Books and Bookmen | Page 8

work.
Rambling through a bookshop a few months ago I lighted on a copy of Monte Christo and bought it greedily, for there was a railway journey before me. It is a critical experiment to meet a love of early days after the years have come and gone. This stout and very conventional woman--the mother of thirteen children--could she have been the black-eyed, slim girl to whom you and a dozen other lads lost their hearts? On the whole, one would rather have cherished the former portrait and not have seen the original in her last estate. It was therefore with a flutter of delight that one found in this case the old charm as fresh as ever--meaning, of course, the prison escape with its amazing ingenuity and breathless interest.
When one had lost his bashfulness and could associate with grown-up books, then he was admitted to the company of Scott, and Thackeray, and Dickens, who were and are, as far as one can see, to be the leaders of society. My fond recollection goes back to an evening in the early sixties when a father read to his boy the first three chapters of the Pickwick Papers from the green-coloured parts, and it is a bitter regret that in some clearance of books that precious Pickwick was allowed to go, as is supposed, with a lot of pamphlets on Church and State, to the great gain of an unscrupulous dealer.
The editions of Scott are now innumerable, each more tempting than the other; but affection turns back to the old red and white, in forty-eight volumes, wherein one first fell under the magician's spell. Thackeray, for some reason I cannot recall, unless it were a prejudice in our home, I did not read in youth, but since then I have never escaped from the fascination of Vanity Fair and The Newcomes, and another about which I am to speak. What giants there were in the old days, when an average Englishman, tried by some business worry, would say, "Never mind, Thackeray's new book will be out to-morrow." They stand, these three sets, Scott, Thackeray, and Dickens, the very heart of one's library of fiction. Wearied by sex novels, problem novels, theological novels, and all the other novels with a purpose, one returns to the shelf and takes down a volume from this circle, not because one has not read it, but because one has read it thirty times and wishes for sheer pleasure's sake to read it again. Just as a tired man throws off his dress coat and slips on an old study jacket, so one lays down the latest thoughtful, or intense, or something worse pseudo work of fiction, and is at ease with an old gossip who is ever wise and cheery, who never preaches and yet gives one a fillip of goodness. Among the masters one must give a foremost place to Balzac, who strikes one as the master of the art in French literature. It is amazing that in his own day he was not appreciated at his full value, and that it was really left to time to discover and vindicate his position. He is the true founder of the realistic school in everything wherein that school deserves respect, and has been loyal to art. He is also certain to maintain his hold and be an example to writers after many modern realists have been utterly and justly forgotten.
Two books from the shelf of fiction are taken down and read once a year by a certain bookman from beginning to end, and in this matter he is now in the position of a Mohammedan converted to Christianity, who is advised by the missionary to choose one of his two wives to have and to hold as a lawful spouse. When one has given his heart to Henry Esmond and the Heart of Midlothian he is in a strait, and begins to doubt the expediency of literary monogamy. Of course, if it go by technique and finish, then Esmond has it, which from first to last in conception and execution is an altogether lovely book; and if it go by heroes--Esmond and Butler--then again there is no comparison, for the grandson of Cromwell's trooper was a very wearisome, pedantic, grey-coloured Puritan in whom one cannot affect the slightest interest. How poorly he compares with Henry Esmond, who was slow and diffident, but a very brave, chivalrous, single- hearted, modest gentleman, such as Thackeray loved to describe. Were it not heresy to our Lady Castlewood, whom all must love and serve, it also comes to one that Henry and Beatrix would have made a complete pair if she had put some assurance in him and he had installed some principle into her, and Henry Esmond might have married