Confessions of a Book-Lover Part 1

Confessions of a Book-Lover.

by Maurice Francis Egan.

CHAPTER I

MY BOYHOOD READING

_Early Recollections_

To get the best out of books, I am convinced that you must begin to love these perennial friends very early in life. It is the only way to know all their "curves," all those little shadows of expression and small lights. There is a glamour which you never _see_ if you begin to read with a serious intention late in life, when questions of technique and grammar and mere words begin to seem too important.

Then you have become too critical to feel through all Fenimore Cooper's verbiage the real lakes and woods, or the wild fervour of romance beneath dear Sir Walter's mat of words. You lose the unreclaimable flavour of books. A friend you may irretrievably lose when you lose a friend--if you are so deadly unfortunate as to lose a friend--for even the memories of him are embittered; but no great author can ever have done anything that will make the book you love less precious to you.

The new school of pedagogical thought disapproves, I know, of miscellaneous reading, and no modern moralist will agree with Madame de Sevigne that "bad books are better than no books at all"; but Madame de Sevigne may have meant books written in a bad style, or feeble books, and not books bad in the moral sense. However, I must confess that when I was young, I read several books which I was told afterward were very bad indeed. But I did not find this out until somebody told me! The youthful mind must possess something of the quality attributed to a duck's back! I recall that once "The Confessions of Rousseau" was s.n.a.t.c.hed suddenly away from me by a careful mother just as I had begun to think that Jean Jacques was a very interesting man and almost as queer as some of the people I knew. I believe that if I had been allowed to finish the book, it would have become by some mental chemical process a very edifying criticism of life.

"Tom Jones" I found in an attic and I was allowed to read it by a pious aunt, whom I was visiting, because she mixed it up with "Tom Brown of Rugby"; but I found it even more tiresome than "Eric, or Little by Little," for which I dropped it. I remember, too, that I was rather shocked by some things written in the Old Testament; and I retorted to my aunt's p.r.o.nouncement that she considered "the 'Arabian Nights' a dangerous book," by saying that the Old Testament was the worst book I had ever read; but I supposed "people had put something into it when G.o.d wasn't looking." She sent me home.

At home, I was permitted to read only the New Testament. On winter Sunday afternoons, when there was nothing else to do, I became sincerely attached to the Acts of the Apostles. And I came to the conclusion that n.o.body could tell a short story as well as Our Lord Himself. The Centurion was one of my favourite characters. He seemed to be such a good soldier; and his plea, "Lord, I am not worthy," flashes across my mental vision every day of my life.

In the Catholic churches, a part of the Gospel is read every Sunday, and carefully interpreted. This always interested me because I knew in advance what the priest was going to read. Most of the children of my acquaintance were taught their Scriptures through the International Sunday-school lessons, and seemed to me to be submerged in the geography of Palestine and other tiresome details. For me, reading as I did, the whole of the New Testament was radiant with interest, a frankly human interest. There were many pa.s.sages that I did not pretend to understand, sometimes because the English was obscure or archaic, and sometimes because my mind was not equal to it or my knowledge too small. Whatever may be the opinion of other people, mine is that the reading of the New Testament in the simplicity of childhood, with the flower of intuition not yet blighted, is one of the most beautiful of mental experiences. In my own case, it gave a glow to life; it caused me to distinguish between truth and fairy tales, between fact and fiction--and this is often very difficult for an imaginative child.

This kind of reading implies leisure and the absence of distraction.

Unhappily, much leisure does not seem to be left for the modern child.

The unhappy creature is even told that there will be "something in Heaven for children to do!" As to distractions, the modern child is surrounded by them; and it appears to be one of the main intentions of the present system of instruction not to leave to a child any moments of leisure for the indulgence of the imagination. But I am not offering the example of my childhood for imitation by the modern parents.

