There is something, however, to be said in favor of romantic books, despite the horrible examples at the top of this barrel. Perhaps our own literature shivers in too thin a shift. For once upon a time somewhere between the age of bustles and ourselves there were writers who ended their stories “and they were married and lived happily ever after.” Whereas at this present day stories are begun “They were married and straightway things began to go to the devil.” And for my own part I have read enough of family quarrels. I am tired of the tune upon the triangle and I am ready for softer flutings. When I visit my neighbors, I want them to make a decent pretense. It was Charles Lamb who found his married friends too loving in his presence, but let us not go to extremes! And so, after I have read a few books of marital complication, I yearn for the old-fashioned couple in the older books who went hand in hand to old age. At this minute there is a black book that looks down upon me like a crow. It is “Crime and Punishment.” I read it once when I was ill, and I nearly died of it. I confess that after a very little acquaintance with such books I am tempted to sequester them on a top shelf somewhere, beyond reach of tiptoe, where they may brood upon their banishment and rail against the world.
Encyclopedias and the tonnage of learning properly take their places on the lowest shelves, for their lump and mass make a fitting foundation. I must say, however, that the habit of the dictionary of secreting itself in the darkest corner of the lowest shelf contributes to general illiteracy. I have known families wrangle for ten minutes on the meaning of a word rather than lift this laggard from its depths. Be that as it may, the novels and poetry should be on the fifth shelf from the bottom, just off the end of the nose, so to speak.
Now, the vinegar cruet is never the largest vessel in the house. So by strict analogy, sour books—the kind that bite the temper and snarl upon your better moods—should be in a small minority. Do not mistake me! I shall find a place, maybe, for a volume or two of Nietzsche, and all of Ibsen surely. I would admit uplift too, for my taste is catholic. And there will be other books of a kind that never rouse a chuckle in you. For these are necessary if for no more than as alarm clocks to awake us from our dreaming self-content. But in the main I would not have books too insistent upon the wrongs of the world and the impossibility of remedy.
I confess to a liking for tales of adventure, for wrecks in the South Seas, for treasure islands, for pirates with red shirts. Mark you, how a red shirt lights up a dull page! It is like a scarlet leaf on a gray November day. Also I have a weakness for the bang of pistols, round oaths and other desperate rascality. In such stories there is no small mincing. A villain proclaims himself on his first appearance—unless John Silver be an exception—and retains his villainy until the rope tightens about his neck in the last chapter but one; the very last being set aside for the softer commerce of the hero and heroine.
You will remember that about twenty years ago a fine crop of such stories came out of the Balkans. At that time it was a dim, unknown land, a kind of novelists’ Coast of Bohemia, an appropriate setting for distressed princesses. I’ll hazard a guess that there was not a peak in all that district on which there was not some Black Rudolph’s castle, not a road that did not clack romantically with horses’ hoofs on bold adventure. But the wars have changed all this by bringing too sharp a light upon the dim scenery of this pageantry, and swash-bucklery is all but dead.
To confess the truth, it is in such stories that I like horses best. In real life I really do not like them at all. I am rather afraid of them as of strange organisms that I can neither start with ease nor stop with safety. It is not that I never rode or drove a horse. I have achieved both. But I don’t urge him to deviltry. Instead I humor his whims. Some horses even I might be fond of. Give me a horse that nears the age of slippered pantaloon and is, moreover, phlegmatic in his tastes, and then, as the stories say “with tightened girth and feet well home”—but enough! I must not be led into boasting.
But in these older stories I love a horse. With what fire do his hoofs ring out in the flight of elopement! “Pursuit’s at the turn. Speed my brave Dobbin!” And when the Prince has kissed the Princess’ hand, you know that the story is nearly over and that they will live happily ever after. Of course there is always someone to suggest that Cinderella was never happy after she left her ashes and pumpkins and went to live in the palace. But this is idle gossip. Even if there were “occasional bickerings” between her and the Prince, this is as Lamb says it should be among “near relations.”
I nearly died of “Crime and Punishment.” These Russian novelists have too distressful a point of view. They remind me too painfully of the poem—
It was dreadful dark