I hate to read new books. There are twenty or thirty volumes that I have
read over and over again, and these are the only ones that I have any
desire ever to read at all. It was a long time before I could bring myself
to sit down to the Tales of My Landlord, but now that author's works have
made a considerable addition to my scanty library. I am told that some of
Lady Morgan's are good, and have been recommended to look into Anastasius;
but I have not yet ventured upon that task. A lady, the other day, could
not refrain from expressing her surprise to a friend, who said he had been
reading Delphine:--she asked,--If it had not been published some time
back? Women judge of books as they do of fashions or complexions, which
are admired only "in their newest gloss." That is not my way. I am not one
of those who trouble the circulating libraries much, or pester the
booksellers for mail-coach copies of standard periodical publications. I
cannot say that I am greatly addicted to black-letter, but I profess
myself well versed in the marble bindings of Andrew Millar, in the middle
of the last century; nor does my taste revolt at Thurloe's State Papers,
in Russia leather; or an ample impression of Sir William Temple's Essays,
with a portrait after Sir Godfrey Kneller in front. I do not think
altogether the worse of a book for having survived the author a generation
or two. I have more confidence in the dead than the living. Contemporary
writers may generally be divided into two classes--one's friends or one's
foes. Of the first we are compelled to think too well, and of the last we
are disposed to think too ill, to receive much genuine pleasure from the
perusal, or to judge fairly of the merits of either. One candidate for
literary fame, who happens to be of our acquaintance, writes finely, and
like a man of genius; but unfortunately has a foolish face, which spoils a
delicate passage:--another inspires us with the highest respect for his
personal talents and character, but does not quite come up to our
expectations in print. All these contradictions and petty details
interrupt the calm current of our reflections. If you want to know what
any of the authors were who lived before our time, and are still objects
of anxious inquiry, you have only to look into their works. But the dust
and smoke and noise of modern literature have nothing in common with the
pure, silent air of immortality.
When I take up a work that I have read before (the oftener the better) I
know what I have to expect. The satisfaction is not lessened by being
anticipated. When the entertainment is altogether new, I sit down to it as
I should to a strange dish,--turn and pick out a bit here and there, and
am in doubt what to think of the composition. There is a want of
confidence and security to second appetite. New-fangled books are also
like made-dishes in this respect, that they are generally little else than
hashes and _rifaccimentos_ of what has been served up entire and in a more
natural state at other times. Besides, in thus turning to a well-known
author, there is not only an assurance that my time will not be thrown
away, or my palate nauseated with the most insipid or vilest trash,--but I
shake hands with, and look an old, tried, and valued friend in the
face,--compare notes, and chat the hours away. It is true, we form dear
friendships with such ideal guests--dearer, alas! and more lasting, than
those with our most intimate acquaintance. In reading a book which is an
old favourite with me (say the first novel I ever read) I not only have
the pleasure of imagination and of a critical relish of the work, but the
pleasures of memory added to it. It recalls the same feelings and
associations which I had in first reading it, and which I can never have
again in any other way. Standard productions of this kind are links in the
chain of our conscious being. They bind together the different scattered
divisions of our personal identity. They are land-marks and guides in our
journey through life. They are pegs and loops on which we can hang up, or
from which we can take down, at pleasure, the wardrobe of a moral
imagination, the relics of our best affections, the tokens and records of
our happiest hours. They are "for thoughts and for remembrance!" They are
like Fortunatus's Wishing-Cap--they give us the best riches--those of
Fancy; and transport us, not over half the globe, but (which is better)
over half our lives, at a word's notice!
My father Shandy solaced himself with Bruscambille. Give me for this
purpose a volume of Peregrine Pickle or Tom Jones. Open either of them
anywhere--at the Memoirs of Lady Vane, or the adventures at the masquerade
with Lady Bellaston, or the disputes between Thwackum and Square, or the
escape of Molly Seagrim, or the incident of Sophia and her muff, or the
edifying prolixity of her aunt's lecture--and there I find the same
delightful, busy, bustling scene as ever, and feel myself the same as when
I was first introduced into the midst of it. Nay, sometimes the sight of
an odd volume of these good old English authors on a stall, or the name
lettered on the back among others on the shelves of a library, answers the
purpose, revives the whole train of ideas, and sets "the puppets
dallying." Twenty years are struck off the list, and I am a child again.
