The book with beautiful illustrations is a true investment, since now such illustrations are seldom if ever wasted on a second-rate text. To a great extent these illustrated books are ones appreciable by children as well as by their elders—things like Westward Ho! and The Last of the Mohicans—and came up for our consideration in Chapter 9. But there are certain classics, like the editions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Milton’s Comus with pictures by Arthur Rackham, which are adult throughout. One of the most splendid is the Vierge Edition of Don Quixote, in four volumes, illustrated with 260 drawings by Daniel Vierge and provided with an introduction by Royal Cortissoz. The same work, illustrated by Jean de Bosschere, may be had in one large volume; and other treasures of the sort are The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, both illustrated by Edmund Dulac. I must not omit the edition of Scott’s Quentin Durward, with illustrations in color by the American artist, C. Bosseron Chambers.
When, in Chapter 2, we discussed books of essays, it was with the thought of their beguiling qualities pretty much forward in our minds. I hope I do not derogate the essay, a literary form raised to the highest eminence by Bacon, Emerson, Lamb and so many others, when I say that its widest and most useful office resembles the form of investment known as short-term notes. Investors of money are constantly in receipt of funds for which, at the moment, they have no suitable repository; and investors in literature are frequently in the same fix. The man with money buys high grade commercial paper with an early maturity and watches for his long-term investment. The reader with time on his hands may often most profitably do likewise. But in one respect he is the more favoured person. If his brief-lived investment is well-chosen, the chances are great that it will lead him to some author or some group of books to which he can gladly commit his reading hours for a month or several months or a year.
Such, among literary profit-producers, are books like Stuart P. Sherman’s The Genius of America and his Americans, the first devoted to “studies in behalf of the younger generation” of such subjects as Puritanism, shifting morals, popular education and American critical writing; the second a series of presentations of individual figures—Roosevelt, Emerson, Whitman, Carnegie, Paul Elmer More, Franklin, and others. Either his On or his fictional satire, The Mercy of Allah, should lead the chance reader some ways further in the conquest of Hilaire Belloc. Dr. Joseph Collins’s The Doctor Looks at Literature has, in a very few months, created and aborted some thousands of readers of James Joyce, Fyodor Dostoievski, Marcel Proust, D. H. Lawrence, May Sinclair, Rebecca West, Stella Benson, Katherine Mansfield and the other contemporary writers whose pathology it inquires into. Books about books have all the range from Jesse Lee Bennett’s invaluable reader’s Baedeker, What Books Can Do for Me (with priceless reading lists of every variety) to Maurice Francis Egan’s delightful Confessions of a Book-Lover and Henry van Dyke’s Companionable Books. What will you try? John Corbin’s The Return of the Middle Class with its impulsion toward other social studies? J. H. Gardiner’s The Bible as English Literature or William Lyon Phelps’s Human Nature in the Bible with their lights upon ancient thinking and racial character? Corbin’s book may lead you back to Edward Carpenter’s Civilization: Its Cause and Cure. Gardiner and Phelps may send you to Horace G. Hutchinson’s The Greatest Story in the World, which is the story of mankind from the beginnings of history to the time of the firm establishment of the Roman Empire. From that picturesque history of the civilisations that succeeded each other in the Mediterranean lands would you be led in the direction of Henry Fairfield Osborn’s Men of the Old Stone Age and Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, or toward the recent books by Lothrop Stoddard, or into the fascinations of Edwyn Bevan’s Hellenism and Christianity and G. Lowes Dickinson’s The Greek View of Life, I wonder? As one wishful of your enjoyment and satisfaction, I hope you wonder, too.
Here, of all things, is A History of Chinese Literature, by Herbert A. Giles, professor of Chinese in the University of Cambridge (you didn’t know they had one, did you?). It begins with Confucius (born B.C. 551) and is divided into eight parts according to dynasties. One sees easily that while each age had its poets and writers, the drama and the novel did not develop in China until the Mongol Dynasty (A.D. 1200) and the famous Ming Dynasty (A.D. 1368-1544). From all the important writers Dr. Giles quotes at length in excellent translation; he summarises plays and explains the curious technique of the Chinese theatre. The book is rounded off with examples of Chinese wit and humour.
