TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
Bold text is denoted by =equal signs=.
Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been
corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within
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More detail can be found at the end of the book.
THE
LIBRARY OF
ENTERTAINMENT
A THOUSAND HOURS OF ENJOYMENT
WITH THE WORLD'S GREAT WRITERS
HANDBOOK
BY JOHN CHILTON SCAMMELL, A.B.
CHICAGO AND BOSTON
GEO. L. SHUMAN & CO.
MCMXX
COPYRIGHT, 1915,
BY GEO. L. SHUMAN & CO.
_Norwood Press_
_J. S. Cashing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co._
_Norwood, Mass., U.S.A._
_Boston Bookbinding Co., Cambridge, Mass._
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE v
THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK xi
PART I
SIDE-LIGHTS ON GREAT WRITERS 1
'TO DRIVE DULL CARE AWAY' 12
PART II
THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 17
THE DECISIVE PERIODS IN LITERATURE 19
NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS 28
THE DIVISIONS OF LITERATURE 36
FROM SEVEN TO TWENTY-ONE 54a
THE USE OF THE INDEX AND THE BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES 54m
LITERARY CRITICISM 55
PART III
STUDIES OF GREAT AUTHORS 61
BURNS 61
SCOTT 64
WORDSWORTH 67
COLERIDGE 70
BYRON 72
SHELLEY 76
KEATS 78
TENNYSON 81
BROWNING, R. 83
BROWNING, E. B. 86
IRVING 89
POE 91
HAWTHORNE 94
BRYANT 97
LONGFELLOW 99
WHITTIER 102
LOWELL 104
HOLMES 107
HOMER 109
VERGIL 113
DANTE 116
MILTON 119
SHAKESPEARE 122
GOETHE 126
SCHILLER 129
DICKENS 131
THACKERAY 134
JOHNSON 136
GOLDSMITH 139
GRAY 141
BURKE 143
WEBSTER 146
PLATO 148
AURELIUS 151
BACON 153
CARLYLE 156
RUSKIN 159
EMERSON 162
HEINE 164
PLINY 166
PREFACE
"Nowhere so happy as curled up in a corner with a book." So said, or
is reputed to have said, no less a genius than St. Thomas à Kempis.
And thousands of men and women, boys and girls, still testify to the
truth and power of that saying. For of all friends or companions a
book is the most reliable--often quite as helpful as any Jonathan to
any David. For instance, what could have given Abraham Lincoln more
lasting help than those early volumes which he so hungrily devoured
over and over again? "Æsop's Fables," "Robinson Crusoe," "Benjamin
Franklin's Autobiography," "The Pilgrim's Progress" absorbed every
moment he could spare from his chores and his sleep. Not mere
knowledge, but inspiration entered his soul from those oft-read
pages; in them he gleaned visions of life, its strain and anguish,
its exaltation and thrill; there, too, he caught the secret of that
quaint faculty for terse anecdote by which he was to win his way not
only to the heads but to the hearts of the hardy, courageous folk
of the Middle West, and, later, those of the East as well. It was
through this power to read and understand and enjoy that Lincoln
learned to penetrate to the very soul of mankind, the deep recesses
of the thoughts and feelings of his fellow men.
The will to try, the simple decision to make the effort, is all that
is needed in order to grasp what an infinite fund of amusement and
delight lies stored away in books. No unusual imaginative powers are
requisite to get us on horseback with Dumas's swashbuckling, duelling
musketeers, or to place us beside Poe's heroes in their dread
predicaments. What friend or acquaintance can tell you half the tales
of hair-breadth escape, side-splitting dilemma, or tender romance,
such as scores of the cleverest writers have spent their lives in
devising? These same writers have left this world, they can never
more be seen or heard on earth; but the very essence of their talent
and their personality, their brightest, most sparkling thoughts and
ideas remain, and may readily be placed within reach of your own
hand. Charles Dickens can never again voyage over the Atlantic and
stroll across Boston Common in velvet coat and plaid waistcoat,
gesticulating with eyes a-twinkle. But his Mr. Pickwick's adventure
with the Middle-Aged Lady in Yellow Curl-Papers still remains, and
the echo of Pickwick's "Bless my soul, what a dreadful thing" will
ring in our ears forever, and forever stir a quiet chuckle. Rudyard
Kipling is growing old, and his pen no longer flourishes with the
reckless vivacity of the days when he was little more than a "cub"
reporter and wrote "Mandalay." Yet that same "Mandalay" of the "old
Moulmein pagoda" and the "tinkly temple bells" will rouse a thrill
of romance and adventure in thousands of hearts that are still to be
born. Poor Stevenson coughed his life away at Samoa, after a plucky
fight for life that led him to France, 'Frisco, and the South Seas.
