Chapter I: My Boyhood Reading (2)

It must not be understood that I put St. Paul in the same category with these mundane persons. Nevertheless, I found St. Paul very often reasonably mundane. He preferred to work as a tentmaker rather than take money from his clients, and one could imagine him as preaching while he worked. He frankly made collections for needy churches, and he was very grateful to Phoebe for remembering that he was a hungry man and in need of homely hospitality. He was interested in his fellow passengers Aquilla and Priscilla whom he met on board the ship that was taking them from Corinth to Ephesus. It was evident that they had not been able to make their salt in Corinth, where, however, their poverty had not interfered with their zeal in the cause of Christ. Any tent marked "Ephesus" was sure to have a good sale anywhere. The tents from Ephesus were as fashionable as the purple from Tyre, and St. Paul was pleased that his two disciples should have a chance of being more prosperous. I always felt, too, that, in his practical way, he knew that Ephesus would give him a better chance of supporting himself.

That Saul of Tarsus had not lacked for luxuries in his youth, one easily guessed. It was plain, too, that he had had the best possible instructors, and I liked to believe, when I was young, that his muscles had been well trained in the sports of gentlemen of his class. Altogether, so graphic were his descriptions and so potent his personality that, while Julius Caesar and Brutus receded, he filled the foreground, and all the more because at this time I picked up an English translation of Suetonius, just by chance one dark winter day, and as I had not yet discovered that Suetonius was a "yellow" gossip, my idols, some of the Roman heroes, received a great shock.

The constant reading of St. Paul led me to the Acts of the Apostles, and I found St. Luke very good reading, though I often wished that, as I understood he had some reputation as an artist, he had adorned his writings with illustrations.

It was a great shock to discover that none of the Apostles wrote in English, for it seemed to me that their styles were as different from one another as any styles could be, and as I, having lived a great part of my time in classes where Nepos and Caesar were translated by my dear young friends, had very little confidence in the work of any translator, I came to the conclusion that God had taken special care of the translators of the Bible, for I could not help believing that He had no interest whatever in the translations which we made daily for the impatient ears of our instructors!

One could not help loving St. Paul, too, because he was such a good fighter. When he said he fought with beasts, I was quite sure that these beasts were the unreasonable and unrighteous persons who persecuted and contradicted him. No obstacle deterred him, and he was gentle, too, although he called things by their right names and his denunciations were so vivid and mouthfilling that you knew his enemies must have been afraid to open their lips while he was near them, whatever they might have said behind his back.

My devotion to St. Paul brought me into disrepute one Friday at school when discipline was relaxed, and the teacher condescended to conversation. We were asked who was our favourite hero, and when it came to my turn I answered "St. Paul." As George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, General Grant, General Lee, Napoleon, and Alexander the Great, had walked in procession before I produced my hero, I was looked on as rather weakminded. The teacher, too, seemed astonished, and he asked me on what grounds I founded my worship. This question, coming suddenly, petrified me for a moment, and I answered, "He fought with beasts." This was taken as a personal allusion by some of my dear comrades with whom I had had altercations, and I was made to suffer for it as much as these dear comrades deemed prudent. However, they discovered that I had "language" on my side, for on the next composition day, when we read aloud the work of our brains, I accused them of "being filled with all iniquity," and other evil things which brought down a horrified remonstrance from the teacher, who was unaccustomed to such plain English, but he was knocked high and dry by the proof that I was only quoting St. Paul to the Romans.

Perhaps I became too familiar with St. Paul. Be that as it may, I regarded him as a very good friend indeed, for some of his "language," quoted in times of crisis, produced a much better effect on one's enemies than any swear word that could be invented. I am not excusing my attitude toward the Bible, but merely explaining how it affected my youthful mind. There was something extremely romantic in the very phrase, "the tumult of the silversmiths" at Ephesus. It seemed to mean a whole chapter of a novel in itself.

And there was the good centurion--Christ always seemed to have a sympathy for soldiers--who was willing to save Paul when the ship, on its way to Rome, was run aground. So he reached Melita where the amiable barbarians showed him no small courtesy. And one could not help liking the Romans; that is, the official Romans, even Felix, whose wife was a Jew like St. Paul, and who, disgusted when the Apostle spoke to him of chastity and of justice to come, yet hoped that money would be given him by Paul, and frequently sent for, and often spoke with him. And how fine seemed the Apostle's belief in his nobility as a Roman citizen! He rendered unto Caesar the things that were Caesar's. And one could easily imagine the pomp and circumstance when Agrippa and Bernice entered into the hall of audience with the tribunes and principal men of the city! And one could hear St. Paul saying, protecting himself nobly, through the nobility of a Roman law:

For it seemeth to me unreasonable to send a prisoner and not to
signify the things laid to his charge,

and Agrippa's answer, after Paul's apologia:

In a little thou persuadest me to become a Christian!