A sage philosopher, who was not a very wise man, said, that he should like
very well to be young again, if he could take his experience along with
him. This ingenious person did not seem to be aware, by the gravity of his
remark, that the great advantage of being young is to be without this
weight of experience, which he would fain place upon the shoulders of
youth, and which never comes too late with years. Oh! what a privilege to
be able to let this hump, like Christian's burthen, drop from off one's
back, and transport one's-self, by the help of a little musty duodecimo,
to the time when "ignorance was bliss," and when we first got a peep at
the raree-show of the world, through the glass of fiction--gazing at
mankind, as we do at wild beasts in a menagerie, through the bars of their
cages,--or at curiosities in a museum, that we must not touch! For myself,
not only are the old ideas of the contents of the work brought back to my
mind in all their vividness, but the old associations of the faces and
persons of those I then knew, as they were in their lifetime--the place
where I sat to read the volume, the day when I got it, the feeling of the
air, the fields, the sky--return, and all my early impressions with them.
This is better to me--those places, those times, those persons, and those
feelings that come across me as I retrace the story and devour the page,
are to me better far than the wet sheets of the last new novel from the
Ballantyne press, to say nothing of the Minerva press in
Leadenhall-street. It is like visiting the scenes of early youth. I think
of the time "when I was in my father's house, and my path ran down with
butter and honey,"--when I was a little, thoughtless child, and had no
other wish or care but to con my daily task, and be happy!--Tom Jones, I
remember, was the first work that broke the spell. It came down in numbers
once a fortnight, in Cooke's pocket-edition, embellished with cuts. I had
hitherto read only in school-books, and a tiresome ecclesiastical history
(with the exception of Mrs. Radcliffe's Romance of the Forest): but this
had a different relish with it,--"sweet in the mouth," though not "bitter
in the belly." It smacked of the world I lived in, and in which I was to
live--and shewed me groups, "gay creatures" not "of the element," but of
the earth; not "living in the clouds," but travelling the same road that I
did;--some that had passed on before me, and others that might soon
overtake me. My heart had palpitated at the thoughts of a boarding-school
ball, or gala-day at Midsummer or Christmas: but the world I had found out
in Cooke's edition of the British Novelists was to me a dance through
life, a perpetual gala-day. The six-penny numbers of this work regularly
contrived to leave off just in the middle of a sentence, and in the nick
of a story, where Tom Jones discovers Square behind the blanket; or where
Parson Adams, in the inextricable confusion of events, very undesignedly
gets to bed to Mrs. Slip-slop. Let me caution the reader against this
impression of Joseph Andrews; for there is a picture of Fanny in it which
he should not set his heart on, lest he should never meet with anything
like it; or if he should, it would, perhaps, be better for him that he had
not. It was just like ---- ----! With what eagerness I used to look
forward to the next number, and open the prints! Ah! never again shall I
feel the enthusiastic delight with which I gazed at the figures, and
anticipated the story and adventures of Major Bath and Commodore Trunnion,
of Trim and my Uncle Toby, of Don Quixote and Sancho and Dapple, of Gil
Blas and Dame Lorenza Sephora, of Laura and the fair Lucretia, whose lips
open and shut like buds of roses. To what nameless ideas did they give
rise,--with what airy delights I filled up the outlines, as I hung in
silence over the page!--Let me still recall them, that they may breathe
fresh life into me, and that I may live that birthday of thought and
romantic pleasure over again! Talk of the _ideal_! This is the only true
ideal--the heavenly tints of Fancy reflected in the bubbles that float
upon the spring-tide of human life.
Oh! Memory! shield me from the world's poor strife,
And give those scenes thine everlasting life!