None the less, though he has gone from us, the pictures of hope and
courage that leap and laugh at us from his pages are as vivid to-day
as when they first brought their new joy to the delighted world. Read
once more that dainty sketch--that etching rather--"A Night among
the Pines," and see for yourself how that great master of words has
voiced our modern appreciation of the great outdoors. For each great
author is an individual, no two of them are alike, any more than you
are like your next-door neighbor. Their modes of expression, their
joy in life are as varied and divergent as life itself. There is,
moreover, nothing commonplace about them, their work is strong and
fresh. Each has his tale to tell, his song to sing, his meditations
to entrust to us, his own special message to the spirit or to the
intellect of many a generation and many a race.
In other words, all great authors are artists, makers or shapers
of truth and beauty, just as much and in the same measure as are
painters and sculptors. Indeed, Literature is the chief of the Fine
Arts. Music, with all its grandeur and charm, is but sound, and dies
away; Painting, though never so rich in color and striking in form,
is passive and for the most part devoid of action, and sad to say,
very few of us have wealth enough to own even one canvas by a master;
Sculpture, with all its dignity and grace, is cold and cheerless
in the main; and Architecture is too bulky and ponderous to stir
personal appreciation at a moment's notice.
In fact, Literature, and Literature alone, possesses the power of
meeting our every mood and desire, for comfort, for excitement, for
exaltation, for pathos, for laughter.
Literature alone can dwell within the walls of the humblest cabin,
even in the squatter's camp in Labrador or Borneo. Raphael's glorious
paintings may only be visited at the expense of months of time and
hundreds of dollars; Beethoven's symphonies can only be presented
by the most finished orchestras in a few of our largest cities; the
statues wrought by Phidias and Rodin cannot be reproduced by the
thousand and spread broadcast over our nation; Rheims Cathedral and
her sister marvels must stand where first they rose, nor may they
be successfully imitated. But, thank Heaven, Shakespeare, Dickens,
Longfellow for a few cents send their messages to every soul on earth
that can read English.
All of us are acquainted with some half dozen of the immortal writers
of the world, but how many of them have we never met, perhaps have
never heard of. If we could only obtain an introduction to them;
if we only knew which writers and which of their works to select,
all would be well. The most brilliant, the most lovable, the most
sincere, the most thoughtful authors would gather round us and talk
to us; they would bring their very best to entertain and delight
us; they would offer us their guidance and companionship into every
field of thought. Emerson's calm reflective tones reveal the answers
to many of life's most pressing and significant problems; Swift, in
"Gulliver's Travels," jestingly, yet bitterly, strips mankind of its
pride and conceit, and lays bare the greed and selfishness that have
ruined not individuals alone, but whole nations and empires; Lewis
Carroll talks the most laughable, clever nonsense that ever inspired
a humorist's pen; Burns, in the simplest of language, voices the
pathos and tragedy of every life, even the humblest, and with our
own Lincoln proves again and again that true nobility may dwell and
flourish in the midst of poverty.
Truly, herein lies one of life's chief joys, in encountering what
others have thought and achieved--in meeting the actors in the great
world drama, the scenes in which they played their parts, the deeds
by which they have won fame and fortune; still more delectable is the
pleasure of whiling away leisure hours with those folk who are but
products of the fancy, children of the poet's brain, dreams of the
teller of tales: Odysseus, who, for the last three thousand years, as
Sir Philip Sidney has put it, "held children from play and old men
from the chimney corner"; Falstaff, chuckling at the comical ease
with which he hoodwinks all about him; Lady Macbeth, who, even in her
dreams, may not forget the dread stain upon her little hand; Faust,
ever seeking to rid himself of his demon accomplice; the knights of
King Arthur's round table, Robin Hood and his merry men, Dickens's
troop of immortal grotesques, Bret Harte's rough miners, with their
hearts of gold, Irving's droll New Yorkers of the Knickerbocker era,
Longfellow's Blacksmith and his Evangeline,--these and a host of
other undying notables have made life far richer for us all.
Ours is the fault if we do not avail ourselves of their magic. For
here in America the special opportunity to mingle with them lies
readier to the hand than in any other nation. Nowhere else, not in
England, nor France, nor in Italy can the everyday man find books at
his command for the asking. In a few of the largest European cities,
and not anywhere else on that continent, there are libraries of size
and worth, yet even these are hedged about with a hundred rules and
regulations that hamper circulation. But here, through the length and
breadth of this glorious land, are thousands and yet more thousands
of free libraries, containing all manner of books, of every age and
nation, awaiting your demand. They contain all that is splendid in
the way of printed matter, but also much, alas, that is not worth any
man's time; so that though the best lies open and free to us, it is
mingled with a vast amount of wretched trash.