Nevertheless, it had great consolations. There were no "movies" in those days, and the theatre was only occasionally permitted; but on long afternoons, after you had learned to read, you might lose yourself in "The Scottish Chiefs" to your heart's content. It seems to me that the beauty of this fashion of leisurely reading was that you had time to visualize everything, and you felt the dramatic moments so keenly, that a sense of unreality never obtruded itself at the wrong time. It was not necessary for you to be told that Helen Mar was beautiful. It was only necessary for her to say, in tones so entrancing that you heard them, "My Wallace!" to know that she was the loveliest person in all Scotland.

But "The Scottish Chiefs" required the leisure of long holiday afternoons, especially as the copy I read had been so misused that I had to spend precious half hours in putting the pages together. It was worth the trouble, however.

Before I could read, I was compelled on rainy days to sit at my mother's knee and listen to what _she_ read. I am happy to say that she never read children's books. Nothing was ever adapted to my youthful misunderstanding. She read aloud what she liked to read, and she never considered whether I liked it or not. It was a method of discipline. At first, I looked drearily out at the soggy city street, in which rivulets of melted snow made any exercise, suitable to my age, impossible. There is nothing so hopeless for a child as an afternoon in a city when the heavy snows begin to melt. My mother, however, was altogether regardless of what happened outside of the house. At two o'clock precisely--after the manner of the King in William Morris's "Earthly Paradise"--she waved her wand. After that, all that I was expected to do was to make no noise.

In this way I became acquainted with "The Virginians," then running in _Harper's Magazine_, with "Adam Bede" and "As You Like It" and "Richard III." and "Oliver Twist" and "Nicholas Nickleby" and "Valentine Vox"--why "Valentine Vox?"--and other volumes when I should have been listening to "Alice in Wonderland." But when I came, in turn, to "Alice in Wonderland," I found Alice's rather dull in comparison with the adventures of the Warrington brothers. And Thackeray's picture of Gumbo carrying in the soup tureen! To have listened to Rebecca's description of the great fight in "Ivanhoe," to have lived through the tournament of Ashby de la Zouche, was a poor preparation for the vagaries of the queer creatures that surrounded the inimitable Alice.

There appeared to be no children's books in the library to which we had access. It never seemed to me that "Robinson Crusoe" or "Gulliver's Travels" or "Swiss Family Robinson" were children's books; they were not so treated by my mother, and I remember, as a small boy, going up to Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, with divine eagerness, to buy the latest number of a d.i.c.kens serial. I think the name of the shop--the shop of Paradise--which sold these books was called Ashburnham's. It may be asked how the episode in "Adam Bede" of Hetty and that of "little Em'ly" in d.i.c.kens struck the child mind. As I remember, the child mind was awed and impressed, by a sense of horror, probably occasioned as much by the force of the style, by the suggestions of an unknown terror, as by any facts which a child could grasp.

It was a curious thing that my mother, who had remarkably good taste in literature, admired Mrs. Henry Wood extravagantly. She also admired Queen Victoria. She never read "East Lynne" aloud, because, I gathered, she considered it "improper"; and Miss Braddon's "Lady Audley's Secret"

came under the same ban, though I heard it talked of frequently. It was difficult to discover where my mother drew the line between what was "proper" and what was "not proper." Shakespeare she seemed to regard as eminently proper, and, I noticed, hesitated and mumbled only when she came to certain parts of Ophelia's song. It seems strange now that I never rated Mrs. Henry Wood's novels with those of George Eliot or Thackeray or d.i.c.kens. There seemed to be some imperceptible difference which my mother never explained, but which I, instinctively, understood; and when Anthony Trollope's "Orley Farm" was read, I placed him above Mrs. Henry Wood, but not on an equality with d.i.c.kens or Thackeray.

_Harper's Magazine_, in those days, contained great treasure! There, for instance, were the delightful articles by Porte Crayon--General Strothers, I think. These one listened to with pleasure; but the bane of my existence was Mr. Abbott's "Life of Napoleon Bonaparte." It seemed to me as if it would never end, and it stretched as dolorously before me as that other fearful process which appalled my waking days--the knowledge that all my life I should be obliged to clean my teeth three times a day with powdered charcoal!