Here is George H. McKnight’s English Words and Their Background, with facts only recently recognised about the relation and differences of American English and British English; with a good chapter on slang; with new light on the changes word meanings have undergone, and why; with stuff about personal names and place names.
The general reader has perhaps tried to find out about Dante, and found, on the one hand, some work by the scholar and for the scholar, on the other, books full of technical and controversial idiom. Behold, here is Mary Bradford Whiting’s Dante: The Man and the Poet with its simple and memorable account of the student, lover and statesman, the exile and wanderer, the poet and seer. Or he has wondered if it were impossible for anyone to write about sex with beauty and sanity—and then has had the miracle of getting hold of Havelock Ellis’s Little Essays of Love and Virtue wrought in his behalf. He has been the victim all his life of such stuff as Freudians are made on, and some benignant fate has put into his hands Basil King’s convincing account of The Conquest of Fear. He has wearied over the Younger Generation and been comforted as he read Brander Matthew’s The Tocsin of Revolt; contemporary criticism—too contemporary—has set his teeth on edge until he found a more ripened wisdom in the books of W. C. Brownell. A sense of futility and a dark brown taste of boredom have resulted from the perusal of the usual kind of book on How to Live; and the sparkling and nutritious antidote has proved to be Arnold Bennett’s How to Make the Best of Life. For that condition in which one cannot endure concentration on a single topic for the duration of a book—what? Perhaps either volume of Bennett’s Things That Have Interested Me, or some such book as Basil Anderton’s Sketches From a Library Window, in which one may read about a French gourmet, a sixteenth century humanist, holiday joys in Northumberland, the art of the translator, the adventures of an English seaman in the Napoleonic wars, or Sir Thomas Browne.
v
“I never read fiction.”
The next time I meet him I shall not place in his hands a novel, not even one of the great masterpieces among the novels. I shall hand him My Best Story, to which thirty-one English authors have contributed (though we may claim John Russell for America). Here in a single book are such perfect tales as Stacy Aumonier’s “The Great Unimpressionable,” one from Ernest Bramah’s Kai Lung’s Golden Hours, Quiller-Couch’s “Statement of Gabriel Foot, Highwayman,” Galsworthy’s “Courage,” Perceval Gibbon’s “The Connoisseur,” Cunninghame Graham’s “The Lone Wolf,” Elinor Mordaunt’s “The Gold Fish,” John Russell’s “The Price of a Head” and Rebecca West’s “In a City That Is Now Ploughed Fields.” Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, W. W. Jacobs, May Sinclair, H. G. Wells and Israel Zangwill are some of the others who furnish stories for the collection. Such a book, by its variety as well as from its superlative quality, ought to win him to fiction more readily than any long tale, however distinguished.
He is rare, but you do sometimes meet him, that type of literary investor who cannot trust himself to range over the whole field ... like one whose fortune, however great, must needs be kept strictly in savings bank accounts. I grant you that one needs to know his fiction, both in itself and in relation to his possible profit. But I personally would not for the world be one of those who have never heard of Charles De Coster’s Legend of Ulenspiegel, that classic of the Lowland countries which Hendrik Van Loon named recently as one of the ten books he has enjoyed the most. I should not be willing to be ignorant of “Elizabeth,” whose Vera had such grim power and whose The Enchanted April made a good many enchanted Mays, Junes, Julys, Augusts and other months for its readers. Of what avail to have read novels by Kathleen Norris and to have missed Certain People of Importance, I should like to know? Who thinks he has any acquaintance with the work of Edna Ferber if he has omitted to read The Girls or such tales, in Gigolo, as “Old Man Minnick” and “Home Girl”? Yet there are unfortunate persons who read One Man in His Time and who will read the stories in The Shadowy Third and innocently suppose they have “read” Ellen Glasgow, that competent and admirable novelist whose earlier novels, like The Deliverance, have such surprising vitality when you read or re-read them today.