My Literary Passions | Page 8

boyhood was passed.

II. GOLDSMITH
When I began to have literary likings of my own, and to love certain
books above others, the first authors of my heart were Goldsmith,
Cervantes, and Irving. In the sharply foreshortened perspective of the
past I seem to have read them all at once, but I am aware of an order of
time in the pleasure they gave me, and I know that Goldsmith came
first. He came so early that I cannot tell when or how I began to read
him, but it must have been before I was ten years old. I read other
books about that time, notably a small book on Grecian and Roman
mythology, which I perused with such a passion for those pagan gods
and goddesses that, if it had ever been a question of sacrificing to Diana,
I do not really know whether I should have been able to refuse. I adored
indiscriminately all the tribes of nymphs and naiads, demigods and
heroes, as well as the high ones of Olympus; and I am afraid that by
day I dwelt in a world peopled and ruled by them, though I faithfully
said my prayers at night, and fell asleep in sorrow for my sins. I do not
know in the least how Goldsmith's Greece came into my hands, though
I fancy it must have been procured for me because of a taste which I
showed for that kind of reading, and I can imagine no greater luck for a
small boy in a small town of Southwestern Ohio well-nigh fifty years
ago. I have the books yet; two little, stout volumes in fine print, with
the marks of wear on them, but without those dishonorable blots, or
those other injuries which boys inflict upon books in resentment of
their dulness, or out of mere wantonness. I was always sensitive to the

maltreatment of books; I could not bear to see a book faced down or
dogs-eared or broken-backed. It was like a hurt or an insult to a thing
that could feel.
Goldsmith's History of Rome came to me much later, but quite as
immemorably, and after I had formed a preference for the Greek
Republics, which I dare say was not mistaken. Of course I liked Athens
best, and yet there was something in the fine behavior of the Spartans
in battle, which won a heart formed for hero-worship. I mastered the
notion of their communism, and approved of their iron money, with the
poverty it obliged them to, yet somehow their cruel treatment of the
Helots failed to shock me; perhaps I forgave it to their patriotism, as I
had to forgive many ugly facts in the history of the Romans to theirs.
There was hardly any sort of bloodshed which I would not pardon in
those days to the slayers of tyrants; and the swagger form of such as
despatched a despot with a fine speech was so much to my liking that I
could only grieve that I was born too late to do and to say those things.
I do not think I yet felt the beauty of the literature which made them all
live in my fancy, that I conceived of Goldsmith as an artist using for
my rapture the finest of the arts; and yet I had been taught to see the
loveliness of poetry, and was already trying to make it on my own poor
account. I tried to make verses like those I listened to when my father
read Moore and Scott to my mother, but I heard them with no such
happiness as I read my beloved histories, though I never thought then
of attempting to write like Goldsmith. I accepted his beautiful work as
ignorantly as I did my other blessings. I was concerned in getting at the
Greeks and Romans, and I did not know through what nimble air and
by what lovely ways I was led to them. Some retrospective perception
of this came long afterward when I read his essays, and after I knew all
of his poetry, and later yet when I read the 'Vicar of Wakefield'; but for
the present my eyes were holden, as the eyes of a boy mostly are in the
world of art. What I wanted with my Greeks and Romans after I got at
them was to be like them, or at least to turn them to account in verse,
and in dramatic verse at that. The Romans were less civilized than the
Greeks, and so were more like boys, and more to a boy's purpose. I did
not make literature of the Greeks, but I got a whole tragedy out of the
Romans; it was a rhymed tragedy, and in octosyllabic verse, like the
"Lady