A child's guide to reading

THE READING OF FICTION—(Continued)

In discussing the question of plots we could not keep out the question of character, which we agreed for the purposes of our discussion is the second element of fiction. In importance it is the first—the indispensable element. What is fiction for except to tell us about human beings? I cannot believe what somebody said, that the three essentials of stories are first plot, second plot and third plot. In the first place, that sounds too clever to be true and in the second place—it is not true. The plot is the means of keeping persons in action so that we can get to know them. In this “naturalists” and “realists” find a good argument, for they put their emphasis on human character. They say: “Here we exhibit you and your friends and your enemies. Plot? We are telling a story. Stories are all about you. But we have not forced events out of probable order or distorted the facts of life beyond recognition for the sake of an exciting situation. We draw our fellow men, so that you recognize them as they are. Even as they are in their homes and shops and churches, so they are in these pages, talking, loving, hating, bargaining, intriguing, dying. We select the significant, we heighten the values of life; but we portray life essentially as it is.” True enough. The realist gives us “folks.” But he has no monopoly of human beings. We are quite as well acquainted with Alice who wandered in Wonderland and went through the Looking Glass as we are with Mr. David Copperfield and Miss Maggie Tulliver. Peter Pan (in Mr. J. M. Barrie’s play), who flew in the face of nature and refused to grow up, is so true a person that all the children recognized him at once and old men chuckled and remembered him.

The English novel is varied and abundant, and its characters, collectively, form a populous democracy. Everybody is in it somewhere from peasant to king, and if some of us and our friends have been left out, new novelists are at hand watching every kind and grade of life and preparing to fix it in a living page. The American novel is not yet old and broad enough to have captured all our types of men and women and recreated them in fiction. But a good beginning has been made. The varied voices of the American country town are heard from all corners of the land, but so far most of them have been voices of short compass, incapable of sustained utterance. We still depend for studies of American character on sketches and short stories, and these in the mass are an important body of literature. New England, Virginia, California, the Middle West, the great cities, have had their short-story writers. The novelists are still on the way. Our national life is so scattered and changing that the novelist has difficulty in keeping a group of Americans together long enough to plot them into a large book. In Europe where a small town contains every kind of society the novelist finds the compact social stage all set and characters in abundance. Anthony Trollope, with little care to plot, sets society to turning in the quiet eddy of a small cathedral town and presently we are looking into the heart of England. He introduces the same people into novel after novel and we are always glad to see them again. The success of his many novels supports the contention that characters are the staff of fiction. A defect of plot is easier to pardon than a defect in character drawing.

Untruth to human nature, violence either to its waking experiences or its dreams, destroys a book, destroys the living world it represents and leaves us holding a thing of ink and paper. The other day I was reading a novel which has multiplied itself over the land by force of printing presses and sensational advertising. It is a story about modern people of an undistinguished but potentially interesting kind; the heroine is, if I remember right, a confidential secretary to a business man. The author makes her say something like this to her lover:

“Ere I knew you, there had come into my life but few pleasures and diversions; I had been like a bird shut up in a cage; and you set me free. Yet it was not that alone which attracted me to you. Grateful as I was, I was charmed, too, by your conversation which was so totally different than (sic) anything I had known heretofore. You saved me from the wretched monotony of commonplace existence and took me into a new world, and my gratitude for that blossomed into love”; and so on.

The only thing in that which sounds like human speech is the blunder in the use of “than,” which I suspect is an unintentional blunder on the part of the author. The speech is no more appropriate to the given character in the given place than a sentence out of Macaulay’s essays. The most ingenious plotting could not entice a discriminating reader beyond that dead line of empty words, for they are proof enough that the author himself does not know his heroine’s character. To be sure, dialogue in novels cannot be “natural as life,” for actual conversation taken down word for word is diffuse and hard to read. The conversations in books must sound natural, appropriate to the place, the time, and the character of the person whom the reader is expected to believe in. There cannot be any rules for making conversation; if there are any rules they are for the novelists to study, not for the reader. The reader only knows whether the speeches sound right or whether the author is cheating him by passing off as talk mere words which the author strung out on paper and did not hear with his inner sense from the lips of his character.

In the same book there is a description which I will quote, if I can resist the temptation to parody it:

“The house nestled amid the verdurous shade of immense trees; to the left of the wooded park were sloping lawns dotted here and there with beds of the most exquisite flowers, which in contrast to the old weatherbeaten house greatly enhanced the beauty of the scene. Inside the house the utmost good taste prevailed from the antique colonial hatrack in the front hall to the handsome, but simple furniture of the parlor, in one corner of which on a sofa that was a cherished heirloom, a young girl might have been seen sitting engaged in embroidering a fine piece of linen. She was beautiful with large dark eyes and a luxuriant mass of richest brown hair,” and so on.

