W. Somerset Maugham
Books and You
Doubleday,
Doran & Co., 1940.
Preface
I was
commissioned to write the three articles which make up this little book by the
Saturday Evening Post. They are now reissued to satisfy the large number of
persons who have expressed their desire to possess them in a form of somewhat
greater permanence and in the hope that they will be useful to many who did not
chance to come across them when they appeared in the pages of the magazine. I
was limited to four thousand words, and though I think I slightly exceeded
this, it must be plain that in that space I could not hope to deal with my
subject otherwise than in the most cursory manner. There was in truth in each
of my articles matter for a fat volume. My object was to give to such readers
as are confused by the great riches which we have inherited from the writers of
the past a list of books which anyone who is interested in the things of the
spirit could read with pleasure and profit; but since I had to take care to
make my list short enough not to dismay, I had to leave out a great many works
of high significance. With one or two exceptions I have only mentioned one book
by each author, but there are many authors, Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray,
Balzac and Dostoevsky, to name but a handful of novelists, who have written
several books which have all the qualities for a place in my list. I had to
leave out certain authors of merit, such as Charlotte Brontë, because I had not
room for anyone not quite of the first class, and I had to omit all reference to
lesser books, such as Izaak Walton’s Lives and James Morier’s The Adventures of
Hajji Baba of Ispahan, books delightful to read, because I could not afford to
ask you to occupy yourself with any but recognized masterpieces. So, if I were
taking a friend, who had enthusiasm but not much time, round a gallery of
antique sculpture, I would ask him to direct his attention not to Roman
portraiture, though I would not deny its interest, nor even to the statuary of
the archaic period, exciting as I find it, but to give all his powers of
apprehension to the great works that have come down to us from the golden age
of Greece.
This little book
is necessarily slight, but I trust you, the reader, will not find it
superficial. I have written its chapters not as a critic (which indeed I am
not) nor even as a writer by profession (for in that capacity my interest in
literature would tend to be special) but as the plain man with a proper
interest in humanity. The first thing I have asked of a book before I put it on
my list was that it should be readable; for I want you to read these books, and
readability is something I have a notion the professors of literature and the
critics whom they have trained take for granted. But it is not a thing to be taken
for granted at all. There are many books important in the history of literature
which it is now unnecessary for anybody but the student to read. Few people
have the time today to read anything but what immediately concerns them. My
claim is that the books I have mentioned in the following pages concern
everybody. By readability I do not mean that it should be possible to read the
book without attention. The reader must bring something of his own; he must
have at least the capacity of interesting himself in human affairs and he must
have at least some imagination. I know a number of people who say they cannot
read novels, and I have noticed they are apt to suppose that it is because,
their minds being busy with important matters, they cannot trouble to occupy
themselves with imaginary events; but I think they are deceived; it is either
because they are so absorbed in themselves that they cannot take an interest in
what happen to others, or because they are so devoid of imagination that they
have not the power to enter into the ideas and sympathize with the joys and
sorrows of the characters of fiction. No book is readable if you have neither
curiosity nor fellow-feeling. To be readable a book must mean something to you
here and now, it is but one quality among the others it may have, and it is a
quality relative to the interests of the reader. I am confident that on the
whole the books I have recommended will appeal to the person of ordinary
interests because they have that humanity which is common to us all.
You will notice that I have written
the chapter on the classic books of America on slightly different lines
from those on which I wrote the other two, and I think I should explain the
reason for this. When I dealt with European literature the mass of material was
so great that I could afford to speak only of books which all right-minded men
have agreed are masterly. I had nothing to do but commend them. If a book did
not seem to me to deserve almost unqualified praise, I had no need to mention
it. But when I came to American books I was in a different situation. The
history of American literature is short. If I had adopted the same standard I
should have had no more than perhaps four writers to speak of. I did not think
that would be very useful. It seemed to me that I should be of greater service
to you if I told you what I feel about certain writers who because they are
American rightly demand your attention, but whom now that American literature
has found its feet it is sensible to regard without national bias. I have asked
you to read them for yourselves and decide their value for you regardless
of the
opinions of authority. I repeat here what you will find in my
first chapter, that the only thing that signifies to you in a book is what it
means to you, and if your opinion is at variance with that of everyone else in
the world it is of no consequence. Your opinion is valid for you. In matters of
art people, especially, I think, in America, are apt to accept
willingly from professors and critics a tyranny which in matters of government
they would rebel against. But in these questions there is no right and wrong.
The relation between the reader and his book is as free and intimate as that
between the mystic and his God. Of all forms of snobbishness the literary is
perhaps the most detestable, and there is no excuse for the fool who despises
his fellow-man because he does not share his opinion of the value of a certain
book. Pretence in literary appreciation is odious, and no one should be ashamed
if a book that the best critics think highly of means nothing to him. On the
other hand it is better not to speak ill of such books if you have not read
them. To go
back to American literature: because it has been in existence so short a time
and its products are scanty, sundry authors have attained an eminence and their
works are regarded with a reverence which are to my mind undeserved. America can
well afford now to look at them without the prejudice of patriotism and,
viewing them as citizens of the world, which great artists are, rather than as
Americans, esteem them at their proper value.
The narrow limits to which I was confined obliged me in my article on English literature
only to name a certain number of novels, and for my own satisfaction I propose
to take advantage of this preface to say something more about three of these. They
are Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds, Meredith’s The Egoist and George Eliot’s
Middlemarch. When I wrote I had not read them for many years, but since then I
have done so again. I suggested
that you should read The Eustace
Diamonds rather than Barchester
Towers, which is
Trollope’s best-known novel, because it is complete in itself. It seemed to me
that really to appreciate Barchester
Towers you would have to
read the series of which it is part. Neither the motives of the characters nor
the results of their activities are quite clear unless you read the novels that
come before and after, and I did not think that Trollope was important enough, keeping
in view my object of asking you to read books which would be pleasant and
profitable, to justify me in asking you to read half a dozen closely printed
volumes. And I remembered that there was in Barchester Towers
a good deal of that caricature which to us now seems a tiresome feature of
Victorian fiction. But now that I have read The Eustace Diamonds once more, I
should recommend you even with these slight drawbacks to read the more
celebrated book. The Eustace Diamonds is by way of being a detective story and
it has two very ingenious surprises, but it is told at inordinate length. We
have learnt a good deal about the manner of writing fiction of this kind since
then, and a modern writer could have made a much better story of it by
compressing it into three hundred pages. The characters are soundly observed,
but not very interesting, and most of them are the stock figures of Victorian
fiction. You have the impression that Trollope was trying to write the sort of
novel that was bringing Dickens so much success, and not making a very good job
of it. The most human character is Lizzie Eustace, but Trollope had apparently,
or at least wished his readers to have, so great an antipathy for her that he
treats her unfairly, and just as when a lawyer browbeats a prisoner in court
your sympathies regardless of his crime go out to him, so you feel that Lizzie
wasn’t really so much worse than anybody else and therefore scarcely deserved
the hard knocks the author has given her. The novel can, however, be read without
difficulty, and for anyone interested in Victorian England there is a good deal
of entertainment to be got by observing the manners and customs of that
long-past day. This is cold commendation. But though I advise you in place of
The Eustace Diamonds to read Barchester
Towers, I am constrained
to add that you would be unwise to expect too much from it. The merit of
Trollope has of late years been somewhat exaggerated. For a generation he was
almost forgotten, and when he was rediscovered, having in the interval acquired
the charm of a period piece, greater praise was awarded him than he deserves.
He was an honest and industrious craftsman with a considerable power of
observation. He had some gift of pathos and he could tell a straightforward
story in a straightforward, though terribly diffuse, way; but he had neither
passion, wit nor subtlety. He had no talent for revealing a character or
resuming the significance of an episode in a single pregnant phrase. His
interest now lies in his unaffected, accurate and sincere portrayal of a state
of society which has perished.
Fifty years
ago every intelligent young man with pretensions to culture read Meredith with
enthusiasm. He was read as a generation later young men read Shaw and as ten
years ago they read T. S. Eliot. Now he has, I believe, few readers among the
young. But The Egoist is a fine
novel. It is true that it deals with a class of society which we no longer
regard with the awe which Meredith thought was its due. We no longer accept
these country gentlemen, these opulent ladies who drive about in barouches, as
the salt of the earth, and their behaviour too often strikes us as vulgar and
trivial. The world has changed since Meredith wrote, and it is hard for us now
to be seriously impressed when Clara Middleton, a high-spirited girl of
independent mind and ample fortune, makes such a to-do about breaking her
engagement with Sir Willoughby Patterne after she has discovered that she no
longer cares for him. The girls of our own time would have found it easy to
deal with the situation. We demand plausibility in our novels nowadays and we
are only impatient with difficulties which can be avoided by the exercise of
common sense. When at last Clara makes up her mind to run away to London she slips out of
the house with trepidation and walks to the station, but, a storm arising, she
gets her feet wet and so misses the train, whereupon she is persuaded to
return. She showed little of the wiliness which is supposed to be
characteristic of her sex. It is strange that it never occurred to her that as
she was going to be married she would need some clothes and no one could think
it odd that she should go to London
to try them.
