George Hamlin Fitch

“ If you have made a study of fine music, beautiful paintings and statuary and the best books, you cannot fail to get liberal returns in the way of spiritual enjoyment from the great works in all these arts. And this enjoyment is a permanent possession, because you can always call up in memory and renew the pleasure of a great singer's splendid songs, the strains of a fine orchestra, the impassioned words of a famous actor, the glory of color of an immortal painting, or the words of a poem that has lived through the centuries and has stimulated thousands of readers to the higher life. ”

“ This work of looking up the references which Milton makes to history and mythology is not difficult, and it will reward the patient reader with much knowledge that would not come to him in any other way. Behind Milton's grand style, as behind the splendid garments of a great monarch, one may see at times the man who influenced his own age by his genius and whose power has gone on through the ages, stimulating the minds of poets and sages and men of action, girding up their loins for conflict, breathing into them the spirit which demands freedom of speech and conscience. ”

“ No book has lived beyond the age of its author unless it were full of this spiritual force which endures through the centuries. The words of the Biblical writers, of Thomas à Kempis, Milton, Bunyan, Dante and others who are discussed in this book, are charged with a spiritual potency that moves the reader of today as they have moved countless generations in the past. Could one wish for a more splendid immortality than this, to serve as the stimulus to ambitious youth long after one's body has moldered in the dust? ”

“ By this reading you will be prepared for the supreme tragedies—each a masterpiece without a superior in any literature. These are Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Julius Cæsar, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. In no other six works in any language can one find such range of thought, such splendor of verse, such soundings of the great sea of human passions—love, jealousy, ambition, hate, remorse, fear and shame. ”

“ Features of Great Work by Old Thomas à Kempis—Meditations of a Flemish Monk Which Have Not Lost Their Influence in Five Hundred Years.
The great books of this world are not to be estimated by size or by the literary finish of their style. Behind every great book is a man greater than his written words, who speaks to us in tones that can be heard only by those whose souls are in tune with his. In other words, a great book is like a fine opera—it appeals only to those whose ears are trained to enjoy the harmonies of its music and the beauty of its words. ”

“ To give a list of the plays of Shakespeare which one should read is very difficult, because one reader prefers this and another that, and each can give good reasons for his liking. What I shall try to do here is to indicate certain plays which, if carefully read several times, will make you master of Shakespeare's art and will prepare you for wider reading in this great storehouse of human nature. Romeo and Juliet, a tragedy of young, impulsive love, represents the fine flower of Shakespeare's young imagination, before it had been clouded by sorrow. ”

“ Rarely eloquent is his tribute to this unselfish mother, whose virtues were those of the good women of all ages and whose love for her son was the flower of her life. In all literature there is nothing finer than the old churchman's tender memorial to his dear mother and his pathetic record of the heavy grief, that finally was eased by a flood of tears. ”

“ The peculiarity of Shakespeare's genius was that it reached far beyond his time; it makes him modern today, when the best work of his contemporaries, like Ben Jonson, Marlowe and Ford, are unreadable. Any theatrical manager of our time who should have the hardihood to put on the stage Jonson's The Silent Woman or Marlowe's Tamburlaine would court disaster. Yet any good actor can win success with Shakespeare's plays, although he may not coin as much money as he would from a screaming farce or a homespun play of American country life. ”

“ The last of the worthies of old English literature is Dr. Samuel Johnson, whose monumental figure casts a long shadow over most of his contemporaries. The man whom Boswell immortalized and made as real to us today as though he actually lived and worked and browbeat his associates in our own time, is really the last of the great eighteenth century writers in style, in ways of thought and in feeling. ”

“ No other work, ancient or modern, can challenge this; but, like the Bible, the great plays of Shakespeare are little read. Many of today prefer to read criticism about the dramatist rather than to get their ideas at first hand from his best works. Others spend much time on such nonsense as the Baconian theory—hours which they might devote to a close and loving study of the greatest plays the world has ever seen. Such a study would make the theory that the author of the Essays and the Novum Organum wrote Hamlet or Othello seem like midsummer madness. ”

“ Among men of New England strain like myself it is easy to labor long hours, to endure nervous strain, to sacrifice comfort and ease for the sake of their dear ones; but men of Puritan strain, with natures as hard as the flinty granite of their hillsides, cannot tell their loved ones how dear they are to them, until Death lays his grim hand upon the shoulder of the beloved one and closes his ears forever to the words of passionate love that now come pouring in a flood from our trembling lips. ”

“ In all literature there is no book which so eloquently paints the success of forgetting one's self in the work of helping others.
The Imitation, like the Bible, should be read day by day, if one is to draw aid and inspiration from it. Read two or three pages each day, and you will find it a rare mental tonic, so foreign to all present-day literature, that its virtues will stand out by comparison. ”

“ Some of the world's great books are noteworthy for the profound influence that they have exerted, not only over the contemporaries of the writers, but over many succeeding generations. Some there are which seem to have in them a perennial stimulus to all that is best in human nature; to stretch hands across the gulf of the centuries and to give to people today the flaming zeal, the unquestioning religious faith, the love of beauty and of truth that inspired their authors hundreds of years ago. ”