Here lies the chief difficulty for us Americans: How are we to
distinguish the chaff from the wheat, the weeds from the harvest? The
task is that of seeking the proverbial needle in the haystack. We are
deluged with printed matter, tons upon tons of books and magazines
are poured daily upon the bookseller's counters. What is our chance
of choosing the treasures from out this hodgepodge?
To meet this very problem these volumes have been prepared; it is
hardly our place to dwell upon the years of labor and thought in
which they have gradually taken shape, but it is perhaps to the point
to remark that they represent the patient effort of many judges and
critics to supply an introduction and a guide to the best and most
inspiring literature of the nations from the beginning of the art
to the present day,--a means of recreation, amusement, and lasting
profit.
In the past three thousand years, some four hundred authors have
achieved such fame and standing as to distinguish them from the
endless multitudes of commonplace penmen. To choose and present their
very best work in complete, unified selections has constituted the
fundamental purpose of these twelve volumes. In them, it is certain,
an amazingly large proportion of the finest literature has been
brought together; they form a boundless source of entertainment and a
wellnigh infinite field for intellectual diversion and development.
By means of brief and suggestive biographical sketches, together with
the Index and the Handbook, to serve as a guide to fuller enjoyment
and appreciation, the editors have sought to amplify and enhance
the value of the selective feature of the work. And through an
abundance of illustrations, many of them painstaking reproductions of
water color paintings of the homes and favorite haunts of the chief
writers, additional understanding and pleasure is afforded.
The whole of this work has been built on the central idea of
entertainment that shall be simple and unified. Every effort has
been made to shun the elaborate, intricate methods that prevail so
wastefully to-day in our educational and our recreational systems.
At last educators are openly admitting that the only sane means
of raising our standards of education must lie in simplifying the
quantity of the studies so as to attain higher quality. In school and
out of it, Johnny and his sister Molly will unquestionably profit by
simple, straightforward teaching, play, reading, thinking. The more
complex a game is, the fewer people can enjoy it or appreciate its
fine points; the more involved a school system, the fewer children
will be able to acquire thorough training. But simple games and
simple instruction will enable all of us and of our little ones to
get the habit of thoroughness and stability. These twelve volumes,
then, are all constructed upon this principle of furnishing enjoyment
in a simple, clean-cut manner; they constitute one of the most
straightforward, clear, and forceful means toward the advance of our
civilization.
The measure of a successful life is surely the amount of happiness,
of true lasting pleasure which it has contained and which it has
passed on to others. We do not count our years in terms of sorrow or
vexation; we do not recall again and again our moments of failure or
folly; only the bright and golden hours remain fast emblazoned in
our memories, those days of sunshine and delight, when beauty and
laughter sang in our hearts and the air was filled with music. Of all
such days, those on which the friendly pages of some treasured author
were first opened, or those when we reveled in the companionship of
our favorite heroes of romance and adventure--those days indeed are
among the brightest of all. The greater the number of red-letter
days of such wonder and rapture, the greater the value of our lives,
not only to ourselves, but to all who have shared them. In work and
in play, at home and abroad, our undoubted ideal is that of finding
perpetual joy in life. The Fountain of Youth, which Ponce de Leon
vainly sought, is the quest of us all--we no longer seek to lengthen
our lives, but instead we strive with might and main to fill them to
the very brim with joyous thoughts and deeds. To be happy is to be
forever young.
THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK
It is the easiest thing in the world to open the treasure-vaults of
the Bank of England--if you have the combination; if you haven't, the
task is hopeless. It is the easiest thing in the world to enjoy the
most brilliant stories, the most laughable humor, the most heroic
deeds that the world has known--if you know where to find them.
"Where's something to read, something so interesting that I can
forget how tired I am and what a hard day I had at the office?" There
is the problem of almost every home in this country. Tired men and
women must have some means of refreshing themselves, of forgetting
their worries and trials for a time. They must rest and gather
strength for the next day's work. Where are they going to get it?
The purpose of this book is to give the owners of THE LIBRARY OF
ENTERTAINMENT an easy answer to that question. Its opening pages
contain some unusual notes on the oddities of literary folk and some
suggestions for hours and hours of entertainment and amusement that
will drive away care and fatigue unfailingly. The brightest stories
and the most fascinating humor are put right on the table beside you,
all you have to do is to turn to them according to the directions in
these pages.