Meredith
wrote in a manner which does not make his books easy to read. This posturing of
his, this cutting of capers and jumping through verbal hoops, is very tiresome.
You would think that he found it almost impossible to make a plain statement
plainly, and his wit, on which he seems to have prided himself, is tortured.
But he had a gift for creating characters of such vitality that you can never
quite forget them. They are not, like for instance the characters of Moby Dick,
a little larger than life size, but they are something more than ordinary human
beings. They have the artificiality of the persons in a comedy by Congreve, but
it is not a dead artificiality; Meredith has inspired them with his own gusto
and they live, like the puppets in Hoffmann’s old story which the magician
brought to life, with a radiance all their own. They are truly creations and
only a real novelist could have invented them. It is this gusto which enables
you to read Meredith, if you can read him at all, with delight notwithstanding
the coruscations of his style, the falseness of his values and the occasional
clumsiness of his intrigue; he carries on his story with a fine swing and you
are hurried along with him on the wings of his high spirits and boisterous,
windswept joy in the exercise of his creative faculty. The Egoist is Meredith’s
best novel because his subject here was universal. Egoism is the mainspring of
human nature. It is the one quality from which we can never escape (I do not
like to call it a vice, though it is the ugliest of our vices, because it is
also the marrow of our virtues), for it determines our existence. Without it we
should not be what we are. Without it we should be nought. And yet our constant
effort must be to check its claims and we can only live well if we do our best
to suppress it. In Sir Willoughby Patterne, Meredith has drawn such a portrait
of an egoist as has never been drawn before or since. But I think no one can
read this book without some qualms of conscience, for he must be even a greater
egoist than Sir Willoughby if he does not see in himself some of the traits at
least which make Sir Willoughby at once odious and absurd. Meredith was right
when he said that his wretched hero was not this man or than man but all of us.
So when I recommend you to read The Egoist it is not only because it is a
lively, entertaining novel, but because it may teach you something about
yourself that it is good for you to know.
Now I come to
Middlemarch. Judged simply as a
piece of fiction it seems to me better than either of the novels I have just
been discussing. It is an excellent piece of craftsmanship. It cannot have been
easy to construct, for George Eliot has taken as her subject not one group of
persons in one social sphere, but different groups in different spheres, giving
you a picture of the landed gentry who live on their estates round the town of
Middlemarch, and the professional men, merchants and tradesmen who inhabit it.
You are not asked, as you are by so many novelists, to concern yourself with
the fortunes of two or three people who live in vacuum, as it were, so that the
world outside them is of no moment, but with the fortunes of all the sorts and
conditions of men who make up the world in which we all live; and their various
stories are managed with consummate skill. Nor, as often happens when less
skilful writers attempt this complicated form of fiction, is your interest
confined to one set of characters so that when you are asked to transfer it to
another you do so with disinclination; George Eliot enlists your sympathies
equally with them all, and she passes from one lot of people to another as
naturally as in real life we pass from the people who are associated with one
side of it to the people who are associated with another. This gives the novel
a singular air of reality. Although the action begins when George the Fourth
was still King of England we say to ourselves that this is the sort of thing we
know life to be. The characters, and there are a great many of them, are
wonderfully natural; they are observed with precision, so that each one stands
on his own feet, a human being with his own idiosyncrasies; but George Eliot
had no glow and she could not give the creatures of her invention the quality
of the archangel which George Meredith was so often able to give his (and it
occurs to me that this is a legitimate excuse for Clara Middleton never giving
a thought to her trousseau, for doubtless an archangel would not consider the
need of a wedding-gown); George Eliot saw them coolly, accurately, but with
sympathy. Her heroes are no more heroic than we are and her villains no more villainous.
She got so into the skin of her personages that we see them not only as others
see them but as they see themselves, and thus even Mr Casaubon is not only a
hateful figure but also a pitiable one. They have a modern air, for they are
not solely occupied with their emotions; they are concerned with politics and
interest themselves in the problems of the day; economic questions enter into
their lives as they enter into ours: they have heads as well as hearts. They
are in short very much the same sort of people we are. I should be inclined to
sum up my judgment of Middlemarch by saying that George Eliot had every gift of
the great novelist but fire. No English author has given an ampler and more
reasonable interpretation of life; the only quality that escaped her sensible
and sympathetic observation was romance.
[…]
I.
One isn’t
always as careful of what one says as one should be. When I stated in a book of
mine called The Summing Up that young people often came to me for advice on the
books they would do well to read, I did not reckon with the consequences. I
received a multitude of letters from all manner of persons, asking me what the
advice was that I gave. I answered them as best I could, but it is not possible
to deal fully with such a matter in a private letter; and as many people seem
to desire such guidance as I can offer, it has occurred to me that they might
like to have a brief account of what suggestions I have to make from my own
experience for pleasant and profitable reading.
The first
thing I want to insist on is that reading should be enjoyable. Of course, there
are many books that we all have to read, either to pass examinations or to
acquire information, from which it is impossible to extract enjoyment. We are
reading them for instruction, and the best we can hope is that our need for it
will enable us to get through them without tedium. Such books we read with
resignation rather than with alacrity. But that is not the sort of reading I
have in mind. The books I shall mention in due course will help you neither to
get a degree nor to earn your living, they will not teach you to sail a boat or
get a stalled motor car to run, but they will help you to live more fully. That,
however, they cannot do unless you enjoy reading them.
The “you” I
address is the adult whose avocations give him a certain leisure and who would
like to read the books which cannot without loss be left unread. I do not
address the bookworm. He can find his own way. His curiosity leads him along
many unfrequented paths and he gathers delight in the discovery of
half-forgotten excellence. I wish to deal only with the masterpieces which the
consensus of opinion for a long time has accepted as supreme. We are all
supposed to have read them; it is a pity that so few of us have. But there are
masterpieces which are acknowledged to be such by all the best critics and to
which the historians of literature devote considerable space, yet which no
ordinary person can now read with enjoyment. They are important to the student,
but changing times and changing tastes have robbed them of their savour and it
is hard to read them now without an effort of will. Let me give one instance: I
have read George Eliot’s Adam Bede, but I cannot put my hand on my heart and
say it was with pleasure. I read it from a sense of duty: I finished it with a
sigh of relief.
Now of such books as this I mean to
say nothing. Every man is his own best critic. Whatever the learned say about a
book, however unanimous they are in their praise of it, unless it interests you
it is no business of yours. Don’t forget that critics often make mistakes, the
history of criticism is full of the blunders the most eminent of them have made,
and you who read are the final judge of the value to you of the book you are
reading. This, of course, applies to the books I am going to recommend to your
attention. We are none of us exactly like everyone else, only rather like, and
it would be unreasonable to suppose that the books that have meant a great deal
to me should be precisely those that will mean a great deal to you. But they
are books that I feel the richer for having read, and I think I should not be
quite the man I am if I had not read them. And so I beg of you, if any of you who
read these pages are tempted to read the books I suggest and cannot get on with
them, just put them down; they will be of no service to you if you do not enjoy
them. No one is under an obligation to read poetry or fiction or the
miscellaneous literature which is classed as belles-lettres. (I wish I knew the
English term for this, but I don’t think there is one.) He must read them for
pleasure, and who can claim that what pleases one man must necessarily please
another?
But let no one think that pleasure is
immoral. Pleasure in itself is a great good, all pleasure, but its consequences
may be such that the sensible person eschews certain varieties of it. Nor need
pleasure be gross and sensual. They are wise in their generation who have
discovered that intellectual pleasure is the most satisfying and the most
enduring. It is well to acquire the habit of reading. There are few sports in
which you can engage to your own satisfaction after you have passed the prime
of life; there are no games except patience, chess problems and crossword
puzzles that you can play without someone to play them with you. Reading
suffers from no such disadvantages; there is no occupation – except perhaps
needlework, but that leaves the restless spirit at liberty – which you can more
easily take up at any moment, for any period, and more easily put aside when
other calls press upon you; there is no other amusement that can be obtained in
these happy days of public libraries and cheap editions at so small a cost. To
acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost
all the miseries of life. Almost all, I say, for I would not go so far as to
pretend that to read a book will assuage the pangs of hunger or still the pain
of unrequited love; but half a dozen good detective stories and a hot-water
bottle will enable anyone to snap his fingers at the worst cold in the head. But
who is going to acquire the habit of reading for reading’s sake, if he is
bidden to read books that bore him?