Except for the poor fun of making sport of the author no one with a sense of humor will read beyond that. The author himself cannot see the place he would present to his reader’s eye. Description, which we have chosen to regard as the third element of fiction, must aid the imagination to realize the events and the people or it is worse than ineffectual. The novelist whose story is “dotted here and there” with descriptions which really “enhance the beauty” of his story is to be numbered among the immortals.

The masters of description touch in details of sound and vision as they progress with the narrative, and the reader hears and sees without being aware that he has read description. The more leisurely novelists, who are great enough to carry a story through three volumes, do often stop and paint a picture, and even the great ones frequently fail to get the pictorial effect they seek. Scott’s descriptions sometimes interfere with his story and descend into a catalogue of details. But the total effect of his description is to make the entire world familiar with Scotland, streets, houses, mountains, and moors. It is part of Scott’s patriotic purpose to preserve in a series of novels the legend, the history, the character, the ideals, the social customs of old and new Scotland; and he allows himself, as a kind of antiquarian, all the space he needs for minute description. So his descriptions serve a purpose, even when they lack imaginative vision. Moreover, the great river of his stories is broad and swift enough to carry an amount of dead wood which would choke narratives of lesser volume and power.

A great example of a long descriptive passage in fiction is in the fifty-fifth chapter of “David Copperfield.” There is to be action enough presently to sweep the reader off his feet; in preparation for it Dickens gives three or four pages of description of the storm. The excellence of that description grows upon the reader who finds how seldom even the better novelists succeed in painting on large canvases. Few artists in prose have been adequate to the greatness of the sea. Stevenson has succeeded in giving both the seas on the Scotch coast and the Pacific with its mysterious islands. Of living writers in English the masters of “sea pieces” are Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Mr. Joseph Conrad. But none of the younger writers, even of those especially devoted to the sea, has excelled Dickens, landsman and London cockney as he was, in that great picture of the storm.

I once knew some young ladies who were enamored of the books of that third-rate novelist, Miss Marie Corelli. To be fair, I never read but two of her novels, and though they are so false that I doubt her ability to write anything beautiful and true, she may have written masterpieces that I have unfortunately missed. The young ladies had named their club after one of Miss Corelli’s books. I asked one worshipper what she liked in her favorite novelist. The reply was startling: “I love the beautiful descriptions.” It was interesting to find a young lady who liked beautiful descriptions for their own sake—most of us are not so far advanced in our critical enjoyment of fiction—and it was interesting to learn that Miss Corelli had written beautiful descriptions. But when I ungraciously pressed the matter, my friend confessed that she could not find any descriptive passage that seemed especially worth exhibiting.

The secret of this case, if we are ungallant enough to subject to inquisition so tender a thing as a young lady’s conscience and literary tastes, is that she had learned from some muddied source that a beautiful description is a precious thing in a novel. She was afraid that the things in the book which really interested her might not be admirable—though I dare say they are harmless enough—and so she presented that little white excuse for reading the novel. Just so ladies who are not young have been known to admire a fiction of doubtful character wholly for its “exquisite style,” when if they really appreciated “exquisite style,” they would be reading something else.

There is an enjoyment of style that seems either apart from the other kinds of enjoyment in reading or is a refinement, an addition, which makes the other kinds keener. In choosing novels, however, we do not need, as a practical matter, to hunt for style, any more than we need to hunt for descriptions, for the writer who is great enough to contrive plots and draw characters must have learned how to write well. The good novels are all in good style. The fiction maker whose style is poor is almost certain to fail in other ways and be altogether unacceptable. It is true that among the great ones some have more distinction of manner than others. Thackeray never writes so clumsily as Dickens at his worst. Stevenson’s phrasing is invariably excellent, whereas a greater novelist, Walter Scott, often for pages at a time throws off his sentences so hastily that they are not easy, not pleasant, to read. Jane Austen in her style is near to perfection; George Eliot, a writer of much more power, whose heights of eloquence are not equaled by any other woman, seems sometimes to be either expressing a kind of thought, or expressing it in a vocabulary and with a complexity of construction, which would be tolerable in a philosophic essay but is not suited to fictitious narrative. It is well to begin to be aware of the degrees of style and their general effect, to enjoy beauty and eloquence and grace in some measure for their own sake. But the inexperienced reader is safe to choose his novels for their substance; the style will usually be adequate and the merits of the style will enter the reader’s consciousness gradually and without effort of appreciation on his part.

