After one has passed the middle period of life, or even long before
that, it is interesting to note what books he spontaneously recurs
to and re-reads. Do his old favorites retain anything of their first
freshness and stimulus for him, or have they become stale and trite,
or completely outgrown? On taking down for the third or fourth time
a favorite author the present winter, I said to myself, “There is no
test of a book like that: can we, and do we, go back to it?” If not, is
it at all probable that future generations will go back to it? One’s
own experience may be looked upon as the experience of the race in
miniature. If one cannot return to an author again and again, is it not
pretty good evidence that his work has not the keeping qualities? One
brings a different self, a different experience, to each re-reading,
and thus in a measure brings the test of time and humanity. Yet there
is always some difficulty in going back. It is difficult to go back,
after some years, to live in a place from which one has once flitted.
Somehow things look stale to us. Is it our dead selves that we
encounter at every turn? Even the old homestead has a certain empty,
pathetic, forlorn look. In the journey of life there is always more or
less pain in going back; and I suppose it is partly because in every
place in which we have lived we have had pain, and partly because there
is some innate dislike in us to going back; the watchword of the soul
is onward. If the book has given us pain, we cannot return to it; and
our second or third or fourth pleasure in it will be in proportion to
the depth and genuineness of our first. If our pleasure was in the
novelty or strangeness or unexpectedness of the thing, it will not
return, or only in small measure. Stories of exciting plots, I find,
one can seldom re-read. One can go back to the “Vicar of Wakefield;”
but can he read a second time “The Woman in White”? In such books there
can be only one first time. Pluck out the heart of a mystery once, and
it never grows again. Curiosity and astonishment make a poor foundation
to build upon. The boy tires of his jumping-jack much sooner than of
his top or ball. Only the normal, the sane, the simple, have the gift
of long life; the strained, the intemperate, the violent will not live
out half their days. We never outgrow our pleasure in simple, common
things; if we do, so much the worse for us; and I think it will be
found that those books to which we return and that stand the test of
time have just this quality of simple, universal, every-day objects and
experiences, with, of course, some glint of that light that never was
on sea or land,--the light of the spirit. How many times does a reading
man return to Montaigne, not to make a dead set at him, but to dip
into him here and there, as one takes a cup of water from a spring!
Human nature is essentially the same in all ages; and Montaigne put so
much of his genuine, unaffected self into his pages, and put it with
such vivacity of style, that all men find their own in his book; it is
forever modern. We return to Bacon for a different reason,--the breadth
and excellence of his wisdom, and his masterly phrases. The excellent
is always modern; only, what is excellent?
A man of my own tastes re-reads Gilbert White two or three times,
and dips into him many times more. It is easy to see why such a book
lasts. So much writing there is that is like half-live coals buried in
ashes; but here there are no ashes, no dead verbiage at all; we are in
immediate contact with a live, simple, unaffected mind and personality.
But this general description applies to all books that last; they all
have at least one quality in common, living reality. What is special
to White is his fine, scholarly style, busied with the common, homely
things of everyday country life. The facts are just enough heightened
and related to the life of this man to make them of perennial interest.
We probably go back to books from two motives: one, because we want to
recover some past mood or experience to which the book may be the key;
and the other from the perennial sources of pleasure and profit which a
good book holds; in other words for association and inspiration.
I suppose it was with some such motives as these that I recently
opened the “Autocrat” after the pages had been closed to me for over a
quarter of a century. To recover as far as possible the spirit of the
old days, I got out the identical numbers of the “Atlantic” in which I
had first read those sparkling sentences. Life to me had the freshness
and buoyancy of the morning hours in those first years of the great
Boston magazine. I recall how impatiently I waited for each number to
appear, and how, on one occasion at least, I ran all the way home from
the post-office with the new issue in my hand, so eager was I to be
alone with it in my room. I remember, too, how I resented the criticism
of a schoolmate, then at Harvard College, who said that Holmes was not
the great writer I fancied him to be, but only a _Boston_ great writer.
Well, I found places in the “Autocrat” that would not bear much
pressure,--thin places where a lively rhetoric alone carried the mind
over. And I found much that was sound and solid, that would not give
way beneath one under any pressure he could bring.
When Dr. Holmes got hold of a real idea, as he often did, he could
exploit it in as taking a way as any man who has lived; but frequently,
I think, he got hold of sham or counterfeit ideas; and these, with all
his skill in managing them, will not stand the pressure of time. (His
classing poems with meerschaum pipes, as two things that improve with
use, is an instance of what I mean by his sham ideas.)
