Suppose, for a better example, that the cheerful Mark Tapley, who always came out strong in adversity, were placed in a modern Russian novel. As the undaunted Taplovitch he would have shifted its gloom to a sunny ending. Fancy our own dear Pollyanna, the glad girl, adopted by an aunt in "Crime and Punishment." Even Dostoyevsky must have laid down his doleful pen to give her at last a happy wedding—flower-girls and angel-food, even a shrill soprano behind the hired palms and a table of cut glass.
Oliver Twist and Nancy—merely acquaintances in the original story—with a fresh hand at the plot, might have gone on a bank holiday to Margate. And been blown off shore. Suppose that the whole excursion was wrecked on Treasure Island and that everyone was drowned except Nancy, Oliver, and perhaps the trombone player of the ships' band, who had blown himself so full of wind for fox-trots on the upper deck that he couldn't sink. It is Robinson Crusoe, lodging as a handsome bachelor on the lonely island—observe the cunning of the plot!—who battles with the waves and rescues Nancy. The movie-rights alone of this are worth a fortune. And then Crusoe, Oliver, Friday, and the trombone player stand a siege from John Silver and Bill Sikes, who are pirates, with Spanish doubloons in a hidden cove. And Crusoe falls in love with Nancy. Here is a tense
triangle. But youth goes to youth. Crusoe's whiskers are only dyed their glossy black. The trombone player, by good luck (you see now why he was saved from the wreck), is discovered to be a retired clergyman—doubtless a Methodist. The happy knot is tied. And then—a sail! A sail! Oliver and Nancy settle down in a semi-detached near London, with oyster shells along the garden path and cat-tails in the umbrella jar. The story ends prettily under their plane-tree at the rear—tea for three, with a trombone solo, and the faithful Friday and Old Bill, reformed now, as gardener, clipping together the shrubs against the sunny wall.
When I found Brooks, I felt again the pang of loss, that Theodore Roosevelt had not read "Hints to Pilgrims," before he passed into "the other room" and eternal light shone upon him! He would have discovered "Hints to Pilgrims," and celebrated it as soon as any of us.
How he loved books! And he seemed to have read all the right things in his youth; you forgot time and kicked Black Care away when he talked with you about them. He could drop from Dante to Brillat-Savarin (in whom he had not much interest, since he was a gourmet and did not regard sausages as the highest form of German art!) and his descents and ascents from book to book were as smooth as Melba's sliding scales—and her scales were smoother than Patti's.
Do you remember his "Dante in the Bowery," and "The Ancient Irish Sagas"? He caught fire at the quotation from the "Lament of Deirdre"; and concluded at once that the Celts were the only people who, before Christianity invented chivalry, understood the meaning of romantic love. It is a great temptation to write at length on the books he liked, and how he fought for them, and explained them, and lived with them. Thinking of him, the most constant of book-lovers, I can only say, "Farewell and Hail!"
[2] Mr. Walpole has almost forfeited the allegiance of people who admired his quality of well-bred distinction by writing in "The Young Enchanted" of George Eliot as a "horse-faced genius."
THE END
Transcriber's notes:
People using this book as a reference should be aware that some of the spelling and quotations are not necessarily accurate.
Some obvious printing errors were corrected
(gu'une→qu'une [p96]; natio→nation [p223])
Consistent archaic spellings of names of people and times were retained as is.
Accenting was not 'corrected'.
Some potential printer's errors left as is include:
Gaugain may be Gauguin [p237] (Paul Gauguin from context)
Who the Holliday refered to in chapter V [p244] was is unknown.