A child's guide to reading

THE READING OF POETRY—(Continued)

In almost every American household there will be some volume of poetry through which the young reader can make his entrance into the enchanted world; there will be a volume of Shakespeare, an old copy of “Paradise Lost” or the works of Longfellow or Tennyson. In our day a desire to read is seldom thwarted by lack of books. Indeed, it sometimes seems as if the very abundance of books made us so familiar with their backs that we do not value the treasures inside. The biographies of our grandfathers tell us of walks of five miles to secure some coveted volume, and a volume so secured was not skimmed or neglected; the effort to get it made it doubly precious.

If one is left to choose the door through which to enter the realm of poetry, a good anthology will prove a broad approach. There is none better than Palgrave’s “Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics.” It is inexpensive, so that anyone can save enough pennies to buy it. It is convenient to carry in one’s pocket, a virtue that makes it preferable to larger anthologies, to those old-fashioned “household collections” printed in double columns. If all our men and boys had the “Golden Treasury” in their coat pockets, what a civilization we should have at the end of ten years! In order to keep up with us the ladies would have to provide pockets in their dresses or carry more spacious handbags than the tyranny of style now permits.

The selections in Palgrave or in the four volumes of Ward’s “English Poets,” are so rich and varied that no reader can fail to find his own poet, and the next step will be to get a larger selection from that poet’s works. All the English poets have been published in inexpensive volumes of selections, many of them in the same Golden Treasury Series; and as poets, like other human beings, are not always at their best, an edition which contains only the best will save the reader from the unfortunate experience of meeting a poet for the first time in his inferior work. When we have learned really to like a poet, we shall wish to have his complete works, but for the young reader most modern poets are better for the suppression of their less admirable passages. Only three or four—Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, our greatest poets—wrote long poems which to be enjoyed at their fullest must be read entire. Although it is true that poetry consists of great lines and that a collection of short poems and passages will be enough to nourish the soul for its whole earthly life, yet supreme poetry is built on a mighty plan. Brief lyrics and bits of song are like jewels, precious, complete, beautiful. Great poems, epics and dramas, are like cathedrals in which the jewels are set in the walls and in the windows. One might read all the fine passages from Shakespeare and yet not feel Shakespeare’s highest, that is, his entire, poetic power.

For the marvelous speeches and songs, however satisfying in themselves, lose some of their meaning when taken out of the structure of which they are a part. The stained glass window is beautiful in the artist’s studio, but when it is set in the church and the light falls through it, it becomes part of a beauty greater than its own. So, too, “Macbeth” is greater than Shakespeare’s lyrics, “Paradise Lost” is greater than all of Milton’s short poems taken together. The true reader of poetry will pass beyond the delight of the perfect stanza to the wider joy of the complete drama, the complete epic.

In approaching a long poem, the modern impatient reader is discouraged sometimes by the number of pages of solid verse which follow those first pages into which he has plunged. It is well to remember that in reading poetry, a little traveling of the eye takes the imagination on long journeys, and that imagination will join for us the first page and the last even if we have spent six months in making the intervening journey. “Hamlet” need not be read in a day. If one reads a few lines at a time one will soon be in the depths of it, and there is no danger of losing one’s way. We can spend a month in the first perusal or we can run rapidly through it in the three hours which it is supposed to occupy on the stage. We can go backward and forward in it, pause as long as we will on a single speech, or fly swiftly upon the wings of the action. The sense of leisure, of independence of hourly circumstance, is one of the spiritual uses of poetry. The poet and our own nature will determine the time for us. When we follow the pageant of Shakespeare’s sad histories of the death of kings, we shall not, I hope, comport ourselves like tourists hurrying through a picture gallery in order that we may have “done” it before our train goes. We shall not be so misguided as to plume ourselves when we enter in our diary: “Read two plays of Shakespeare this week.” Reading that consists merely in passing the eye over the page is not reading at all. When we become conscious of turning pages without any inward response, it is time to lay the book down and do something else. When we are really reading, we shall not be conscious of the book and we shall not know how many pages we have read—until we wake up out of dreamland and come back into our own world.

