Adventures among Books | Page 3

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This etext was prepared by David Price, email [email protected]
from the 1912 Longmans, Green and Co. edition.

ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
by Andrew Lang

Contents:
Preface Adventures Among Books Recollections of Robert Louis
Stevenson Rab's Friend Oliver Wendell Holmes Mr. Morris's Poems
Mrs. Radcliffe's Novels A Scottish Romanticist of 1830 The
Confessions of Saint Augustine Smollett Nathaniel Hawthorne The
Paradise of Poets Paris and Helen Enchanted Cigarettes Stories and
Story-telling The Supernatural in Fiction An Old Scottish Psychical
Researcher The Boy

PREFACE

Of the Essays in this volume "Adventures among Books," and "Rab's
Friend," appeared in Scribner's Magazine; and "Recollections of Robert
Louis Stevenson" (to the best of the author's 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 Longman's Magazine; for "The Boy," and "Mrs.
Radcliffe's 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

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 n'a que soi, as the poor girl says in
one of M. Paul Bourget's novels. In literature, as in love, one can only
speak for himself. This