After a time, I began to read for myself; but the delights of desultory reading were gloomed by the necessity of studying long lessons that no emanc.i.p.ated child of to-day would endure. Misguided people sometimes came to the school and told childish stories, at which we all laughed, but which even the most illiterate despised. To have known George Warrington, to have mingled familiarly in the society of George Washington, to remember the picture of Beatrix Esmond coming down the stairs--I am not speaking of Du Maurier's travesties of that delightful book--to have seen the old ladies in "Cranford," sucking their oranges in the privacies of their rooms, made one despise foolish little tales about over-industrious bees and robins which seemed not even to have the ordinary common sense of geese!

Suddenly, my mother became a devout Catholic. The scene changed. On one unhappy Sunday afternoon "Monte Cristo" was rudely s.n.a.t.c.hed from my entranced hands. Dumas was on the list of the "improper," and to this day I have never finished the episodes in which I was so deeply interested. Now the wagon of the circulating library ceased to come as in the old days. The children of the neighbours offered me Sunday-school books, taken from the precious store of the Methodist Sunday School opposite our house. They seemed to me to be stupid beyond all words.

There was not one really good fight in them all, and after an honest villain like Brian de Bois Guilbert, the bad people in these volumes were very lacking in stamina. The "Rollo" books were gay compared to them. I concluded that if anything on earth could make a child hate religion, it was the perusal of these unreal books. My mother saw that I had Alban Butler's "Lives of the Saints" for Sunday reading. They were equally dull; and other "Lives," highly recommended, were quite as uninspiring as the little volumes from the Protestant library. They were generally translated from the French, without vitality and without any regard for the English idiom. I recall, through the mists, sitting down one Sunday afternoon, to read "The Life of Saint Rose of Lima." As it concerned itself with South America, it seemed to me that there might be in it a good fighter or two; or, at least, somebody might cut off the ear of a High Priest's servant as was done in the New Testament. But no, I was shocked to read in the very beginning, that

so pure was the little Saint, even in her infancy, that when her uncle, who was her G.o.dfather, kissed her after her baptism, a rosy glow, a real blush of shame, overspread her countenance.

In that book I read no more that day!

But I discovered a volume I have never forgotten, which probably after "The Young Marooners," had the greatest influence on me for a short period. This was "Fabiola," by Cardinal Wiseman. There was good stuff in it; it made me feel proud to be a Christian; it was full of thrills; and it taught a lot about the archaeology of Rome, for it was part of that excellent story. I have always looked on "Fabiola" as a very great book. Then at Christmas, when my father gave me "The Last Days of Pompeii," I was in a new world, not alien to the world of "Fabiola," but in some way supplementary to it. This gift was accompanied by Washington Irving's "Tales of the Alhambra." _Conspuez les livres des poupees!_ What nice little story books, arranged for the growing mind, could awaken such visions of the past, such splendid arabesques and trailing clouds of glory as this book! Read at the right time, it makes the pomegranate and the glittering crescents live forever, and creates a love for Spain and a romance of old Spain which can never die.

After this, I had a cold mental douche. I was given "Les Enfants des Bois," by Elie Berthet in French, to translate word for word. It was a horrible task, and the difficulties of the verbs and the laborious research in the dictionary prevented me from enjoying the adventures of these infants. I cannot remember anything that happened to them; but I know that the book gave me an ever-enduring distrust of the subjunctive mood in the Gallic language. Somebody had left about a copy of a French romance called "Les Aventures de Polydore Marasquin." It was of things that happened to a man in a kingdom of monkeys. It went very well, with an occasional use of the dictionary, until I discovered that the gentleman was about to engage himself to a very attractive monkeyess. I gave up the book in disgust, but I have since discovered that there have been lately several imitators of these adventures, which I think were written by an author named Leon Gozlan.