But there is something better still in this little volume. It gives
a true opportunity to enjoy the company of the ablest men and women
who have ever put pen to paper. Until now a college course of three
or four years has been the only means of getting in touch with the
best of good, sensible reading. Our schools do not teach us how to
understand and take pleasure in these books; our libraries only store
them for us to use if we already know about them. Recent figures
show that for some time past more than 10,000 new books have been
published in the United States each year, an equal number in England,
and even more in Germany and Russia. The public libraries contain
millions upon millions printed in the past. It would be impossible
for even a hundred men giving their whole lifetime of eighty years to
do as much as scan the pages of all the world's literature.
Therefore it is only too evident that for the sensible use of the
little time which we can give to reading we should be enabled to
make a selection. We must be started on the right road. This is the
express aim of THE LIBRARY OF ENTERTAINMENT. Until now the pleasure
and the distinction that come from being well-read have belonged to
a few. The combination that opens the treasure-vaults of literature
was only given in college lectures. The outside world has been left
to shift for itself. But this is utterly wrong; with the simple
introduction that is given in Part Two of this book the world of
literature and its lasting delights are open to all.
PART I
SIDE-LIGHTS ON GREAT WRITERS
To many of us it seems as if an author with an assured reputation
must be one of the happiest of men; yet some of the very greatest
have suffered almost intolerably.
Bobby Burns was a victim of drink largely because of his brilliant
imagination and extreme sensitiveness. He was petted by society and
praised as the poet of the future; all England was at his feet. Yet
he gave way to his passions, took to drink, and ruined the lives of
several of his dearest friends, as well as his own. In almost anyone
else this would condemn him absolutely; but the truth is that his
poetic powers, the gift of his genius, rendered him too sensitive to
moods of the moment, and his will could not hold out under the strain.
A somewhat similar case was that of Coleridge. In his youth he showed
extraordinary talent, but he fell a victim to opium and the greater
part of his life was wasted in a series of unfinished efforts. No
opium was necessary to stimulate his imagination, as his weird ballad
of "The Ancient Mariner" plainly shows. Indeed his genius even worked
during his sleep, for "Kubla Khan" is but a fragment of a poem which
he dreamed and then began to write down as soon as he awoke. If he
had not been interrupted by a visitor, a man of no importance, we
might have had the whole instead of a scanty portion of this unique
masterpiece. Even as it stands it is one of the most picturesque and
brilliant compositions ever produced. It seems incredible that it
should be the work of a sleeping brain. And yet this is the man who
gave himself up to opium, wrecking a career that promised to surpass
even that of Byron or Shelley in poetic power.
Thomas De Quincey, the author of the "Confessions of an Opium
Eater," drank laudanum by the glassful. He first took to using this
liquid form of opium in order to gain relief from the dyspepsia that
resulted from his days of privation in the streets of London. Of
course he was unable to stop the use of the drug and had to increase
the doses to the alarming extent mentioned. When he was living in
Edinburgh this almost caused the death of a gentleman who dined with
him there; for his visitor picked up a decanter of a rich, dark red
liquor, which he thought was port wine, poured out a glass, and had
it at his lips, when De Quincey hurriedly seized it and saved the
situation. Smoking opium was not the custom then; Coleridge drank it,
as De Quincey did, and unknowingly spread the habit; for a poor man
who once lived near Coleridge's house admitted that he had obtained
laudanum from a boy who worked for Coleridge and smuggled it out to
his friend by the bottleful.
As we all know, our great American short story writer, Edgar Allan
Poe, was the prey of alcohol and also of opium, as well as a genius.
The combination seems to have been more unavoidable in his case than
in any other we know of. His imagination could only bring forth those
extraordinarily gruesome tales of mystery and horror when stimulated
by wines and brandy or opium. His whole life was spent in the shadow
of despondency and irritation; and although we are indebted to him
for priceless literary gems, he paid the penalty with misery which we
cannot imagine.
In contrast, look at the life of Charles Lamb. He was a poor clerk
at a pitiful salary, struggling to increase his income by literary
work in his spare time, with a dangerous appetite for alcohol, and
an insane sister to take care of. He, himself, constantly dreaded
insanity. Yet he kept up a cheerful and continual resistance to his
craving for drink, although he often took a drop too much. In order
to care for his sister, who had killed her mother in one of her
attacks, he gave up his sweetheart and settled down to the brave and
heartrending task of devotion to the unhappy invalid. This lasted
for thirty-three years, during which he never murmured except when
her attacks forced him to place her in an asylum. One of his friends
leaves the record of meeting Charles and Mary Lamb walking across
the fields to the hospital with tears streaming down their faces.
Yet in spite of all his troubles Lamb's essays have a delicacy and a
cheerfulness that never reveal the burden he had to bear. He is one
of the great heroes of English literature.