Now, the
first book on my list is Defoe’s Moll
Flanders. No English novelist has ever achieved a greater verisimilitude
than Defoe; it is hard, indeed, when you read him, to remember that you are
reading a work of fiction; it is more like a consummate piece of reporting. You
are convinced that his people spoke exactly as he made them speak, and their
actions are so plausible that you cannot doubt that this is how, in the
circumstances, they behaved. Moll Flanders is
not a moral book. It is bustling, coarse and brutal, but it has a robustness
that I like to think is in the English character. Defoe had little imagination
and not much humour, but he had a wide and varied experience of life and, being
an excellent journalist, he had a keen eye for the curious incident and the
telling detail. He had no sense of climax, he attempted no pattern; and so the
reader is not swept away by a power that he does not seek to resist; he is
carried along in the crowd, as it were, and it may be that when he comes to a
side street he will slip down it and get away. He may, to put it plainly, after
a couple of hundred pages of very much the same sort of thing feel that he has
had enough. Well, that’s all right. But for my part I am quite willing to
accompany my author till he brings his ribald heroine to the haven of
respectability tempered with penitence.
Then I should
like you to read Swift’s Gulliver’s
Travels. I am going to deal with Doctor Johnson later on, but here I must
note that, speaking of this book, he said: “When once you have thought of big
men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest.” Doctor Johnson was an excellent
critic and a very wise man, but here he talked nonsense. Gulliver's Travels has
wit and irony, ingenious invention, broad humour, savage satire and vigour. Its
style is admirable. No one has ever written this difficult language of ours
more compactly, more lucidly and more unaffectedly than Swift. I could wish that Doctor
Johnson had said of him what he said of another: “Whoever wishes to attain an
English style, familiar but not coarse and elegant but not ostentatious, must
give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.”
He could then have added a third to his pairs of adjectives: virile but not
overweening.
Two novels come next. Fielding’s Tom Jones is, perhaps, the
healthiest novel in English literature. It is a dashing, brave and cheerful
book, sturdy and generous; it is, of course, very frank, and Tom Jones, with
good looks and vitality, a friendly fellow whom we should all like to have
known, does certain things which the moralist will deplore. But do we care? Not
unless we are solemn prigs, for he is disinterested and his heart is golden.
Fielding was, unlike Defoe, a conscious artist; his scheme gave him the
opportunity to describe a multitude of incidents and to create a great number
of personages. They are splendidly alive in a world that is pungent with the
bustle and turmoil of reality. Fielding took himself seriously – as, of course,
every author should – and there were many subjects of importance on which he
felt called upon to deliver himself. At the beginning of each part he puts a
dissertation in which he discusses one thing and another. These have humour and
sincerity, but for my part I think they can be skipped without disadvantage. I
have a notion that no one can read Tom Jones without delight, for it is a
manly, wholesome book, without any humbug about it, and it warms the cockles of
your heart.
Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is a novel of very different character. You might say of it what Dr Johnson said of Sir
Charles Grandison: “If you were to read it for the story, you would hang
yourself.” It is a book that, according to your temperament, you will find
either as readable as anything you have ever read, or tiresome and affected. It
has no unity. It has no coherence. Digression follows upon digression. But it
is wonderfully original, funny and pathetic; and it increases your spiritual
possessions with half a dozen characters so full of idiosyncrasy and so lovable
that once you have come to know them, you feel that not to have known them
would have been an irreparable loss. Nor would I have anyone fail to read
Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey; I have nothing to say of it except that it is
enchanting.
Now let us leave fiction for a while. I suppose it
is universally acknowledged that Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson is the
greatest biography in the language. It is a book that you can read with profit
and pleasure at any age. You can pick it up at any time, opening it at random,
and be sure of entertainment. But to praise such a work at this time of day is
absurd. I should like, however, to add to it a book that, to my mind
undeservedly, is less well known. This is Boswell’s
The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. The purchase by Colonel Isham of the
Boswell manuscripts has resulted in a new and unexpurgated edition of it, for,
as I suppose everyone knows, Boswell’s manuscript was edited by Malone, who
thought it proper to tone it down in accordance with the primly elegant taste
of the day, and so left out much that gave the book flavour. It enlarges your
knowledge both of Johnson and of Boswell, and if it increases your love and
admiration for the sturdy old doctor, it adds also to your respect for his poor
biographer who has been so much abused. This is not a writer to be despised who
had such a quick eye for an amusing incident, so much appreciation of a racy
phrase, and such a rare gift for reproducing the atmosphere of a scene and the
liveliness of a conversation.
The figure of Doctor Johnson towers over the eighteenth century, and he has been
accepted as representing the English character, with its sterling merits and
unhappy defects, at its best. But if we have all read his biography, so that we
know him more intimately than we know many of the people we have passed our
lives with, few of us have read any of his writings; and yet he produced one
work at least which is in the highest degree enjoyable. I know no better book
to take on a holiday or to keep at one’s bedside than Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. It is written with
limpidity. It has pungency and humour. It is full of horse sense. Though
sometimes his judgments startle us – he found Gray dull and had little good to
say of Milton Lycidas – you delight in them because they are an expression of
his own personality. He was as much interested in the men he wrote of as in
their works, and though you may not have read a word of these, you can hardly
fail to be diverted by the shrewd, lively and tolerant observation with which
he portrays their authors.
I come next to a book that I name
with hesitation, for, as I must remind the reader, I wish to speak here only of
books that one would be the poorer for not having read, and though I have a
great fondness for Gibbon’s
Autobiography, I am not quite sure that it would have made much difference
to me not to have read it. I should certainly have lost a keen pleasure, but if
I mention it I feel that I should also mention a large number of other works,
not so great as the greatest, to be judged by a different standard, and they
would need a chapter to themselves. But Gibbon’s Autobiography is very
readable; it is short, written with the peculiar elegance of which he was
master, and it has both dignity and humour. Of the latter I cannot resist
giving an example. When he was at Lausanne
he fell in love, but his father threatening to disinherit him, he prudently
gave up the thought of marrying the object of his affections. He ends his
recital of the episode with these words: “I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a
son; and my wound was insensibly healed by time, absence, and the habits of a
new life.” I think if the book contained nothing else, it would be worth
reading for that delicious sentence.
[…]
I would not
claim that [Jane Austen] is England’s
greatest novelist; with all his faults of exaggeration, vulgarity, wordiness
and sentimentality, Dickens remains that. He was prodigious. He did not
describe the world as we know it; he created a world. He had suspense, drama
and humour, and thus was able to give the feel of the multifariousness and
bustle of life as, so far as I know, only one other novelist, Tolstoy, has
done. Out of his immense vitality he fashioned a whole series of characters,
diverse, individual, and tremulous – no, “tremulous” isn’t the right word –
turbulent with life. He managed his complicated and often highly improbable
stories with a dashing skill that perhaps you must be a novelist thoroughly to
appreciate. But Jane Austen is
perfect. It is true that her scope is restricted; she deals with a little world
of country gentlefolk, clergymen and middle-class persons; but who has equalled
her insight into character or surpassed the delicacy and reasonableness with
which she probed its depths? She does not need my praise. The only
characteristic I would like to impress upon your attention is one which she
exhibits with so much ease that you might well take it for granted. Though, on
the whole, nothing very much happens in her stories, and she mostly eschews
dramatic incident, you are inveigled, I hardly know how, to turn from page to
page by the urgent desire to know what is going to happen next; and that is the
novelist’s essential gift. Without it he is done. I can think of no one who
possessed it more fully than Jane Austen. My only difficulty now is to decide
which of her few novels especially to recommend. For my part, I like Mansfield Park best. I recognize that its heroine
is a little prig and its hero a pompous ass, but I do not care; it is wise,
witty and tender, a masterpiece of ironical humour and subtle observation.
At this point
I would draw your attention to Hazlitt.
His fame has been overshadowed by that of Charles Lamb, but to my mind he was
the better essayist. Charles Lamb, a charming, gentle, witty creature whom to
know was to love, has always appealed to the affections of his readers. Hazlitt
could hardly do that. He was rude, tactless, envious and quarrelsome; but,
unfortunately, it is not always the most worthy men who write the best books.
In the end it is the personality of the artist that counts, and for my part I
find more to interest me in the tormented, striving, acrimonious soul of
Hazlitt than in Charles Lamb’s patient but somewhat maudlin amiability. As a
writer, Hazlitt was vigorous, bold and healthy. What he had to say, he said
with decision. His essays are full of meat, and when you have read one of them
you feel, not as you do when you have read one of Lamb’s, that you have made a
meal of savoury kickshaws, but that you have satisfied your appetite with
substantial fare. Much of his best work can be found in his Table Talk, but
there have been published a number of selections from his essays, and none of
these can fail to contain My First Acquaintance with Poets, which, I suppose,
is not only the most thrilling piece he ever wrote but the finest essay in the
English language.
Now two more novels: Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and Emily
Bronte’s Wuthering
Heights. I can say little
about them, for my space is growing short. Critics nowadays are inclined to
carp at Thackeray. Perhaps he was unfortunate in his period. He should have
lived and written in our own time, when he would not have been hampered by the
conventions which prevented the Victorian novelist from telling the truth,
however bitter, as he saw it. His point of view was modern. He was deeply
conscious of the mediocrity of human beings and he was interested in the
contradictions of their natures. And however much you may deplore his
sentimentality and his sermonizing or regret the weakness that led him to defer
unduly to the demands of the public, the fact remains that in Becky Sharp he
created one of the most real, living and forcible characters in English
fiction.