About this time, the book auction became a fashion in Philadelphia. If your people had respect for art, they invariably subscribed to a publication called the _Cosmopolitan Art Magazine_, and you received a steel engraving of Shakespeare and his Friends, with Sir Walter Raleigh very much in the foreground, wearing a beautifully puffed doublet and very well-fitting hose, and another steel engraving of Washington at Lexington. If your people were interested in literature, they frequented the book auctions. My father had a great respect for what he called "cla.s.sical literature." He considered Cowper's "The Task" immensely cla.s.sical; it was beautifully bound, and he never read it. One day he secured a lovely edition of the "Complete Works of Thomas Moore." It had been a subject of much compet.i.tion at the auction, and was cherished accordingly. The binding was tooled. It was put on the centre table and adored as a work of art. Here was richness!

Tom Moore's long poems are no doubt cla.s.sed at present as belonging to those old and faded gardens in which "The Daisy" and "The Keepsake," by Lady Blessington, once flourished; but if I could only recall the pleasure I had in the reading of "Lalla Rookh" and "The Veiled Prophet of Korha.s.son," I think I should be very happy. And the notes to "Lalla Rookh" and to Moore's prose novel of "The Epicurean"! "The Epicurean"

was not much of a novel, but the notes were full of amazing Egyptian mysteries, which seemed quite as splendid as the machinery in the "Arabian Nights." The notes to "Lalla Rookh" smelled of roses, and I remember as a labour of love copying out all the allusions to roses in these notes with the intention of writing about them when I grew up. My mother objected to the translations from Anacreon; she said they were "improper"; but my father said that he had been a.s.sured on competent authority that they were "cla.s.sic," and of course that settled it. There was no story in them, and they seemed to me to be stupid.

Just about this time, one of the book auctions yielded up a copy of the "Complete Works of Miss Mitford." You perhaps can imagine how a city boy, who was allowed to spend two weeks each year at the most on the arid New Jersey seacoast, fell upon "Our Village." It became an incentive for long walks, in the hope of finding some country lanes and something resembling the English primroses. I read and reread "Our Village" until I could close my eyes at any time and see the little world in which Miss Mitford lived. I tried to read her tragedy, "The Two Foscari." A tragedy had a faint interest; but, being exiled to the attic for some offense against the conventionalities demanded of a Philadelphia child, with no book but Miss Mitford's, I spent my time looking up all the references to roses in her tragedies. These I combined with the knowledge acquired from Tom Moore, and made notes for a paper to be printed in some great periodical in the future. Why roses?

Why Miss Mitford and roses? Why Tom Moore and roses? I do not know, but, when I was sixteen years of age, I printed the paper in _Appleton's Journal_, where it may still be found. My parents, who did not look on my literary attempts, at the expense of mathematics, with favour, suggested that I was a plagiarist, but as I had no time to look up the meaning of the word in the dictionary, I let it go. It simply struck me as one of those evidences of misunderstanding which every honest artist must be content to accept.

My mother, evidently fearing the influence of "cla.s.sical" literature, gave me one day "The Parent's a.s.sistant," by Miss Edgeworth. I think that it was in this book that I discovered "Rosamond; or The Purple Jar"

and the story of the good boy or girl who never cut the bit of string that tied a package; I sedulously devoted myself to the imitation of this economic child, and was very highly praised for getting the best out of a good book until I broke a tooth in trying to undo a very tough knot.

It was a far cry from the respectable Miss Edgeworth to a series of Beadle's "Dime Novels." I looked on them as delectable but inferior.

There was a prejudice against them in well-brought-up households; but if you thoughtfully provided yourself with a brown paper cover, which concealed the flaring yellow of Beadle's front page, you were very likely to escape criticism. I never finished "Osceola, the Seminole,"

because my aunt looked over my shoulder and read a rapturous account of a real fight, in which somebody kicked somebody else violently in the abdomen. My aunt reported to my mother that the book was very "indelicate" and after that Beadle's "Dime Novels" were absolutely forbidden. At school, we were told that any boy who read Beadle's was a moral leper; but as most of us concluded that leper had something to do with leaper, the effect was not very convincing.