The paradox with which I set out is, I hope, less startling than it was;
the reader will, by this time, have been let into my secret. Much about
the same time, or I believe rather earlier, I took a particular
satisfaction in reading Chubb's Tracts, and I often think I will get them
again to wade through. There is a high gusto of polemical divinity in
them; and you fancy that you hear a club of shoemakers at Salisbury,
debating a disputable text from one of St. Paul's Epistles in a
workmanlike style, with equal shrewdness and pertinacity. I cannot say
much for my metaphysical studies, into which I launched shortly after with
great ardour, so as to make a toil of a pleasure. I was presently
entangled in the briars and thorns of subtle distinctions,--of "fate,
free-will, fore-knowledge absolute," though I cannot add that "in their
wandering mazes I found no end;" for I did arrive at some very
satisfactory and potent conclusions; nor will I go so far, however
ungrateful the subject might seem, as to exclaim with Marlowe's
Faustus--"Would I had never seen Wittenberg, never read book"--that is,
never studied such authors as Hartley, Hume, Berkeley, etc. Locke's Essay
on the Human Understanding is, however, a work from which I never derived
either pleasure or profit; and Hobbes, dry and powerful as he is, I did
not read till long afterwards. I read a few poets, which did not much hit
my taste,--for I would have the reader understand, I am deficient in the
faculty of imagination; but I fell early upon French romances and
philosophy, and devoured them tooth-and-nail. Many a dainty repast have I
made of the New Eloise;--the description of the kiss; the excursion on the
water; the letter of St. Preux, recalling the time of their first loves;
and the account of Julia's death; these I read over and over again with
unspeakable delight and wonder. Some years after, when I met with this
work again, I found I had lost nearly my whole relish for it (except some
few parts) and was, I remember, very much mortified with the change in my
taste, which I sought to attribute to the smallness and gilt edges of the
edition I had bought, and its being perfumed with rose-leaves. Nothing
could exceed the gravity, the solemnity with which I carried home and read
the Dedication to the Social Contract, with some other pieces of the same
author, which I had picked up at a stall in a coarse leathern cover. Of
the Confessions I have spoken elsewhere, and may repeat what I have
said--"Sweet is the dew of their memory, and pleasant the balm of their
recollection!" Their beauties are not "scattered like stray-gifts o'er the
earth," but sown thick on the page, rich and rare. I wish I had never read
the Emilius, or read it with less implicit faith. I had no occasion to
pamper my natural aversion to affectation or pretence, by romantic and
artificial means. I had better have formed myself on the model of Sir
Fopling Flutter. There is a class of persons whose virtues and most
shining qualities sink in, and are concealed by, an absorbent ground of
modesty and reserve; and such a one I do, without vanity, profess
myself.[149] Now these are the very persons who are likely to attach
themselves to the character of Emilius, and of whom it is sure to be the
bane. This dull, phlegmatic, retiring humour is not in a fair way to be
corrected, but confirmed and rendered desperate, by being in that work
held up as an object of imitation, as an example of simplicity and
magnanimity--by coming upon us with all the recommendations of novelty,
surprise, and superiority to the prejudices of the world--by being stuck
upon a pedestal, made amiable, dazzling, a _leurre de dupe_! The reliance
on solid worth which it inculcates, the preference of sober truth to gaudy
tinsel, hangs like a mill-stone round the neck of the imagination--"a load
to sink a navy"--impedes our progress, and blocks up every prospect in
life. A man, to get on, to be successful, conspicuous, applauded, should
not retire upon the centre of his conscious resources, but be always at
the circumference of appearances. He must envelop himself in a halo of
mystery--he must ride in an equipage of opinion--he must walk with a train
of self-conceit following him--he must not strip himself to a buff-jerkin,
to the doublet and hose of his real merits, but must surround himself with
a _cortege_ of prejudices, like the signs of the Zodiac--he must seem any
thing but what he is, and then he may pass for any thing he pleases. The
world love to be amused by hollow professions, to be deceived by
flattering appearances, to live in a state of hallucination; and can
forgive every thing but the plain, downright, simple honest truth--such as
we see it chalked out in the character of Emilius.--To return from this
digression, which is a little out of place here.
Books have in a great measure lost their power over me; nor can I revive
the same interest in them as formerly. I perceive when a thing is good,
rather than feel it. It is true,
Marcian Colonna is a dainty book;
and the reading of Mr. Keats's Eve of St. Agnes lately made me regret that
I was not young again. The beautiful and tender images there conjured up,
"come like shadows--so depart." The "tiger-moth's wings," which he has
spread over his rich poetic blazonry, just flit across my fancy; the
gorgeous twilight window which he has painted over again in his verse, to
me "blushes" almost in vain "with blood of queens and kings." I know how I
should have felt at one time in reading such passages; and that is all.
