My Literary Passions | Page 5

this volume. When the
author came to revise the material, he found sins against taste which his
zeal for righteousness could not suffice to atone for. He did not hesitate
to omit the proofs of these, and so far to make himself not only a
precept, but an example in criticism. He hopes that in other and slighter
things he has bettered his own instruction, and that in form and in fact
the book is altogether less crude and less rude than the papers from
which it has here been a second time evolved.
The papers, as they appeared from month to month, were not the
product of those unities of time and place which were the happy
conditioning of 'My Literary Passions.' They could not have been
written in quite so many places as times, but they enjoyed a comparable
variety of origin. Beginning in Boston, they were continued in a Boston
suburb, on the shores of Lake George, in a Western New York health
resort, in Buffalo, in Nahant; once, twice, and thrice in New York, with
reversions to Boston, and summer excursions to the hills and waters of
New England, until it seemed that their author had at last said his say,
and he voluntarily lapsed into silence with the applause of friends and
enemies alike.
The papers had made him more of the last than of the first, but not as
still appears to him with greater reason. At moments his deliverances
seemed to stir people of different minds to fury in two continents, so far
as they were English-speaking, and on the coasts of the seven seas; and
some of these came back at him with such violent personalities as it is
his satisfaction to remember that he never indulged in his attacks upon
their theories of criticism and fiction. His opinions were always
impersonal; and now as their manner rather than their make has been
slightly tempered, it may surprise the belated reader to learn that it was
the belief of one English critic that their author had "placed himself
beyond the pale of decency" by them. It ought to be less surprising that,
since these dreadful words were written of him, more than one
magnanimous Englishman has penitently expressed to the author the
feeling that he was not so far wrong in his overboldly hazarded

convictions. The penitence of his countrymen is still waiting expression,
but it may come to that when they have recurred to the evidences of his
offence in their present shape.
KITTERY POINT, MAINE, July, 1909.

MY LITERARY PASSIONS

I. THE BOOKCASE AT HOME
To give an account of one's reading is in some sort to give an account
of one's life; and I hope that I shall not offend those who follow me in
these papers, if I cannot help speaking of myself in speaking of the
authors I must call my masters: my masters not because they taught me
this or that directly, but because I had such delight in them that I could
not fail to teach myself from them whatever I was capable of learning. I
do not know whether I have been what people call a great reader; I
cannot claim even to have been a very wise reader; but I have always
been conscious of a high purpose to read much more, and more
discreetly, than I have ever really done, and probably it is from the
vantage-ground of this good intention that I shall sometimes be found
writing here rather than from the facts of the case.
But I am pretty sure that I began right, and that if I had always kept the
lofty level which I struck at the outset I should have the right to use
authority in these reminiscences without a bad conscience. I shall try
not to use authority, however, and I do not expect to speak here of all
my reading, whether it has been much or little, but only of those books,
or of those authors that I have felt a genuine passion for. I have known
such passions at every period of my life, but it is mainly of the loves of
my youth that I shall write, and I shall write all the more frankly
because my own youth now seems to me rather more alien than that of
any other person.
I think that I came of a reading race, which has always loved literature
in a way, and in spite of varying fortunes and many changes. From a
letter of my great-grandmother's written to a stubborn daughter upon
some unfilial behavior, like running away to be married, I suspect that
she was fond of the high-colored fiction of her day, for she tells the
wilful child that she has "planted