains; the “Sentences” of Epictetus; of Marcus Antoninus; the “Vishnu
Sarma” of the Hindoos; the “Gulistan” of Saadi; the “Imitation of
Christ,” of Thomas à Kempis; and the “Thoughts” of Pascal.
All these books are the majestic expressions of the universal
conscience, and are more to our daily purpose than this year’s almanac
or this day’s newspaper. But they are for the closet, and to be read
on the bended knee. Their communications are not to be given or
taken with the lips and the end of the tongue, but out of the glow
of the cheek, and with the throbbing heart. Friendship should give
and take, solitude and time brood and ripen, heroes absorb and enact
them. They are not to be held by letters printed on a page, but are
living characters translatable into every tongue and form of life.
I read them on lichens and bark; I watch them on waves on the beach;
they fly in birds, they creep in worms; I detect them in laughter and
blushes and eye-sparkles of men and women. These are Scriptures which
the missionary might well carry over prairie, desert, and ocean, to
Siberia, Japan, Timbuctoo. Yet he will find that the spirit which is in
them journeys faster than he, and greets him on his arrival,--was there
already long before him. The missionary must be carried by it, and find
it there, or he goes in vain. Is there any geography in these things?
We call them Asiatic, we call them primeval; but perhaps that is only
optical; for Nature is always equal to herself, and there are as good
eyes and ears now in the planet as ever were. Only these ejaculations
of the soul are uttered one or a few at a time, at long intervals, and
it takes millenniums to make a Bible.