As a writer Dr. Holmes always reminded me of certain of our bird
songsters, such as the brown thrasher or the catbird, whose
performances always seem to imply a spectator and to challenge his
admiration. The vivacious doctor always seemed to write with his eye
upon his reader, and to calculate in advance upon his reader’s surprise
and pleasure. If the world finally neglects his work, it will probably
be because it lacks the deep seriousness of the enduring productions.
Yet this test of re-reading is, of course, only an approximate one. So
great an authority as Hume said it was sufficient to read Cowley once,
but that Parnell after the fiftieth reading was as fresh as at the
first. Now, for my part, I have to go to the encyclopædia to find out
who Parnell was, but of Cowley even desultory readers like myself know
something. His essays one can not only read, but re-read. They make one
of the unpretentious minor books that one can put in his pocket and
take with him on a walk to the woods, and nibble at under a tree or by
a waterfall. Solitude seems to bring out its quality, as it does that
of some people.
In our intellectual experience there can probably be but one first
time. We go back to an author again and again; yet in all save a few
exceptional cases, the pleasure of the second or third reading is only
a lesser degree of the first. On the other hand, a favorite piece of
music one may hear with the same keen delight any number of times. Is
it because music is so largely made up of the sensuous, at least to
a greater extent than is any other phase of art? It is the same with
perfumes, flavors, colors: they never lose their first freshness to us.
But a book or a poem we absorb and exhaust more or less,--that is, as
to its intellectual content; and if we return to it, it is probably for
some charm or quality that is to the spirit what music or perfume or
color is to the senses, or what a congenial companion is to our social
instincts. We shall not go back to a book that does not in some way,
apart from its mere intellectual service, relate itself to our lives.
Time tries all things, and surely does it sift out the false and
fugitive in books. Contemporary judgment is usually unreliable. It
is like trial by jury, the local and accidental play so large a part
in the verdict. The next age, or the next, forms the higher court of
appeal. In the same way a man’s future self corrects or sets aside his
verdict of to-day. If in later life he reaffirms his first opinion,
the chances are that time is on his side. There is, of course, a sense
or a degree in which any book that one has once read becomes a sucked
orange; but some books become much more so than others. I doubt if many
of us find books that, like a few people, become dearer to us as time
passes, and to which we always return with increasing interest. And the
reason is that one’s mental and spiritual outlook is not uniformly the
same, while his social and human wants, such as his need of food and
warmth, do remain about the same. One in a measure absorbs the book
and puts it behind him. It is like a place he has visited: he has had
the view, and until the impression is more or less obliterated he does
not care to repeat it. But one’s friend is always a fresh stimulus: he
keeps the past alive for him (which the book can also do in a measure),
and he consecrates the present (which the book cannot do). Indeed, the
sense of companionship which one can have in a book is but a faint echo
or shadow of the companionship he has with persons. Yet this sense
of companionship does adhere to some books much more vividly than to
others. They are our books; they were written for us; they become a
part of our lives, and they do not drop away from us with the lapse of
time, as do others. Different readers have felt this way about such
writers as Emerson, Carlyle, Wordsworth, and Whitman; but it may be a
question how writers who make the intense personal appeal that these
men make will wear. Are they too special and individual for future
generations to recognize close kinship with? Will each age have its
own doctors and saviors, and go back only for lovers and for the touch
of nature that makes all the world kin? I know not; yet it is apparent
that he who stands upon the common ground where all men stand, and
by the magic of his genius makes poetry and romance out of that, has
the best chance to endure. Only so far as the writers named, or any
writers, represent states of mind and spirit that are likely to return
again and again, and not to be outgrown in the progress of the race,
are we likely to come back to them, or is the future likely to feel an
interest in them. A path or a road becomes obsolete when there are
no more travelers going that way; and an author becomes obsolete when
there are no more readers going _his_ way.
For my part, I find myself returning again and again to the works of
the men named, but, of course, with the cooled ardor that years bring
to every man. I feel that I am less near the end with Whitman than with
any of the others; he is the most stimulating to my intellect, because
he suggests the most far-reaching problems. I re-read Wordsworth as I
walk again along familiar paths that lead to the sequestered and the
idyllic. I climb the Whitman mountain when I want a big view, and a
wide horizon, and a glimpse of the unknown.
I think the service most of us get from Carlyle is a moral rather than
an intellectual one. He was to his generation more like a much-needed
drastic tonic remedy than like a simple hygienic regimen; we get the
virtue of him now in a thousand ways without re-reading him. Hence
there are more chances of our outgrowing him than of our outgrowing
some lesser but more normal men. In a measure, I think, this is true
of Emerson, but not entirely so. Emerson has charm; he has illusion;
he has the witchery of the ideal. He is like the wise doctor whose
presence, whose reassuring smile, and whose cheerful prognosis do
more for the patient than anything else. We want him to come again
and again. To re-read his first essays, his “Representative Men,” his
“English Traits,” and many of his poems, is again to hear music, to
breathe perfume, or to walk in a spring twilight when the evening star
throbs above the hill.