Two or three plays of Shakespeare are being read every year in every high school in America. It is a common experience of teachers that the pupils regard Shakespeare’s plays as the hardest part of the prescribed reading. One reason is that these dramatic poems are through a regrettable necessity made the text of lessons in language. The atmosphere of study and duty surrounding “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in the classroom takes the charm out of that fairy play. This is not the fault of the teachers and it is not for us to criticise them; the wisest leaders in education have not found a way to make the study of Shakespeare in school less laborious than it is. And many of them think that it is well that lessons should be hard nuts to crack, that the young mind is better disciplined if its schoolday tasks are not made too delightful and easy. Some teachers believe that the old-fashioned hard digging at books is being in too large a measure replaced by kindergarten methods, which are so unadvisedly extended that even a geometry lesson is treated as a game.

For the present we will keep our consideration of the uses and delights of reading apart from the problems of the schools, and regard Shakespeare as we regard Scott—a friend to enjoy in leisure hours. I should advise, then, that pupils who are reading Shakespeare in school select other plays than those prescribed in class and come to them as to a novel chosen for pleasure. If the class work requires a study of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” let the young reader try “The Tempest” by himself. If “Julius Cæsar” is a part of the winter’s school task, let us in vacation time slip “Macbeth” or “Henry V” into our pockets. And while our friends in the other hammock are reading a romance of the hour, let us be reading a romance of the ages. When we are tired of reading and are ready to play that game of tennis, our opponent, who has been reading a book that he bought on the newsstand at the railroad station, will not necessarily beat us, because we know what he does not know, that a gift of tennis balls comes into the plot of “Henry V.”

The Dauphin of France sends Henry the tennis balls for a mocking gift, and Henry answers:

That has a spirit which your friend will not find in the excellent story of a school game which he has been reading, “How Ralph Saved the Day.”

The great poems receive us on any good ground of interest which we choose to tread. Would you have a romantic novel? Shakespeare provides that in “As You Like It” and “Twelfth Night.” Or a military adventure? There is “Henry Fifth.” Or a love tragedy? There is “Romeo and Juliet.” These satisfy our primitive liking for a good story. And so in some measure do all great poems, for the great poems are epics and dramas, that is, stories in verse. Literature finds its best structural material in action and event, and language is best suited to the expression of actions, perhaps because it has been made by a world of workers and doers. The most effective means of conveying abstract ideas is through story. The most moving sections of the Bible are narrative, the greatest lessons are taught in parables and instances. “Paradise Lost” is a narrative of great vigor, for all the dull debates and arguments; and if it was not Milton’s primary intention to tell a great story for its own sake, nevertheless he did tell a great story and we can enjoy it for its own sake long before we have begun, and long after we have ceased, to be interested in his theology and philosophy.

To say that great poets, Homer, Vergil, Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare, are romancers as truly as are the writers of prose novels is not to belittle poetry. The highest thoughts can be conveyed in a story. When a great poetic story-teller ceases for too many lines to be master of narrative, it will often be found that some other poetic qualities have for the moment died out of him too. And when he attempts to convey great ideas with little regard to their place in a moving sequence of events, he pays the penalty of not being read, he loses hold of the reader’s interest. The most titanic case of the failure of high poetic thoughts to win their way to the common heart of man, because of the disregard of narrative form, is Browning’s “The Ring and the Book.” There the story, a terrible and touching story, is told over a dozen times, and not once told well. Imbedded in its strange shapelessness are wonderful ideas and passages of intense beauty. As a heap of poetry it is the only production of the Victorian age that has the magnitude of Shakespeare and the classic epics. Other poems of Browning’s, “Clive” and “Ivan Ivanovitch,” show that he had narrative gifts. Some scenes in his dramas are in emotional energy and narrative progression unrivaled by any poet since Shakespeare. But in “The Ring and the Book,” into which he put his whole heart, he would not or could not tell his story as the experience of all ages has shown that stories must be told: his poem does not move forward in a continuously high and noble style. And so most of the world of readers are deprived of the richness with which he freighted from his prodigal mind and great soul his mighty rudderless ship that goes down in midocean.