Perhaps I might have been decoyed back to Beadle's, for all the youngsters knew that there was nothing really wrong in them, but I happened to remember the scene in Sir Walter Scott's "Abbot," where Edward Glendenning wades into the sea to prevent Mary Stuart from leaving Scotland. I hied me to "The Monastery" and devoured everything of Sir Walter's except "Saint Ronan's Well." That never seemed worthy of the great Sir Walter. "The Black Dwarf" and "Anne of Geierstein" were rather tough reading, and "Count Robert of Paris" might have been written by Lord Bacon, if Lord Bacon had been a contemporary of Sir Walter's. "Peveril of the Peak" and "Ivanhoe" and "Bride of Lammermoor"

again and again dazzled and consoled me until I discovered "Nicholas Nickleby."

"Nicholas Nickleby" took entire possession of me. In the rainy winter afternoons, when nothing could occur out of doors which a respectable city boy was permitted to indulge in, I found that I was expected to work. Boys worked hard at their lessons in those days. There was a kitchen downstairs with a Dutch oven not used in the winter. There it was easy to build a small fire and to toast bread and to read "Nicholas Nickleby" after one had rushed through the required tasks, which generally included ten pages of the "Historia Sacra" in Latin. If you never read "Nicholas Nickleby" when you were young, you cannot possibly know the flavour of d.i.c.kens. You can't laugh now as you laughed then.

Oh, the delight of Mr. Crummles's description of his wife's dignified manner of standing with her head on a spear!

The tragedy in "Nicholas Nickleby" never appealed to me. It was necessary to skip that. When the people were gentlemanly and ladylike, they became great bores. But what young reader of d.i.c.kens can forget the hostile att.i.tude of Mr. Lillyvick, great-uncle of the little Miss Kenwigses, when Nicholas attempted to teach them French? As one grows older, even Mr. Squeers and 'Tilda give one less real delight; but think of the first discovery of them, and it is like Balboa's--or was it Cortez's?--discovery of the Pacific in Keats's sonnet. "Nicholas Nickleby" was read over and over again, with unfailing pleasure. I found "Little Dorrit" rather tiresome; "Barnaby Rudge" and "A Tale of Two Cities" seemed to be rather serious reading, not quite d.i.c.kensish enough for my taste, yet better than anything else that anybody had written. My later impressions of d.i.c.kens modified these instinctive intuitions.

One day, a set of Thackeray arrived, little green volumes, as I remember, and I began to read "Vanity Fair." My mother seized it and read it aloud again. Her confessor had told her that a dislike for good novels was "Puritan" and she, shocked by the implied reproach, took again to novel reading. I am afraid that I disliked Colonel Dobbin and Amelia very much. Becky Sharp pleased me beyond words; I don't think that the morality of the case affected my point of view at all. I was delighted whenever Becky "downed" an enemy. They were such a lot of stupid people--the enemies--and I reflected during the course of the story that, after all, Thackeray had said that poor Becky had no mother to guide her footsteps. When the Marquis of Steyne was. .h.i.t on the forehead with the diamonds, I thought it served him right; but I was unhappy because poor Becky had lost the jewels. In finishing the book with those lovely Thackerayan cadences, my mother said severely, "That is what always happens to bad people!" But in my heart I did not believe that Becky Sharp was a bad person at all.

For a time I returned to d.i.c.kens, to "Nicholas Nickleby," to "David Copperfield." I respected Thackeray. He had gripped me in some way that I could not explain. But d.i.c.kens I loved. Later--it was on one June afternoon I think--when the news of d.i.c.kens's death arrived, it seemed to me that for a while all delight in life had ended.

One of those experts in psychology who are always seeking questions sometime ago wrote to me demanding if "Plutarch's Lives" had influenced me, and whether I thought they were good reading for the young. Our "Plutarch" was rather appalling to look at. It was bound in mottled cardboard, and the pages had red edges; but I attacked it one day, when I was about ten years of age, and became enthralled. It was "actual." My mother was a veteran politician, and read a daily paper, with Southern tendencies called the _Age_; my father belonged to the opposite party, and admired Senator h.o.a.r as greatly as my mother admired the famous Vallandigham. Between the two, I had formed a very poor opinion of American statesmen in general; but the statesmen in "Plutarch" were of a very different type.