The sharp luscious flavour, the fine _aroma_ is fled, and nothing but the
stalk, the bran, the husk of literature is left. If any one were to ask me
what I read now, I might answer with my Lord Hamlet in the play--"Words,
words, words."--"What is the matter?"--"_Nothing!_"--They have scarce a
meaning. But it was not always so. There was a time when to my thinking,
every word was a flower or a pearl, like those which dropped from the
mouth of the little peasant-girl in the Fairy tale, or like those that
fall from the great preacher in the Caledonian Chapel! I drank of the
stream of knowledge that tempted, but did not mock my lips, as of the
river of life, freely. How eagerly I slaked my thirst of German sentiment,
"as the hart that panteth for the water-springs;" how I bathed and
revelled, and added my floods of tears to Goethe's Sorrows of Werter, and
to Schiller's Robbers--
Giving my stock of more to that which had too much!
I read and assented with all my soul to Coleridge's fine Sonnet,
beginning--
Schiller! that hour I would have wish'd to die,
If through the shuddering midnight I had sent,
From the dark dungeon of the tow'r time rent,
That fearful voice, a famish'd father's cry!
I believe I may date my insight into the mysteries of poetry from the
commencement of my acquaintance with the authors of the Lyrical Ballads;
at least, my discrimination of the higher sorts--not my predilection for
such writers as Goldsmith or Pope: nor do I imagine they will say I got my
liking for the Novelists, or the comic writers,--for the characters of
Valentine, Tattle, or Miss Prue, from them. If so, I must have got from
them what they never had themselves. In points where poetic diction and
conception are concerned, I may be at a loss, and liable to be imposed
upon: but in forming an estimate of passages relating to common life and
manners, I cannot think I am a plagiarist from any man. I there "know my
cue without a prompter." I may say of such studies--_Intus et in cute_. I
am just able to admire those literal touches of observation and
description, which persons of loftier pretensions overlook and despise. I
think I comprehend something of the characteristic part of Shakspeare; and
in him indeed all is characteristic, even the nonsense and poetry. I
believe it was the celebrated Sir Humphry Davy who used to say, that
Shakspeare was rather a metaphysician than a poet. At any rate, it was not
ill said. I wish that I had sooner known the dramatic writers contemporary
with Shakspeare; for in looking them over about a year ago, I almost
revived my old passion for reading, and my old delight in books, though
they were very nearly new to me. The Periodical Essayists I read long ago.
The Spectator I liked extremely: but the Tatler took my fancy most. I read
the others soon after, the Rambler, the Adventurer, the World, the
Connoisseur: I was not sorry to get to the end of them, and have no desire
to go regularly through them again. I consider myself a thorough adept in
Richardson. I like the longest of his novels best, and think no part of
them tedious; nor should I ask to have any thing better to do than to
read them from beginning to end, to take them up when I chose, and lay
them down when I was tired, in some old family mansion in the country,
till every word and syllable relating to the bright Clarissa, the divine
Clementina, the beautiful Pamela, "with every trick and line of their
sweet favour," were once more "graven in my heart's table."[150] I have a
sneaking kindness for Mackenzie's Julia de Roubigne--for the deserted
mansion, and straggling gilliflowers on the mouldering garden-wall; and
still more for his Man of Feeling; not that it is better, nor so good; but
at the time I read it, I sometimes thought of the heroine, Miss Walton,
and of Miss ---- together, and "that ligament, fine as it was, was never
broken!"--One of the poets that I have always read with most pleasure, and
can wander about in for ever with a sort of voluptuous indolence, is
Spenser; and I like Chaucer even better. The only writer among the
Italians I can pretend to any knowledge of, is Boccacio, and of him I
cannot express half my admiration. His story of the Hawk I could read and
think of from day to day, just as I would look at a picture of Titian's!--
I remember, as long ago as the year 1798, going to a neighbouring town
(Shrewsbury, where Farquhar has laid the plot of his Recruiting Officer)
and bringing home with me, "at one proud swoop," a copy of Milton's
Paradise Lost, and another of Burke's Reflections on the French
Revolution--both which I have still; and I still recollect, when I see
the covers, the pleasure with which I clipped into them as I returned with
my double prize. I was set up for one while. That time is past "with all
its giddy raptures:" but I am still anxious to preserve its memory,
"embalmed with odours."--With respect to the first of these works, I would
be permitted to remark here in passing, that it is a sufficient answer to
the German criticism which has since been started against the character of
Satan (_viz._ that it is not one of disgusting deformity, or pure,
defecated malice) to say that Milton has there drawn, not the abstract
principle of evil, not a devil incarnate, but a fallen angel. This is the
Scriptural account, and the poet has followed it. We may safely retain
such passages as that well-known one--
----His form had not yet lost
All her original brightness; nor appear'd
Less than archangel ruin'd; and the excess
Of glory obscur'd--
for the theory, which is opposed to them, "falls flat upon the grunsel
edge, and shames its worshippers." Let us hear no more then of this
monkish cant, and bigotted outcry for the restoration of the horns and
tail of the devil!--Again, as to the other work, Burke's Reflections, I
took a particular pride and pleasure in it, and read it to myself and
others for months afterwards. I had reason for my prejudice in favour of
this author. To understand an adversary is some praise: to admire him is
more. I thought I did both: I knew I did one. From the first time I ever
cast my eyes on anything of Burke's (which was an extract from his Letter
to a Noble Lord in a three-times a week paper, The St. James's Chronicle,
in 1796), I said to myself, "This is true eloquence: this is a man pouring
out his mind on paper." All other style seemed to me pedantic and
impertinent. Dr. Johnson's was walking on stilts; and even Junius's (who
was at that time a favourite with me) with all his terseness, shrunk up
into little antithetic points and well-trimmed sentences. But Burke's
style was forked and playful as the lightning, crested like the serpent.