John Milton was another such hero. As a young man he won great
distinction as a poet and a scholar; so much so that when he
went to Italy the greatest Italian authors and critics praised
his Italian and Latin poetry as the best of that day, superior
to anything written during that time in Italy itself. He was
received there with boundless enthusiasm and was having the time
of his life, so to speak, when the news reached him of the Puritan
rebellion against Charles the First. Without a moment's hesitation
he abandoned his tour and came back to England. There he acted as
foreign correspondent for Cromwell's Government and kept England
safe from attacks by France and the rest of Europe through his able
diplomacy. He worked day and night until he fell ill and eventually
lost his eyesight. To make matters worse, the Puritans were deprived
of their power and Milton's enemies then persecuted him so that he
had to fly for his life. He spent the rest of his days in a humble
cottage, while his daughters grumbled because he made them transcribe
"Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained." It seems as if his sacrifice
for his country was utterly unrewarded, until we remember that his
name to-day is almost the first in its long roll of poets.
One of the sorrows of literary men is lack of appreciation.
Longfellow was laughed at by the Harvard students whom he taught,
for his poems had no attraction for them and he was only appreciated
elsewhere. Bret Harte wrote the finest stories of California life
that have ever appeared, yet for years he was not recognized in this
country as a writer of unusual powers, and as a matter of fact he
spent the greater part of his life in London, six thousand miles
from his old home; Lafcadio Hearn was so homely and eccentric that
he could not be happy or comfortable in the United States or in
Europe, and took refuge in Japan where his appearance would never
be remarked. As he points out in his wonderful writings on Japanese
life, politeness is one of the ruling habits of that race, so that
he was made far more comfortable and did far better work than would
have been possible in his own country.
Some writers have done their best work in prison. "The Star Spangled
Banner," as we know, was written by Francis Scott Key, while he was
a captive on a British battleship during the bombardment of Fort
McHenry, near Baltimore, in the War of 1812, and as he wondered
whether the flag was still flying he jotted down the lines of our
National Anthem. The masterpiece of Spanish literature was written
in jail; "Don Quixote" is so amusing, so pathetic, and so vivid
that Spain can stake her whole reputation on that one work, written
by Cervantes, an innocent man, imprisoned through envy and malice.
John Bunyan, another guiltless author, wrote his immortal "Pilgrim's
Progress" while he was locked up for his stubborn refusal to mold his
religious belief according to the demands of authorities for whom he
could have no respect. The opium of Coleridge and De Quincey and the
brandy of Edgar Allan Poe never stimulated them to equal the work
of these two geniuses. Innocence in prison has been proved superior
to dissipation in the best of surroundings, for the opium victims,
Coleridge and De Quincey, had the society of England's most brilliant
men and the environment of her finest scenery.
Both Bunyan and Cervantes worked hard, but the hardest workers of
all have been Frenchmen; Balzac and Dumas labored unceasingly for
the greater part of their lifetimes. In twenty years Balzac wrote
ninety-seven novels for a mere pittance that just kept body and
soul together. The greatness of his work was recognized, but the
French public, as a whole, did so little reading, that the publisher
himself did not make anything like a fortune. Dumas was more popular
and employed a staff of assistants to collect the material for his
historical romances, but the actual writing was all his own and cost
him from fourteen to eighteen hours a day in labor. His works are
more numerous than those of Dickens, Thackeray, and Cooper combined.
It seems incredible that one man could have turned out such a
tremendous mass of fascinating stories.
The only man in English literature who is to be compared to these
two Frenchmen is Sir Walter Scott. In his first success, when money
flowed in on him almost in torrents, his vanity led him to build the
mansion of Abbotsford and his one wish was to be regarded as the
Squire or ruler of the countryside, but not long after, when his
partner in the publishing business had caused the failure of the
firm, he bravely went to work and wrote novel after novel, year after
year, to pay off his debts. His vanity and love of show disappeared
and the man's true nobility took its proper place; almost on his
death-bed he continued to dictate his novels although he was agonized
with pain and distress.
Similar patience was shown by Thomas Carlyle, who rewrote the whole
of his great work, "The French Revolution," after the first copy had
been carelessly burnt by a servant girl in the house of a friend
who had borrowed the manuscript. He was a dyspeptic and a constant
grumbler, but on this occasion he redeemed himself by sitting down
quietly to work and hammering away at his dreary task until he had
once more finished the masterpiece. Carlyle was so sensitive to noise
and other disturbances that he had a sound-proof shed or room built
on the roof of his house in London, where he did a great part of his
writing, and even there he complained of the rumbling of the wagons
in the street, which vibrated through the house.
Herbert Spencer, the great English philosopher, was also easily
disturbed by noises, but he solved the problem by wearing ear muffs
which were specially made under his instruction. Spencer was rather
irritable, it is said; certainly on one occasion he made himself a
source of amusement when he objected to being beaten at billiards by
the son of a friend of his and remarked that it was not fitting that
a young man should have spent so much time and money on so foolish a
pastime; yet when he won, the expenditure of thought and time on the
part of so great a philosopher seemed altogether wise.
