Andrew Lang
Adventures Among Books
PREFACE
Of the Essays in this volume Adventures among Books, and Rabs Friend, appeared in Scribners Magazine; and Recollections of Robert Louis Stevenson (to the best of the authors memory) in The North American Review. The Essay on Smollett was in the Anglo-Saxon, which has ceased to appear; and the shorter papers, such as The Confessions of Saint Augustine, in a periodical styled Wit and Wisdom. For The Poems of William Morris the author has to thank the Editor of Longmans Magazine; for The Boy, and Mrs. Radcliffes Novels, the Proprietors of The Cornhill Magazine; for Enchanted Cigarettes, and possibly for The Supernatural in Fiction, the Proprietors of The Idler. The portrait, after Sir William Richmond, R.A., was done about the time when most of the Essays were written and that was not yesterday.
CHAPTER I: ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
I
In an age of reminiscences, is there room for the confessions of a veteran, who remembers a great deal about books and very little about people? I have often wondered that a Biographia Literaria has so seldom been attempted a biography or autobiography of a man in his relations with other minds. Coleridge, to be sure, gave this name to a work of his, but he wandered from his apparent purpose into a world of alien disquisitions. The following pages are frankly bookish, and to the bookish only do they appeal. The habit of reading has been praised as a virtue, and has been denounced as a vice. In no case, if we except the perpetual study of newspapers (which cannot fairly be called reading), is the vice, or the virtue, common. It is more innocent than opium-eating, though, like opium-eating, it unlocks to us artificial paradises. I try to say what I have found in books, what distractions from the world, what teaching (not much), and what consolations.
In beginning an autobiographia literaria, an account of how, and in what order, books have appealed to a mind, which books have ever above all things delighted, the author must pray to be pardoned for the sin of egotism. There is no other mind, naturally, of which the author knows so much as of his own. On na que soi, as the poor girl says in one of M. Paul Bourgets novels. In literature, as in love, one can only speak for himself. This author did not, like Fulke Greville, retire into the convent of literature from the strife of the world, rather he was born to be, from the first, a dweller in the cloister of a library. Among the poems which I remember best out of early boyhood is Lucy Ashtons song, in the Bride of Lammermoor:
Look not thou on beautys charming,
Sit thou still when kings are arming,
Taste not when the wine-cup glistens,
Speak not when the people listens,
Stop thine ear against the singer,
From the red gold keep thy finger,
Vacant heart, and hand, and eye,
Easy live and quiet die.
The rhymes, unlearned, clung to my memory; they would sing themselves to me on the way to school, or cricket-field, and, about the age of ten, probably without quite understanding them, I had chosen them for a kind of motto in life, a tune to murmur along the fallentis semita vitæ. This seems a queer idea for a small boy, but it must be confessed.
It takes all sorts to make a world, some are soldiers from the cradle, some merchants, some orators; nothing but a love of books was the gift given to me by the fairies. It was probably derived from forebears on both sides of my family, one a great reader, the other a considerable collector of books which remained with us and were all tried, persevered with, or abandoned in turn, by a student who has not blanched before the Epigoniad.
About the age of four I learned to read by a simple process. I had heard the elegy of Cock Robin till I knew it by rote, and I picked out the letters and words which compose that classic till I could read it for myself. Earlier than that, Robinson Crusoe had been read aloud to me, in an abbreviated form, no doubt. I remember the pictures of Robinson finding the footstep in the sand, and a dance of cannibals, and the parrot. But, somehow, I have never read Robinson since: it is a pleasure to come.
