Part 2

_Among men of New England strain like myself it is easy to labor long hours, to endure nervous strain, to sacrifice comfort and ease for the sake of their dear ones; but men of Puritan strain, with natures as hard as the flinty granite of their hillsides, cannot tell their loved ones how dear they are to them, until Death lays his grim hand upon the shoulder of the beloved one and closes his ears forever to the words of passionate love that now come pouring in a flood from our trembling lips._

_San Francisco, October 9, 1910._

COMFORT FOUND IN GOOD OLD BOOKS

THE GREATEST BOOK IN THE WORLD

HOW TO SECURE THE BEST THAT IS IN THE BIBLE--MUCH COMFORT IN SORROW AND STIMULUS TO GOOD LIFE MAY BE FOUND IN ITS STUDY.

Several readers of my tribute to my dead son Harold have asked me to specify, in a series of short articles, some of the great books that have proved so much comfort to me in my hours of heart-breaking sorrow. In this age of cheap printing devices we are in danger of being overwhelmed by a great tide of books that are not real books at all. Out of a hundred of the new publications that come monthly from our great publishing houses, beautifully printed and bound and often ornamented with artistic pictures, not more than ten will live longer than a year, and not more than a single volume will retain any life ten years from the time it first saw the light. Hence it behooves us to choose wisely, for our lives are limited to the Psalmist's span of years, and there is no hope of securing the length of days of Methuselah and his kindred.

Business or professional cares and social duties leave the average man or woman not over an hour a day that can be called one's very own; yet most of the self-appointed guides to reading--usually college professors or teachers or literary men with large leisure--write as though three or four hours a day for reading was the rule, rather than the exception. In my own case it is not unusual for me to spend six hours a day in reading, but it would be folly to shut my eyes to the fact that I am abnormal, an exception to the general rule. Hence in talking about books and reading I am going to assume that an hour a day is the maximum at your disposal for reading books that are real literature.

And in this preliminary article I would like to enforce as strongly as words can express it my conviction that knowledge and culture should be set apart widely. In the reading that I shall recommend, culture of the mind and the heart comes first of all. This is more valuable than rubies, a great possession that glorifies life and opens our eyes to beauties in the human soul, as well as in nature, to all of which we were once blind and dumb. And culture can be built on the bare rudiments of education, at which pedagogues and pedants will sneer. Some of the most truly cultured men and women I have ever known have been self-educated; but their minds were opened to all good books by their passion for beauty in every form and their desire to improve their minds. Among the scores of letters that have come to me in my bereavement and that have helped to save me from bitterness, was one from a woman in a country town of California. After expressing her sympathy, greater than she could voice in words, she thanked me warmly for what I had said about the good old books. Then she told of her husband, the well-known captain of an army transport, who went to sea from the rugged Maine coast when a lad of twelve, with only scanty education, and who, in all the years that followed on many seas, laboriously educated himself and read the best books.

In his cabin, she said, were well-worn copies of Shakespeare, Gibbon, Thackeray, Dickens, Burns, and others. These great worthies he had made a part of himself by constant reading. Of course, the man who thinks that the full flower of education is the ability to "parse" a sentence, or to express a commonplace thought in grandiloquent language that will force his reader to consult a dictionary for the meaning of unusual words--such a man and pedant would look upon this old sea captain as uneducated. But for real culture of mind and soul give me the man who has had many solitary hours for thought, with nothing but the stars to look down on him; who has felt the immensity of sea and sky, with no land and no sail to break the fearful circle set upon the face of the great deep.

In the quest for culture, in the desire to improve your mind by close association with the great writers of all literature, do not be discouraged because you may have had little school training. The schools and the universities have produced only a few of the immortal writers. The men who speak to you with the greatest force from the books into which they put their living souls have been mainly men of simple life. The splendid stimulus that they give to every reader of their books sprang from the education of hard experience and the culture of the soul. The writers of these books yearned to aid the weak and heavy-laden and to bind up the wounds of the afflicted and sorely stricken. Can one imagine any fame so great or so enduring as the fame of him who wrote hundreds of years ago words that bring tears to one's eyes today--tears that give place to that passionate ardor for self-improvement, which is the beginning of all real culture?

And another point is to guard against losing the small bits of leisure scattered through the day. Don't take up a magazine or a newspaper when you have fifteen minutes or a half hour of leisure alone in your room. Keep a good book and make it a habit to read so many pages in the time that is your own. Cultivate rapid reading, with your mind intent on your book. You will find in a month that you have doubled your speed and that you have fixed in your mind what you have read, and thus made it a permanent possession. If you persist in this course, reading always as though you had only a few moments to spare and concentrating your mind on the page before you, you will find that reading becomes automatic and that you can easily read thirty pages where before ten pages seemed a hard task.

