Books That Stay By

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

I HAVE never discovered just how to classify them. With me, at all events, — and in this corner we are privileged, I take it, to talk of personal experience and impression, leaving formality and eloquence to our betters in the more public parts of the magazine, — with me such books seem not to be restricted to any special, recognizable class. I could go to my shelves and pick them out, with more or less of hesitation and fumbling, — not without some indecisive takings down and puttings back again, probably; but when all was done they would look, I apprehend, like a rather motley crew, — as if the chooser’s taste had been more freakish than catholic. Even so, however, they would have at least one thing in common: they would be mostly books that I did not fall in love with early. As between man and man, — meaning also, but not exclusively, as between man and woman, — I am a believer in love at first sight; that is to say, I think I am. At all events, I am not a disbeliever, although if I were put to it, and compelled to rake my memory over, I fear I should have to confess that, according to the sum of my observation and experience, love at first sight does not always turn out to be the poet’s

My own youthful bookish affections, certainly, have shifted under far less stress of weather than such language seems to figure. The truth is, no doubt, that in this respect, as in others, we are all parts of the whole, and subject to the general law. It would be a bold man who should boast of standing still (though some theologians have seemed to do it, we must admit), with all the rest of creation on the move about him. So I take no shame to myself for having neither fixity of taste nor fixity of opinion. Even the poet, in his highest flight, makes the child to be only the father of the man.

As a reader, then, — I confess it frankly, for all the natural piety that has bound my days together, — I have altered as I alteration found, and bent with the remover to remove. My condition, in short, is not dissimilar to that of another “reader,” with whose curiously naive confessions (my thanks to him) we were recently favored in this place.

Carlyle and Macaulay, for example, friendly as I once was with them both, are now for the most part mere stayers upon the shelf, — pensioners, so to speak, enjoying an otium cum indignitate, — serving a use, such as it is, as reminders of a good time (and what a good time it was!) now far removed.

Emerson, a considerably later favorite, is more frequently invited down. He long counted for so very much with me — many times more than Carlyle and Macaulay together — that it must be I shall still find him companionable, I say to myself; but alas! the experiment is more likely than not to end in failure. There is a world of lofty thought and feeling between those faded maroon covers; no one has better reason than I to know it; but somehow, for better or worse (it is my fault, if anybody’s, but I suspect it is nobody’s), the noble sentences no longer stir me as they used to do. Perhaps the tide will turn again, perhaps not. Possibly I have read the books so much (few, if any, ever did more for me) that whatever of nutriment and stimulus they once contained for my particular need was some time ago exhausted. For my particular need, I say; for as no author ever put into his book all that his best readers get out of it, so no one reader, however faithful and competent, ever gets out of a book all that the author put into it. There is no such thing, in other words, as mind answering perfectly to mind.

Thoreau, up to this date, lasts better with me than his so-called master. Some wiser head than mine can possibly tell me why. Perhaps, although he was a younger man, he wrote for older readers. He seems to me rather more concrete, more nutty, to use a word of his own. He is more provocative, and oftener gives me a useful nudge. Sometimes, too, serious humorist that the man was, he makes me laugh, at him or at myself, — a pretty sound benefit, better and better esteemed by most of us, I think, as years lengthen and desire begins to fail.

Matthew Arnold, again, with whom I have faithfully served my time, is no longer quite what in the old days I found him. To tell the unhappy truth (I speak of his prose), he is beginning to seem to me like an old story, a “back number,” — if it is n’t too free an expression, a sucked orange. I fed much upon him, but while I acknowledge my debt with all thankfulness, it is with no very fervent yearnings for a second course. Is it, I wonder, that I feel a something too much of the schoolmaster in him, — as if the rest of us were to him but so many boys on the bench?

Lowell keeps a better place, though I still see, as I have always done, some of his shortcomings. These, fortunately, are not of the nagging, unendurable sort, and, after all, we do not let books go so often for their faults as for their deficiencies. If he sometimes permits a metaphor to run away with his discretion, I have only to skip a few lines. If he is unpleasantly smart once in a while, as I am sure he is, that is a failing that leans to virtue’s side, and withal is not amazingly common. It annoys me, now and then, to think how much better he might have done with a more patient revision, but on the whole the best of his prose is still an invigoration to me. I can read it in those hours, known to all bookish people, when I feel the need of something that is familiar and yet as good as new.

And so I might go on; but Club talk must not degenerate into monologue, and really I had no thought of compiling a list. Let the names I have cited be taken as examples merely, not the best, of necessity, but such as came first to hand. My concern is not so much with the case of this or that author as with the general question of the quality or qualities by virtue of which any author retains his hold upon us. Why is it, I say, that Stevenson wears with me so much better than some whom my critical judgment (for I am supposed to have one) settles upon as larger men ? Somehow the best of his work (the best to me) bears a fresh reading most remarkably well. At times, indeed, I question whether he really was a smaller man; whether his highly finished style has not caused him to pass for a less substantial thinker than he actually was. Clear water, I remind myself, is sometimes deeper than it looks. I will not presume to judge. One thing, nevertheless, I am bound to say: that I am often finding stimulation and help in him, choice and (even yet) unexpected turns of phrase through which a new light breaks in upon the mind. He pleases me greatly by these flashes. Taking times together, few things are more to my liking. My attention is kept awake, now and then I have a thought of my own, or what seems to be my own (an extraordinary piece of fortune), and when I lay the book down I am conscious of a feeling of elation, expansion, uplifting, as if I had been breathing pure air and looking at a wide prospect. As long as any books do this for me, so long I shall love to read them.

So it is with Montaigne, dear old Montaigne. I seldom feel like being with him a great while at once, but I never wish to be long without at least a rambling page or two of his wise garrulity. Perhaps I am naturally something of a gossip myself. My occupation at the present minute may be held to indicate as much. That I like the personal note is certain. Who is there that does n’t ? When I read a book I relish it all the better if it sounds like a man talking; and if he talks about himself, with a modicum of frankness and a modicum of wit, why, so much the better still. Good Montaigne, good Stevenson, say I, your place is on the table rather than on the shelf, and long may you be within reach from my pillow.