I remember that when I had finally made up my mind that the doctrine of predestination was true, and that I was clearly one of those who were foreordained to be damned for incapacity to believe the incredible, I became for a time thoroughly comfortable in my mind, very much as I suppose a man of business is when he receives his discharge in bankruptcy. I felt myself emancipated from many restraints that had sat heavily on my boyish soul. Having decided, with the mature wisdom of ten or a dozen years of age, that I was to be damned in any case, I saw no reason why I should not read the fascinating books that had been forbidden to me by the discipline of the Methodist Church, to which I perforce belonged.
In that early day of strenuous theological requirement, the Methodist Church disapproved of literature as such, and approved it only in so far as it was made the instrument of a propaganda. Its discipline required that each person upon being "received into full membership"—the Methodist equivalent of confirmation—should take a vow not "to read such books or sing such songs as do not pertain to the glory of God." I quote the phrase from memory, but accurately I think. That prohibition, as interpreted by clerical authority at the time, had completely closed to me the treasures of the library my scholarly father had collected, and to which, under his dying instructions, my mother had added many scores of volumes of the finest English literature, purchased with the money for which his law books had been sold after his death.
I had read a little here and there in those books, and had been fascinated with the new world they opened to my vision, when, at the ripe age of ten or twelve years, I was compelled by an ill-directed clerical authority to submit myself to the process of being "received into full membership," under the assumption that I had "reached the age of responsibility."
After that the books I so longed to read were forbidden to me—especially a set entitled "The British Drama," in which appeared the works of Ben Jonson, Marlowe, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, and a long list of other classics, filling five thick volumes. By no ingenuity of construction could such books be regarded as homilies in disguise, and so they were Anathema. So was Shakespeare, and so even was Thiers' "French Revolution," of which I had devoured the first volume in delight, before the inhibition fell upon me, blasting my blind but eager aspiration for culture and a larger knowledge of the world and of human nature.
XI
Culture by Stealth
After I made up my mind to accept damnation as my appointed portion, I felt myself entirely free to revel at will in the reading that so appealed to my hungry mind; free, that is to say, so far as my own conscience was concerned, but no freer than before so far as the restraints of authority could determine the matter. I had no hesitation in reading the books when I could do so without being caught at it, but to be caught at it was to be punished for it and, worse still, it was to have the books placed beyond my reach, a thing I dreaded far more than mere punishment. Punishment, indeed, seemed to me nothing more than a small advance upon the damnation I must ultimately suffer in any case. The thing to be avoided was discovery, because discovery must lead to the confiscation of my books, the loss of that liberty which my acceptance of damnation had given to me.
To that end I practised many deceits and resorted to many subterfuges. I read late at night when I was supposed to be asleep. I smuggled books out into the woods and hid them there under the friendly roots of trees, so that I might go out and read them when I was supposed to be engaged in a search for ginseng, or in a hunt for the vagrant cow, to whose unpunctuality in returning to be milked I feel that I owe an appreciable part of such culture as I have acquired.
The clerical hostility to literature endured long after the period of which I have been writing, long after the railroad and other means of freer intercourse had redeemed the West from its narrow provincialism. Even in my high school days, when our part of the country had reached that stage of civilization that hangs lace curtains at its windows, wears store clothes of week days, and paints garden fences green instead of white, we who were under Methodist dominance were rigidly forbidden to read fiction or anything that resembled fiction, with certain exceptions. The grown folk of our creed permitted themselves to read the inane novels of the Philadelphia tailor, T. S. Arthur; the few young men who "went to college," were presumed to be immune to the virus of the Greek and Latin fictions they must read there—probably because they never learned enough of Greek or Latin to read them understandingly—and finally there were certain polemic novels that were generally permitted.