"Look, Mother, we've got the bookcase filled up at last!" "Well, I am glad to see it! It was distressin' to see all those shelves so empty like."
Will they ever look at them? Never a look! It is even odds they do not cut the pages. Now that the noble art of pressing autumn leaves has gone out—you know how it was done, with wax and a hot flatiron, and then you put them between the pages of a book—now that pastime is forgotten, there isn't one remaining cause why those pages should ever be opened. The insides of those books will be the most secret place in that house henceforth. Talk about sliding panels and secret drawers in old writing-desks—they are open and conspicuous in comparison. They will be great for hiding places—I think I will write a melodrama and have the missing will turn up in the fifth act, sixty years later, hidden between page 1 and page 2 of one of the volumes in somebody's Complete Works.
For the third place in the list of best methods to discourage reading there are two competitors. They are so nearly tied that it is hard to choose between them. I am inclined to think that the honor should be awarded to the custom of setting up counsels of perfection in the matter of recommending the so-called "classics" to possible readers, of saying by word of mouth, or by printed page: "These are the great classics, the great books of the world" and adding, by implication, "If you don't like them, after making heroic attempts, then you have been weighed in the balance and found wanting."
This word "classics" covers a multitude of nuisances and perplexities. The "classics" include books which are still alive with humanity, which are delightful today to any person who is at all bookish, and they include books which are so utterly alien, so far removed from our time, place and habit of mind, that it is absolutely absurd to pretend that anyone in this year and land, except a few, a very few, specialists, can read them with any pleasure, or can read them at all, in fact, except under compulsion.
These lists of the great classics are too frequently compiled with a cowardly obedience to tradition. It matters a little what some great person of a hundred or a thousand years ago thought about a book—but it does not matter much. Recently, I saw in a book a list of great persons who had been influenced by this or that book. Some book or other influenced Madame de Maintenon—what of it? Doubtless other books, far less desirable, influenced her, too, so what does it prove? The value of books, as a recent writer has pointed out, shifts and changes with the changing years. What may have been truly a great book a thousand years ago is not necessarily great today—no matter how many famous personages have embalmed it in their praise, and no matter how many other personages have praised it, not because they enjoyed it themselves, but because the earlier ones did. Such a book is interesting—to specialists—as a milestone in the history of literature, but it is not to be forced, however gently, upon the general reader as a book he "ought" to read.
Museums of art, like the Louvre, contain paintings which ignoramuses like myself look upon with astonishment. Mediæval pictures of the most hideous description—how came they in the same building with these other beautiful works of art? Is it possible that anyone is so silly as to pretend to admire them? And then the explanation dawns upon the ignoramus: they are here to illustrate the development of the art of painting. This is a museum, as well as a collection of beautiful things. No one who is honest pretends to enjoy their beauty. It is thus with books. A great collection of books may well contain those writings which seemed full of meaning to people two thousand years ago, but they are not to be held up—not all of them, at any rate—as books which anybody "ought" to read today. The significance of any work of literature, however noble, is a thing to ebb and flow, and finally to vanish altogether. Professor Barrett Wendell reminded me once that Shakespeare's plays and my daily themes would alike, one day, be dust and atoms in the void of the centuries—but I do not think that he meant unduly to compliment Shakespeare by this association.
Since it is always better to come down to tacks in speaking of books, I will mention some of the classics which have little significance today. It is always dangerous to do this—somebody is sure to hold up his hand and exclaim: "Why, I like them, very much," or "I know an old gentleman who reads that, every night before going to bed." But I will take the risk, and say that the Greek and French dramas of the classic periods are works of literature almost certain to appear on most of these lists of Best Books, and that it is almost sheer humbug to put them there. So few people can read them, there is so little reason—especially in the case of the French plays—why anyone should read them, today, that their inclusion is a pitiful example of lack of courage. In the matter of the French drama I speak especially of Racine and Corneille—names almost certain to appear on these lists of the classics. Someone will relate the story about Napoleon saying that if Racine (or was it Corneille?) had lived in his time, he would have made him a marshal. Then some of his plays are smugly entered upon the list. With their stiff, set speeches, their ridiculous unbosomings of the leading characters of their "confidantes," they are as out of place in our life as were their Caesars, Alexanders, and Pompeys, teetering about the stage in high-heeled shoes, ruffles, wigs, and all the rest of the costume of Louis XIV.
It is good to recommend the classics, but it must not be forgotten that there are classics, and classics. There should be independence, and an ability to look things in the face, to realize that a change has come, when it is already here. Why should the people who deal with books let the politicians get ahead of them? There is a bright, clean air blowing through the nation, and those who worship fusty precedent are correspondingly unhappy. We have a president who cares not a rap for mouldy and senseless traditions—he has learned well the lesson taught him by one of his predecessors. If President Wilson has the courage to point out that the final authority on matters of factory legislation and mine inspection in the year 1913 is not necessarily Thomas Jefferson, is it not possible for the critics and choosers of books to understand that Dr. Johnson and Madame de Maintenon have not uttered the last word about literature? There might and should be a "new freedom" of literary criticism—not yesterday, nor today, nor tomorrow, but all the time.
Here is another way to discourage reading. You can do it by giving a man one of these over-annotated editions of a book. I mean a book which has so many footnotes that the text is crowded right out of bed; a book in which the editor is so pleased with himself for discovering that the father of Lady Hester Somebody (who is mentioned in the text) was born in 1718 and died in 1789 that he simply has not the decent manners to keep his useless knowledge to himself. No; he must tell it to you, even though he elbows the author—a better man than himself—out of the way to do it.
One of the best books of its kind—I speak under correction—is George Birkbeck Hill's edition of Boswell's "Johnson." It is, I believe, correct, and scholarly; it certainly represents a vast amount of labor, and it is "very valuable for reference." Also it is admirably arranged for driving a reader away from Boswell forever. It is positively exasperating to see page after page on which Boswell occupies two lines at the top, and Dr. Hill takes up all the rest of the room. Sometimes he takes up the whole page! Yet that edition is recommended to readers by persons who ought to know better.