Long years ago it was my custom to reach home a half hour before dinner. To avoid irritability which usually assailed me when hungry, I took up Scott and read all the Waverley novels again. It required barely a year, but those half hours made at the end of the period eight whole days. In the same way in recent years I have reread Dickens, Thackeray, Kipling and Hardy, because I wanted to read something as recreation which I would not be forced to review. Constant practice in rapid reading has given me the power of reading an ordinary novel and absorbing it thoroughly in four hours. This permits of no dawdling, but one enjoys reading far better when he does it at top speed.

Macaulay in his memoirs tells of the mass of reading which he did in India, always walking up and down his garden, because during such exercise his mind was more alert than when sitting at a desk.

Many will recall Longfellow's work on the translation of Dante's _Inferno_, done in the fifteen minutes every morning which was required for his chocolate to boil. Every one remembers the "Pigskin Library" which Colonel Roosevelt carried with him to Africa on his famous hunting trip. The books were all standard works of pocket size, bound in pigskin, which defies sweat, blood, dirt or moisture, and takes on in time the rich tint of a well-used saddle. Roosevelt read these books whenever he chanced to have a few minutes of leisure. And it seems to me the superior diction of his hunting articles, which was recognized by all literary critics, came directly from this constant reading of the best books, joined with the fact that he had ample leisure for thought and wrote his articles with his own hand. Dictation to a stenographer is an easy way of preparing "copy" for the printer, but it is responsible for the decadence of literary style among English and American authors.

In selecting the great books of the world place must be given first of all, above and beyond all, to the Bible. In the homely old King James' version, the spirit of the Hebrew prophets seems reflected as in a mirror. For the Bible, if one were cast away on a lonely island, he would exchange all other books; from the Bible alone could such a castaway get comfort and help. It is the only book in the world that is new every morning: the only one that brings balm to wounded hearts.

Looked upon merely as literature, the Bible is the greatest book in the world; but he is dull and blind indeed who can study it and not see that it is more than a collection of supremely eloquent passages, written by many hands. It is surcharged with that deep religious spirit which marked the ancient Hebrews as a people set apart from alien races. Compare the Koran with the Bible and you will get a measure of the fathomless height this Book of books is raised above all others. Those who come to it with open minds and tender hearts, free from the worldliness that callouses so many fine natures, will find that in very truth it renews their strength; that it makes their spirit "mount up with wings as an eagle."

First read the Old Testament, with its splendid imagery, its noble promises of rewards to those who shall be lifted out of the waters of trouble and sorrow. Then read the New Testament, whose simplicity gains new force against this fine background of promise and fulfilment. If the verbiage of many books of the Old Testament repels you, then get a single volume like _The Soul of the Bible_, arranged by Ulysses Pierce and printed by the American Unitarian Association of Boston. This volume of 500 pages contains the real essence of the Bible, revealed in all the beauty of incomparable phrase and sublime imagery; sounding the deeps of sorrow, mounting to the heights of joy; traversing the whole range of human life and showing that God is the only refuge for the sorely afflicted. How beautiful to the wounded heart the promise that always "underneath are the everlasting arms."

Read _The Soul of the Bible_ carefully, and make it a part of your mental possessions. Then you will be ready to take up the real study of the Bible, which can never be finished, though your days may be long in the land. This study will take away the stony heart and will give you in return a heart of flesh, tender to the appeals of the sick and the sorrowing. If you have lost a dear child, the daily reading of the Bible will gird you up to go out and make life worth living for the orphan and the children of poverty and want, who so often are robbed from the cradle of their birthright of love and sunshine and opportunity for development of body and mind.

If you have lost father or mother, then it will make your sympathy keen for the halting step of age and the pathetic eyes, in which you see patient acceptance of the part of looker-on in life, the only role left to those who have been shouldered out of the active ways of the world to dream of the ardent love and the brave work of their youth. So the reading of the Bible will gradually transmute your spirit into something which the worst blows of fate can neither bend nor break. To guard your feet on the stony road of grief you will be "shod with iron and brass." Then, in those immortal words of Zophar to Job:

"Then shall thy life be clearer than the noonday; Though there be darkness, it shall be as the morning, And because there is hope, thou shalt be secure; Yea, thou shalt look about thee, and shalt take thy rest in safety; Thou shalt lie down, and none shall make thee afraid."