Wuthering Heights is unique. It is an
awkward novel to read, because sometimes it so outrages probability that you
are completely bewildered; but it is passionate and profoundly moving; it has
the depth and power of a great poem. To read it is not like reading a work of
fiction, in which, however absorbed, you can remind yourself, if need be, that
it is only a story; it is to have a shattering experience in your own life.
[…]
Of course, everyone must read the
great tragedies of Shakespeare. He is not only the greatest poet that ever
lived but the glory of our race. But knowing, as I do, these plays pretty well,
I wish that someone with taste, knowledge and discretion could be found who
would make an anthology of Shakespeare's plays and poems, putting in not only
the famous passages with which we should all be familiar but also fragments,
single lines even; so that I might have in a convenient volume a book to which
I could always turn when I wanted the cream of all poetry.*
*Since I wrote these lines George
Rylands has produced an anthology under the title The Ages of Man which comes
as near fulifilling the wish I have here expressed as, I suppose, anyone can
expect. It is a welcome gift to a troubled world.
II.
In my first chapter I confined myself
to the works of English authors. They are the common inheritance of the
English-speaking peoples. Now I want to tell you about some books in other
languages, but for the sake of your convenience, only of such as can be read in
translations: and that makes my pleasant task simpler, for it obliges me to
leave poetry on one side. That you must read in original or not at all. I am
not a poet, and I speak of poetry with diffidence, but it seems to me that its
sound is so inextricably part of the satisfaction it affords that no
translation, however skilful, can do more than suggest its quality. I would go
farther; and since words have for us associations that we have come by with our
mother’s milk, with recollections of our childhood, with our first love, we can
to the full only appreciate poetry in our own native language.
Let us then deal only with prose. The first book I wish to speak of is Don Quixote. Shelton made a translation of it early in the seventeenth century, but you may not find it very convenient to read; and since I want you to read with delight, I suggest that you should read it in Ormsby’s more recent version, published in 1885. But I should like to warn you of one thing: Cervantes was a poor man and he was paid to provide a certain amount of work; he had by him, one may presume, some short stories, and it seemed to him a very good notion to use them to fill out his book. I have read them, but I read them as Doctor Johnson read Paradise Lost – as a duty rather than with pleasure – and if I were you, I would skip them. In Ormsby’s version, in order to make it easy to do this, they are printed in smaller type. After all, it is Don Quixote himself you want – Don Quixote with his faithful Sancho Panza; he is tender, loyal and great-hearted; and though you cannot but laugh at his misadventures (less now than his contemporaries did, for we are more squeamish than they were and the jests that were played on him are sometimes too cruel to amuse us), you must be very insensitive if you do not feel for the Knight of the Rueful Countenance not only affection but respect. The fantasy of man has never created a personage that so deeply appeals to a generous nature.
I do not want
to speak of French literature just yet, because it is so rich, and contains so
many books which I should like at least to name, that I am afraid if I once
start upon it I shall leave myself no space to deal with certain books in other
languages that I am sure it would be a real loss never to have read. But I
should like here to mention one, since it, too, offers the portrait of a man, a
man of very different sort from Don Quixote, who insinuates himself into your
affections in such a way that when you have once made his acquaintance he
becomes your treasured friend. This is Montaigne,
who in the course of his essays painted so complete a picture of himself, with
his tastes, his oddities, his frailties, that you come to know him more
intimately than you are likely ever to know any of your own friends. And in
getting to know him you discover not a little about yourself, for in his
patient and humorous examination of his own nature he threw a searching light
on human nature in general. Much has been said of Montaigne’s scepticism, and
if to see that there are two sides to a question, and that when certainty is
impossible it is sensible to keep an open mind, is scepticism, I suppose he was
a sceptic. But his scepticism taught him tolerance – a virtue our own day more
than ever needs – and his interest in human beings, his enjoyment of life, led
him to an indulgence that, could we but possess it, would help us not only to
be happy ourselves but to make others happy also.
Montaigne was
magnificently translated by Florio, but perhaps the later translation of
Cotton, edited by William Carew Hazlitt, will be found more readable by those
who do not much care for the flamboyance of Elizabethan English. You can choose
any of the essays at random and be sure of entertainment, but to get Montaigne
at his best you would do better to read the third book as a whole. The essays
it contains are longer, and so give greater scope for the charming
discursiveness which is characteristic of him; they are more serious, though
not less amusing; and in them, master as he was by then of his medium and
confident in his readers’ interest, he gives you the quintessence of his
vagabond spirit. Do not think from the title that an essay will not interest you,
for his titles have generally very little to do with the contents. In the essay
titled On Some Verses of Virgil, for instance, you will find a disquisition on
the French language which is one of the most enchanting things he ever wrote,
and also a variety of remarks enough to bring a blush even to a cheek that is
not prudish.
Now I want to
leap across a couple of centuries and try to persuade you to read a book which most people
will tell you, if they have ever heard of it, is unreadable. This is Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meister, and it was very conscientiously translated by Carlyle. Goethe
is under a cloud in Germany
just now; he aimed at being a citizen of the world rather than a citizen of the
state, and that is an attitude which finds small favour with the present rulers
of his country; but even before they attained power Wilhelm Meister was little
read even in Germany.
[…] My opinion is that it is a very interesting and significant
work. It is the last of the eighteenth-century novels of sentiment, it is the
first of the romantic novels of the nineteenth-century, and it is the
forerunner of the autobiographical novels of which there has been in our own
day such a plentiful crop. The hero is as colourless as are the heroes of most
autobiographical novels. I do not quite know why this should be. Perhaps it is
because when we write about ourselves we are disconcerted by the contrast
between our aims and our achievements, and insensibly dwell on the
disappointment we feel with ourselves for having made so much less of our
opportunities than we had hoped to, and thus present the reader with a
frustrated, rather than with a fulfilled, character. Perhaps it is that, just
as when we walk down the street all the exciting things seem to happen on the
other side, our own experiences appear so commonplace to us that we cannot
describe them without making ourselves commonplace too; and it is only the
experiences of others that have the thrilling quality of what is strange and
romantic. But on the thread of this feckless creature Goethe has strung a great
number of curious incidents; he has surrounded him with unusual, varied and
fantastic persons, and he has used him as a mouthpiece for his own ideas on all
manner of subjects. Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship – I cannot recommend the Travels,
which are intolerable – is at once poetical, absurd, profound and dull. Well,
the dull parts you can skip. Carlyle said that he had not got so many ideas out
of any book that he had read for six years, but it is only honest to add that
he said also: “Goethe is the greatest genius that has lived for a century and
the greatest ass that has lived for three.”
Then, after
another leap across the years, I must draw your attention to three Russian
novels of the nineteenth century: Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Tolstoy’s War
and Peace, and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Of the three authors, Turgenev is the least considerable. But
he was an artist, with a delicate sense of the poetry of life, and he had
charm, pathos and humanity. He does not greatly move, but neither does he bore;
and in Fathers and Sons, by far his
best novel, he has depicted for the first time in fiction the Nihilist who was
the forerunner of the Communist of our own day. It is curious to recognize in
Bazarov, his hero, many of the traits which we have seen in men who, according
to our political opinions, have wrought havoc or opened new vistas on the world
we now live in. Bazarov is a brutal creature, but he is strangely impressive
and not altogether unsympathetic; his power is manifest, and though he has no
opportunity for action and so expends himself in words, you cannot but be
convinced that, given propitious circumstances, he is capable of translating
into deeds the ideas which his audacious mind has formulated. He has a dark and
pitiful greatness.
When I began
to write these pages I intended to recommend you to read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina rather than War and Peace, for in my
recollection it was the better novel of the two; but I took the precaution to
read both books again, and now I have no doubt that War and Peace is incomparably
the greater. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy painted a rich and vivid picture of
Russian society during the last half of the nineteenth century, but the story
he had to tell has too much the aspect of a moral tract entirely to please me. Tolstoy
strongly disapproved of Anna’s love for Vronsky, and in order to bring it home
to the reader that the wages of sin is death he loaded the dice against her. There
is no reason, except that Tolstoy had it in for her, why Anna shouldn’t have
divorced her husband, whom she had never loved and who cared nothing for her,
married Vronsky and lived happily ever after. To bring about the tragic ending
on which he had set his mind, Tolstoy had to make his heroine stupid, tiresome,
exacting and unreasonable; and though, heaven knows, I would never deny that
there are plenty of women who are all these, I do not find it possible greatly
to sympathize with the troubles their folly has brought upon them.
If I
hesitated about War and Peace, it is
because it seems to me sometimes tedious. There are to my mind too many battles
narrated in too great detail, and the experiences of Pierre with Freemasonry are exceedingly dull.