Robert Browning had an amusing experience on one occasion toward the
close of his life. He was walking through the residential district of
London's fashionable West End to a meeting which he had been invited
to attend. Mistaking the house, he walked into a literary gathering
that was discussing his own poems. Presently he rose to his feet and
offered a few suggestions as to the meaning of a rather difficult
passage. Now Browning was not at all like a poet in appearance, but
rather resembled a prosperous business man, and it happened that as
he was well toward the back of the hall no one recognized him. On the
contrary his suggestions were ridiculed by other critics who took
the floor when he sat down and he retired unrecognized but vastly
delighted. Of course some of Browning's work is intensely intricate
and confused; he himself said of his early poem "Sordello" that once
there were two beings who understood it, the Almighty and Robert
Browning; now, he added, there was but one, for Browning had long
lost the key to its problem.
Charles Dickens was one of the most impressionable writers who
ever lived. His characters were absolutely real to him and when
he was writing he would impersonate the various characters he
was describing, talking, making faces, jumping up and looking in
the mirror, and then dashing back to his desk to set down each
inspiration. But his impressionable nature prevented complete
happiness; he was either intensely happy or down in the dumps and
miserable. This made him very hard to get along with, so that it is
no wonder that his wife found it almost impossible to live with him.
Gladstone, the 'Grand Old Man' of English politics in the last
century, was a scholar and a linguist as well as a statesman.
On one occasion he was seated in the House of Commons while his
bitter opponent, the clever Disraeli, was delivering a venomous and
brilliant attack upon him. During the speech Gladstone was observed
to be writing on a scrap of paper, apparently taking notes for his
reply. At the conclusion of his enemy's speech Gladstone rose and
delivered a most masterly refutation of the attack, answering and
breaking down each point of Disraeli's invective with the utmost
skill. A member sitting near by noticed that the scrap of paper was
lying on Gladstone's seat and picked it up to see what the notes
were like; to his surprise they consisted of a careful translation
of "Rock of Ages" into smooth Greek verse, which the orator had made
half-consciously while waiting for the occasion to reply to his
opponent.
Macaulay, too, had wonderful scholastic talent and a fine memory.
Even in his youth he showed great ability and read with amazing
speed; most remarkable is the fact that he never seemed to forget
a line he had read, but could repeat pages of an author many years
after he had once perused his work. He read many works again and
again, it is true, but for the pleasure of enjoying the fine points
of style rather than for the sake of attaining greater familiarity
with the book. His essays are regarded as among the most brilliant in
the language, and seem to have been written posthaste, at full swing.
In reality, however, he was well pleased if he produced five foolscap
pages of longhand manuscript a day. It was his custom to spend the
morning writing as fast as he could, the afternoon, in revising and
pruning the morning's work and thus producing finished copy. He knew
only too well that, as Sheridan said, "easy writing makes cursed hard
reading," and that labor alone could produce a forceful and pleasant
style.
Goethe, the greatest of the German immortals, is mainly remembered
as a poet. Yet his fame would be great even if it depended only upon
his scientific exploits. It was he who did much toward establishing
the modern theory of evolution. Goethe also showed his insight into
human progress by prophesying the construction of the Suez and the
Panama Canals as long ago as 1827; this illustrates the marvelous
imagination of the genius who was, as he himself said, a citizen of
the world.
Shakespeare is certainly the supreme master of English literature,
yet there was a time when he was regarded as a nuisance and a
good-for-nothing. He was a poacher, a thieving vagabond arrested for
stealing or killing deer in the park of the neighboring aristocrat,
Sir Thomas Lucy. It was not long afterward that the future playwright
went to London and gained his first acquaintance with the theater
by holding horses for gentlefolk at the entrance of the principal
playhouse of the city. Some authors would also call him a pirate and
a thief, as Sir Thomas Lucy did, for he took plots and ideas wherever
he found them and worked them over into the revised versions that now
rank among the finest achievements of mankind. Yet all the while
his one desire was to be a well-to-do business man of his native
town of Stratford, and as soon as he had made a comfortable fortune
he retired and spent his last years in quiet, building a new house
and writing one or two last plays in the commonplace seclusion of a
country town. There is still one place left in London where his plays
were performed under his direction, although the old theaters have
long since perished. This is the Temple Hall, in the grounds that
belonged to the old Knights Templar of Crusading fame. Here he put on
"The Winter's Tale" with great success. If you are ever in London you
can visit the hall and on entering you can turn the very door-handle,
so tradition says, which the poet himself used.
