A CHILD’S GUIDE TO READING
[Illustration: _Engraved by T. Westneth._
MILTON]
A CHILD’S GUIDE TO
READING
BY
JOHN MACY
The greatest pleasure in life is that of reading
while we are young.--WILLIAM HAZLITT.
Though in all great and combined facts there
is much which childhood cannot thoroughly imagine,
there is also in very many a great deal
which can only be truly apprehended for the
first time at that age.--WALTER BAGEHOT.
NEW YORK
THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY
1909
COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY
THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY
Published, November, 1909
THE TROW PRESS, NEW YORK
PREFACE
This is a Child’s Guide to Literature and not a Guide to Juvenile
Books. The larger part of the books discussed in the various chapters
and included in the supplementary lists were written for adult readers,
and nearly all of them are at least as interesting to the reader of
forty as to the reader of fourteen. The great writers are the goal and
the child is the traveler. That is why in a Child’s Guide appear the
names of Browning, Carlyle, Tolstoi, Meredith, Gibbon, Darwin, Plato,
Æschylus. A normal child will not be reading those masters, certainly
not all of them, but he will be reading toward them; and between the
greatest names will be found lesser writers who make easy upward slopes
for young feet that are climbing to the highest. In the supplementary
lists will be found very little of what is admittedly ephemeral, and
still less of that kind of “Juvenile” which has not sufficient literary
quality to outlast the most childish interests and tastes. On the other
hand, if we have any feeling for the abundant human nature of children,
we cannot invite them to fly, nor pretend that we have ourselves flown,
to the severe heights of Frederic Harrison’s position when he advises
that we read only authors of the first rank in every subject and every
nation. That ideal, which, to be sure, in his excellent essay on the
“Choice of Books” is tempered by his humanity and good sense, is at too
chilly an altitude for a Child’s Guide, or, I should think, for any
other guide written with appreciation of what kind of advice ordinary
humanity can or will benefit by.
In the advice offered by some very wise men to young and old readers
there is much that is amusingly paradoxical. Schopenhauer, like
Frederic Harrison, enjoins us to devote our reading time exclusively to
the works of those great minds of all times and countries which overtop
the rest of humanity. Yet Schopenhauer is giving that advice in a book
which he certainly hopes will find readers and which, however great we
may consider him, his modesty would not allow him to rank among the
works of the greatest minds of all ages. Emerson counsels us to read no
book that is not at least a year old. But he is himself writing a book
of which he and his publishers undoubtedly hope to sell a few copies
before a year has passed. Thoreau tells us that our little village is
not doing very much for culture, and then he frightens us away from our
poets by one of those “big” ideas with which he and the other preachers
of his generation liked to make us children ashamed of ourselves.
“The works of the great poets,” he says, “have never yet been read by
mankind, for only great poets can read them.” Well, Thoreau, whatever
else he was, was not a great poet, and yet he seems to have read the
great ones and to have understood them while he was still a young
man. It is nearer the truth to say that anybody can read the great
poets. That is the lesson, if there is one, which this Guide seeks to
inculcate.
There should be a chapter in this book about the Bible and religious
writings. But practical considerations debarred it. The American
parent, though quite willing to intrust to others many matters relating
to the welfare of his children, usually prefers to give his own
counsels as to the spirit in which the Bible should be read and what
other religious works should be read with it.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I.--OF GUIDES AND RULES FOR READING 17
II.--THE PURPOSE OF READING 27
III.--THE READING OF FICTION 40
IV.--THE READING OF FICTION (_continued_) 60
List of Fiction 71
V.--THE READING OF POETRY 96
VI.--THE READING OF POETRY (_continued_) 109
List of Books of Poetry 123
VII.--THE READING OF HISTORY 143
List of Works of History 153
VIII.--THE READING OF BIOGRAPHY 164
List of Biographies 172
IX.--THE READING OF ESSAYS 179
List of Essays 192
X.--THE READING OF FOREIGN CLASSICS 204
XI.--THE PRESS OF TO-DAY 217
XII.--THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 235
List of Works on Literature 257
XIII.--SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 260
List of Works in Science and Philosophy 267
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING
PAGE
Milton _Frontispiece_
Dickens 30
Thackeray 46
Scott 56
Hawthorne 68
Cooper 76
Eliot 84
Shelley 104
Tennyson 120
Longfellow 134
Wordsworth 142
Emerson 196
A CHILD’S GUIDE TO READING
CHAPTER I
OF GUIDES AND RULES FOR READING
If you ever go into the Maine woods to hunt and fish you will have as
your companion a veteran of forest and stream, a professional guide.
It will be his duty to show you where the game and fish are most
plentiful; to see that you do not get into trouble with the authorities
by breaking the game laws; to make your camp comfortable; and if you
are very green, to keep a watchful eye on you lest you accidentally
shoot him or mistake another sportsman for a deer. If you are the right
sort--the Maine guide is almost certain to be the right sort--you will
get a great deal more from your companion than the simple services
for which you pay him. He will be not only guide, but friend and
philosopher, and will grudge you nothing of his stores of wisdom,
kindliness, and humor.