But all this can be skipped. It remains a great novel. It describes in epic
proportions the growth and development of an entire generation. The scene of
action is all Europe from the Volga to Austerlitz; a vast number of persons,
wonderfully realized, march across the huge stage; and this immense amount of
material is consummately handled, with the minute attention to detail of a
Dutch picture when the occasion demands, and then, when a different treatment
is needed, with the breathless sweep of Michael Angelo’s frescoes in the
Sistine Chapel. You get an overwhelming impression of the confusion of life and
of the pettiness of individuals in contrast with the dark forces that mould the
fate of nations. War and Peace is a thrilling, tremendous novel. War and Peace
is a work of genius. In it, by the way, Tolstoy did one of the most difficult
things a novelist can do: he drew a perfectly natural, charming, lively
portrait of a young girl; she is perhaps the most enchanting heroine of
fiction; but then he did a thing that none but a great novelist would have
thought of: in an epilogue he shows her to you as she has become when, happily
married, she is the mother of a family. That exquisite creature has grown
fussy, commonplace and a trifle too fat. You are shocked, but you have only for
a moment to consider the matter to realize how likely this was to happen. It
adds a last note of verisimilitude to this amazing novel.
You will
remember that in my first chapter I pointed out that it was useless, in my
opinion, to read books that you did not enjoy; but now that I come to The Brothers Karamazov I hesitate; for
I wonder whether it is possible to read this long, powerful and tragic work
with enjoyment. It depends on what you get enjoyment from. If you can get it
from the sight of a storm at sea, from the fearful splendour of a forest fire
or from the tumult of a great river in flood, then you will get it from The
Brothers Karamazov. But I said also that I would speak only of books that you
would be the poorer for not having read, only of books that in one way or
another increased your spiritual riches and enabled you to live your life with
greater fullness; and I have no doubt that The Brothers Karamazov rightly takes
its place, perhaps a supreme place, in this list. There is nothing in fiction
that remotely resembles the novels of Dostoevsky except the Wuthering Heights
of our own Emily Bronte and Melville’s Moby Dick, and The Brothers Karamazov is
the most tremendous of all Dostoevsky’s works. But you must not read it as
though you were reading a novel about ordinary human beings such as you meet in
the ordinary course of life. It is not for nothing that I spoke just now of a
storm at sea or a forest on fire. Dostoevsky’s characters have an affinity with
the dark forces of nature. They are not common mortals; passionate and
intensely spiritual, excruciatingly sensitive, capable of the extremity of
suffering, they are in everything inordinate. They are tormented by God. Their
actions are the actions of madmen in a madhouse, but there is something
strangely significant in their extravagance; and it is borne in upon you that
in this agonized revealing of themselves they reveal hidden depths and terrible
powers of the human soul.
The Brothers
Karamazov is a shapeless book, of great length, and in parts diffuse; but
except for certain chapters towards the end, it holds you with a firm grip; if
it contains scenes of great horror, it contains others of great beauty. I know
no novel in which the sublimity and vileness of man are so wonderfully
portrait, none in which the tragic adventures and the shattering experiences of
which his soul is capable are depicted with so much compassion and so much
force. Dostoevsky had the deep tenderness for suffering human beings that only
suffering can bring. “Be no man’s judge,” he says; “love men and do not be
afraid of their sins; love man in his sin.” It is with no sense of despair that
you close the book, but with exhilaration, for the beauty of goodness shines
through the ugliness of crime.
Upon looking
back on what I have written, I notice that I have more than once suggested to
you that you would be wise now and then to skip. Perhaps it was unnecessary. I
surmise that only scholars will fail to exercise that useful art with the
quotations from Latin with which Montaigne, following the fashion of his day, plentifully
peppered his essays; and it would be an assiduous reader indeed who could read
in full the last few chapters of The Brothers Karamazov. I know that I found
myself content to glance at rather than to peruse the speeches which Dostoevsky
put into the mouths of counsel at the trial. I think all the books I have
mentioned are important enough to be read thoroughly, but even they are more
enjoyable if you exercise your right to skip. Change of taste has rendered
certain parts of even great works tedious. We no longer want to be bothered
with the moral dissertations of which the eighteenth century was so fond, nor
with the lengthy descriptions of scenery which were favoured in the nineteenth.
When the novel became realistic authors fell in love with detail for its own
sake, and it took them a long time to discover that detail is interesting only
if it is relevant. To know how to skip is to know how to read with profit and pleasure, but
how you are to learn it I cannot tell you, for it is a trick I have never
acquired. I am a bad skipper; I am afraid of missing something that may be of
value to me, and so will read pages that only weary me; when once I begin to
skip, I cannot stop, and end the book dissatisfied with myself because I am
aware I have not done it justice, and then am apt to think that I might just as
well never have read it at all.
Now let me
get back to French literature. It is the richest and most varied in the world
except in one respect: the French on the whole are indifferent poets. They have
on the other hand cultivated all the arts of prose with abundance and the most
brilliant success. It is only proper that they should have had for so long so
great an influence on the writers of our own nation, for till recently, in
prose composition the French had almost everything to teach us and we almost
everything to learn. France, of course, had manifest advantages: its central
position in Europe, its dense population, its wealth, its civilization, were
favourable to the growth of a great literature; and the natural bent of the
French mind towards lucidity, moderation and reasonableness – qualities more
useful to the writer of prose than to the poet – was favourable to the
emergence of great talent. French became a precise and logical language,
enabling writers to express themselves with grace and clarity, when English,
not yet having assimilated the languages it had been for centuries absorbing,
was still muddled and cumbersome. From the immense wealth of this literature it
is plain that in the small space at my disposal I can pick out but a handful of
books.
The first one
to which I would draw your attention is very short. It is The Princess of Cleves by Madame de la Fayette. It was published in
1678, and the historians will tell you that it is the earliest psychological
novel. That, of course, is interesting, but what is more to the point is that
it is a very singular and a very modern story. The scene is the court of Henri
II. The heroine, a very great lady and a virtuous woman, respects but does not
love her husband, and when she meets the Duke of Nemours at a court ball, falls
deeply in love with him. But she is determined not to dishonour herself; and so
that she may with her husband’s help more easily resist the temptation that
distracts her, she confesses her passion to him. He is a man of fine character
and he trusts his wife, he knows that she is incapable of betraying him; but
human nature is weak, and against his will he is racked with jealousy. He
becomes suspicious, irritable, exasperating; I know nothing in fiction more
natural than the way in which his character, under the strain, gradually
deteriorates. It is a moving tale, for the personages concerned are desirous of
doing what they consider their duty and are defeated by circumstances beyond
their control. The moral seems to be that you should ask of no one more than it
is in his power to give. It is an instructive book to read nowadays, when it
seems generally accepted that love knows no law and that duty must in all cases
yield to inclination.
Next I would
have you read another novel, but of a very different sort. This is Prévost’s Manon Lescaut. Its persons
have none of the nobility of soul which enables those of The Princess of Cleves
to face their tragic situation in the grand manner; they are but frail, erring
human beings, and our hearts go out to them because we recognize in them our
own weakness. Here is a human story. I envy anyone who reads this delicious
book for the first time. How fresh, how natural and how charming is Manon, for
all her faults; and how moving is Des Grieux’s constant love for the faithless
creature! Weak? Of course he is weak. A baggage? Of course she is a baggage.
She is inconstant, mercenary and cruel, and she is loving, generous and tender;
the type is immortal, and I think it will be long before the memory of pretty
Manon fades from the hearts of men.
Now let us
speak of another short novel, Voltaire’s
Candide, within whose few pages are contained more wit, more mockery, more
mischievous invention, more sense and more fun, than ever man compressed in so
small a space. It was ostensibly written, as everyone knows, to ridicule the
philosophical optimism which was then in fashion, and at a moment when the
earthquake in Lisbon,
with its widespread destruction and great loss of life, had given a nasty jar
to the worthy people who believed that the world we live in is the best of all
possible worlds. Never has a man had a more versatile and lively mind than
Voltaire, and in this novel he exercised his cynical gaiety at the expense of
most subjects which men have agreed to take seriously – religion and government,
love, ambition and loyalty – and its moral, such as it is (and not a bad one
either) is: Be tolerant and cultivate your garden: that is, do whatever you
have to do with diligence and fortitude.
Then I come
to a very important work – The Confessions
of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is a book that few, I should imagine, will
read without interest, though many will read it with disgust. But if you find
the study of human nature the most absorbing of all studies, you cannot fail to
find this book rewarding, for here you have a man who has laid bare his soul
with candour. He does not, like many who have written of themselves, merely
exhibit frailties which after all are rather engaging; he does not hesitate to
show himself ungrateful, unscrupulous, dishonest, base and mean. You can have
little sympathy with him, since he is despicable; and yet such is his love of
natural beauty, so tender is his sentiment, so miraculous his narrative gift
that, however great your repulsion, you are fascinated; and I don’t know who,
if he is completely honest with himself, can read the confessions of this
weak-willed, petulant, vain and miserable creature without saying to himself:
“After all, is there so much to choose between him and me? If the whole truth
were known about me, should I, who turn away shocked from these revelations,
cut so pretty a figure?” So I warn you, I think no one can read this book
without some disturbance to the self-complacency which is our chief defence in
our dealing with this difficult world.