In choosing novels the ordinary reader need not at first concern himself with the history of a novelist or his technical characteristics, or with the place which critics have given to him in their schemes of literary development. A simple method of selection is to find on somebody’s advice a novel that has interested many readers, and then if it prove good, to try another by the same author. If a writer has produced two novels that interest you, it is safe to assume that he has written a third and a fourth. Some writers, it is true, have been distinguished for a single masterpiece. “Don Quixote” is the only book of Cervantes’ that we are likely to care for. “Robinson Crusoe” is all that most people have found good in Defoe’s tales (though there is much merit in his other stories). No other book of Mrs. Stowe’s is even second to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” “The Vicar of Wakefield” is the glorious whole of Goldsmith’s narrative prose, though he succeeded in every other form of literature, including the prose drama. But the man who can write two novels can write three if he has time; the two-novel power is likely to be a ten-novel power with torpedo fleets of short stories and essays. Anyone who has liked “Silas Marner” and “Middlemarch” will not need to be urged to read “Felix Holt,” “Adam Bede,” “Romola,” “The Mill on the Floss.” The person who has once read and enjoyed two novels of Dickens is likely to read six or eight. “Pendennis” leads to “The Newcomes.” And any of Trollope’s “Barchester,” novels is an introduction to the happily interminable series.

I have purposely said little about the short story, because in this day of magazines we all read short stories, some of them pretty good ones. There are fifty persons who can write one or two acceptable short tales to one who can make a novel of moderate merit. And the great writers of the tale have often been novelists as well, so that if one begins to read novels one will meet with the best short stories which have been worth collecting into volumes. Readers of “The House of Seven Gables” and “The Scarlet Letter” will make the acquaintance of Hawthorne’s “Twice Told Tales” and “Mosses from an Old Manse.” Among modern fictionists of importance Poe stands almost alone as a writer of tales who never tried the longer and greater form of the novel, though there are several excellent authors, such as Mr. Rudyard Kipling, Miss Sarah Orne Jewett, Mrs. Mary Wilkins-Freeman, whose short tales outweigh in value, if not in quantity, their more extended narratives.

In our discussion of fiction we have dwelt entirely on books for adults and neglected what is known as juvenile fiction. Here again the omission was intended. Juvenile fiction is certain to make its way in more than ample supply into American homes, and I doubt whether fiction that is wholly good for adults is not the best for boys and girls of, say, thirteen. When our fathers and mothers, or our grandfathers and grandmothers, were young, they read the newest book by Dickens, Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, and were no worse for having fewer “juveniles” than modern publishers purvey for the benefit of the growing generation. I should think that Henty’s books, which have merits, but were turned out on a steam lathe, would suggest that Scott’s historical romances are better, and that the Pattys and Pollys and Lucys and Brendas, whose adventures are chronicled in many an entertaining series would speedily make way for heroines like Maggie Tulliver and heroes like Master Tom Brown, whose youth is perennial. When “juveniles” are really good, parents read them after children have gone to bed. I do not know whether “Tom Brown at Rugby” is catalogued by the careful librarians as a book for boys, but I am sure it is a book for men. I dare say that a good many pairs of eyes that have passed over the pages of Mr. John T. Trowbridge and Elijah Kellogg and Louisa Alcott have been old enough to wear spectacles. And if Mrs. Kate Douglas Wiggin ever thought that in “Timothy’s Quest” and “Rebecca” she was writing books especially for the young, adult readers have long since claimed her for their own. I have enjoyed Mr. A. S. Pier’s tales of the boys at “St. Timothy’s,” though he planned them for younger readers. We are told on good authority that St. Nicholas and The Youth’s Companion appear in households where there are no children, and they give a considerable portion of their space to serial stories written for young people. Between good “juveniles” and good books for grown persons there is not much essential difference.

Anyone who is old enough to make out the words can safely enter the large world of the English and American novel. The chances of encountering the few that are unfit for the young are slight. Ruskin in his essay “Of Queens’ Gardens,” which treats of the education of girls, says: “Whether novels, or poetry, or history be read, they should be chosen, not for what is out of them but for what is in them. The chance and scattered evil that may here and there haunt, or hide itself in, a powerful book, never does any harm to a noble girl; but the emptiness of an author oppresses her, and his amiable folly degrades her.” A novel in our language that has been read and freely talked of for many years is as safe as a church; and there are enough such novels to keep one happily occupied during all the hours one can give to reading fiction to the end of one’s days.