The first books which vividly impressed me were, naturally, fairy tales, and chap-books about Robert Bruce, William Wallace, and Rob Roy. At that time these little tracts could be bought for a penny apiece. I can still see Bruce in full armour, and Wallace in a kilt, discoursing across a burn, and Rob Roy slipping from the soldiers horse into the stream. They did not then awaken a precocious patriotism; a boy of five is more at home in Fairyland than in his own country. The sudden appearance of the White Cat as a queen after her head was cut off, the fiendish malice of the Yellow Dwarf, the strange cake of crocodile eggs and millet seed which the mother of the Princess Frutilla made for the Fairy of the Desert these things, all fresh and astonishing, but certainly to be credited, are my first memories of romance. One story of a White Serpent, with a woodcut of that mysterious reptile, I neglected to secure, probably for want of a penny, and I have regretted it ever since. One never sees those chap books now. The White Serpent, in spite of all research, remains introuvable. It was a lost chance, and Fortune does not forgive. Nobody ever interfered with these, or indeed with any other studies of ours at that time, as long as they were not prosecuted on Sundays. The fightingest parts of the Bible, and the Apocrypha, and stories like that of the Witch of Endor, were sabbatical literature, read in a huge old illustrated Bible. How I advanced from the fairy tales to Shakespeare, what stages there were on the way for there must have been stages is a thing that memory cannot recover. A nursery legend tells that I was wont to arrange six open books on six chairs, and go from one to the others, perusing them by turns. No doubt this was what people call desultory reading, but I did not hear the criticism till later, and then too often for my comfort. Memory holds a picture, more vivid than most, of a small boy reading the Midsummer Nights Dream by firelight, in a room where candles were lit, and some one touched the piano, and a young man and a girl were playing chess. The Shakespeare was a volume of Kenny Meadows edition; there are fairies in it, and the fairies seemed to come out of Shakespeares dream into the music and the firelight. At that moment I think that I was happy; it seemed an enchanted glimpse of eternity in Paradise; nothing resembling it remains with me, out of all the years.
We went from the border to the south of England, when the number of my years was six, and in England we found another paradise, a circulating library with brown, greasy, ill-printed, odd volumes of Shakespeare and of the Arabian Nights. How their stained pages come before the eyes again the pleasure and the puzzle of them! What did the lady in the Genis glass box want with the Merchants? what meant all these conversations between the Fat Knight and Ford, in the Merry Wives? It was delightful, but in parts it was difficult. Fragments of The Tempest, and of other plays, remain stranded in my memory from these readings: Ferdinand and Miranda at chess, Cleopatra cuffing the messenger, the asp in the basket of figs, the Friar and the Apothecary, Troilus on the Ilian walls, a vision of Cassandra in white muslin with her hair down. People forbid children to read this or that. I am sure they need not, and that even in our infancy the magician, Shakespeare, brings us nothing worse than a world of beautiful visions, half realised. In the Egyptian wizards little pool of ink, only the pure can see the visions, and in Shakespeares magic mirror children see only what is pure. Among other books of that time I only recall a kind of Sunday novel, Naomi; or, The Last Days of Jerusalem. Who, indeed, could forget the battering-rams, and the man who cried on the battlements, Woe, woe to myself and to Jerusalem! I seem to hear him again when boys break the hum of London with yells of the latest disaster.
We left England in a year, went back to Scotland, and awoke, as it were, to know the glories of our birth. We lived in Scotts country, within four miles of Abbotsford, and, so far, we had heard nothing of it. I remember going with one of the maids into the cottage of a kinsman of hers, a carpenter; a delightful place, where there was sawdust, where our first fishing-rods were fashioned. Rummaging among the books, of course, I found some cheap periodical with verses in it. The lines began
The Baron of Smaylhome rose with day,
He spurred his courser on,
Without stop or stay, down the rocky way
That leads to Brotherstone.
A rustic tea-table was spread for us, with scones and honey, not to be neglected. But they were neglected till we had learned how
The sable score of fingers four
Remains on that board impressed,
And for evermore that lady wore
A covering on her wrist.
We did not know nor ask the poets name. Children, probably, say very little about what is in their minds; but that unhappy knight, Sir Richard of Coldinghame, and the Priest, with his chamber in the east, and the moody Baron, and the Lady, have dwelt in our mind ever since, and hardly need to be revived by looking at The Eve of St. John.
Soon after that we were told about Sir Walter, how great he was, how good, how, like Napoleon, his evil destiny found him at last, and he wore his heart away for honours sake. And we were given the Lay, and The Lady of the Lake. It was my father who first read Tam o Shanter to me, for which I confess I did not care at that time, preferring to take witches and bogies with great seriousness. It seemed as if Burns were trifling with a noble subject. But it was in a summer sunset, beside a window looking out on Ettrick and the hill of the Three Brethrens Cairn, that I first read, with the dearest of all friends, how
The stag at eve had drunk his fill
Where danced the moon on Monans rill,
And deep his midnight lair had made
In lone Glenartneys hazel shade.
Then opened the gates of romance, and with Fitz-James we drove the chase, till
Few were the stragglers, following far,
That reached the lake of Vennachar,
And when the Brig of Turk was won,
The foremost horseman rode alone.
