Books and Bookmen | Page 8

another possession of the past, but I
still retain in a grateful memory the scene where Rube, the Indian
fighter, who is supposed to have perished in a prairie fire and is being
mourned by the hero, emerges with much humour from the inside of a
buffalo which was lying dead upon the plain, and rails at the idea that
he could be wiped out so easily. Whether imagination has been at work
or not I do not know, but that is how my memory has it now, and to this
day I count that resurrection a piece of most fetching 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