But the story did not end then. I rehearsed over and over again what the King Agrippa might have said to his sister, the noble and beautiful Bernice--I knew nothing of the lady's reputation then--and how finally they did become Christians. In my imagination, princely dignity and exquisite grace were added to the external beauty of religion; and Paul went to Rome protected by the law of the Romans. And yet the very fineness of his attitude was the cause of his further imprisonment. "This man," I often repeated with Agrippa, "might have been set at liberty, if he had not appealed to Caesar."

It was St. Paul who sent me back to the Prophet Micheas, who had previously struck me as of no importance at all, and I read:

And Thou, Bethlehem Ephrata, art a little one among the thousands
of Juda; out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be the
ruler in Israel; and his going forth is from the beginning, from
the days of eternity.

And back again to St. Matthew--

But they said to him: In Bethlehem of Juda; For so it is written by
the prophet; And thou, Bethlehem, the land of Juda, art not the
least among the princes of Juda; for out of thee shall come forth
the captain, who shall rule my people Israel.

These exercises in completing the prophecies of the Old Testament with the fulfilments of the New were interesting, and I found great pleasure in them. And this led me to a greater appreciation of the Old Testament, against which I had been once rather prejudiced. One day, I was led, by some reference or other in another book, to read the twenty-third psalm of David, in the King James version. It struck me as much more simple and appealing than the version in the Douai Bible, which begins in Latin "_Dominus regit me_." It runs:

The Lord ruleth me: and I shall want nothing.

2 He hath set me in a place of pasture.

He hath brought me up, on the water of refreshment:

3 He hath converted my soul. He hath led me on the paths of
justice, for his own name's sake.

4 For though I should walk in the midst of the shadow of death, I
fear no evils, for thou art with me.

Thy rod and thy staff, they have comforted me.

5 Thou hast prepared a table before me, against them that afflict
me.

Thou hast anointed my head with oil: and my chalice which
inebriateth me how goodly is it.

And thy mercy will follow me all the days of my life.

And that I may dwell in the house of the Lord, unto length of days.

In the Douai version this psalm was called the twenty-second.

Without any special guidance--I think most of my teachers would have looked on as dangerous any attempt to ally English literature with the Bible--I soon discovered that nearly everything I read owed something to the Bible. At first, the comparison of the twenty-third psalm in the King James version enraptured me so much that I began to find fault with the Latinized phrases of the Vulgate in English. It was the fashion in the early seventies to be very Saxon in speech, especially in the little group at school interested in English literature. Street cars at this time were comparatively new in Philadelphia, and I think we reached the last extremity of Saxonism in speech when we spoke of them as "folk wains." The tide then turned toward the Latins; and I preferred the Book of Job and the story of Ruth in the Latinized version, because the words were more mouth filling, and because it was very difficult to translate everything into a bald "early English medium", which for a time I had been trying to do. It was Keats's lovely phrase "amid the alien corn" which sent me back to "Ruth"; and a quotation in Quackenbos's "Rhetoric"--"Can'st thou hook the Leviathan" which made me revel in "Job."

Something Meg Merrilies said bore me on toward the roaring storm of Isaiah. The Latinized medium seemed to suit his denunciations best; and then, besides, I found more illuminating footnotes in the Douai version than in the King James. In both versions, some passages were so obscure that I often wondered how anybody could get any meaning out of them. I was often astonished to find in English novels that the old people in the cottages were soothed by texts, quoted at a great length, out of which I could make nothing, so I limited myself to the Douai version, which I found more illuminating.

Whether my system of reading is to be commended or not to young persons, I am not prepared to say, but for me it made the Bible a really live book. To be frank, and perhaps shocking at the same time--if anybody had asked me whether, being marooned on an island, I should have most preferred the Bible in my loneliness, I should promptly have answered "No." At this age "Nicholas Nickleby" or "Midsummer Night's Dream," or "The Tempest," or "As You Like it," or Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome," would have suited me better, provided, of course, that I could have chosen only one book.