Molière was the greatest French dramatist. At the height of his
career, legend relates, he was such a favorite with the grand
monarch, Louis XIV, that this proud king made him come and dine in
private with him, so as to convince his servants and courtiers that
the genius whom they thought of as a vulgar, impossible boor, a mere
actor, was worthy of the greatest consideration. Yet when Molière was
dead the king ungratefully refused to see that he was properly buried
and the great man was carried to his last resting-place with little
ceremony.
At the present day one of France's most prominent writers is Rostand,
the author of "Cyrano de Bergerac," a play which brought him into
instant popularity through its brilliance, although a few weeks
before scarcely anyone had heard his name. On the first night of the
production, in 1897, the audience cheered and shouted until it seemed
as if the performance would break up in the confusion created by its
success, yet thanks to Rostand's coolness the actors and even the
spectators were kept calm enough to carry the play through to its
masterly conclusion. At the close, when the curtain had fallen on the
last act, Rostand was sought for everywhere to make his bow to the
enthusiastic audience, but he had quietly driven away to his country
home, with his wife, and there he stayed for a week or more before
the public had a chance to welcome him.
Byron is almost the only man in English letters to come so suddenly
before the people. He woke up one morning to find himself famous,
through the publication of "Childe Harold." Byron was another of
the unhappy geniuses. He was hot-headed and married an equally
irritable wife, so naturally they separated, with anger and yet
with sorrow. His little daughter, who he said was the one friend he
had in the world, died at an early age. He dreaded being fat and
therefore starved himself, a process which did not make him happier.
But his death was in itself enough to redeem him in spite of his
irresponsible and rather selfish career, for he gave himself up to
the cause of the freedom and independence of the Greeks, and died of
fever contracted while preparing for the great campaign against the
Turks.
Poor Dean Swift, the author of "Gulliver's Travels," the bitterest
book ever written about human beings, suffered even more than Byron.
He was keenly sensitive, and his political labors were poorly paid
because he was none too courteous in his manner to the political
leaders for whom he worked so hard. Boot-licking would have brought
him the position he desired, but Swift was not a toady, so he was
driven to accept the second-rate place offered him, and there vented
his anger in the most savage attacks on human nature that can be
imagined. All this while he had been fearing that his mind would give
way; "I am like that tree," he said to a friend one day when they
were out walking, "I shall die at the top first." He was right, for
not long afterward his brain gave way.
"The Old Oaken Bucket" still has a touch of beauty for us, if we
do not hear it too often. It was written under rather interesting
circumstances. Samuel Woodworth, the author, was born and brought up
on a little farm in Scituate, not far from Plymouth, Massachusetts.
In his youth he went to New York and got a job as a reporter. One
day he was in a bar, taking a glass of brandy and declaring that it
was the finest drink on earth, when a friend with him said, "You're
wrong; think of the delicious water you used to draw from the old
well at home." Woodworth jumped up and hurried over to his rooms,
where he sat down and dashed off the outline of the song that at once
won a widespread vogue.
Perhaps the bravest fight against ill health was put up by Robert
Louis Stevenson, the gentle, lovable poet and novelist. As a young
man he found that consumption threatened to carry him off. With the
cheerfulness characteristic of the victims of the White Plague he
set off on a series of outdoor trips afoot and afloat. Two of these
are preserved for us in his "Inland Voyage" and the more fascinating
"Travels with a Donkey." This latter is almost unequaled as a picture
of travel. He finally started for America to see if the climate there
would not be better for him than the moist weather of Scotland, his
home. Eventually he reached Samoa, in the South Seas of the Pacific,
where he lived for several years, cheerful and brave in spite of his
increasing weakness. His character, although mild and kindly, was so
forceful that the chiefs among the natives held him in veneration,
and at the time of his death no one lamented him more than the simple
Samoans, some of whom bore him to the grave on the hill-top near his
home.
Thoreau, one of New England's philosophers of the great and glorious
Emerson days, was as eccentric as any one that can be found. For the
sake of peace and independence he went off into the woods and lived
as a hermit near Walden Pond, outside Concord. To earn what little
money he needed he made lead pencils; like many country folks of
those days he was amazingly dexterous with his knife and his pencils
were a delight to use. In his leisure he made an exhaustive study of
the Pond; but in two years' time he left this little cabin and never
returned. He said that he had had enough of that sort of life and
now he was going to try something else. His was the same spirit of
adventure that stirred the old explorers and yet he was so fond of
New England that he rarely set foot outside her boundaries. He could
find enough to keep him busy thinking and writing within his own
dooryard. But he showed that it was possible for a man in good health
to live on less than $100 a year and have more than two thirds of his
time to himself. On the other hand, as he died of consumption at the
age of forty-four, he also proved that outdoor life is not in itself
a preventive of that scourge.
