Jonathan methodically tucked his bookmark into "The Virginians," and,
closing the fat green volume, began to knock the ashes out of his pipe
against the bricked sides of the fireplace.
"'The Virginians' is a very comfortable sort of book," he remarked.
"Is it?" I said. "I wonder why."
He ruminated. "Well, chiefly, I suppose, because it's so good and long.
You get to know all the people, you get used to their ways, and when
they turn up again, after a lot of chapters, you don't have to find out
who they are--you just feel comfortably acquainted."
I sighed. I had just finished a magazine story--condensed, vivid,
crushing a whole life-tragedy into seven pages and a half. In that space
I had been made acquainted with sixteen different characters, seven
principal ones and the rest subordinate, but all clearly drawn. I had
found it interesting, stimulating; as a _tour de force_ it was
noteworthy even among the crowd of short-stories--all condensed, all
vivid, all interesting--that had appeared that month. But--comfortable?
No. And I felt envious of Jonathan. He had been reading "The Virginians"
all winter. His bookmark was at page 597, and there were 803 pages in
all, so he had a great deal of comfort left.
Perhaps comfort is not quite all that one should expect from one's
reading. Certainly it is the last thing one gets from the perusal of our
current literature, and any one who reads nothing else is missing
something which, whether he realizes it or not, he ought for his soul's
sake to have--something which Jonathan roughly indicated when he called
it "comfort." The ordinary reader devours short-stories by the dozen, by
the score--short short-stories, long short-stories, even short-stories
laboriously expanded to a volume, but still short-stories. He glances,
less frequently, at verses, chiefly quatrains, at columns of jokes, at
popularized bits of history and science, at bits of anecdotal
biography, and nowhere in all this medley does he come in contact with
what is large and leisurely. Current literature is like a garden I once
saw. Its proud owner led me through a maze of smooth-trodden paths, and
pointed out a vast number of horticultural achievements. There were
sixty-seven varieties of dahlias, there were more than a hundred kinds
of roses, there were untold wonders which at last my weary brain refused
to record. Finally I escaped, exhausted, and sought refuge on a hillside
I knew, from which I could look across the billowing green of a great
rye-field, and there, given up to the beauty of its manifold simplicity,
I invited my soul.
It is even so with our reading. When I go into one of our public
reading-rooms, and survey the serried ranks of magazines and the long
shelves full of "Recent fiction, not to be taken out for more than five
days,"--nay, even when I look at the library tables of some of my
friends,--my brain grows sick and I long for my rye-field.
Happily, there always is a rye-field at hand to be had for the seeking.
Jonathan finds refuge from business and the newspapers in his pipe and
"The Virginians." I have no pipe, but I sit under the curling rings of
Jonathan's, and I, too, have my comfortable books, my literary
rye-fields. Last summer it was Malory's "Morte d'Arthur," whose book I
found indeed a comfortable one--most comfortable. I read much besides,
many short stories of surpassing cleverness and some of real excellence,
but as I look back upon my summer's literary experience, all else gives
place to the long pageant of Malory's story, gorgeous or tender or gay,
seen like a fair vision against the dim background of an old New England
apple orchard. Surely, though the literature of our library tables may
sometimes weary me, it shall never enslave me.
But they must be read, these "comfortable" books, in the proper fashion,
not hastily, nor cursorily, nor with any desire to "get on" in them.
They must lie at our hand to be taken up in moments of leisure, the
slowly shifting bookmark--there should always be a bookmark--recording
our half-reluctant progress. (I remember with what dismay I found myself
arrived at the fourth and last volume of Malory,) Thus read, thus
slowly woven among the intricacies and distractions of our life, these
precious books will link its quiet moments together and lend to it a
certain quality of largeness, of deliberation, of continuity.
For it is surely a mistake to assume, as people so often do, that in a
life full of distractions one should read only such things as can be
finished at a single sitting and that a short one. It is a great
misfortune to read only books that "must be returned within five days."
For my part, I should like to see in our public libraries, to offset the
shelves of such books, other shelves, labeled "Books that may and should
be kept out six months." I would have there Thackeray and George Eliot
and Wordsworth and Spenser, Malory and Homer and Cervantes and
Shakespeare and Montaigne--oh, they should be shelves to rejoice the
soul of the harassed reader!
No, if one can read but little, let him by all means read something big.
I know a woman occupied with the demands of a peculiarly exigent social
position. Finding her one day reading "The Tempest," I remarked on her
enterprise. "Not a bit!" she protested, "I am not reading it to be
enterprising, I am reading it to get rested. I find Shakespeare so
peaceful, compared with the magazines." I have another friend who is
taking entire charge of her children, besides doing a good deal of her
own housework and gardening. I discovered her one day sitting under a
tree, reading Matthew Arnold's poems, while the children played near by,
I ventured to comment on what seemed to me the incongruity of her choice
of a book. "But don't you see," she replied, quickly. "That is just why!
I am so busy from minute to minute doing lots of little practical,
temporary things, that I simply have to keep in touch with something
different--something large and quiet. If I didn't, I should die!"
I suppose in the old days, in a less "literary" age, all such busy folk
found this necessary rest and refreshment in a single book--the Bible.
Doubtless many still do so, but not so many; and this, quite
irrespective of religious considerations, seems to me a great pity. The
literary quality of the Scriptures has, to be sure, been partly vitiated
by the lamentable habit of reading them in isolated "texts," instead of
as magnificent wholes; yet, even so, I feel sure that this constant
intercourse with the Book did for our predecessors in far larger measure
what some of these other books of which I have been speaking do for
us--it furnished that contact with greatness which we all crave.
It may be accident, though I hardly think so, that to find such books we
must turn to the past. Doubtless others will arise in the
future--possibly some are even now being brought to birth, though this I
find hard to believe. For ours is the age of the short-story--a
wonderful product, perhaps the finest flower of fiction, and one which
has not yet achieved all its victories or realized all its
possibilities. All the fiction of the future will show the influence of
this highly specialized form. In sheer craftsmanship, novel-writing has
progressed far; in technique, in dexterous manipulation of their
material, the novices of to-day are ahead of the masters of yesterday.
This often happens in an art, and it is especially true just now in the
art of fiction. Yes, there are great things preparing for us in the
future, there are excellent things being done momently about us. But
while we wait for the great ones, the excellent ones sometimes create in
us a sense of surfeit. We cannot hurry the future, and if meanwhile we
crave repose, leisure, quiet, steadiness, the sense of magnitude, we
must go to the past. There, and not in the yearly output of our own
publishers, we shall find our "comfortable" books.