From that time, for months, there was usually a little volume of Scott in ones pocket, in company with the miscellaneous collection of a boys treasures. Scott certainly took his fairy folk seriously, and the Mauth Dog was rather a disagreeable companion to a small boy in wakeful hours. 1 After this kind of introduction to Sir Walter, after learning ones first lessons in history from the Tales of a Grandfather, nobody, one hopes, can criticise him in cold blood, or after the manner of Mr. Leslie Stephen, who is not sentimental. Scott is not an author like another, but our earliest known friend in letters; for, of course, we did not ask who Shakespeare was, nor inquire about the private history of Madame dAulnoy. Scott peopled for us the rivers and burnsides with his reivers; the Fairy Queen came out of Eildon Hill and haunted Carterhaugh; at Newark Tower we saw the embattled portal arch
Whose ponderous grate and massy bar
Had oft rolled back the tide of war,
just as, at Foulshiels, on Yarrow, we beheld the very roofless cottage whence Mungo Park went forth to trace the waters of the Niger, and at Oakwood the tower of the Wizard Michael Scott.
Probably the first novel I ever read was read at Elgin, and the story was Jane Eyre. This tale was a creepy one for a boy of nine, and Rochester was a mystery, St. John a bore. But the lonely little girl in her despair, when something came into the room, and her days of starvation at school, and the terrible first Mrs. Rochester, were not to be forgotten. They abide in ones recollection with a Red Indians ghost, who carried a rusty ruined gun, and whose acquaintance was made at the same time.
I fancy I was rather an industrious little boy, and that I had minded my lessons, and satisfied my teachers I know I was reading Pinnocks History of Rome for pleasure till the wicked day of destiny came, and I felt a call, and underwent a process which may be described as the opposite of conversion. The call came from Dickens. Pickwick was brought into the house. From that hour it was all over, for five or six years, with anything like industry and lesson-books. I read Pickwick in convulsions of mirth. I dropped Pinnocks Rome for good. I neglected everything printed in Latin, in fact everything that one was understood to prepare for ones classes in the school whither I was now sent, in Edinburgh. For there, living a rather lonely small boy in the house of an aged relation, I found the Waverley Novels. The rest is transport. A conscientious tutor dragged me through the Latin grammar, and a constitutional dislike to being beaten on the hands with a leather strap urged me to acquire a certain amount of elementary erudition. But, for a year, I was a young hermit, living with Scott in the Waverleys and the Border Minstrelsy, with Pope, and Prior, and a translation of Ariosto, with Lever and Dickens, David Copperfield and Charles OMalley, Longfellow and Mayne Reid, Dumas, and in brief, with every kind of light literature that I could lay my hands upon. Carlyle did not escape me; I vividly remember the helpless rage with which I read of the Flight to Varennes. In his work on French novelists, Mr. Saintsbury speaks of a disagreeable little boy, in a French romance, who found Scott assommant, stunningly stupid. This was a very odious little boy, it seems (I have not read his adventures), and he came, as he deserved, to a bad end. Other and better boys, I learn, find Scott slow. Extraordinary boys! Perhaps Ivanhoe was first favourite of yore; you cannot beat Front de Boeuf, the assault on his castle, the tournament. No other tournament need apply. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, greatly daring, has attempted to enter the lists, but he is a mere Ralph the Hospitaller. Next, I think, in order of delight, came Quentin Durward, especially the hero of the scar, whose name Thackeray could not remember, Quentins uncle. Then The Black Dwarf, and Dugald, our dear Rittmeister. I could not read Rob Roy then, nor later; nay, not till I was forty. Now Di Vernon is the lady for me; the queen of fiction, the peerless, the brave, the tender, and true.
The wisdom of the authorities decided that I was to read no more novels, but, as an observer remarked, I dont see what is the use of preventing the boy from reading novels, for hes just reading Don Juan instead. This was so manifestly no improvement, that the ban on novels was tacitly withdrawn, or was permitted to become a dead letter. They were far more enjoyable than Byron. The worst that came of this was the suggestion of a young friend, whose life had been adventurous indeed he had served in the Crimea with the Bashi Bazouks that I should master the writings of Edgar Poe. I do not think that the Black Cat, and the Fall of the House of Usher, and the Murders in the Rue Morgue, are very good reading for a boy who is not peculiarly intrepid. Many a bad hour they gave me, haunting me, especially, with a fear of being prematurely buried, and of waking up before breakfast to find myself in a coffin. Of all the books I devoured in that year, Poe is the only author whom I wish I had reserved for later consideration, and whom I cannot conscientiously recommend to children.