During the
nineteenth century France
was wonderfully rich in fiction. Its three great novelists were Balzac,
Stendhal and Flaubert. Taking him all and all, I suppose Balzac is the greatest novelist who ever lived. Like Dickens, he
was more at his ease with the extraordinary than with the usual, and he
depicted the vile with greater force than the deserving; but he was a creator
even more prodigious than Dickens, and his scope was greater. He sought to
write the history of society in his own time, and in some measure he succeeded.
When you read him you do not feel that you are concerned with a limited group
of persons, but with the commonweal at large, in which bigger issues than the
fate of individuals are involved. I think he was the first novelist to realize
the importance of affairs; his people have shops or go to business, make
fortunes or lose them; and though love – as with all novelists – plays a large
part in his novels, money is the motive force in the world of his invention. He
wrote badly, he was excessive, he had no taste, but he had a passion and a
vigour which enabled him to create characters, extravagant and abnormal
doubtless, who are violently and magnificently alive. He is often blamed for
the melodramatic nature of his stories, but I ask myself how it is possible to
expect that these exceptional persons should move in a world of measure and
restraint. The storm needs the mountains and the sea for its grandeur. It is
hard to choose one among the many deeply interesting novels that Balzac wrote,
but since to my mind Father Goriot
shows most completely his thrilling and varied power, I think that is the one I
would recommend to your attention.
Stendhal wrote two novels which I would have
you read; first, The Red and the Black,
and then, if you like it as much as I do, The
Charterhouse of Parma. For I must tell you that he is my favourite
novelist. I like the plain and exact manner in which he wrote and the cool
precision of his psychological analysis. He scrutinized the workings of the
human heart with perspicacity. Energy was the quality that he most admired in
men, and the creatures of his fancy that he has studied with most elaborate and
anxious care are those who will allow no obstacles to prevent them from
exercising their forceful will and who will hesitate at no crime to achieve the
end on which they have determined. To my mind, The Red and the Black is for its
two thirds one of the best novels ever written; I think it fails then, and for
a very singular reason. Stendhal founded it on fact, but the character he
invented, Julien Sorel, ran away with him, as the characters of our invention
often do, and when Stendhal forced him to behave in such a way as to fit the
actual circumstances which had been the inspiration of his story, you are
disconcerted, for you cannot believe that the unscrupulous, ambitious and
resolute man whom he has drawn would act with such a foolish disregard of
consequences.
Now I come to
Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. It is a
landmark in the history of modern fiction. On reading it again recently I could
not but feel that Flaubert’s desire to be unshrinkingly objective has resulted
in a certain frigidity of tone, a certain dryness, and this somewhat qualified
my admiration; but I still thought it a great and powerful work. The characters
are described with minuteness and verisimilitude. It leaves you, when you have
finished it, with a feeling of profound, yet half-contemptuous, pity for those
commonplace people for whom life has proved so cruel. The persons that the
author has set before you are so real, they suffer so desperately, that they
cease to be merely individuals, they become typical of humanity; and if you
must extract a moral from a novel, you may extract from Madame Bovary the
not-unimportant one that idle dreams, reveries that have no chance of fulfilment,
can lead only to disaster; and oddly enough you return to the moral of Candide –
take things as they come and do your duty with good will.
I have
reached the limits of my space, and though there are other books, of smaller
consequence, which I should have liked to talk to you about, I must content
myself with only briefly mentioning a few more. Benjamin Constant wrote
a short novel called Adolphe in
which, reversing the practice of most authors who are more inclined to describe
the beginnings of a love affair, he has analyzed with rare power its decline. It
is a real human document. In The Three Musketeers you have a grand romantic novel. It may not be
literature, the characters may be sketchy and the plot ill-contrived, but it is
wonderfully readable; and to be that, I may remind you, is the novelist’s
indispensable faculty. Anatole France had a small but exquisite
talent, which he displayed with rare felicity in a volume of stories called The Mother-of-Pearl Case. He was at one
time too highly esteemed, but the neglect which has now befallen him is unjust.
Finally, I
must remind you that our own time has produced in Marcel Proust a novelist who can stand comparison with the
greatest. His work has been so well translated that I am inclined to think it
alone, of all those I have mentioned, loses nothing in its English dress. He
wrote one novel only, but that in fifteen volumes. When first they were made
known to an astonished world, they were praised out of all reason. I myself
wrote that I preferred being bored by Proust to being amused by any other
writer. A second reading has made most of us assume a more sensible attitude.
He is often repetitive, his self-analyses grow wearisome, and his obsession
with the tedious emotion of jealousy fatigues in the long run even his most
willing readers; but his defects are far more than compensated by his merits. He
is a great and original writer. He has subtlety, creative power and psychological
insight; but I think the future will hail him above all as a wonderful
humorist. So I recommend you to start at the beginning of this copious novel,
read till you are bored, skip and start reading again; but to take care to miss
nothing of Madame Verdurin or the Baron de Charlus. They are the richest
creations of the comic fancy our time has seen.
One word
more. In these two chapters I have drawn your attention to various books, and I
have had little but good to say of them; for if I had not thought them in their
various ways valuable, I would not have recommended you to read them. I have by
the way said something of their authors; and I am conscious that it must seem
rather absurd for me, as though I were a candidate for office trying to get on
good terms with voters, to give Jane Austen a chuck under the chin, as it were,
a pat on the head to Goethe and a friendly nod to Dostoevsky. But I do not know
what else I could have done. Merely to have given you a list of books would
have been dull. In the short space allowed to me I could treat of them only
summarily, but because I wanted to interest you in them I had to say at least
something about them. All I can hope now is that if you read them, or any of
them, you will find them enjoyable as well as spiritually profitable; and I
should be glad to think that when afterwards you look back on them you will
feel, as I do, that you are the better for having read them, and that they have
given you something of value that you would not be without.
III.
[…]
I am bound to
confess, however, that on rereading The Scarlet Letter for my present purpose
the profit and pleasure I gained were of a limited character. I see no harm in
putting things in their proper place, and I must point out to you that the last
forty years have seen the rise in America
of at least half a dozen much better novelists than Hawthorne ever was. It is only prejudice and
the fact that they are alive and in our midst that can blind us to it. But The
Scarlet Letter is a famous romance, and it has been read, I suppose, by every
American who has read anything at all. For my part I found the introduction,
entitled The Custom House, more interesting than the tale. It has charm,
lightness and humour. The first thing you ask of a novel is that you should
believe it; if you feel instinctively that the characters do not behave with
ordinary common sense the spell is broken and the novelist has lost his hold on
you. Now, Hawthorne early in his narrative was faced with a difficulty; a
reason had to be found why Hester Prynne, free to go anywhere, should decide to
remain in the place where the humiliation to which she had been exposed must
make her life intolerable; and he found it naturally enough in her love for
Arthur Dimmesdale, which was so great that she preferred, notwithstanding the
attendant shame, to remain where he was. But Hawthorne did not face a much greater
difficulty, for if he had he could never have written the story he did: the
facts of life were not unknown to the Puritans, who were as practical as they
were pious, and no stork brought the baby to a Hester who never suspected that
such an even was in prospect. It is incredible that she should not have gone to
some distant place to be secretly delivered of her child, and if the lovers
could not bear to be separated, it is hard to understand why, since on a later
occasion they had no difficulty in arranging to sail back to Europe together,
they should not have adopted such an obvious course when the occasion was so
much more urgent. For all they knew Roger Chillingworth was dead and, like
Benjamin Franklin with the respectable Miss Read a century later, they could
have effected a common-law marriage. Hawthorne
did not posses the gift of creating living characters; Roger Chillingworth is
merely a bundle of malignancies, not a human being, and Hester is but a fine
piece of statuary. The Reverend Mr Dimmesdale comes to life only when, the pair
having finally decided on flight, he is anxious to know the precise time at
which the vessel on which they propose to sail may be expected to depart. He
has composed his Election Sermon and is unwilling not to deliver it. That is a
nice and human touch. It is not then for its story that I would have you read
The Scarlet Letter and if you have done so already to read it again, but for
the impressive quality of its language. Hawthorne
formed his style on the great writers of the eighteenth century. Such a phrase
as: “there was never in his heart so much cruelty as would have brushed the
down off a butterfly’s wing” might well have been written by Sterne, and he
would have been pleased with it. Hawthorne
had a delicate ear and great skill in the construction of an elaborate phrase.
He could write a sentence half a page long, rich with subsidiary clauses, that
was resonant, balanced and crystal-clear. He could be splendid and various. His
prose had the sober opulence of a Gothic tapestry, but under restraint of his
taste it never became turgid or monotonous. His metaphors were significant, his
similes apt, and his vocabulary fitting to his matter. Fashions come and go in
literature and it may well be that the hairy-chested, rough-neck prose which is
favour today will in the future lose its vogue. It may be that readers will ask
for a more formal, a more distinguished way of writing; authors then will be
glad to learn from Hawthorne how to manage a sentence of more than half a dozen
words, how to combine dignity with lucidity, and how without pedantry to please
both the eye and the ear.