He delivered plain things on a plain ground; but when he rose, there was
no end of his flights and circumgyrations--and in this very Letter, "he,
like an eagle in a dove-cot, fluttered _his_ Volscians," (the Duke of
Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale[151]) "in Corioli." I did not care for
his doctrines. I was then, and am still, proof against their contagion;
but I admired the author, and was considered as not a very staunch
partisan of the opposite side, though I thought myself that an abstract
proposition was one thing--a masterly transition, a brilliant metaphor,
another. I conceived, too, that he might be wrong in his main argument,
and yet deliver fifty truths in arriving at a false conclusion. I remember
Coleridge assuring me, as a poetical and political set-off to my sceptical
admiration, that Wordsworth had written an Essay on Marriage, which, for
manly thought and nervous expression, he deemed incomparably superior. As
I had not, at that time, seen any specimens of Mr. Wordsworth's prose
style, I could not express my doubts on the subject. If there are greater
prose-writers than Burke, they either lie out of my course of study, or
are beyond my sphere of comprehension. I am too old to be a convert to a
new mythology of genius. The niches are occupied, the tables are full. If
such is still my admiration of this man's misapplied powers, what must it
have been at a time when I myself was in vain trying, year after year, to
write a single Essay, nay, a single page or sentence; when I regarded the
wonders of his pen with the longing eyes of one who was dumb and a
changeling; and when, to be able to convey the slightest conception of my
meaning to others in words, was the height of an almost hopeless ambition!
But I never measured others' excellences by my own defects: though a sense
of my own incapacity, and of the steep, impassable ascent from me to them,
made me regard them with greater awe and fondness. I have thus run through
most of my early studies and favourite authors, some of whom I have since
criticised more at large. Whether those observations will survive me, I
neither know nor do I much care: but to the works themselves, "worthy of
all acceptation," and to the feelings they have always excited in me since
I could distinguish a meaning in language, nothing shall ever prevent me
from looking back with gratitude and triumph. To have lived in the
cultivation of an intimacy with such works, and to have familiarly
relished such names, is not to have lived quite in vain.
There are other authors whom I have never read, and yet whom I have
frequently had a great desire to read, from some circumstance relating to
them. Among these is Lord Clarendon's History of the Grand Rebellion,
after which I have a hankering, from hearing it spoken of by good
judges--from my interest in the events, and knowledge of the characters
from other sources, and from having seen fine portraits of most of them. I
like to read a well-penned character, and Clarendon is said to have been a
master in this way. I should like to read Froissart's Chronicles,
Hollinshed and Stowe, and Fuller's Worthies. I intend, whenever I can, to
read Beaumont and Fletcher all through. There are fifty-two of their
plays, and I have only read a dozen or fourteen of them. A Wife for a
Month, and Thierry and Theodoret, are, I am told, delicious, and I can
believe it. I should like to read the speeches in Thucydides, and
Guicciardini's History of Florence, and Don Quixote in the original. I
have often thought of reading the Loves of Persiles and Sigismunda, and
the Galatea of the same author. But I somehow reserve them like "another
Yarrow." I should also like to read the last new novel (if I could be sure
it was so) of the author of Waverley:--no one would be more glad than I to
find it the best!--