Shakespeare told good stories in almost all his plays. He did not invent the stories, but he selected them from the literature of the world and from other Elizabethan writers, and then enriched the narrative with every kind of beauty and significance which it would hold. On account of their excellence as narratives and their intensely human and stirring materials, the plays of Shakespeare enjoyed some measure of popularity even in their own time, if the scholars have rightly informed us; and the plays have continued to hold the stage and to interest many of the “great variety of readers” who are addressed in one of the introductions to the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s works. In our time the influence of the schools has insured popular acquaintance with Shakespeare as an object of serious study. On the other hand, the great increase in the quantity of prose fiction, and the fact that it is easier to read thin prose than rich poetry, have obscured for many readers the elementary delight of Shakespeare’s plays as fictitious romances.

One reason that the inexperienced reader regards the reading of Shakespeare as an unusual operation of eye and brain is that we are not accustomed to read the drama of our own time; so that we have not the habit of following naked dialogue accompanied only by a few terse stage directions. Since Shakespeare’s time our literature has not been so rich in drama as in other forms. Some of our plays—those that have succeeded on the stage and those written in conventional dramatic form without regard to performance on the stage—are worth reading. But the public does not encourage the printing of them. Many of our writers shrewdly make double use of their ideas and turn them both into stage form and into prose fiction. The large number of dramatized novels and “novelized” dramas—Shakespeare himself dramatized novels—shows that in England and America we regard the playbook as something for the actor to learn and represent to us in spoken word and action. In France the latest play is for sale in the bookshops like the latest novel. If our stage is to return to high literary standards, there must grow up in our public an audience of intelligent playreaders as well as playgoers. The more intelligently we read plays, the more there will be worth reading; we can help the stage to attain and hold a better level of excellence by demanding of it that its productions shall be “literary,” that is, readable.

That Shakespeare is the single dramatist in our language whom we feel we ought to read is regrettable. It sets him apart in a solitude which is as artificial in its way as the attempt of some critics to group him in a “school of playwrights.” He is solitary in greatness, quite lonely among his many contemporaries[1] in drama, but the form he used, narrative dialogue, ought to be as familiar to us as the novel. If ten people read “The Vicar of Wakefield” to one that reads “She Stoops to Conquer,” the reason is not that “The Vicar” is better work, but that the printed play looks strange to the eyes of our reading public. Plato put his philosophy in dramatic dialogue, apparently with the intention of choosing a popular and readable form. And the author of the Shakespearian drama seems to have felt that he had chosen the most popular and practical vehicle of ideas. Perhaps, if he had known to what a low condition Puritan prejudice, the social weaknesses of stage life and other causes were to bring dramatic literature, he might have turned his narrative genius into other than dramatic form.

That we are not readers of plays is no special fault of this age. A hundred years ago Charles and Mary Lamb found a wide audience for their “Tales from Shakespeare.” The publisher announced in the second edition that the “Tales,” intended primarily for children, had been found “an acceptable and improving present to young ladies advancing to the state of womanhood.” If Shakespeare was to be retold for the young, it was fortunate that Charles Lamb was selected as the emissary from the land of poetry to those who had never made the great adventure beyond the confines of prose. Yet it is hard to believe that Lamb’s “Tales” are necessary to any but lovers of Lamb. There is a danger that the young reader, for whom he designed the book as a door to Shakespeare, will linger in the vestibule, content with the genuine riches that are there, and will not go on to the greater riches of Shakespeare himself. Shakespeare told the stories better than another can tell them, and anyone who knows enough of the English language to read Lamb’s “Tales” will find Shakespeare’s plays intelligible to read, just as when performed on the stage they are intelligible to the people in the gallery, even to those in the boxes. Repeated readings with some reference to simple explanatory notes will make the deep meanings and fine beauties ever more and more clear.

The plays which a beginner should read are, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “The Merchant of Venice,” “As You Like It,” “Twelfth Night,” “The Tempest,” “Henry IV,” “Henry V,” “Richard III,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Julius Cæsar,” “Hamlet,” “Othello,” “King Lear,” and “Macbeth.” The other plays and the poems may, for various reasons, be reserved for the time when one no longer needs advice about reading.