If, however, you are to receive most profit and pleasure from life in
the woods with this good comrade, you must do your part of the work,
use what wits you have, and not show a disposition to lean too limply
on his strength. There are some things that the best guide cannot do.
Not only will he be unable to think for you, but if you are too ready
to let him do all the paddling, he will give you only perfunctory help
and sulky advice. If, on the contrary, you are handy, he will be doubly
handy. The more you learn, the more he can tell you. The more rapidly
you approach the time when you are qualified to set up as professional
guide yourself, the more you will enjoy the niceties of his theories of
hunting, fishing, and wood lore.
Now, a guide to reading--if he be of the right sort--can do for the
beginner in literature very much the same degree of service as the
Maine woodsman. The literary guide is merely one who has lived longer
among books than the unprofessional reader. Since he has elected to
pass his life in the literary woods, he may be supposed to have a good
nose for interesting clews, and sharp eyes and alert ears for leading
signs. He knows what novels are good fishing and what poetic trees are
sound and what are hollow. But his services, however willingly tendered
and skillfully performed, have limitations. You must do your own
thinking and your own reading, and understand that only when you cease
to be in floundering need of a guide will you begin to receive the
richest benefits of reading. The guide’s idea of his duty is to help
you to get along altogether without him.
No guide, no literary adviser can give you ears for poetry or eyes for
truth. The wisest companion can only persuade you to live among good
books in order that your ear may have opportunity to reveal its fine
capacities if it has them, and in order that your eye, dwelling upon
beautiful things, may grow practiced in discernment. He cannot read for
you. If you do not intend or hope to read any of the books mentioned in
this volume, it will be waste of time for you to turn this page. If you
passively receive every judgment of your guide about the merits of the
scores of books we shall discuss, and never once question or try his
judgment for yourself, you may be learning something about this guide,
but you will not be learning about literature. It is not the part of a
good pupil to surrender right of private judgment, but it is his part
to give his judgment solid matter to work upon. On the other hand, too
much independence, especially if it is not grounded in experience, is
not modest. Even those who have read a good deal and arrived at mature
opinions about books, may be content to accompany for a while a new
guide whose experience has, necessarily, been different from that of
others.
Whatever your hope or intention, your guide is only a guide; he has
not power to lead you against your will, he has not the schoolmaster’s
right to prescribe a set course of reading. The reading must be
voluntary, and to have value it must involve some hard work. Healthful
entertainment and recreation we can safely promise. As for wisdom,
reverence, the deeper delights of communion with noble minds, whether
you meet these great spiritual experiences depends on you. The guide
can merely indicate where they may be sought.
Let us at the outset agree not to map out our journey too rigidly. A
young friend of mine conceived at the age of sixteen the inordinate
ambition to read everything that is good. He procured a public library
catalogue, and asked a school-teacher to check off the titles of all
the books knowledge of which is essential to a perfect education. The
teacher smiled and confessed that she did not know even the titles
herself. She might have added that neither does any one else know the
titles, much less the insides, of all good books. But she marked some
hundred names, and the ambitious youngster entered upon his long feast.
He never finished all the books that were checked, for one or two
proved discouragingly stiff and dull, and as he ran his eye down the
list for the next prescribed masterpiece he saw other alluring titles
which were not checked, and he wrote the numbers on library slips. The
experience taught him that he must select books for himself, and that
the world’s library is too vast for anyone to be acquainted with all
its treasures.
A youth so eager to know good books can be trusted sooner or later to
find his way to them. For the benefit of less zealous persons, great
faith used to be placed in lists of the Hundred Best Books. Such
lists, even the very judicious selection made by Sir John Lubbock
(Lord Avebury), can never be satisfactory. Lord Avebury is too good a
student of nature and human nature to regard his list as final. It was
not final for one man, John Ruskin, who has given us a most inspiring
essay on books, “Of Kings’ Treasures.” Ruskin thought that Lubbock had
included in the chosen hundred some books that were not only unworthy
but injurious. No man could make a list which would fare any better at
the hands of another critic of solid convictions. Who shall select a
social Four Hundred, all of whom we should accept as friends? Who can
select a Four Hundred or a One Hundred of books and not leave out some
of the noblest and best? It may be that Lubbock and Ruskin were both a
little priggish to take that century of masterpieces quite so solemnly.
In books, as in all things, we cherish much that is not the best, but
is good in its way. It is not natural nor right to reject all but the
superlatively excellent. It is natural to prefer sometimes a book of
secondary value, and it is perversely natural to turn away from the
book that we are assured too insistently we “ought to read.” A formal
list of “oughts” is a severe test for ordinary human patience. Becky
Sharp in “Vanity Fair” is a bad-tempered and bad-hearted young woman,
but one can have a little sympathy with her when she throws her copy of
Johnson’s Dictionary at the head of her teacher as she parts forever
from the school gates. It is not altogether her fault if Johnson’s
Dictionary seems to her at that moment of all printed things the most
detestable.