Since Hawthorne belongs to what historians of literature call
the School of Concord, or which Emerson and Thoreau
were distinguished members, this seems a fitting place to speak of them. The
interest of Walden must depend on the taste of the reader. For my part I read
it without boredom, but without exhilaration. It is very pleasantly written, in
a style without formality, with ease and grace; but if I were snowbound on a
Western prairie, with a deaf mute as my only companion, I must admit that I
should be dismayed to find that Thoreau’s Walden was the only book in the log
cabin. It is the kind of book that needs an author of vigorous personality,
with a background of singular experience and a store of out-of-the-way
learning; but Thoreau was a man of supine character, his knowledge of the world
was small and his reading, though respectable, followed a well-trodden path. I
do not think he had the emotional force to make the experiment which is the
theme of his book very important. He discovered that if you limit your wants
you can satisfy them at small expense. We knew that. “It contributes greatly to
a man’s moral and intellectual health,” says Hawthorne, “to be brought into
habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for
his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to
appreciate.” This is very true, and none should take it more to heart than the
writer of books. The interest of Walden must depend on the taste of the reader.
For my part I read it without boredom, but without exhilaration. It is very
pleasantly written, in a style without formality, with ease and grace; but if I
were snowbound on a Western prairie, with a deaf mute as my only companion, I
must admit that I should be dismayed to find that Thoreau’s Walden was the only
book in the log cabin. It is the kind of book that needs an author of vigorous
personality, with a background of singular experience and a store of
out-of-the-way learning; but Thoreau was a man of supine character, his
knowledge of the world was small and his reading, though respectable, followed
a well-trodden path. I do not think he had the emotional force to make the
experiment which is the theme of his book very important. He discovered that if
you limit your wants you can satisfy them at small expense. We knew that. “It
contributes greatly to a man’s moral and intellectual health,” says Hawthorne,
“to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself,
who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out
of himself to appreciate.” This is very true, and none should take it more to
heart than the writer of books.
Emerson, of course, is a figure of much
greater substance. I was first led to read him many years ago by a fair-haired
lady I met on the Lake
of Como. On the
excursions we took she always carried a volume of the Essays with her and she had heavily underlined in blue pencil
(perhaps to bring out the colour of her eyes) the passages that particularly
struck her. There were at least two or three on every page. She told me that
she found Emerson a great solace. She said that in all the tribulations and
difficulties of her life she went to him and found something to her purpose. I
met her again many years later in Hawaii
and she very kindly asked me to lunch with her at a house she had rented for
the season. She had always been wealthy, but since our last meeting had come up
in the world, for her husband had been raised to the peerage and she was now a
woman of title. She received me in a Callot dress (the Sisters Callot being
then the most fashionable dressmakers in Paris),
wearing a pearl chain that must have cost a quarter of a million dollars, but
with no shoes or stockings. “You see,” she said, pointing to her bare feet
“here we lead the simple life.” I thought it a pity they had bunions on them.
At that moment a Chinese butler, dressed very like one of the Ming emperors,
brought in a tray of cocktails. I asked her if she still read Emerson. She
seized a volume from the table and clasped it to her by this time withering
bosom, and told me, indeed yes, she never went anywhere without a volume of the
Essays; she waved a jewelled hand at the blue sea which you saw through the
open windows and said that except for Emerson she would never really have grasped
the spiritual significance of the Pacific Ocean. She died a little while ago at
a ripe old age, but a disciple of Emerson to the last, and she left her yacht
and her library to the gigolo who had been the other solace of her declining
years. Since she did not leave him enough money to run the yacht he sold it;
but secondhand books fetch little and it may be that he kept the library. In
that case I can only hope he found the Emerson a solace in his bereavement. I
must admit that he has never been a solace to me. I do not wish to speak
disrespectfully of a writer in whom his country-men take pride; I recognize the
charm and benignity of his character; when you read his journals you cannot but
be impressed by the thoughtfulness which possessed him even when he was no more
than a young boy, and by the fluency with which he expressed himself; and since
he was a lecturer, with the platform in view when he wrote, it may be that his
voice and presence added a significance to his discourse which is lost in the printed
page; but I can only confess that I cannot find much profit or entertainment in
his celebrated Essays. Often he hardly escapes the commonplace by a hair’s
breadth. He had a gift of the picturesque phrase, but too often it is empty of
meaning. He is a nimble skater who cuts elegant and complicated figures on a
surface of frozen platitudes. Perhaps he would have been a better writer if he
had not been quite so good a man. But since in the case of so famous an author
one’s natural curiosity impels one to ask what it is that has given him such a
position in the world of letters, I should recommend you to read his English Traits. In this book he was
bound down to the concrete and so there is less in it of the vague, loose and
superficial thinking which in his Essays he was apt to indulge in; he thus
managed to be more vivid, more actual and more entertaining than in any of his
other works. I certainly read it with pleasure.
It may be
that the writers of the School
of Concord have a value
to Americans which the foreigner cannot hope to comprehend; he must be content
to leave it and pass on. This is not the case with Edgar Allan Poe; indeed he
is, I think, more honoured in Europe than in the land of his birth, and in France, for
example, his influence is still powerful with his fellow-writers. It may be
that his moral character and the unsatisfactory nature of his life have
unjustly caused Americans to hold him in less esteem than he deserves. But
neither an author’s character nor his life has anything to do with the reader,
who is concerned only with his works. Poe wrote the most beautiful poetry that
has ever been written in America.
It is like some of those great pictures of the Venetians whose sudden
loveliness takes your breath away so that, for the moment satisfied by the
appeal to your senses, you do not care that they can give you no matter for
your fancy to work upon. They have nothing but their beauty to offer, but their
beauty is matchless. Poe, furthermore, was an acute critic and his analysis of
the art of the short story for long governed the practice of his successors.
His tales have never been excelled. I need hardly remind you that in The Gold
Bug and the narratives in which Monsieur Dupin figures he invented the
detective story which has resulted in the flood of books which we all of us at
times are glad to read. The field has been cultivated by a great many writers
with variety and success, but in essentials no one has added anything to what
he at first attempt accomplished. It may be that his stories of horror and
mystery owe something to Hoffmann and Balzac, but they wonderfully achieve the
end he set himself, for he was the most self-conscious of artists, and they
deserve their renown. He wrote in a turgid style, and he was lavish of romantic
accessories; his dialogue was as bombastic as his people were unreal; his range
was narrow; but that you have to put up with: what he has to give us is unique.
He wrote very little and almost all he wrote can be read with enjoyment.
[…]
Henry James
was not the greatest writer that America has produced, but surely
the most distinguished. His gifts were conspicuous; but there was some defect
in his character, one must suppose, that prevented him from making the most of
them. He had humour, insight, subtlety, a sense of drama; but a triviality of
soul that made the elemental emotions of mankind, love and hatred, the fear of
death and the sense of life’s mystery, incomprehensible to him. No one ever
plumbed the surface of things with a keener scrutiny, but there is no
indication that he was ever aware of the depths beneath it. He looked upon The
Ambassadors as his best novel; I read it again the other day and I was appalled
by its emptiness. It is tedious to read on account of its convoluted style; no
attempt is made to render character by manner of speech, and everyone speaks
like everyone else, in pure Henry James; the only living person in the book is
Mrs Newsome who never appears in the flesh; and Strether is a silly, meanly
inquisitive old woman. It would be intolerable but for Henry James’s great gift
(the novelist’s essential gift) of carrying the reader on from page to page by
the desire to know what is going to happen next, and by the wonderful
atmosphere of Paris in spring and summer which no one, to the best of my
knowledge, has so exquisitely conveyed. I much prefer The American. It is
written with lucidity and elegance, with some pomposity perhaps (people do not
go away, they depart; they do not go home, they repair to their domiciles; and
they do not go to bed, they retire); but that gives it a period flavour that I
do not find displeasing. It is a curious novel in this respect, that it is a
love story in which there is no love. Christopher Newman wishes to marry Madame
de Cintré because he wants a mother for his children and she will grace the
head of his table, and when the engagement is broken off his pride is
humiliated but his heart is unaffected. The characters are not human beings;
the men are stuffed shirts and the women are crinolines. Madame de Cintré,
though charming, graceful and elegant, is a purely conventional figure who
gives you the impression that she is drawn not from nature, but from a diligent
perusal of Balzac’s novels. Balzac, however, was able to give his most
conventional creatures something of his own exuberant vitality; Henry James had
nothing of the sort to give, and she has no more life in her than a
fashion-plate in a Lady’s Keepsake. Newman, the American, is the Western
pioneer, and indeed, judging from the period at which the story is set, he may
well have taken part in the gold rush to California; but Henry James seems to
have know the sort of man he was trying to portray too little to give his hero
even a superficial plausibility. Newman could scarcely have learned his
epistolary style in a pool-room at St
Louis or on the water front in St Francisco. My own
belief is that he fooled Henry James, and the real reason why the aristocratic
Bellegardes refused the projected alliance was not that Newman had made his
fortune in business, but that, as they fortunately discovered in time, he was
really an assistant instructor in English at the University of Harvard.
