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I choose to trace the connection between the styles of dress and books, and–where my knowledge serves–to show the effect of political change on both. For it is written that when Constantinople fell in the fifteenth century Turkish costumes became the fashion through western Europe–maybe a flash of eastern color across the shoulders or an oriental buckle for the shoes. Similarly the Balkan War gave us hints for dress. Many styles to-day are marks of our kinship with the East. These are mere broken promptings for your own elaboration. And it seems to sort with this theory of close relation, that the generation which flared and flounced its person until nature was no more than a kernel in the midst, which puffed itself like a muffin with but a finger-point of dough within, should be the generation that particularly delighted in romantic literature, in which likewise nature is so prudently wrapped that scarce an ankle can show itself. It would be a nice inquiry whether the hoopskirt was not introduced–it was midway in the eighteenth century, I think–at the time of the first budding of romantic sentiment. The “Man of Feeling” came after and Anne Radcliffe’s novels. Is it not significant also, in these present days of Russian novels and naked realism, that costume should advance sympathetically to the edge of modesty?

There is something, however, to be said in favor of romantic books, despite the horrible examples at the top of this barrel. Perhaps our own literature shivers in too thin a shift. For once upon a time somewhere between the age of bustles and ourselves there were writers who ended their stories “and they were married and lived happily ever after.” Whereas at this present day stories are begun “They were married and straightway things began to go to the devil.” And for my own part I have read enough of family quarrels. I am tired of the tune upon the triangle and I am ready for softer flutings. When I visit my neighbors, I want them to make a decent pretense. It was Charles Lamb who found his married friends too loving in his presence, but let us not go to extremes! And so, after I have read a few books of marital complication, I yearn for the old-fashioned couple in the older books who went hand in hand to old age. At this minute there is a black book that looks down upon me like a crow. It is “Crime and Punishment.” I read it once when I was ill, and I nearly died of it. I confess that after a very little acquaintance with such books I am tempted to sequester them on a top shelf somewhere, beyond reach of tiptoe, where they may brood upon their banishment and rail against the world.

Encyclopedias and the tonnage of learning properly take their places on the lowest shelves, for their lump and mass make a fitting foundation. I must say, however, that the habit of the dictionary of secreting itself in the darkest corner of the lowest shelf contributes to general illiteracy. I have known families wrangle for ten minutes on the meaning of a word rather than lift this laggard from its depths. Be that as it may, the novels and poetry should be on the fifth shelf from the bottom, just off the end of the nose, so to speak.

Now, the vinegar cruet is never the largest vessel in the house. So by strict analogy, sour books–the kind that bite the temper and snarl upon your better moods–should be in a small minority. Do not mistake me! I shall find a place, maybe, for a volume or two of Nietzsche, and all of Ibsen surely. I would admit uplift too, for my taste is catholic. And there will be other books of a kind that never rouse a chuckle in you. For these are necessary if for no more than as alarm clocks to awake us from our dreaming self-content. But in the main I would not have books too insistent upon the wrongs of the world and the impossibility of remedy.