To this spiritual comfort will be added gain in culture through close and regular reading of the Bible. Happy are they who commit to the wax tablets of childish memory the great passages of the Old Testament. Such was Ruskin, who owed much of his splendid diction to early study of the Bible. Such also were Defoe and De Quincey, two men of widely different gifts, but with rare power of moving men's souls. The great passages of the Bible have entered into the common speech of the plain people of all lands; they have become part and parcel of our daily life. So should we go to the fountainhead of this unfailing source of inspiration and comfort and drink daily of its healing waters, which cleanse the heart and make it as the heart of a little child.

SHAKESPEARE STANDS NEXT TO THE BIBLE

HINTS ON THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS--HOW TO MASTER THE BEST OF THESE DRAMAS, THE FINEST OF MODERN WORK.

Next to the Bible in the list of great books of the world stands Shakespeare. No other work, ancient or modern, can challenge this; but, like the Bible, the great plays of Shakespeare are little read. Many of today prefer to read criticism about the dramatist rather than to get their ideas at first hand from his best works. Others spend much time on such nonsense as the Baconian theory--hours which they might devote to a close and loving study of the greatest plays the world has ever seen. Such a study would make the theory that the author of the _Essays_ and the _Novum Organum_ wrote _Hamlet_ or _Othello_ seem like midsummer madness. As well ask one to believe that Herbert Spencer wrote _Pippa Passes_ or _The Idyls of the King_.

The peculiarity of Shakespeare's genius was that it reached far beyond his time; it makes him modern today, when the best work of his contemporaries, like Ben Jonson, Marlowe and Ford, are unreadable. Any theatrical manager of our time who should have the hardihood to put on the stage Jonson's _The Silent Woman_ or Marlowe's _Tamburlaine_ would court disaster. Yet any good actor can win success with Shakespeare's plays, although he may not coin as much money as he would from a screaming farce or a homespun play of American country life.

Those who have heard Robert Mantell in Lear, Richard III, Hamlet or Iago can form some idea of the vitality and the essential modernism of Shakespeare's work. The good actor or the good stage manager cuts out the coarse and the stupid lines that may be found in all Shakespeare's plays. The remainder reaches a height of poetic beauty, keen insight into human nature and dramatic perfection which no modern work even approaches. Take an unlettered spectator who may never have heard Shakespeare's name and he soon becomes thrall to the genius of this great Elizabethan wizard, whose master hand reaches across the centuries and moves him to laughter and tears. The only modern who can claim a place beside him is Goethe, whose _Faust_, whether in play or in opera, has the same deathless grip on the sympathies of an audience.

And yet in taking up Shakespeare the reader who has no guide is apt to stumble at the threshold and retire without satisfaction. As arranged, the comedies are given first, and it is not well to begin with Shakespeare's comedies. In reading any author it is the part of wisdom to begin with his best works. Our knowledge of Shakespeare is terribly meager, but we know that he went up to London from his boyhood home at Stratford-on-Avon, that he secured work in a playhouse, and that very soon he began to write plays. To many this sudden development of a raw country boy into a successful dramatist seems incredible.

Yet a similar instance is afforded by Alexander Dumas, the greatest imaginative writer of his time, and the finest story-teller in all French literature. Dumas had little education, and his work, when he went to Paris from his native province, was purely clerical, yet he read very widely, and the novels and romances of Scott aroused his imagination. But who taught Dumas the perfect use of French verse? Who gave him his prose style as limpid and flowing as a country brook? These things Dumas doesn't think it necessary to explain in his voluminous memoirs. They are simply a part of that literary genius which is the despair of the writer who has not the gift of style or the power to move his readers by creative imagination.

In the same way, had Shakespeare left any biographical notes, we should see that this raw Stratford youth unconsciously acquired every bit of culture that came in his way; that his mind absorbed like a sponge all the learning and the literary art of his famous contemporaries. The Elizabethan age was charged with a peculiar imaginative power; the verse written then surpasses in uniform strength and beauty any verse that has been written since; the men who wrote were as lawless, as daring, as superbly conscious of their own powers as the great explorers and adventurers who carried the British flag to the ends of the earth and made the English sailor feared as one whose high courage and bulldog tenacity never recognized defeat.