We shall have gained much of the freedom of soul which is the necessary condition of reading poetry, if we make a New Year’s resolution not to be frightened away from the real mysteries of Shakespeare by the false mysteries of his editors and critics.[2] Shakespeare speaks our language, but the scholars speak a language which they invented, as if they intended to hold their authority by wrapping themselves in impenetrable obscurities which common folk would not try to master. Let us not be deceived. “The Tempest” was not written for university professors. Let us open it with the same confident curiosity that we should bring to “Robinson Crusoe” or “Ivanhoe.”

And after you have read “The Tempest,” what do you remember to have found difficult? Is it not clearer than daylight, that enchanted island where Prospero, the exiled duke, has lived twelve years with his daughter Miranda? Is it not a simple and sweet romance that Prince Ferdinand should be wrecked on the island and should fall in love with Miranda and that she should fall in love with him, the first man she has seen except her father? Is it not clear that Prospero, a student of magic, has gained control of the spirits of the island and has his blithe servant, Ariel, and his brutal servant, Caliban? Did you find any difficulty in understanding that when the wicked brother, who cheated Prospero of his dukedom, is cast ashore upon the island, Prospero pardons him and gets his dukedom back? What is obscure in this wonder tale? “Cinderella” and “The Sleeping Beauty” are made of the same stuff, and we hear them at our mothers’ knees before we are able to read at all.

But there is more in “The Tempest” than a childish fairy tale. Yes, much more, but that more is insinuated into the story, it is embroidered upon it, it comes to us without effort of ours, for the poet is a Prospero and teaches us, as Prospero taught Miranda, by art and nature and not by laborious counsel. You will feel as you follow the fairy story that the spirit of nature has stolen over you unawares, that Caliban represents the evil in the natural world and Ariel the good, and that both are obedient to the bidding of man’s intelligence. So much philosophy will come to you of itself; it is not a dull lesson to knit your brows over; you need seek no lecturer to expound it to you. A song of Ariel will linger in your ear. All that is required of you is that your senses be wide awake and that your fancy be free from bookish anxiety and ready to be played upon. The miracle will be wrought for you. You need only sit, like Ferdinand, and watch the masque which the wizard evokes—“a most majestic vision, and harmoniously charming.” There will remain with you some speech, grave with philosophy and luminous with imagery, such as this:

It is better, perhaps, to read the comedies and histories before the tragedies. The comedies and histories are simpler in motive, and through lighter thoughts give one the feeling for Shakespeare’s diction and prepare one to enter the tragedies that treat of higher matters. It is because tragedy is concerned with greater ideas, not because it ends unhappily, that it is greater poetry than comedy. It deals with more important motives and more serious events, and its thought is complete; the career of Hamlet, or of Macbeth, is finished, and the ideas of life that informed the career and shaped the events are carried out to their fullest. Tragedy does not consist in the piling up of corpses in the last act; the end of the characters is nothing in itself. Shakespeare always rounds off the conclusion with rapid strokes; having done with the ideas and motives that lead to the end he has little interest in the mere death of his characters. It is the “way to dusty death” that interests him and us and makes the tragedy profound. To those readers referred to in a previous chapter, who do not like sad endings, we can now give another answer. They put too much thought upon the ending and too little upon the story that leads to the end. Whoever does not like tragedy does not like serious ideas, and whoever does not read tragedy does not read the greatest poetry. For the greatest poetry must consist of the most important ideas. Not only upon beauty of form and magic of phrase, but on the heart, the content, depends the greatness of a poem.

LIST OF BOOKS OF POETRY

(Supplementary to Chapter VI)

COLLECTIONS AND ANTHOLOGIES OF POETRY

On the whole, the most satisfactory collection of English poetry. Each of the chief poets is represented by several selections, and the introductory criticisms are in themselves a liberal education.

The poems are divided according to form; one volume containing ballads; another, odes and sonnets; another, lyrics; and so on. This is a rational, but not a practical, principle of division, for it is better to have the selections, say, from Keats, together in one’s anthology than to have his sonnets in one volume and his lyrics in another. A poet and his poetry are very definite units, but the lines between lyrics and ballads and odes are not sharp and, on the whole, not important.

