Why we should read Part 1

Why we should read.

by S. P. B. Mais.

INTRODUCTION

From reviews that I have read of earlier books of mine I have at last learnt wisdom. It seems that I must be explicit about my intentions in a preface in order to save the critics the trouble of reading the book through.

Now it must be remembered that literary critics are men of intelligence who have read everything and d.a.m.ned most things. Very few indeed are the books which they allow to be worth the trouble that must have been taken to write them.

And it is certainly true that we suffer from a flood of reading matter which serves no more purpose than a packet of the cheapest cigarettes or a c.o.c.ktail.

We have not troubled to acquire a critical sense. We accept what we see on the bookstalls and buy books almost entirely from the attractiveness of their wrappers. But there ought to be a mean between a ferocious disdain of all modern writing and a surfeiting on all that is published.

The majority of men and women are very much like myself, I imagine. They read with equal interest a modern novel, say, of Sheila Kaye-Smith, an exposition of the Relativity Theory like Eddington's _s.p.a.ce, Time and Gravitation_, E. V. Lucas's essays, Henri Fabre and Trotter, and at the same time keep harking back to reread _Don Quixote_, _Tristram Shandy_, Sh.e.l.ley and other favourites among the cla.s.sics.

Even so, they are apt to miss much that is readable ... and from my correspondence I gather that I have many times been lucky enough to introduce an author to a new reader, as a result of which an undying friendship between the two has been caused.

Merely to turn over the following pages will not give the critic any clue why I chose the writers and books that I have chosen.

In point of fact, it just happens that these are the people who have attracted me sufficiently in my reading during the last year to jot down not so much why I found them attractive as what I found attractive in them.

It is quite by chance that there should be almost an equal number of foreigners, contemporaries and native cla.s.sics in my list. I suppose it means that I devote about one-third of my reading hours to each.

With regard to my method of approach, it is no good reviling me for not criticising each book or author according to a stereotyped plan, as if I were a chemist a.n.a.lysing a compound. I am not a.n.a.lysing so much as enjoying. My position is that of the not altogether successful cricketer who yet takes a keen delight in watching great players bat. I do not propose to sit down and lay emphasis on the chances given or the faulty strokes: my object is rather to take as many enthusiasts of the game with me as I can find and just lie down and watch an innings which I know to be a good one.

To call this "gush" or "gusto," as some of my reviewers do, is merely silly. I am not so mentally deficient as they would have people to believe.

Merely to "s...o...b..r" over a book or a person is not one of my characteristics. It is extremely easy to pick holes, to adopt a negative att.i.tude, to call down fire from heaven and make a show with the fists when your enemy is merely an author. That is not my idea of honourable action. If a book is bad (and I agree that most books are), let it die by itself. Professional critics only too frequently remind me of vultures: they crowd round the weak and the dying ready to devour.

The object of any man who enjoys life is to share his enjoyment with others. If a book appeals to me I want as many people as possible to derive the pleasure that I derived from it.

I would have my critics remember that this is not a book on "Why we should _not_ Read----" (which would have been very easy to write), and therefore is meant to be laudatory. I do demand sincerity in my authors and at any rate a feeling for beauty.... Knowing full well as a novelist myself how extremely hard these desiderata are to be obtained, I am perhaps more lenient than some critics who have never tackled a creative task, just as I am less inclined to decry another man's strokes at cricket when I think of my own feeble efforts, but it is very definitely worth pointing out that the severest critics of any sport are always those who know nothing about it, and I am beginning to believe that these modern critics who find no good in any work which comes under their notice know nothing whatever about literature, but, like the audiences at a Cup-tie, talk a wonderful jargon which is apt to deceive all but the elect.

I feel that I have wasted too much time on the critics. They don't really count for anything on either side.

To you for whom I have written this book there is perhaps just this to say. Don't begin by looking for fresh light on authors that you already know. My sole object is to introduce you to authors that you don't yet know. This introduction was not written for you. You can leave it out.

The introduction was written for the critics, the book for you, and the proportion of pages devoted to them set against the pages devoted to you will give you an accurate idea of the proportion of favour that I want, yours and the critics'.

Five of the shortest chapters in this book have been already published, one in _To-Day_, the others in _John o' London's Weekly_; to the editors of these journals I am indebted for permission to reprint.

PART I

SOME ENGLISH CLa.s.sICS

I

_TOM JONES_

I suppose there is still somebody living who has not read _Tom Jones_: it seems inconceivable that it should be so, but queer things of this sort do happen. Only the other day I met a man who had never seen any Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera. To say that Fielding possessed more wit and humour and more knowledge of mankind than any other person of modern times, except Shakespeare, ought to be sufficient to drive anyone ignorant of his work at once to the nearest bookshop. "Since the days of Homer," says one great critic, "the world has not seen a more artful fable [than _Tom Jones_]. The characters and adventures are wonderfully diversified; yet the circ.u.mstances are all so natural, and rise so easily from one another, and co-operate with so much regularity in bringing on, even while they seem to r.e.t.a.r.d, the catastrophe, that the curiosity of the reader is kept always awake, and instead of flagging, grows more and more impatient as the story advances, till at last it becomes downright anxiety. And when we get to the end, and look back on the whole contrivance, we are amazed to find that of so many incidents there should be so few superfluous; that in such variety of fiction there should be so great probability, and that so complete a tale should be so perspicuously conducted and with perfect unity of design."