Yet perhaps no better book than a good dictionary could be found
whereon to base a library and a knowledge of literature. The wit who
said that the dictionary is a good book, but changes the subject too
often, told but a partial truth, for the dictionary keeps consistently
to the first of all subjects, the language in which all subjects
are expressed. If it be true that Americans are of all peoples the
most assiduous patrons of the dictionary, the future of our popular
education and of our national literature is secure, for although mere
words will not make thought, it is only thoughtful people who have a
zealous interest in the dictionary. The schoolmaster who first made
the present writer conscious that there is a difference between good
English and bad used to tell us in the moments when regular school
exercises were pending to study our dictionaries. The dictionary would
be a reasonable answer to that delightful conundrum: “If you were
wrecked on a desert island, and could have only one book, what book
would you choose?”
The shrewdest of all answers to that question evaded it: “I should
spend so much time trying to choose the book that I should miss the
steamer and not be wrecked.” These conundrums--the best book?--the
best hundred books?--the greatest novel?--the greatest poem?--are not
to be answered. The use of them is that they stir our imaginations
and whet our judgments. If we come close and try to settle them in
earnest, we bring tumbling about our heads a multitude of conflicting
answers. Then we flee from the disorder and realize that conundrums are
only stimulating nonsense. Individual choice among the riches of the
world’s literature is not to be confined by hard and fast rules and
tests.
As a practical matter we are not altogether free to choose. Our
book friends, like our human friends, are in part chosen for us by
accidental encounters. We do not wander over the world seeking for
the dozen souls that are most fit to be grappled to us with hoops of
steel. We merely choose the most congenial among our neighbors. So it
is with books. Each of us wishes to select the best among such as are
available, to have judgment in accepting the right one when it falls
in our way. Biography is full of instances of chance encounters in the
world’s library that have shaped great careers.
John Stuart Mill records in his Autobiography how Wordsworth’s
poetry brought about in him a spiritual regeneration. At the age of
twenty-one, precociously far advanced in his study of economics and
philosophy, he found himself dejected and with no clear outlook upon
life. He had often heard of the uplifting power of poetry, and read
the whole of Byron, but Byron did him no good. He took up Wordsworth’s
poems “from curiosity, with no expectation of mental relief.” “I found
myself,” he says, “at once better and happier as I came under their
influence.” The reading of Wordsworth was the immediate occasion,
though not the sole cause, of a complete change in his way of thinking,
and his new way of thinking led him to life-long associations with
other great men.
We cannot tell which poet, which thinker, will do for us what
Wordsworth did for Mill. But while we are young we can take trial
excursions into literature until we find our own. And when we do find
our own, the treasure that is most precious to our souls, we shall know
it, and know it the better, perhaps, if we have tried many good books
and failed to like them.
If we are to rely so frankly upon our own likings, a word of caution
may be necessary to help us distinguish liberty of choice from
unreasonable license. We have to ask not only, Does this book interest
me?--but, Does this book appeal to the best tastes and emotions in me?
Many of us, by no means bad human beings, are so constituted that if
our eye meets the morbid, the coarse, the senselessly horrible, we are
fascinated, we are indeed interested. But it requires only the most
simple self-analysis and a little honesty, to pull ourselves together
and realize that it is an unworthy side of us, a side that we do not
care to show our friends, which is being held at attention. Not that
we need, like the stupidest of the old Puritans, be afraid of a book
simply because it does thrill us and make us breathless. For every bad
book which holds the depraved mind guiltily alert, a good book can be
found, so absorbing, so compelling, that beside it the bad book is tame.
I once had a pupil whose transparent honesty was only one of his many
lovable qualities. He believed that “Literature” consisted of dull
books written by authors who died long ago. The ill-reasoned conclusion
was his own, but I found that the raw materials of his error lay
in the prudishness of one of his teachers. When I told him that
“Huckleberry Finn,” by a very live author, is literature, and that a
short story by Mrs. Mary Wilkins-Freeman in a current magazine seemed
to me literature of rare excellence, his delight so aroused his wits
that for some time after that my part of the lessons consisted merely
in meeting his enthusiasm halfway.
A friend once asked me what he could read to improve his mind. In the
pride of a little superior wisdom, I loftily recommended Shakespeare.
His reply was, “That is too deep for me.” A wiser counselor than
I, knowing his circumstances, would not have tried to cultivate a
sprouting ambition with quite so perfect an intellectual instrument.
But I stuck to my advice, and shortly after I had opportunity to prove
that I was, if not wise, at least on the side of wisdom. We went
together to see “Othello”--from gallery seats. After that my friend
read the play and another that was bound with it.
Shakespeare is deep, forsooth. Hamlet’s soliloquy in the fourth act:
How all occasions do inform against me,
is so profound that it is darkened by its very depth. But the play
“Hamlet” is a stirring melodrama that keeps the “gallery gods” leaning
forward in their seats. The larger part of literature is by dead
authors, because the “great majority” of the race is dead and includes
its proportionate number of poets and prophets. Some great books _are_
dull except to a comparatively few minds in certain moods. But most
dull books by old writers have been forgotten; our ancestors saved
us the trouble of rejecting them. Most books that have survived are
triumphantly alive in all senses. The vitality of a book that is just
born may be brief as a candle flame. The old book that is still bright
has proved that its brightness is the true luster of the metal; else we
should not know its name.