But for all that The American is well worth reading. So great is Henry James’s
skill in telling a story, so rare his sense of suspense and so sure his touch
in working up to a dramatic situation, that you are held from beginning to end.
It is as exciting as a detective story and, after all, no more incredible; and
you cannot remain unconscious of the charm of contact with the author’s
amiable, urbane and cultivated mind. The American is not a great book, but it
is a very readable one: there are not many novels of which you can say that
sixty years after their appearance.
I will speak
of a great book now. This is Moby Dick. I read Melville’s South
Sea books, Omoo and Typee, when I was
myself on the islands [1916/17] and I read them with interest and pleasure, but
I have never been tempted to read them again; and I have not read Pierre, accepting the
opinion of good critics that Melville went to pieces when he wrote it. But Moby
Dick is enough for any man’s reputation. Some critics have complained of the
flamboyance of its style. To my mind it is written in a manner that wonderfully
suits the theme. Grandiloquence is an affair of hit or miss; when it comes off
you may reach the sublime, when it doesn’t you descend to the ridiculous. I
will admit that sometimes Melville does so descend; but it is beyond human
powers to walk always on the topmost heights, and his tumbles may be condoned
when you consider how splendidly, with what a noble force, with what a
sustained splendour of phrase, he writes his best passages. I will confess that
there are a number of chapters, the chapters of antiquarian lore mugged-up in a
library and those dealing with the natural history of the whale, which I find
tedious; but it is obvious that Melville set great store on his recondite
knowledge, and you have to accept the crotchets of an author of great parts.
Homer sometimes nods and Shakespeare can write passages of empty rhetoric. But
in the scenes at New Bedford,
and when he describes events, when he deals with men, above all of course with
the tremendous Ahab, then he is magnificent. There is a throb, a mystery, a
foreboding, a passion, a sense of the horror and terror of life, of the
inevitableness of destiny and of the power of evil, which take you by the
throat. You are left shattered, but strangely uplifted. And if you are a writer
you are proud to think that you cultivate an art which is capable of such
altitudes and which can work such wonderful effects on the hearts and senses
and minds of men.
[…]
It would be difficult in any case,
and impossible in the space allowed to me, to say exactly what I mean by the
American tang: it is in literature that characteristic which differentiates a
work from any that could possibly have been written in another country and so
marks it as the unmistakable product of its environment; but I can point to a
very good instance of it. You have it conspicuously in Mark Twain, and he gives
it you in all its richness and savour in Huckleberry Finn. This book stands
head and shoulders above the rest of his work. It is an authentic masterpiece.
At one time Mark Twain was somewhat patronized because he was a humorist, and
the pundits are apt to look askance at contemporary humour; but his death has
reassured them and now he is, I think, universally accepted as one of the
greatest of American authors. I need in consequence say little about him. I
would only point out one circumstance. When Mark Twain tried to write in a
literary manner he produced (as in Life on the Mississippi) but indifferent
journalese; but in Huckleberry Finn he had the happy idea of writing in the
person of his immortal hero and so produced a model of the vernacular style
which, I conjecture, has proved a valuable stimulus to some of the best and
most characteristic writers of the present day. He showed them that a living
manner of writing is not to be sought in the seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century writers of England,
but in the current speech of their own people. It would be foolish to suppose
that the language in which Huck Finn expresses himself is what painters call
representational; no illiterate small boy could have conceived such neat
phrases or made such an apt choice of epithets. Perhaps because he thought it
beneath the dignity of literature to write thus colloquially in the first
person, Mark Twain, using a literary artifice which we gladly accept, made [us]
believe that these were the actual utterances of his little hero; and in so
doing he freed the American style from the shackles that had so long bound it.
Huckleberry Finn, with its amazing variety and invention, its gusto and life,
is in the tradition of that great and celebrated variety of fiction, the
picaresque novel; and it holds its place bravely with the two greatest examples
of the genre, Gil Blas and Tom Jones; in fact, if Mark Twain had not had the
unfortunate notion of bringing in that boring little muttonhead Tom Sawyer to
ruin the last few chapters, it would have been faultless.
[…]
I must also say a few words about
Emily Dickinson. I am afraid I shall offend many persons in America when I
confess that to my mind she has been accorded more praise than she deserves.
She has been hailed as the great American poet. But poetry has nothing to do
with nationality. Poets inhabit the empyrean and belong to no country. Do we
talk of Homer as a great Greek poet or of Dante as a great Italian poet? To do
so would be to depreciate them. Nor should our judgment be affected by the
circumstances of a poet’s life. That Emily Dickinson had an unhappy love affair
and lived for many years in seclusion, that Poe tippled and was ungrateful to
those who befriended him, neither makes the poetry of the one any better nor
that of the other any worse. Emily Dickinson is best read in anthologies. There
her wit, her poignancy, her simplicity make their utmost effect, and it may be
that most anthologies would be the richer if they were less niggardly in their
selections; but when you read the whole body of her work you are likely to be
disappointed. She is at her best when she allows herself to sing; when her
rhythm is modulated and varied, when her language serves her emotion and when
her invention is spontaneous. But she is too rarely at her best. Like Miss
Emmeline Grangerford, Emily Dickinson could rattle off poetry like nothing.
There is a great deal of monotony in her constant use of the common or ballad
metre in a stanza of four lines; it is in itself a limiting form, and she
narrows it still more because her ear was not subtle and her language was
seldom simple enough for the measure. She had a strain of sophistication which
induced her too often to sacrifice lyric beauty to a desire to make a clever
point. In the short epigrammatic poems she wrote it is a matter of hitting the
nail accurately on the head; she was very apt to give it a little tap slightly
on one side. She had a gift, but a small one, and it is only confusing when
claims are made on her behalf which there is little in her work to justify.
Poetry is the crown of literature, but we have the right to demand that its
pearls should not be cultured nor its rubies reconstructed. America will
produce poets (indeed I am inclined to think it has already done so) who will
make the encomiums lavished on Emily Dickinson appear extravagant.
Now I have but Walt Whitman to speak
of. I have kept him to the end, because I think it is in Leaves of Grass that
we at last get, free from European influences, the pure and unadulterated
Americanism which in these pages we have sought. Leaves of Grass is a work of
immense significance, but since I began by reminding you that I would recommend
you to read books which, whatever their other merits, were enjoyable, I am
constrained to tell you that few great poets have been more uneven than
Whitman. I think many books are spoilt for readers because the critics speak of
them as though they had no defects. Perfection is not of this world, and
generally merits can only be achieved at the cost of short-comings. It is much
better that the reader should know what to expect; otherwise, finding himself
at variance with the panegyrists, he will unduly blame himself for not
appreciating something that in fact does not merit appreciation. Whitman was a
writer of splendid beginnings, but either because he found his way of writing
too easy or because he was intoxicated with his own verbosity, often enough he
went on and on when he had nothing of significance to add to what he had
already said. That you must put up with. He wrote his poems partly in the
rhythmic language of the Bible, partly in the sort of blank verse that was
written in the seventeenth century, and partly in an uncouth pedestrian prose
which offends the ear. Well, that you must put up with too. These defects are
regrettable, but unimportant. It is easy to skip. Leaves of Grass is a book to
open anywhere, read on as long as it pleases and then turn the pages and start
at random elsewhere. Whitman could write lines of pure and lovely poetry, he
could turn phrases that thrill, and often he hit upon ideas that were
wonderfully moving. There can be no need for me to say that he is one of the
most exciting of all poets. He had a vigour and a sense of life, in its
manifold variety, in its passion, beauty and exhilaration, which an American
may justly and with pride think truly American. He brought poetry home to the
common man. He showed that it was not only to be found in moonlight, ruined
castles and the pathos of lovesick maidens; but in streets and trains and
steamboats, in the labour of the artisan and the humdrum toil of the farmer’s
wife, in work and ease; in all life, in short, and the ways it is lived. Just
as Wordsworth showed that you need not use poetic language to make poetry, but
could make it out of the common words of our everyday speech, so Whitman showed
that its subject matter was not only where the romantics had sought it, but was
all about you in the most usual circumstances of your daily round. His was not
a poetry of escape, but a poetry of acceptance. It would be a dull-spirited
American who could read Whitman without receiving a greater apprehension of the
vastness of his country, the splendour of its resources, and the illimitable
hope that is contained in its future. I think it was really in Whitman that America became
aware of itself in literature. It is a virile, democratic poetry; it is the
authentic battle cry of a new nation and the solid foundation of a national
literature. In European museums you sometimes see the genealogy of the house of
Jesse depicted as a tree, with Adam massively outlined in the trunk and the
branches ending in figures of the patriarchs and the kings of Israel. If such
a tree were made to represent the development of American literature and the
branches ended with the shapes of O. Henry, Ring Lardner, Theodore Dreiser,
Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Vachel Lindsay, Eugene O’Neill and
Edwin Arlington Robinson, the trunk would be rough-hewn in the splendid,
dauntless and original form of Walt Whitman.