It was borne in on me many times that no author could improve on the phrasing of the Bible. Both in the Vulgate and the King James versions there are passages which, leaving aside all question of doctrine, it is sacrilege to try to improve. The French translation of the Bible is, as everybody knows, very paraphrastic, and that may account for the fact that, while regarded as a precious depository of doctrine, it is not a household book, and the dreadfully dull interpretations of Clement Marot--called hymns--naturally bored a people who, in their hearts, believe that God listens more amiably to petitions uttered in the language of the Academy! In their novels, dealing with the beginnings of Christianity--and there are many such novels in French unknown in other countries--it is hard for a French author not to be rhetorical, in the manner of the writer of "Ben Hur" when the death of Christ is described. No human author could improve on the words of the Vulgate, or the words of the King James version. What young heart can ponder over these words, without a thrill, St. John XIX (Douai version: 1609; Rheims; 1582):

When Jesus therefore had seen his Mother and the disciple standing
whom he loved, he saith to his Mother: Woman, behold thy son.

After that, he saith to the disciple, Behold thy mother. And from
that day the disciple took her to his own.

Afterwards, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished,
that the Scripture might be fulfilled, said: I thirst.

Now there was a vessel set there full of vinegar, and they, putting
a sponge full of vinegar about hyssop, put it to his mouth.

And Jesus therefore when he had taken the vinegar, said, it is
consummated, and bowing his head, gave up the ghost.

When Marie Corelli became a popular author, there were persons existing--happily, they have all gone to the great beyond--who thought that the "talented" author could have done better!

_Essays and Essayists_

I am aware that many persons look on Emerson as somewhat dangerous reading for a boy of sixteen. The mothers and fathers of my Baptist friends and the uncle of my Methodist cousins forbade the reading of Emerson because of his Unitarianism; but, as the rector of our parish never denounced Unitarians from the altar, though he frequently offered his compliments to Martin Luther, I paid no attention whatever to these objections. I trust that I am not defending the miscellaneous reading of my boyhood; I do not recommend this course to the approval of parents and guardians; I am simply expressing the impression that certain books made on my youthful mind and heart; for, though I never said so in words, the books I liked were always nearer to my heart than to my mind. I owe a great debt to Emerson.

It was on a hot afternoon during the summer vacation that, near sundown, sitting on the warm marble steps of our house, I dipped into an early edition of Emerson. I felt inspired at once to think great thoughts and to do good things, to lift myself above the petty things of the earth, and to feel that to be an American was to be at once proud and humble. Emerson's abrupt sentences, like a number of brilliants set close together, reminded me of "Proverbs"; but the Book of Proverbs did not get so near to my actual life as the essays of Emerson. I liked the lessons that he drew from the lives of great men. I was shocked when he mentioned Confucius and Plato in the same breath as Christ; but I was amiably tolerant, for I felt that he had never had the privilege of studying the Little Catechism, and I thought of writing to him on the subject. But somebody told me that he was an "American Classic" and, from that, I concluded he was dead, and had doubtless already found out his mistake.

Perhaps I might have been better engaged in reading the more practical books offered to boys in our own time, if we had had them. There were some books then on scientific subjects, reduced to the comprehension of the young; but not so many as there are now. One of my uncles recommended the works of Samuel Smiles--"Self-Help" I think was his favourite; but Samuel Smiles never appealed to me. My small allowance, paid weekly, could not have been affected by "Thrift", and when my uncle quoted passages from this tiresome book I astounded him by replying, in a phrase I wrongly attributed to the adorable Emerson, that if I had a quarter to spend instead of twelve cents, I would give half of it for a hyacinth! My miserly uncle said it sounded just like Mohammed, and that Emerson had doubtless found it in that dangerous book, the Koran.

I cannot imagine any other author doing for me just what the essays of Emerson did. In the first place, they seemed to me to be really American; in the second, and largely because of their quality, they offered an antidote to the materialism in the very air, which had succeeded the Civil War. At this time there was much talk of money and luxury everywhere about us. Even in our quiet neighbourhood, where simple living was the rule, many had burst into ostentation, and moved away into newer and more pretentious quarters, and there was a rumour that some of these sought unlimited opportunities for extravagant expenditure. We saw them driving in new carriages, and condescendingly stopping before the white doors and the green window-shutters of our old-fashioned colonial houses. They had made money through the war. For the first time in our lives we boys heard of money making as the principal aim of life. The fact that these successful persons were classed as "shoddy" did not lessen the value of the auriferous atmosphere about us. Emerson was a corrective to this materialism. As to his philosophy or theology, that did not concern me any more than the religious opinions of Julius Caesar, whose "Commentaries" I was obliged to read. Emerson gave me a taste for the reading of essay.

