FullReads

I confess to a liking for tales of adventure, for wrecks in the South Seas, for treasure islands, for pirates with red shirts. Mark you, how a red shirt lights up a dull page! It is like a scarlet leaf on a gray November day. Also I have a weakness for the bang of pistols, round oaths and other desperate rascality. In such stories there is no small mincing. A villain proclaims himself on his first appearance–unless John Silver be an exception–and retains his villainy until the rope tightens about his neck in the last chapter but one; the very last being set aside for the softer commerce of the hero and heroine.

You will remember that about twenty years ago a fine crop of such stories came out of the Balkans. At that time it was a dim, unknown land, a kind of novelists’ Coast of Bohemia, an appropriate setting for distressed princesses. I’ll hazard a guess that there was not a peak in all that district on which there was not some Black Rudolph’s castle, not a road that did not clack romantically with horses’ hoofs on bold adventure. But the wars have changed all this by bringing too sharp a light upon the dim scenery of this pageantry, and swash-bucklery is all but dead.

To confess the truth, it is in such stories that I like horses best. In real life I really do not like them at all. I am rather afraid of them as of strange organisms that I can neither start with ease nor stop with safety. It is not that I never rode or drove a horse. I have achieved both. But I don’t urge him to deviltry. Instead I humor his whims. Some horses even I might be fond of. Give me a horse that nears the age of slippered pantaloon and is, moreover, phlegmatic in his tastes, and then, as the stories say “with tightened girth and feet well home”–but enough! I must not be led into boasting.

But in these older stories I love a horse. With what fire do his hoofs ring out in the flight of elopement! “Pursuit’s at the turn. Speed my brave Dobbin!” And when the Prince has kissed the Princess’ hand, you know that the story is nearly over and that they will live happily ever after. Of course there is always someone to suggest that Cinderella was never happy after she left her ashes and pumpkins and went to live in the palace. But this is idle gossip. Even if there were “occasional bickerings” between her and the Prince, this is as Lamb says it should be among “near relations.”

I nearly died of “Crime and Punishment.” These Russian novelists have too distressful a point of view. They remind me too painfully of the poem–

It was dreadful dark
In that doleful ark
When the elephants went to bed.

Doubtless if the lights burn high in you, it is well to read such gloom as is theirs. Perhaps they depict life. These things may be true and if so, we ought to know them. At the best, theirs is a real attempt “to cleanse the foul body of the infected world.” But if there be a blast without and driving rain, must we be always running to the door to get it in our face? Will not one glance in the evening be enough? Shall we be always exposing ourselves “to feel what wretches feel”? It is true that we are too content under the suffering of others, but it is true, also, that too few of us were born under a laughing star. Gray shadows fall too often on our minds. A sunny road is the best to travel by. Furthermore–and here is a deep platitude–there is many a man who sobs upon a doleful book, who to the end of time will blithely underpay his factory girls. His grief upon the book is diffuse. It ranges across the mountains of the world, but misses the nicer point of his own conduct. Is this not sentimentally like the gray yarn hysteria under the spell of which wealthy women clicked their needles in public places for the soldiers? Let me not underrate the number of garments that they made–surely a single machine might produce as many within a week. But there is danger that their work was only a sentimental expression of their world-grief. I’ll sink to depths of practicality and claim that a pittance from their allowances would have bought more and better garments in the market.

Perhaps we read too many tragical books. In the decalogue the inheritance of evil is too strongly visited on the children to the third and fourth generation, and there is scant sanction as to the inheritance of goodness. It is the sins of the fathers that live in the children. It is the evil that men do that lives after them, while the good, alas, is oft interred with their bones. If a doleful book stirs you up to life, for God’s sake read it! If it wraps you all about as in a winding sheet for death, you had best have none of it.

I had now burned several matches–and my fingers too–in the inspection of the closet where the women’s garments hung. And it came on me as I poked the books within the barrel and saw what silly books were there, that perhaps I have overstated my position. It would be a lighter doom, I thought, to be rived and shriveled by the lightning flash of a modern book, even “Crime and Punishment,” than stultified by such as were within.

Then, like the lady of the poem

Having sat me down upon a mound
To think on life,
I concluded that my views were sound
And got me up and turned me round,
And went me home again.