One winter night I tried to re-read Carlyle’s “Past and Present” and
certain of his “Latter-Day Pamphlets;” but I found I could not, and
thanked my stars that I did not have to. It was like riding a spirited
but bony horse bareback. There was tremendous “go” in the beast; but
oh, the bruises from those knotty and knuckle-like sentences! But the
“Life of Sterling” I have found I can re-read with delight; it has a
noble music. Certain of the essays, also, such as the ones on Scott,
Burns, and Johnson, have a perennial quality. Parts of “Frederick” I
mean to read again, and the “Reminiscences.” I have re-read “Sartor
Resartus,” but it was a task, hardly a pleasure. Nearly four fifths of
the book, I should say, is chaff; but the other fifth is real wheat,
if you are not choked in getting it. Yet I have just read the story
of an educated tramp who carried the book in his blanket thousands of
miles and knew it nearly by heart. Carlyle wrote as he talked; his
“Latter-Day Pamphlets” are harangues that it would have been a delight
to hear, but in the printed page we miss the guiding tone and emphasis,
and above all do we miss the laugh that mollified the bitter words.
One can stand, or even welcome, in life what may be intolerable in
print; put the same thing in a book, and it is the pudding without the
sauce, and cold at that. The colloquial style is good, or the best, if
perfectly easy and simple. In reading aloud we teach our children to
read as they speak, and thus make the words their own. The same thing
holds in writing: the less formal, the less _written_, the sentences
are, or the more they are like familiar speech, the more genuine and
real the writing seems, the more it becomes one’s own; but when the
form and manner of spoken sentences are very pronounced, they become
tiresome when transferred to print. Carlyle will doubtless hold his
place in English literature, but he is terribly handicapped in some of
his books by his crabbed, raw-boned style.
What reading man does not re-read Boswell’s “Johnson” two or three
times in the course of his life? The charm of this is that it is
so much like the spoken word, and so filled with the presence of
the living man. Another volume of a similar kind, which I have read
three times and dipped into any number of times, is Eckermann’s
“Conversations with Goethe.” It is a pregnant book; in fact, I know no
such armory of critical wisdom anywhere else as this book contains. Its
human interest may not be equal to Boswell, though I find this very
great; but as an intellectual excitant it is vastly superior.
It is a profitable experience for one who read Dickens forty years ago
to try to read him now. Last winter I forced myself through the “Tale
of Two Cities.” It was a sheer dead pull from start to finish. It all
seemed so insincere, such a transparent make-believe, a mere piece of
acting. My sympathies were hardly once touched. I was not insensible
to the marvelous genius displayed in the story, but it left me cold and
unmoved. A feeling of unreality haunted me on every page. The fault
may have been my own. I give myself reluctantly to a novel, yet I love
to be entirely mastered by one. But my poor success with this one, of
course, makes me think that Dickens’s hold upon the future is not at
all secure. A man of wonderful talents, but of no deep seriousness; a
matchless mimic through and through, and nothing else. But I am proud
to add that my boy, a youth of eighteen, reads his books with great
enthusiasm.
Natural, irrepressible humor is always welcome; but the humor of the
grotesque, the exaggerated, the distorted, is like a fashion in dress:
it has its day. How surely we tire of the loud, the too pronounced, the
merely peculiar, whether it be in carpets and wall-papers, or in books
and art! The common, the average, the universal, quickened with a new
spirit, imbued with a vernal freshness--that is the stuff of enduring
works.
One often wonders what is the secret of the vitality of such a book as
Dana’s “Two Years before the Mast.” Each succeeding generation reads it
with the same pleasure. I can myself re-read it every ten or a dozen
years. Parkman’s “Oregon Trail” has much of the same perennial charm as
has Franklin’s autobiography.
How far perfect seriousness and good faith carry in literature! Why
should they not count for just as much here as in life? They count in
anything. The least bit of acting and pretense, and the words ring
false. The effort of the writer of books like “Two Years before the
Mast” is always entirely serious and truthful; his eye is single; he
has no vanities to display before the reader. Compare this book with
such a record as Stevenson’s “Inland Voyage” or his “Travels with a
Donkey.” Here the effort is mainly literary, and we get the stimulus of
words rather than of things; we are one remove more from reality.
General Grant’s “Memoirs,” I think, are likely to last, because of
their deep seriousness and good faith. The effort here is not a
literary one, but a real one. The writer is not occupied with his
manner, but with his matter. Had Grant had any literary vanity or
ambition, is it at all probable that his narrative would cleave to us
as it does? The near presence of death would probably cure any man of
his vanity, if he had any; but Grant never had any.