By chance I fell upon some essays of Carlyle. The inflation of his style did not deter me from thoroughly enjoying the paper on "Novalis." That on "Cagliostro," however, was my favourite. It introduced me intimately to the French Revolution. I disliked this great charlatan for his motto, "Tread the lilies under foot." I was for the Bourbons! The French Revolution, as a fact, was very near to me. My mother had been born (in Philadelphia) in 1819, and my great-uncle and my grandfather had lived through the French Revolution. There was a legend, moreover--probably the same legend exists in every family of Irish descent whose connections had lived in France--that one of them had been a clerk to Fabre d'Eglantine, and had spent his time in crossing off the list of the condemned the names of the Irish-French aristocrats and substituting in their place others that did not happen to belong to Celts!

In spite of the Little Catechism and the uplifting influence of Emerson, I looked on this probably mythical gentleman as one of the glories of our family. And then there was an old man--very old--who walked up and down Sixth Street with his head wrapped in a bandanna handkerchief, bearing a parrot on his shoulder. The boys of the neighbourhood believed that he was Sanson, the executioner of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette. We shivered when we saw him; but we boasted of his existence in our neighbourhood, all the same. After I had read "Cagliostro" I devoured every line on the subject of the French Revolution I could find. It seemed to me that I would have been willing to give five years out of my life to have lived in Paris during those horrors, and to have rescued Marie Antoinette and the Princess Elizabeth! Such brutalities seemed impossible in our time; and yet I have since lived very near to friends who went through even greater horrors in Russia--the Baroness Sophie de Buxhoevenden, second lady-in-waiting to the Czarina, for instance, whose letters lie before me as I write.

In spite of my taste for Carlyle, which induced me to dip into Jean Paul Richter, of whose writings I remember only one line,

I love God and little children,

I did not get very far into his "French Revolution." It seemed then an unreal and lurid book.

Emerson led to Montaigne, whose essays, in an old edition which I had from the Mechanics' Institute, of which my father was a committeeman, delighted me beyond words. I liked Emerson's essay on "Friendship" better than his, but for wit, quick repartee, general cheerfulness, he reminded me of my favourite heroine in literature, Sir Walter Scott's Catherine Seton! Later, I read with astonishment that Montaigne was an unbeliever, a skeptic, almost a cynic. I was extremely indignant; he seemed to me to be a very pious gentleman, with that wit and humour which I seldom found in professedly pious books; and to this day I cannot hear Montaigne talked of as a precursor of Voltaire without believing that there is something crooked in the mind of the talker. So much for the impressions made in youth, so much for the long, long thoughts of which Longfellow sings.

Who is more amusingly cheerful than Montaigne, who more amusingly wise, who so well bred and attractive, who knew the world better and took it only as the world? Give me the old volume of Montaigne and a loaf of bread--no Victrola singing to me in the wilderness!--a thermos bottle, and one or two other things, and I can still spend the day in any wild place! I did not, of course, know, in those early days, what in his flavour attracted me. Afterward, I found that it was the very flavour and essence of Old France. Carlyle's impressions of historical persons interested me, but Montaigne was the most actual of living persons who spoke to me in a voice I recognized as wholly his. To be sure, I read him in Florio's translation.

I think it was about this time, too, that I discovered a very modern writer, who charmed me very greatly. It was Justin McCarthy who contributed a series of sketches of great men of the day to a magazine called the _Galaxy_. He "did" Victor Emmanuel and Pope Pius IX. and Bismarck, and many other of the worthies of the times. Nothing that he wrote before or after this pleased me at all; but these sketches were so interesting and apparently so true that they really became part of my life. If I had been asked at this time who was my favourite of all modern authors, and what the name of the composer I admired most, I should have said Justin McCarthy and Offenbach! I regarded "Voici le Sabre" in "La Grande Duchesse" as a masterpiece only to be compared to an "Ave Verum," by Pergolesi, which was often sung in St. Philip's Church at the Offertory! A strange mixture, but the truth is the truth. Although I have not been able to find Justin McCarthy's series of sketches, they still hold a sweet place in my memory. Perhaps, like other masterpieces that one loves in youth, one would now find them like those beautiful creatures of the sea that seem to be vermilion and purple and gold under the waves, but are drab and ugly things when taken out of the water. This applies to some books that one reads with pleasure in early days, and wonders, later, how they were endured!