Called “a book of verse for boys”; really a book of verse for everybody, consisting of the martial, the heroic, the patriotic, from the old English ballads to Rudyard Kipling.

A remarkably adequate collection of English poems of the last seventy years.

Not only a wise selection of the best American poetry, but a complete survey of the poetic utterance of this country, from a biographical and historical point of view.

This continues the first Golden Treasury and includes the Victorian poets. It is not so complete as Stedman’s Anthology, but costs only half as much.

The two foregoing are in the Golden Treasury Series, and published by Macmillan.

An inexpensive collection, published by Ginn & Co., covering the same period as is covered by about one sixth of the Golden Treasury, but in larger type and so pleasanter to read.

Continues the volume mentioned above.

A good collection of verse intended by the editor for young people, and selected by him wisely, but quite whimsically, from poets he happens to like.

An excellent anthology intended for youth.

A handsome book which represents, in less degree than most anthologies, the traditional standards of excellence or traditionally excellent poets, and in rather greater degree the fine taste of the editor for the best.

This is a selection in a single volume from the great edition of the ballads by Professor Child. It is equally for the student and the reader. In the Cambridge Poets, published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

Passages that pleased Lamb in the works of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Interesting to a reader of Elizabethan drama and to a reader of Lamb.

INDIVIDUAL POETS

Household Edition. Aldrich was a careful editor of his own work and this volume is complete in its inclusions and its omissions. It is one of the few volumes of American poetry worth owning.

In two volumes of Bohn’s Library, translated by W. J. Hickie.

The Globe Edition, published by Macmillan, which costs $1.75, is the best. Most of the chief British poets can be had in this edition. The Cambridge Edition, published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co., costs a little more the volume, but it is preferable on the whole in point of manufacture and readability. The young reader of Arnold may begin with the narrative poem, “Sohrab and Rustum.”

The best selection of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher is the two volumes, edited by J. St. Loe Strachey in the Mermaid Series, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons. In this series are, in the words of the title page, “The Best Plays of the Old Dramatists.” A taste for Elizabethan drama is as well left undeveloped until after a fair acquaintance has been formed with the plays of Shakespeare.

There are several collections of Blake’s lyrics in single-volume editions. A good one is that with an introductory essay by Lawrence Housman. Blake’s lyrics of children and his “Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright” will be found in many of the anthologies.

A remarkable English poet, but little known to the general public until the posthumous publication of his work in 1900 by Macmillan & Co., in the single-volume Globe Edition, which contains the works of Shelley, Tennyson, and other great poets; Brown is worthy of that distinguished company.

In one volume, in Macmillan’s Globe Edition. “The Sonnets from the Portuguese” are to be found in a small volume by themselves. They are the best of Mrs. Browning’s work. The new reader of Mrs. Browning should begin after page 150 in the Macmillan edition and read only the shorter poems.

The Cambridge Edition is the best, in one volume. The Globe Edition is in two volumes. The two volumes in Everyman’s Library contain all of Browning’s poems written up to 1864. A good volume for the young reader is “The Boys’ Browning,” which contains poems of action and incident. An inexpensive volume, published by Smith, Elder & Co., called “The Brownings for the Young,” contains a good variety of Browning, with some selections from Mrs. Browning.

The poems of Bryant are published in one volume by D. Appleton & Co. Bryant’s translations of the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” are better than most poetic versions of Homer in simplicity and dignity. The young reader cannot do better than to meet Homer in Bryant before he learns Greek enough to meet Homer himself.

The complete work of Burns in the Globe Edition (Macmillan).

A selection by Matthew Arnold in the Golden Treasury Series.

A taste for refined parody indicates the possession of a critical sense. Coarse parody which implies no intimate knowledge of the poet parodied is not worth while. The reader who appreciates Calverley’s delicious verses will have learned to appreciate the serious modern poets. Other writers of humorous verse, including parodies which are delicate and witty, are J. K. Stephen, Mr. Owen Seaman, Henry Cuyler Bunner.

Enough of Campbell will be found in Ward’s Poets.

