I
|A weekly paper has been asking well-known people what books they
re-read. The most pathetic reply made to the inquiry is that of Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle. “I seldom re-read now,” says that unhappy man. “Time
is so short and literature so vast and unexplored.” What a desolating
picture! It is like saying, “I never meet my old friends now. Time is so
short and there are so many strangers I have not yet shaken hands with.”
I see the poor man, hot and breathless, scurrying over the “vast and
unexplored” fields of literature, shaking hands and saying, “How
d'ye do?” to everybody he meets and reaching the end of his journey,
impoverished and pitiable, like the peasant in Tolstoi's “How much land
does a man need?”
I rejoice to say that I have no passion for shaking hands with
strangers. I do not yearn for vast unexplored regions. I take the North
Pole and the South, the Sahara and the Karoo for granted. As Johnson
said of the Giant's Causeway, I should like to see them, but I should
not like _to go_ to see them. And so with books. Time is so short that
I have none to spare for keeping abreast with the circulating library.
I could almost say with the Frenchman that when I see that a new book is
published I read an old one. I am always in the rearward of the fashion,
and a book has to weather the storms of its maiden voyage before I
embark on it. When it has proved itself seaworthy I will go aboard; but
meanwhile the old ships are good enough for me. I know the captain
and the crew, the fare I shall get and the port I shall make and the
companionship I shall have by the way.
Look at this row of fellows in front of me as I write--Boswell, “The
Bible in Spain,” Pepys, Horace, “Elia,” Montaigne, Sainte-Beuve,
“Travels with a Donkey,” Plutarch, Thucydides, Wordsworth, “The Early
Life of Charles James Fox,”
“Under the Greenwood Tree,” and so on. Do not call them books.
Camerado, this is no book.
Who touches this, touches a man,
as Walt Whitman said of his own “Leaves of Grass.” They are not books.
They are my friends. They are the splendid wayfarers I have met on
my pilgrimage, and they are going on with me to the end. It was
worth making the great adventure of life to find such company. Come
revolutions and bereavements, come storm and tempest, come war or peace,
gain or loss--these friends shall endure through all the vicissitudes
of the journey. The friends of the flesh fall away, grow cold, are
estranged, die, but these friends of the spirit are not touched with
mortality. They were not born for death, no hungry generations tread
them down, and with their immortal wisdom and laughter they give us
the password to the eternal. You can no more exhaust them than you
can exhaust the sunrise or the sunset, the joyous melody of Mozart or
Scarlatti, the cool serenity of Velasquez or any other thing of beauty.
They are a part of ourselves, and through their noble fellowship we are
made freemen of the kingdoms of the mind--
... rich as the oozy bottom of the deep
In sunken wrack and sumless treasuries.
We do not say we have read these books: we say that we live in communion
with these spirits.
I am not one who wants that communion to be too exclusive. When my old
friend Peter Lane shook the dust of Fleet Street off his feet for ever
and went down into the country he took Horace with him, and there he
sits in his garden listening to an enchantment that never grows stale.
It is a way Horace has. He takes men captive, as Falstaff took Bardolph
captive. They cannot see the swallows gathering for their southern
flight without thinking that they are going to breathe the air that
Horace breathed, and asking them to carry some such message as John
Marshall's:
Tell him, bird,
That if there be a Heaven where he is not,
One man at least seeks not admittance there.
This is not companionship. This is idolatry. I should be sorry to miss
the figure of Horace--short and fat, according to Suetonius--in the
fields of asphodel, but there are others I shall look for with
equal animation and whose footsteps I shall dog with equal industry.
Meanwhile, so long as my etheric body, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would
say, is imprisoned in the flesh I shall go on reading and re-reading
the books in which their spirits live, leaving the vast and unexplored
tracts of the desert to those who like deserts.