There were not so many outdoor books in the late '60's as there are now. We were all sent to Thoreau's "Walden" and Dana's "Two Years Before the Mast." "Walden" I learned to like, but I much preferred Fenimore Cooper's description of nature. "Walden" struck me as the book of a man playing at out-of-doors, imagining his wildness, and never really liking to be too far from the town. Singularly enough, it was not until I discovered Hamerton's "A Painter's Camp" that I began to see that nature had beauties in all weathers. In truth, I hate to confess that nature alone never appealed to me. A landscape without human beings seemed deadly dull; and I did not understand until I grew much older that I had really believed that good art was an improvement on nature.

I have not the slightest idea in what light the modern critics see the works of Philip Gilbert Hamerton. I tried to read one of his novels recently, and failed; but let me say that, allowing for receptivity and what one may call temperament, I know of no book more revealing as to the relations of nature and art than "A Painter's Camp." I recall vividly the words of the beginning of the preface to the first edition:

It is known to all who are acquainted with the present condition of
the fine arts in England that landscape-painters rely less on
memory and invention than formerly, and that their work from nature
is much more laborious than it used to be.

I had seen so many pictures that seemed to be "made up" in the artist's studio and I knew so well from my experience in the drawing classes at school, how nature was neglected for artificial models, that I hailed these words with great joy.

Everything in life was rather conventional, rather fixed, for the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, to which our country owes the beginning of the aesthetic awakening, had not yet taken place. It may seem strange to this generation that we were limited to the wood-cuts in Godey's _Lady's Book_, the illustrations in _Harper's Magazine_, and an occasional picture in some short-lived periodical. The reign of the chromo had just begun. Rogers's groups were a fixture in nearly every self-respecting house, though I am glad to say, in my own family, very good casts of the Clytie and the Discus-thrower filled their place. My father greatly admired Power's Greek Slave, whose praises had been celebrated in the _Cosmopolitan Magazine_; but my mother regarded it as almost "improper."

Nearly every youth of my generation, in Philadelphia, wanted not exactly something better, but something more vivid. There were few sports; long walks and a little cricket supplied the place of the coming baseball and tennis.

In his "Steeplejack," James Huneker speaks of his weekly walks with Mr. Edward Roth, the head of a military school and the author of "Christus Judex." I, too, looked on these walks with an occasional row on the Schuylkill with him as the best part of my education. But this was later. All we could do, then, in our moments of leisure, was to walk and talk and read.

The cult of the out-of-doors had not yet begun to be developed. The beginning of "A Painter's Camp" was most attractive to my thirsty soul. Mr. Hamerton says:

I had a wild walk yesterday. I have a notion of encamping on the
Boulsworth moors to study heather; and heartily tired of being
caged up here in my library, with nothing to see but wet
garden-walks and dripping yew trees, and a sundial whereon no
shadow had fallen the livelong day, I determined, in spite of the
rain to be off to the moors to choose a site for my encampment. Not
very far from this house still dwells an old servant of my uncle's
with whom I am on the friendliest terms. So I called upon this
neighbour on my way and asked him if he would take a walk with me
to the hills. Jamie stared a little and remarked that "it ur feefi
weet" but accompanied me nevertheless, and a very pleasant walk we
had of it.

Hamerton opened his book in Jane Eyre's country; our family had lately read "Jane Eyre." This added interest to the volume, and there came the details of the invention of the new hut, intended to be a shelter against all weathers, so that the artist might study nature on intimate terms. He made it in order to paint the heather at close range. Now, this was a revelation! It had never hitherto occurred to me that the heather changes its aspect day by day, or indeed that our pet place of beauty, the Wissahickon Creek, or river if you like, was not the same every day in the year except when the ice bound it! This may seem a rather stupid state of mind; but it is the stupidity that is very common. I could understand how interesting it would be to be in snow-fall while yet safely out of it. Mr. Hamerton thus described his hut:

It consists entirely of panels, of which the largest are two feet
six inches square: these panels can be carried separately on
packhorses, or even on men's backs, and then united together by
iron bolts into a strong little building. Four of the largest
panels serve as windows, being each of them filled with a large
pane of excellent plate-glass. When erected, the walls present a
perfectly smooth surface outside, and a panelled interior; the
floor being formed in exactly the same manner, with the panelled or
coffered side turned towards the earth, and the smooth surface
uppermost. By this arrangement all the wall-bolts are inside, and
those of the floor underneath it, which protects them not only from
the weather but from theft, an iron bolt being a great temptation
to country people on account of its convenience and utility. The
walls are bolted to the floor, which gives great strength to the
whole structure, and the panels are carefully ordered, like the
stones in a well-built wall, so that the joints of the lower course
of panels do not fall below those of the upper. The roof is arched
and provides a current of fresh air, by placing ventilators at each
end of the arch, which insures a current without inconvenience to
the occupant.

The chapters on "Concerning Moonlight in Old Castles," "The Coming of the Clouds," and the little sketches, like "Loch Awe after Sunset, Sept. 23, 1860," enchanted me. It had not before struck me that Loch Awe was different on September 23, 1860, from what it was at other times, or--to carry the idea further--that the imperial Delaware had changed since that momentous time when George Washington crossed it, or the Schuylkill since Tom Moore looked upon it.

To quote further:

The mountain is green-grey, colder and greener towards the summit.
All details of field and wood are dimly visible. Two islands nearer
me are distinct against the hill, but their foliage seems black,
and no details are visible in them. The sky is all clouded over.
From the horizon to the zenith it is one veil of formless vapour.

And:

There is one streak of dead calm, which reflects the green mountain
perfectly from edge to edge of it. There is another calm shaped
like a great river, which is all green, touched with crimson.
Besides these there are delicate half calms, just dulled over with
faint breathings of the evening air; these, for the most part being
violet (from the sky), except at a distance, where they take a deep
crimson; and there is one piece of crimson calm near me set between
a faint violet breeze and a calm of a different violet. There are
one or two breezes sufficiently strong to cause ripple, and these
rippled spaces take the dull grey slate of the upper sky.

Realise this picture as well as you may be able, and then put in
the final touch. Between the dull calms and the glassy calms there
are drawn thin threads of division burning with scarlet fire.

This fire is of course got from the lower sky. I know whence it
comes, but how or why it lies in those thin scarlet threads there
where it is most wanted, and not elsewhere, I cannot satisfactorily
explain.

Then there was a delightful and illuminating chapter called "A Stream at Rest." Hamerton, who is probably now very much out of fashion, taught me the necessity of beauty in life; and, as an accessory to Emerson, the philosophy of enjoying the little, every-day things. It was Emerson who, I think, said first to me, "Take short outlooks"; and I still think that there can be no better introduction to a consideration of the relation of art to nature than "A Painter's Camp." It was "A Painter's Camp" which led me to "The Intellectual Life." There is a particular passage in Hamerton's chapter on "A Little French City" that emphasized the need of beauty.

The cathedral is all poetry; I mean that every part of it affects
our emotional nature either by its own grandeur or beauty, or by
its allusion to histories of bright virtue or brave fortitude. And
this emotional result is independent of belief in the historical
truth of these great legends: it would be stronger, no doubt, if we
believed them, but we are still capable of feeling their solemn
poetry and large significance as we feel the poetry and
significance of "Sir Galahad" or "The Idylls of the King."

Some persons are so constituted that it is necessary to their
happiness to live near some noble work of art or nature. A mountain
is satisfactory to them because it is great and ever new,
presenting itself every hour under aspects so unforeseen that one
can gaze at it for years with unflagging interest. To some minds,
to mine amongst others, human life is scarcely supportable far from
some stately and magnificent object, worthy of endless study and
admiration. But what of life in the plains? Truly, most plains are
dreary enough, but still they may have fine trees, or a cathedral.
And in the cathedral, here, I find no despicable compensation for
the loss of dear old Ben Cruacha.

There are some humorous and perhaps even comic passages in "The Intellectual Life"; these passages are unconsciously humorous or comic, as Mr. Philip Gilbert Hamerton seems to have no sense of humour. For instance, it was a great surprise to me to discover that poverty was unfavourable to the intellectual life! It was enlightening to know the reason why a man should wear evening dress after six o'clock, and why the sporting of gray clothes in the evening was unworthy of the Intellectual! Besides, it affects the character!