One volume in the Mermaid Series. (See pages 243-8 of this Guide.)

A volume in Everyman’s Library contains eighteen of the tales, slightly simplified in spelling and vocabulary, said to be the first successful attempt to modernize Chaucer, for the benefit of the ordinary reader, without destroying the essential quality of the original. But with the glossary and notes found in “The Student’s Chaucer,” edited by W. W. Skeat, the lover of poetry will find himself able to read Chaucer in the original form without great difficulty.

In the Golden Treasury Series. Readers of poetry who have not met Clough have an entirely new poetical experience before them in “The Bothie,” a narrative poem. It should be tried after Longfellow’s “Miles Standish” and “Evangeline.” Clough was not among the greatest Victorian poets, but there is room for him in an age like ours which is said, whether justly or not, to be lacking in poetic voices. In this connection readers may turn to Clough’s poem, “Come, Poet Come!” (see page 107 of this Guide).

In the Globe Edition. The single volume in Everyman’s Library is adequate.

In the Globe Edition.

Cary’s translation is in Everyman’s Library. The best way on the whole for English readers to learn their Dante is through Charles Eliot Norton’s prose translation (see page 210 of this Guide).

In the Mermaid Series.

In the Muses Library (Charles Scribner’s Sons). A wonderful poet, who, perhaps, is not to be read until one’s taste for poetry has grown certain, but a liking for whom in mature years is an almost infallible proof of true poetic appreciation.

In the Globe Edition and also in the Cambridge Edition. The reader should first read Dryden’s odes and lyrical pieces; his satires may be deferred.

In one volume, published by Doubleday, Page & Co., and to be found in any complete edition of her works. Her reputation as a novelist has overshadowed her excellence as a poet. “The Choir Invisible” is one of the noble poems of the century.

In one volume, published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Emerson is the most exalted spirit of our literature, and his poems condense and refine the best ideas to be found in his prose.

In two volumes in Everyman’s Library.

In Everyman’s Library. See also “Specimens of Pre-Shakespearean Drama,” edited by J. M. Manly (Ginn & Co.). The recent stage production of “Everyman” has created a new popular interest in very early English dramas. The value of most of them is historical rather than intrinsically poetic.

Contains the familiar poems for and about children.

There are innumerable editions of this famous poem. An inexpensive one is published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

With Beaumont in the Mermaid Series.

The dramas, translated by Walter Scott and others, are in Bohn’s Library. American readers will be interested in Bayard Taylor’s poetic version of “Faust.”

Goldsmith’s few poems are to be found in a good edition of his works in one volume, published by Crowell & Co.

In one volume, in the Aldine Edition (Macmillan). Readers of the familiar “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” need only to be told that a half dozen of Gray’s other poems are equally fine; and they should not overlook the delightful “Ode on the Death of Mr. Walpole’s Cat.”

Miss Greenaway’s delightful pictures of children would entitle her to a place among the poets, even if she had not done the little rhymes that go with her drawings.

In one volume, published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

Heine’s lyrics have tempted the talents of many translators. The finest collection of verses from Heine in English is that by Emma Lazarus, herself a true poet.

Henley’s one volume of poems, a slender volume, published by Scribner, places him high among the secondary poets of nineteenth century England.

Herbert’s poems with his “Life” by Izaak Walton, are published by Walter Scott, in one volume in the Canterbury Poets, and also, in a single volume, by Crowell & Co. Herbert is the finest of the religious lyric poets of the seventeenth century.

A fine selection, with an introduction by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, is published in one volume by the Century Co. Herrick is to be found also in the Canterbury Poets, in one volume, and in Morley’s Universal Library, published by George Rutledge & Sons.

In the Mermaid Series.

In the Cambridge Edition.

See pages 211-12 of this Guide.

Hood’s humorous poems are found in a pleasantly illustrated volume, published by Macmillan. His serious poems, “Eugene Aram,” “The Bridge of Sighs,” “The Song of the Shirt,” are well known, and are in many anthologies.

Selected translations from the best English poets and scholars in one volume of the Chandos Classics, published by Frederick Warne & Co.