“ Two famous books that seem to follow naturally after Pilgrim's Progress are Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Not to be familiar with these two English masterpieces is to miss allusions which occur in everyday reading even of newspapers and magazines. Probably not one American boy in one thousand is ignorant of Robinson Crusoe. It is the greatest book of adventure for boys that has ever been written, because it relates the novel and exciting experiences of a castaway sailor on a solitary island in a style so simple that a child of six is able to understand it. ”

“ Johnson. You laugh at the man's gross superstitions, at his vanity, his greediness at table, his absurd judgments of many of his contemporaries, his abuse of pensioners and his own quick acceptance of a pension. At all these foibles and weaknesses you smile, yet underneath them was a genuine man, like Milton, full of simplicity, honesty, reverence and humility—a man greater than any literary work that he produced or spoken word that he left behind him. ”

“ Those who have heard Robert Mantell in Lear, Richard III, Hamlet or Iago can form some idea of the vitality and the essential modernism of Shakespeare's work. The good actor or the good stage manager cuts out the coarse and the stupid lines that may be found in all Shakespeare's plays. The remainder reaches a height of poetic beauty, keen insight into human nature and dramatic perfection which no modern work even approaches. ”

“ The Soul of the Bible, arranged by Ulysses Pierce and printed by the American Unitarian Association of Boston. This volume of 500 pages contains the real essence of the Bible, revealed in all the beauty of incomparable phrase and sublime imagery; sounding the deeps of sorrow, mounting to the heights of joy; traversing the whole range of human life and showing that God is the only refuge for the sorely afflicted. How beautiful to the wounded heart the promise that always "underneath are the everlasting arms." ”

“ Does the ordinary business or professional man, who has had no special literary training, take any keen interest in the great masterpieces of the Greeks and Romans? Does it not require some special aptitude or some special preparation for one to appreciate Plato's Dialogues or Sophocles' Œdipus, Homer's Iliad or Horace's Odes, even in the best translations? In most cases, I think the reading of the Greek and Latin classics in translations is barren of any good results. ”

“ But the vital thing is that you have your own favorites—books that are real and genuine, each one brimful of the inspiration of a great soul. Keep these books on a shelf convenient for use, and read them again and again until you have saturated your mind with their wisdom and their beauty. So may you come into the true Kingdom of Culture, whose gates never swing open to the pedant or the bigot. So may you be armed against the worst blows that fate can deal you in this world. ”

“ Cleopatra is the great siren of literature, and the picture of her charms is fine verse.
And here let me advise the hearing of good actors in Shakespeare as a means of culture. All the great Shakespearean actors are gone, but Mantell remains, and he, though not equal to Booth, is, to my mind, far more convincing than Irving. Mantell's Lear is the essence of great acting—something to recall with rare pleasure. Edwin Booth I probably saw in Hamlet a score of times in twice that many years, but never did I see him without getting some new light on the melancholy Dane. ”

“ If you have lost a dear child, the daily reading of the Bible will gird you up to go out and make life worth living for the orphan and the children of poverty and want, who so often are robbed from the cradle of their birthright of love and sunshine and opportunity for development of body and mind. ”

“ If you have lost father or mother, then it will make your sympathy keen for the halting step of age and the pathetic eyes, in which you see patient acceptance of the part of looker-on in life, the only role left to those who have been shouldered out of the active ways of the world to dream of the ardent love and the brave work of their youth. ”

“ Given creative literary genius in greater measure than any other man was ever endowed with, the limits of Shakespeare's development could not be marked. His capacity was boundless and, living in an atmosphere as favorable to literary art as that of Athens in the time of Pericles, Shakespeare produced in a few years those immortal plays which have never been equaled in mastery of human emotion and beauty and power of diction. ”

“ In these two parts of his poem Dante shows how love is the transfiguring force in working the miracle of moral regeneration. And this love is without any trace of carnal passion; it is the supreme aspiration, which has such power that it makes its possessor ruler over his own spirit and master of his destiny. What power, what passion resided in the mind of this old poet that it could so charge his words that these should inspire the greatest writers of an alien nation, six hundred years after his death, to pay homage to the moving spirit of his verse. ”

“ No one should miss the opportunity to see a great actor or a great actress in Macbeth—it is a revelation of the deeps of human tragedy. King Lear is the tragedy of old age, the same tragedy that Balzac drew in Le Pere Goriot, save that Lear becomes bitter, and after weathering the storm of madness, wreaks vengeance on his unnatural daughters. ”

“ In the great world without, it has held its own for five hundred years, gaining readers from all classes by sheer force of the sincerity and power of the man, who put into it all the yearnings of his soul, all the temptations, the struggles and the victories of his spirit. It was written in crabbed Latin of the fifteenth century, without polish and without logical arrangement, much as Emerson jotted down the thoughts which he afterward gathered up and strung together into one of his essays. ”

“ For three years the poet hoped to succeed in regaining his power in Florence, but when these hopes finally failed he turned to the expression of his spiritual conquests, to let the world know how the love of one woman and the desire to "keep vigil for the good of the world" could transform a man's soul. So in poverty and distress, wandering from one Italian city to another, Dante wrote most of his great epic. ”

“ In the reading that I shall recommend, culture of the mind and the heart comes first of all. This is more valuable than rubies, a great possession that glorifies life and opens our eyes to beauties in the human soul, as well as in nature, to all of which we were once blind and dumb. And culture can be built on the bare rudiments of education, at which pedagogues and pedants will sneer. Some of the most truly cultured men and women I have ever known have been self-educated ”