Julius Caesar interested me; but Brutus filled me with exaltation. I had not then read Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar." It seemed to me that Brutus was a model for all time. Now, understand I was a good Christian child, and I said my prayers every night and morning, but this did not prevent me from hating the big bully of the school, who made the lives of the ten or fifteen small boys a perpetual torment. How we suffered, no adult human tongue can tell--and our tongues never told because it was a convention that tales should not be told out of school. One of the pleasant tricks of the bully and his friends was to chase the little boys after school in the winter and bury them until they were almost suffocated in the snow which was piled up in the narrow streets. It was not only suffocating snow, but it was dirty snow. It happened that I had been presented with a penknife consisting of two rather leaden blades covered with a brilliant iridescent mother-of-pearl handle. The bully wanted this knife, and I knew it. Generally, I left it at home; but it occurred to me on one inspired morning, after I had read "Plutarch" the night before, that I would display the knife open in my pocket, and when he threw the full weight of his body upon me, I would kill him at once, by an upward thrust of the knife.

This struck me as a good deed entirely worthy of Brutus. Of course, I knew that I should be hanged, but then I expected the glory of making a last dying speech, and, besides, the school would have a holiday. On the morning preceding the great sacrifice, I gave out dark hints to the small boys, distributed my various belongings to friends who were about to be bereaved, and predicted a coming holiday. I was looked on as rather "crazy," but I reflected that I would soon be considered heroic, and my friends gladly accepted the gifts.

The fatal afternoon came. I displayed the penknife. The chase began. The bully and his chosen friends threw themselves upon me. The moment had come; I thrust the knife upward; the big boy uttered a howl, and ran, still howling. I looked for blood, but there was none visible; I came to the conclusion, with satisfaction, that he was bleeding internally. I spent a gloomy evening at home uttering dire predictions which were incomprehensible to the members of my family, and reread Brutus, in the "Lives."

The next morning I went to school with lessons unstudied and awaited events. The mother of the bully appeared, and entered into an excited colloquy with the very placid and dignified teacher. I announced to the boy next to me, "My time has come." I was called up to the awful desk.

"Is he dead?" I asked. "Did he bleed internally?" "You little wretch,"

the mother of the tyrant said, "you cut such fearful holes in my son's coat, that he is afraid to come to school to-day!" Then I said, regretfully, "Oh, I hoped that I had killed him." There was a sensation; my character was blackened. I was set down as a victim of total depravity; I endured it all, but I knew in my heart that it was "Plutarch." This is the effect that "Plutarch" had on the mind of a good Christian child.

The effects of "Plutarch" on my character were never discovered at home, and as I grew older and learned one or two wrestling tricks, the bully let me alone. Besides, my murderous intention, which had leaked out, gave me such a reputation that I became a dictator myself, and made terms for the small boys, in the name of freedom, which were sometimes rather despotic.

It was also during these days that I remember carrying confusion into the family when a patronizing, intellectual lady called and said, "I hope that this dear little boy is reading the Rollo books?" "No," I answered quickly and indiscreetly, "I am reading 'The New Magdalen,' by Wilkie Collins." I did not think much of Wilkie Collins until I read "The Moonstone." It seemed that "The New Magdalen" had been purchased inadvertently by my father, in a packet of "cla.s.sics."

My father generally arrived at home late in the afternoon, when he read the evening paper. After a very high tea, he stretched himself on a long horsehair-covered sofa, and bade me read to him, generally from the novels of George Eliot, or from certain romances running through the New York _Ledger_ by Sylva.n.u.s Cobb, Jr. These were generally stories of the times of the Irish Kings, in which gallowgla.s.ses and lovely and aristocratic Celtic maidens disported themselves. My mother, after her conversion, disapproved of the New York _Ledger_. In fact, there were families in Philadelphia whose heads regarded it with real horror! In our house, there was a large stack of this interesting periodical, which, with many volumes of G.o.dey's _Lady's Book_, were packed in the attic.