LIST OF FICTION

Supplementary to Chapter IV

The following list of novels, tales, and prose dramas is offered to the young reader by way of suggestion and not as a “prescribed” list. Like the other lists in this book it omits many masterpieces that will occur immediately to the mind of the older reader, and it includes some books that are not masterpieces. The notes, or “evaluations” as the librarians call them, are arbitrary, indicating the private opinions of the present Guide; they are sometimes extensive in the case of less important writers and are omitted in the cases of the great masters. The way to use the list is to run over it from time to time until you form a bowing acquaintance with the names of a few authors and some of their books. One title or another is likely to attract you or excite your curiosity. If you follow the impulse of that aroused curiosity and go get the book, the list will have served its purpose.

Easy to read in French, and to be found translated into English.

Found in many editions, some especially selected and illustrated for children.

Miss Alcott has always been a favorite of young people. Her faithful and wholesome stories of life in a New England country town entitle her to place in the delightful company of Rose Terry Cooke, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mrs. Mary Wilkins-Freeman, and Miss Alice Brown.

A delicate romancer with subtle humor and a turn for paradoxical ingenious fooling which is characteristic in one form or another of American writers as unlike as Frank R. Stockton, Edward Everett Hale, and Mark Twain.

To be found in Everyman’s Library. This collection of books, published at fifty cents the volume by E. P. Dutton & Co., is perhaps the best ever grouped in an inexpensive edition. It will be frequently referred to in this and succeeding lists. Most of the books in it are worth reading and no doubt worth buying, and this is true of most “Universal Libraries,” “Libraries of the World’s Best Literature,” “Five-Foot Book Shelves,” etc. But for variety’s sake one would wish not to have all the books on one’s shelves in the same style of type and binding. And in general it is better to buy the book one wants, distinguished by its title and author, than to take as a whole any editor’s or publisher’s collection of “classics.”

The simplest form in which to read the stories of the Eddas and Scandinavian myths. It is at once a lore book for students and a wonder book for young and old.

Arabian Nights. In a volume of Everyman’s Library. Another good edition is that prepared by Andrew Lang.

In Everyman’s Library.

These are the works of Balzac found in translation in Everyman’s Library. All the novels of Balzac have been translated into English. Balzac is not the easiest of French novelists to read in the original, though not very difficult. The young American who will take the trouble, and give himself the pleasure, of reading a score of French novels will find himself with a good reading knowledge of the language, and school and college examinations in French will lose their terror.

Mr. Barrie has the most tender and whimsical imagination of living writers in English. His later work has been largely for the stage.

In Everyman’s Library.

In Everyman’s Library.

The prose storehouse of Arthurian legend in English is Thomas Mallory’s “Morte d’Arthur,” which is in two volumes in Everyman’s Library. But Mallory is not easy reading. The finest versions are those by the poets, Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King,” Matthew Arnold’s “Tristram and Iseult,” Swinburne’s “Tale of Balen.” Modern prose versions suited to young readers are Howard Pyle’s “Story of King Arthur and his Knights,” Sidney Lanier’s “Boy’s King Arthur” and Andrew Lang’s “Book of Romance.” Legends allied to the Arthurian stories are found in Lady Guest’s “Mabinogian,” which appears in one volume in Everyman’s Library. See also “The Boy’s Mabinogian,” by Sidney Lanier.

The stories of Charlemagne are found in a volume suited for young readers edited by Alfred John Church.

Classic mythology in its highest form is, of course, to be found in the Greek and Roman poets, and it permeates English poetry. Prose versions of Greek and Roman tales suited to young readers are to be found in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Wonder Book” and “Tanglewood Tales,” Charles Kingsley’s “The Heroes, or Greek Fairy Tales for My Children,” and “Stories from the Greek Tragedians,” by Alfred John Church. See also “A Child’s Guide to Mythology,” by Helen A. Clarke.

Among the best American short stories.

In Everyman’s Library and many other cheap editions.

In Motteux’s translation in two volumes of Everyman’s Library, and other popular editions.

One of the most remarkable of recent writers, a Pole who adopted the English language and has contributed to its beauties. Unsurpassed as a writer of stories of the sea.

The young reader had better plunge into Cooper before he ceases to be a young reader; not that the adult reader cannot enjoy these virile narratives, which have been read all over the world for nearly a century, they will always remain important records of early American life; but better fiction soon displaces them, growth in literary taste makes evident the defects which Mark Twain sets forth in his witty essay on Cooper; and to have grown beyond Cooper without having met and enjoyed him means a genuine loss.

Crawford had a vein of real genius which is obscured by the great number of his less meritorious books.