Given creative literary genius in greater measure than any other man was ever endowed with, the limits of Shakespeare's development could not be marked. His capacity was boundless and, living in an atmosphere as favorable to literary art as that of Athens in the time of Pericles, Shakespeare produced in a few years those immortal plays which have never been equaled in mastery of human emotion and beauty and power of diction.

There is no guide to the order in which Shakespeare wrote his plays, except the internal evidence of his verse. Certain habits of metrical work, as shown in the meter and the arrangement of the lines, have enabled close students of Shakespeare to place most of the comedies after the historical plays. Thus in the early plays Shakespeare arranged his blank verse so that the sense ends with each line and he was much given to rhymed couplets at the close of each long speech. But later, when he had gained greater mastery of his favorite blank verse, many lines are carried over, thus welding them more closely and forming verse that has the rhythm and beauty of organ tones. As Shakespeare advanced in command over the difficult blank verse he showed less desire to use rhyme.

This close study of versification shows that _Love's Labor's Lost_ was probably Shakespeare's first play, followed by _The Comedy of Errors_ and by several historical plays. One year after his first rollicking comedy appeared he produced _Romeo and Juliet_, but this great drama of young love was revised carefully six years later and put into the form that we know. Three years after his start he produced _Midsummer Night's Dream_ and _The Merchant of Venice_, and followed these with his greatest comedies, _Much Ado About Nothing_, _Twelfth Night_ and _As You Like It_, the latter the comedy which appeals most strongly to modern readers and modern audiences.

Then came a period in which Shakespeare's world was somber, and his creative genius found expression in the great tragedies--_Julius Caesar_, _Hamlet_, _Othello_, _King Lear_, _Macbeth_ and _Antony and Cleopatra_. And finally we have the closing years of production, in which he wrote three fine plays--_The Tempest_, _Cymbeline_ and _The Winter's Tale_.

According to the best authorities, Shakespeare began writing plays in 1590 and he ended early in 1613. Into these twenty-three years he crowded greater intellectual activity than any other man ever showed in the same space of time. Probably Sir Walter Scott, laboring like a galley slave at the oar to pay off the huge debt rolled up by the reckless Ballantyne, comes next in creative literary power to Shakespeare; but Scott's work was in prose and was far easier of production.

Shakespeare, like all writers of his day, took his materials from all sources and never scrupled to borrow plots from old or contemporary authors. But he so transmuted his materials by the alchemy of genius that one would never recognize the originals from his finished version. And he put into his great plays such a wealth of material drawn from real life that one goes to them for comfort and sympathy in affliction as he goes to the great books of the Bible. In a single play, as in _Hamlet_, the whole round of human life and passions is reviewed. Whatever may be his woe or his disappointment, no one goes to _Hamlet_ without getting some response to his grief or his despair.

To give a list of the plays of Shakespeare which one should read is very difficult, because one reader prefers this and another that, and each can give good reasons for his liking. What I shall try to do here is to indicate certain plays which, if carefully read several times, will make you master of Shakespeare's art and will prepare you for wider reading in this great storehouse of human nature. _Romeo and Juliet_, a tragedy of young, impulsive love, represents the fine flower of Shakespeare's young imagination, before it had been clouded by sorrow. The verse betrays some of the defects of his early style, but it is rich in beauty and passion. The plot is one of the best, and this, with the opportunity for striking stage effects and brilliant costumes, has made it the most popular of all Shakespeare's plays. The characters are all sharply drawn and the swift unfolding of the plot represents the height of dramatic skill. Next to this, one should read _The Merchant of Venice_. Shylock is one of the great characters in Shakespeare's gallery, a pathetic, lonely figure, barred out from all close association with his fellows in trade by evil traits, that finally drive him to ruin. Then take up a comedy like _As You Like It_, as restful to the senses as fine music, and filled with verse as tuneful and as varied as the singing of a great artist.

By this reading you will be prepared for the supreme tragedies--each a masterpiece without a superior in any literature. These are _Hamlet_, _Othello_, _King Lear_, _Julius Caesar_, _Macbeth_ and _Antony and Cleopatra_. In no other six works in any language can one find such range of thought, such splendor of verse, such soundings of the great sea of human passions--love, jealousy, ambition, hate, remorse, fear and shame. Each typifies some overmastering passion, but _Hamlet_ stands above all as a study of a splendid mind, swayed by every wind of impulse, noble in defeat and pathetic in the final ruin of hope and love, largely due to lack of courage and decision of character. Take it all in all, _Hamlet_ represents the finest creative work of any modern author. This play is packed with bitter experience of life, cast in verse that is immortal in its beauty and melody.