I have always felt that Tennyson’s famous poem “Crossing the Bar” did
not ring quite true, because it was not conceived in a spirit serious
enough for the occasion. The poetic effort is too obvious; the pride
of the verse is too noticeable; it bedecks itself with pretty fancies.
The last solemn strain of Whitman, wherein he welcomes death as the
right hand of God, strikes a far deeper chord, I think. As in the
Biblical writers, the literary effort is entirely lost in the religious
faith and fervor. We do not want a thing too much written; in fact,
we do not want it written at all, but spoken directly from the heart.
It is in this respect that I think Wordsworth’s poetry, at its best,
is better than Tennyson’s. It is more inevitable; it wrote itself;
the poetic intention is not so obvious; the art of the singer is more
completely effaced by his inspiration.
There are probably few readers of the critical literature of the times
who do not recur again and again to Matthew Arnold’s criticism, not
only for the charm of the style, but for the currents of vital thought
which it holds. One may not always agree with Arnold, but for that very
reason one will go back to see how it is possible to differ from a man
who sees so clearly and feels so justly. Of course, Arnold’s view is
not final, any more than is that of any other man; but it is always
fit, and challenges your common sense. After the muddle and puddle of
most literary criticism, the reader of Arnold feels like a traveler who
has got out of the confusion of brush and bog into clean and clear open
spaces, where the ground is firm, and where he can see his course.
“Where’er the trees grow biggest,
Huntsmen find the easiest way,”
says Emerson, and for a similar reason the way is always easy and
inviting through Arnold’s pages.
But his theological criticism has less charm; and, for my part, I doubt
if it will survive. I once seriously tried to re-read his “Literature
and Dogma,” but stuck before I had got half-way through it. I suppose
I found too much dogma in it. Arnold makes a dogma out of what he
calls the “method and secret of Jesus,” his “method of _inwardness_”
and “_secret of self-renunciation_;” he iterates and reiterates these
phrases till one never wants to hear them again. Arnold’s besetting
sin of giving a quasi-scientific value to certain literary terms here
has free rein, and one finds only a new kind of inflexibility in place
of the one he condemns. Sir Thomas Browne directed a free play of
mind upon the old dogmas, and the result was the “Religio Medici,” a
work which each generation treasures and re-reads, not because of the
dogma, but because of the literature; it is a rare specimen of vital,
flexible, imaginative writing. It is full of soul, like Emerson’s
“Divinity School Address,” which sought to dissolve certain of the old
dogmas. In both these authors we are made free as the spirit makes
free; but in Arnold’s criticism we are made free only as a liberal
Anglicanism makes free, which is not much.
The books that we do not like to part with after we have read them,
that we like to keep near us,--like Amiel’s “Journal,” say,--are
probably the books that our children’s children will like to have
around. A Western woman once paid an Eastern author this rare
compliment. “Most of the new books,” she said, “we see at the public
library; but your books we always buy, because we like to have them in
the house.” Probably it is the personal element in a book, the quality
of the writer, that alone endears it to us. If we could not love the
man, is it probable that we can love his book?
Of our New England poets, I find myself taking down Emerson oftener
than any other; then Bryant; occasionally Longfellow for a few
poems; then Whittier for “The Playmate” or “Snow-Bound”; and least
of all, Lowell. I am not so vain as to think that the measure of my
appreciation of these poets is the measure of their merit; but as this
writing is so largely autobiographical, I must keep to the facts. As
the pathos and solemnity of life deepen with time, I think one finds
only stray poems, or parts of poems, in the New England anthology that
adequately voice them; and these he finds in Emerson more plentifully
than anywhere else, though in certain of Longfellow’s sonnets there is
adequacy also. The one on “Sumner,” beginning,--
River, that stealest with such silent pace,
easily fixed itself in my mind.
I think we go back to books not so much for the amount of pleasure we
have had in them, as the kind of pleasure. There is a pleasure both in
books and in life that is inconsistent with health and wholeness, and
there is a pleasure that is consistent with these things. The instinct
of self-preservation makes us cleave to the latter. I do not think
we go back to the exciting books,--they do not usually leave a good
taste in the mouth; neither to the dull books, which leave no taste
at all in the mouth; but to the quiet, mildly tonic and stimulating
books,--books that have the virtues of sanity and good nature, and
that keep faith with us.
At any rate, an enduring fame is of slow growth. The man of the moment
is rarely the man of the eternities. If your name is upon all men’s
tongues to-day, some other name is likely to be there to-morrow.