Adventures among Books | Page 9

venture abides, except torture, defeat, and death.
No play not poem of individual fortunes is so moving as this ruin of a
people; no modern story can stir us, with all its eloquence, like the brief
gravity of this ancient history. Nor can we find, at the last, any wisdom
more wise than that which bids us do what men may, and bear what
men must. Such are the lessons of the Greek, of the people who tried all
things, in the morning of the world, and who still speak to us of what
they tried in words which are the sum of human gaiety and gloom, of

grief and triumph, hope and despair. The world, since their day, has but
followed in the same round, which only seems new: has only made the
same experiments, and failed with the same failure, but less gallantly
and less gloriously.
One's school-boy adventures among books ended not long after
winning the friendship of Homer and Thucydides, of Lucretius and
Catullus. One's application was far too desultory to make a serious and
accurate scholar.
I confess to having learned the classical languages, as it were by
accident, for the sake of what is in them, and with a provokingly
imperfect accuracy. Cricket and trout occupied far too much of my
mind and my time: Christopher North, and Walton, and Thomas Tod
Stoddart, and "The Moor and the Loch," were my holiday reading, and
I do not regret it. Philologists and Ireland scholars are not made so, but
you can, in no way, fashion a scholar out of a casual and inaccurate
intelligence. The true scholar is one whom I envy, almost as much as I
respect him; but there is a kind of mental short-sightedness, where
accents and verbal niceties are concerned, which cannot be sharpened
into true scholarship. Yet, even for those afflicted in this way, and with
the malady of being "idle, careless little boys," the ancient classics have
a value for which there is no substitute. There is a charm in finding
ourselves--our common humanity, our puzzles, our cares, our joys, in
the writings of men severed from us by race, religion, speech, and half
the gulf of historical time--which no other literary pleasure can equal.
Then there is to be added, as the university preacher observed, "the
pleasure of despising our fellow-creatures who do not know Greek."
Doubtless in that there is great consolation.
It would be interesting, were it possible, to know what proportion of
people really care for poetry, and how the love of poetry came to them,
and grew in them, and where and when it stopped. Modern poets whom
one meets are apt to say that poetry is not read at all. Byron's Murray
ceased to publish poetry in 1830, just when Tennyson and Browning
were striking their preludes. Probably Mr. Murray was wise in his
generation. But it is also likely that many persons, even now, are

attached to poetry, though they certainly do not buy contemporary
verse. How did the passion come to them? How long did it stay? When
did the Muse say good-bye? To myself, as I have remarked, poetry
came with Sir Walter Scott, for one read Shakespeare as a child, rather
in a kind of dream of fairyland and enchanted isles, than with any
distinct consciousness that one was occupied with poetry. Next to Scott,
with me, came Longfellow, who pleased one as more reflective and
tenderly sentimental, while the reflections were not so deep as to be
puzzling. I remember how "Hiawatha" came out, when one was a boy,
and how delightful was the free forest life, and Minnehaha, and
Paupukkeewis, and Nokomis. One did not then know that the same
charm, with a yet fresher dew upon it, was to meet one later, in the
"Kalewala." But, at that time, one had no conscious pleasure in poetic
style, except in such ringing verse as Scott's, and Campbell's in his
patriotic pieces. The pleasure and enchantment of style first appealed to
me, at about the age of fifteen, when one read for the first time -
"So all day long the noise of battle rolled Among the mountains by the
winter sea; Until King Arthur's Table, man by man, Had fallen in
Lyonnesse about their Lord."
Previously one had only heard of Mr. Tennyson as a name. When a
child I was told that a poet was coming to a house in the Highlands
where we chanced to be, a poet named Tennyson. "Is he a poet like Sir
Walter Scott?" I remember asking, and was told, "No, he was not like
Sir Walter Scott." Hearing no more of him, I was prowling among the
books in an ancient house, a rambling old place with a ghost-room,
where I found