Whittier, the gentle Quaker poet, was one of the sturdiest heroes of
the antislavery movement. In those days he was a fighter, stoned and
mobbed by the partisans of slavery in Philadelphia and Concord, New
Hampshire. His genius was discovered by William Lloyd Garrison, the
abolitionist, while he was editing a paper at Newburyport. Whittier's
sister had sent some verses of her young brother's to the paper and
Garrison not only printed them but hunted up the author to enlist him
in his good work. In his latter years Whittier clung to the rural
obscurity of Amesbury, where he enjoyed the rippling life of the
little town, talking local politics with the 'natives' in the country
store, chatting with his friends on the doorstep of the Friends'
meeting-house which he had helped to build, or planting trees about
it, like Holmes, who used to boast that at one time or another he
had set out more than seven hundred saplings. Whittier, more than
any other American, has left us glowing pictures of New England life
and geniality. With his reverent sense of the need for emphasizing
morals and duty there was a love of home, of the memory of youth's
work and play that makes "Snow-Bound" immortal. Emerson was the
Yankee philosopher; Hawthorne, the novelist of New England's moods;
Thoreau, the nature-worshiper; Holmes, the Bostonian; Longfellow, the
cosmopolitan poet; but Whittier was the poet of New England's heart.
'TO DRIVE DULL CARE AWAY'
The brightest and most delightful pages that have ever been written.
Short stories, humor, adventure, and fun.
SHORT STORIES
ALDRICH: "Père Antoine's Date Palm."
BALZAC: "The Purse."
BARRIE: "Lads and Lassies."
BJÖRNSON: "The Railroad and the Churchyard."
BOCCACCIO: "The Story of Constantia," "The Story of Federigo and
the Falcon."
BROWN: "Rab and his Friends."
COLLINS: "A Terribly Strange Bed."
CRAWFORD: "The Upper Berth."
ELIOT: "Brother Jacob."
HALE: "The Man Without a Country."
HARDY: "The Three Strangers."
HARTE: "Tennessee's Partner."
HAWTHORNE: "The Snow-Image."
IRVING: "Rip Van Winkle."
JAPANESE LITERATURE: "The Forty-Seven Rônins."
KIPLING: "The Man Who Would Be King."
MACLEOD: "The Washer of the Ford."
MAUPASSANT: "The Piece of String."
MEREDITH: "The Story of Noorna Bin Noorka, the Genie Karaz, and
the Princess of Oolb," "The Punishment of Shahpesh, the Persian,
on Khipil, the Builder."
POE: "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Cask of Amontillado."
STERNE: "The Story of Le Fevre."
STEVENSON: "A Lodging for the Night."
TOLSTOI: "Where Love is, There God is Also."
FAIRY TALES
ANDERSEN: "The Hardy Tin Soldier," "The Ugly Duckling," "The Old
Street Lamp."
APULEIUS: "The Story of Cupid and Psyche."
ARABIAN NIGHTS: "Ali Baba and the Forty Robbers," "Abon-Hassan
the Wag, or the Sleeper Awakened," "The Story of the Three
Apples."
FOUQUÉ: "Undine."
GRIMM: "Cinderella," "Hansel and Grethel," "The Two Brothers."
PERRAULT: "Little Red Riding-Hood," "Blue Beard," "Puss in Boots."
RUSSIAN LITERATURE: "The Water King and Vasilissa the Wise."
HUMOR
BARHAM: "The Knight and the Lady."
BROWNE: "The Showman's Courtship."
CARROLL: "A Mad Tea-Party," "The White Knight," "The Walrus and
the Carpenter," "Jabberwocky."
COWPER: "The Diverting History of John Gilpin."
GILBERT: "The Yarn of the Nancy Bell."
HARRIS: "Old Mr. Rabbit, He's a Good Fisherman."
HARTE: "Plain Language from Truthful James."
HOOD: "Faithless Sally Brown."
HOPE: "The House Opposite."
JERROLD: "Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures."
LAMB: "A Dissertation on Roast Pig."
LOWELL: "The Courtin'."
RASPE: "Baron Münchhausen."
STERNE: "A Sentimental Journey."
ADVENTURE
AUDUBON: "Hospitality in the Woods."
CARLYLE: "The Fall of the Bastille."
COLERIDGE: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."
FROUDE: "A Cagliostro of the Second Century."
HAY: "Jim Bludso of the Prairie Belle."
HEARN: "In the Cave of the Children's Ghosts."
HEINE: "Travel-Pictures."
KINGLAKE: "Eothen."
MANDEVILLE: "Travels."
MELVILLE: "Typee."
POLO: "Travels."
STEVENSON: "A Night among the Pines."