We read and reread _Tom Jones_ in order to recapture some of that first careless rapture which is so refreshing a point in Fielding's fiction, to get away from the weary, meticulous self-a.n.a.lysis of the modern novelist, to the full-blooded, honest att.i.tude of the country-bred Englishman of the eighteenth century. Here we have a tale told for the sake of narrative, with incidents, the interest in which never for a moment flags, characters all lively, true and fresh, dialogue full of point, variety and suitability. It is a test of our interest that we feel angry at the constant digressions and interruptions, but who would do without those masterly initial chapters in each book?

As to the charge of coa.r.s.eness which has been brought against him, we feel that Fielding would have been dumbfounded with surprise. He states explicitly, over and over again, that to recommend goodness and innocence was always his sincere endeavour, and certainly no higher-souled, purer heroine than Sophia Western ever walked. Even Tom Jones himself, who was singularly unable to resist the importunity of frail ladies, acts up to a code which is certainly not coa.r.s.e.

"I do not pretend to the gift of chast.i.ty more than my neighbours," he says to Nightingale. "I have been guilty with women, I own it, but am not conscious that I ever injured any. Nor would I, to procure pleasure to myself, be knowingly the cause of misery to any human being."

Allworthy, as his name suggests, is a model of what we should all like to be, generous, pure, slow to believe evil, quick to forgive, a true friend and a merciful judge.

"It hath been my constant maxim in life," he says to Blifil when he hears of his sister's marriage, "to make the best of all matters that happen."

Not that Fielding makes his characters impossibly good: there is none that avoids some taint. Allworthy is altogether too credulous, and Sophia's allegiance to her family pa.s.ses the bounds of common sense, while the rest of the characters have very much of the earthy in their texture. The lovable Partridge is a coward, his wife a shrew, Allworthy's sister and her husband hate each other like poison, Square and Thwack.u.m are eaten up with hypocrisy and deceit, young Blifil is an unredeemed villain, Squire Western is an ignorant, blasphemous boor, and his sister would be a thorn in any man's flesh. Square, with his eternal harping on the natural beauty of virtue, and Thwack.u.m, with his chatter about the divine power of grace, are a pretty couple of scoundrels for Fielding to lavish his irony on.

"Had not Thwack.u.m too much neglected virtue, and Square religion, in the composition of their several systems, and had not both utterly discarded all natural goodness of heart, they had never been represented as the objects of derision in this history," says the author.

But perhaps Fielding's greatest charm lies in his firm, masculine, straightforward, even racy English. We may take as an example what the ordinary author finds most difficult, the description of his heroine.

"Her shape was not only exact, but extremely delicate; and the nice proportion of her arms promised the truest symmetry in her limbs. Her hair, which was black, was so luxuriant that it reached her middle, before she cut it to comply with the modern fashion, and it was now curled so gracefully in her neck that few could believe it to be her own.... Her eyebrows were full, even, and arched beyond the power of art to imitate. Her black eyes had a l.u.s.tre in them which all her softness could not extinguish. Her nose was exactly regular, and her mouth, in which were two rows of ivory, exactly answered Sir John Suckling's description in those lines:

'Her lips were red, and one was thin, Compared to that was next her chin.

Some bee had stung it newly.'

Her cheeks were of the oval kind, and in her right she had a dimple, which the least smile discovered."

Such is the girl who fell in love with Tom Jones in her teens and who after an amazing series of misfortunes ultimately married him, in spite of her knowledge of his many temporary intrigues with other women.

Indeed, if she followed after her father, she would have "liked him the better for it."

"You have not the worse opinion of a young fellow," bellows the Squire to Sophia, "for getting a b.a.s.t.a.r.d, have you, girl? No, no, the women will like un the better for't."

Certainly Sophia did not seem to like Tom the worse for his amatory adventure with Molly Seagrim, perhaps because she, like her creator, was able to differentiate between real love and that "desire of satisfying a voracious appet.i.te with a certain quant.i.ty of delicate white human flesh" which pa.s.ses for love.

In other words, Fielding has made her human.

"We ... are admitted behind the scenes of this great theatre of nature,"

he proudly says in one of his prefaces "(and no author ought to write anything besides dictionaries and spelling-books who hath not this privilege)...." He is certainly admitted behind the scenes of the country squire's household.

Sophia's aunt, with her political and philosophical a.n.a.logies ("You are to consider me, child, as Socrates, not asking your opinion, but only informing you of mine"; and again, "The French shall as soon persuade me that they take foreign towns in defence only of their own country as you can impose on me to believe you have never yet thought seriously of matrimony ..."); Sophia's father's relations with his wife ("His conversation consisted chiefly of halloaing, singing, relations of sporting adventures, bawdy, and abuse of women and of the Government: these, however, were the only seasons when Mr Western saw his wife, for when he repaired to her bed he was generally so drunk that he could not see; and, in the sporting season, he always rose from her before it was light") and his att.i.tude to her after she died ("When anything in the least soured him, as a bad scenting day, or a distemper among his hounds, or any other such misfortune, he constantly vented his spleen by invectives against the deceased, saying, 'If my wife was alive now, she would be glad of this.'")--all these pictures are lightning strokes of verisimilitude which prove how perfectly at home Fielding was in the great theatre of nature.

When we come to the lower cla.s.ses, to Mrs Honour, with her "Marry, come up!" "Hoity toity!" prefaces to gossip, which is only rivalled and not excelled by her counterpart in Shakespeare, Juliet's nurse; to Partridge, with his pricelessly irrelevant tags from the cla.s.sics: "infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem," "hinc illae lachrymae,"

"tempus edax rerum," and so on, we can only give ourselves up whole-heartedly to the enjoyment of them and wish that they may go on talking for ever.