This pleasant, fine-hearted humorist should not be neglected by the rising generation of Americans.

It is a happy accident that Dana’s name follows that of Cupples. Fifty years ago in “The Green Hand” and “Two Years Before the Mast” England and America held command of the sea in fiction. This is an appropriate place to mention three books by the American writer, Herman Melville (1819-91), “Omoo,” “Typee” and “Moby Dick,” which are big enough to sail in the fleet with Cupples and Dana. Sea craft are growing larger every year but not sea books, though Mr. Joseph Conrad, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, Mr. Frank Bullen and Mr. Clark Russell are taking us on good voyages under sail and steam.

Among the easiest of French writers to read in the original. Several of his books have been published in English.

Fresh and charming short stories by a writer who has not fulfilled the promise of his youth.

A fine story of schoolboy life, to be found in English translation.

No list of titles is necessary under the name of Dickens. There are innumerable editions of his works.

And we could not be happy without “The Hunting of the Snark” and other verses in Lewis Carroll’s “Rhyme and Reason.”

The fame of the Sherlock Holmes stories has thrown somewhat into the background the best of Sir Conan Doyle’s work, the two historical romances.

No list of titles is necessary under Dumas’s name. For though he and his “syndicate” of assistants produced a great number of mediocre works, those most frequently met in English are good, “The Three Musketeers,” “The Count of Monte Cristo,” “The Queen’s Necklace” and “Twenty Years After.”

No titles are necessary under George Eliot’s name. Several of her novels are in Everyman’s Library, and there are other inexpensive editions.

The two last named are in Everyman’s Library.

All the works of this writer are being translated into English. The title given above in English is a translated collection of some of his short stories.

In Carlyle’s translation.

In Everyman’s Library.

The volume under this title, published by Little, Brown & Co., contains the best of Dr. Hale’s short stories. The title story is a masterpiece of fiction and the greatest of all sermons on patriotism.

A charming story in simple French, and to be found translated into English.

Incomparably the greatest of living novelists of our race. Certain characteristics of his later novels make them neither pleasant nor intelligible to young readers, but any of those here mentioned is as well adapted to the reader of any age as are George Eliot’s “Adam Bede” and Thackeray’s “Pendennis.”

The volume of this title, published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co., contains the best of Harte’s short stories, and the best remain very good indeed, though since they took the world by storm other writers have given us a truer insight into the life which Harte was the first to discover and proclaim. Harte is a capital humorist in his way, both in his swaggering hearty short stories (see “Colonel Starbottle’s Client”) and in his parodies (see “Condensed Novels”).

No list of titles is necessary under Hawthorne’s name. America has no other literary artist of his stature and perfection, and he is the one American whose works we can say “you ought to read” entire—we dare say it, that is, to American readers.

Mr. Hewlett is one of the ten or twelve important living writers of English fiction. I have seen no book of his which is not good. I give only one title; his brilliant and varied achievement in the past decade makes difficult the selection of other titles for this limited list.

Holmes’s fiction is subordinate both to his essays and his poems, and should be postponed until the reader has become a true lover of the Autocrat. The novels are good for the reason, if for no other, that Holmes was one of the rare geniuses who cannot write otherwise than with wisdom and charm.

The first in point of time and excellence of a now numerous class of historical novels in which the history and the geography as well as the “story” are fictitious.

Hugo’s novels appear in several English translations.

Edited and translated by William Archer and others. The reading of Ibsen, the greatest dramatist of the nineteenth century, may be postponed until the reader has come to mature views of life.

A teller of delightfully droll stories. Like Frank R. Stockton, a much finer artist than the more serious-minded critics would be disposed to admit. It is difficult to select for this list the best of the score of talented short-story writers of the day. Perhaps this is a good place to slip in the name of a contemporary American whose fresh and original stories have deservedly survived their day in the magazines and been collected in volumes—Mr. Sidney Porter, “O. Henry.”

Young readers should beware of misleading chatter about Mr. James which appears in columns of book gossip and newspaper comment; it attempts to turn Mr. James into a joke and caricatures his subtlety and obscurity; it is analogous to the flippant and derisive nonsense through which Browning lived to reach the people at last. “Roderick Hudson” is a great novel and is as clear, strong, and easy to read as the work of any other thoughtful novelist you may choose for comparison.

Stories of the better classes of New England country folk written in a style of unblemished clarity and sweetness.

In spite of a curiously eager disposition on the part of current writers to regard Kipling’s career as over and done, he is the foremost living writer of short stories in English, and of no other young living writer can it be so safely averred that he has become one of the established classics of his race.