And letter XI "To a Master of Arts who said that a Certain Distinguished Painter was Half-educated," was a useful antidote to youthful self-conceit. I had not reached the stage, treated in the chapters on "Women and Marriage," "To a Young Gentleman Who Contemplated Marriage," but I thought the author very wise indeed, and found many other pages which were intensely stimulating. Let others decry Hamerton if they like; I owe a great deal to him; and, though I might be induced to throw "The Intellectual Life" to the Young Wolves of the Beginning of this Century, I shall always insist that "A Painter's Camp" ought to be included in every list of books.

It was George Eliot who sent me to "The Following of Christ," and she interested me in Saint Teresa, that illustrious woman so well compounded of mysticism and common sense, of whom, however, I could find no good "Life." But Thomas [`a] Kempis was a revelation! He fitted into nearly every crisis of the soul, but all his words are not for every-day life. He seems to demand too much of us poor folk of the world. Later, I came to understand that the counsel of perfection which Christ gave to the rich young man was not intended for the whole world, and many fine passages in [`A] Kempis were meant for finer temperaments than my own.

Somebody at this time presented me with a copy of Marcus Aurelius. I found him dull, stale, and unprofitable in comparison with [`A] Kempis. His philosophy of life seemed to lead to nothing except the cultivation of a very high opinion of oneself. I gave this conclusion to one of my English friends, who objected to my uncharted course of reading, and he said, "A person like you who finds nothing humorous or even philosophical in 'Alice in Wonderland' cannot be expected to like the works of Marcus Aurelius!"

It takes a prig to divide his reading into nicely staked off little plots, each with its own date. The art of injudicious reading, the art of miscellaneous reading which every normal man ought to cultivate, is a very fine and satisfactory art; for the best guide to books is a book itself. It clasps hands with a thousand other books. It has always seemed to me that "Sesame and Lilies" would not have been conceived by Ruskin if he had not heard well an echo of "The Following of Christ." There was a time when the lovers of Ruskin who wanted to read "The Stones of Venice" and the rest at leisure, felt themselves obliged to form clubs, and to divide the expense, if they were of moderate means, in order to get what was good out of him. But somehow or other, probably because it appealed more to everybody, it was always possible to find a copy of "Sesame and Lilies" at an old book stand. I think I found one most unexpectedly at Leary's in Philadelphia, where I also discovered the copy of Froissart. The Froissart, as I have said, cost me just half of my father's Christmas present that year, which was five dollars. I must have managed to get the Ruskin volume out of some other fund, for I had many things to buy with the other two and one half dollars!

Ruskin is left alone to-day; he does not seem to fill that "long-felt want" which we, the young of the sixties and seventies, admitted. No doubt he is very mannered in his style, mitred and coped when he might have been very simple in his raiment. He was a priest in literature and art; and he clothed himself as a priest. He marched with a stately tread, and yet he stooped to the single violets by the wayside.

By the way, I often wished when I was reading Ruskin, who once made apple blossoms fashionable, that he had led a crusade against the double and the triple violet, which have destroyed the reputation of the real violet. What can be more repellent to the lovers of simplicity than a bunch of these artificialities, without perfume, tied by dark green ribbon, and with all their leaves removed? "Sesame and Lilies" had the effect of sending me back to the single violet whenever I was inclined to admire the _camellia japonica_ or any other thing that was artificial, or distorted from beauty or simplicity.

Circumstances have a great deal to do with our affection for books. Propinquity, they say, leads very frequently to marriage, and if a book happens to be near and if it is any kind of book at all, there is a great temptation to develop an affection for it. All I can say is that I think that "Sesame and Lilies" is a good book, for after all a book must be judged by its effect. It led me further into Ruskin, and helped me to acquire a reverence for art and to estimate the relations of art and life. One would steel oneself against the fallacy that art, true art, might exist only for art's sake, when one had read "Sesame and Lilies" and "The Stones of Venice." Those wise men who make literary "selections" for the young have done well to include in their volumes that graphic description, so carefully modulated in tone, of the Cathedral of St. Mark. Its only fault is that it comes too near to being prose poetry; and discriminating readers who ponder over it will find some epithets possible only to a writer who was an artist in lines and pigments before he began to paint with the pen.

Ruskin opened our eyes rather violently to some aspects of life which we, the young, did not know; for the young after all learn very little by intuition. They must be taught things. This is perhaps an excuse for those vagaries in youth, those seemingly inexplicable adventures which shock the old who have forgotten what it is to be young.