People of the Book

“ I take up book after book, written by living authors with whom I shouldn't dream of comparing myself, and yet I see how small a circle their characters work in. You would think the world consisted of only eight or ten people, and that there was hardly room for them to move. ”

“ But the true allegory that appeals to all is the presentment of noble natures and of noble deeds. Where, for most people at any rate, is the "allegory" in the Theseus or the Venus of Milo? Yet is not the whole race of man the better for them?
Work, therefore, quietly and continually at the great themes ready set for you in the story of the past and "understanded [Pg 261] of the people," while you are patiently strengthening and maturing your powers of art in safety, sheltered from yourself, and sheltered from the condemnation due to the too presumptuous assumption of apostleship. ”

“ The wonder of the book is its superior intelligence. In the menstruum of this man's wit, the past and the present ages, and their religions, politics and modes of thinking, are dissolved into archetypes and ideas. ”

“ Is it possible that a book at once so simple and sublime should be merely the work of man? Is it possible that the sacred personage, whose history it contains, should be himself a mere man? Do we find that he assumed the tone of an enthusiast or ambitious sectary? ”

“ Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence, the book-learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul. ”

“ Yet with all drawbacks of what seem to us imperfect taste, an imperfect standard of character, and an imperfect appreciation of what there is in the world beyond a given circle of interests, the book does what a biography ought to do—it shows us a remarkable man, and it gives us the means of forming our own judgment about him. ”

“ That will be selected which gives with most freshness and variety the different aspects of continental feeling, the only limits of selection being that a book shall be, on the one hand, amusing, and, on the other, wholesome.
One difficulty which must be frankly faced is that of subject. Life is now treated in fiction by every race but our own with singular candour. ”

“ If you do not think much of the Souls, what position is the book to occupy in respectable literature? If the author has written what is absolutely true from personal observation, the book cannot be lightly treated. ”

“ But we must come to an end ourselves. We would, in short, advocate the claims of literature in general, and its high title to consideration, as it commends itself to all men in common; and we plead guilty to the ambition of adding to the numerous honourable characteristics of our countrymen, that of being in an eminent degree a reading people. ”

“ While the book should, perhaps, be regarded more as a fantasy with a beautiful moral than an ordinary novel, the discriminating reader will, nevertheless, find interwoven with it many a wise, witty, and penetrating reflection on human life and destiny. ”

“ What! not a word against the government, against the manners, against religion! who will read you? If you did but know how tired people are with History, Morality, Phylosophy, Verse, Prose, and all that! The whole world are turned writers; and you will more easily find an author than a reader. How make impression on the crowd? ”

“ For, apart from its religious intention and sacred character, the book is so written that it has supremely in its history, poetry, prophecies, promises, stories, that clear literary quality that supplies, as certainly no other single book does, the want in the human mind which is higher than the want of facts or knowledge. ”

“ What can we see or acquire, but what we are? You have observed a skilful man reading Virgil. Well, that author is a thousand books to a thousand persons. Take the book into your two hands, and read your eyes out; you will never find what I find. ”

“ Hence it is that, though certain of the wise sayings or verses it contains may have authors assigned to them, no really ancient book claims to have an author—a human author. It is only later that the tendency is felt to satisfy the natural craving for a cause by assigning books to individual hands. ”

“ How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! ”

“ But the astonishment soon passed off, the scales seemed to drop from his eyes, and the book became at once and for ever to him the great human and divine book, and the men and women, whom he had looked upon as something quite different from himself, became his friends and counsellors. ”

“ There are many who would laugh at the idea of a novelist teaching either virtue or nobility, — those, for instance, who regard the reading of novels as a sin, and those also who think it to be simply an idle pastime. ”

“ To a little girl who acquires her earliest knowledge of literature through a Reader embellished with fragments of her ancestor’s prose, that personage necessarily fills an heroic space in the foreground of life. ”

“ But the book rises much above the level of mere annals, and while perhaps not reaching that of the philosophical historian, gives the reader more of the feeling that a living man is writing about living men than is usual in medieval books. ”

“ The Book that has had greater influence upon the world than all others, differs from all others, in affirming that man wants life, and in making that statement the basis of all that it contains respecting the past and present and future of mankind. ”

“ A book professedly on the 'History and Progress of Imitation in Poetry,' written by a man of perspicuity, an adept in the art of discerning likenesses, even when minute, with examples properly selected, and gradations duly marked, would make an impartial accession to the store of human literature, and furnish rational curiosity with a high regale. ”

“ His books are by themselves the warrant of the fame which he so widely gained; the extent of his reading, the power of his grasp, the clearness of his insight, the picturesque reality of his narration, are patent to all who are capable of judging. ”

“ But books are the voices of the dead. They are a main instrument of communion with the vast human procession of the other world. They are the allies of the thought of man. They are in a certain sense at enmity with the world. ”

“ Yet, behold, Behold!—the world of books is still the world; ”

“ Great Men are the inspired (speaking and acting) Texts of that divine Book of Revelations, whereof a Chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History; ”

“ Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are their literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily. ”

“ Not one of these novelists aims merely at literary fame, but all are governed by a love of truth as well as of justice,—a combination of great importance, and well worth our serious reflection, betraying and explaining to us, moreover, the philosophical conceptions of this race. ”

“ A bare sketch of these two philosophers may suggest to book-lovers in general the particular period of the culture-epochs dominating each career, and discover some of the forces of heredity and environment which produced these characters, vibrant with full, fresh, free life, or reveal to readers equipped by psychical research for judgment how it was that these natures furnished the battleground for so fierce a conflict of good and evil forces. ”

“ What a field, then, is the novelist's!—what ground for a high, pureminded man or woman to sow seeds in that may sprout, and spread, and fill the world with truth, with purity, with noble aspirations, with right teachings set in the goodliest garb! The youth of the generations is their own. ”

“ The scholar in his library is none. I, who have all my life heard any number of orations and debates, read poems and miscellaneous books, conversed with many geniuses, am still the victim of any new page ”

“ Perhaps no other writers have, for so long a period, exercised so powerful an influence, not only on literary style and taste, but on the character and understanding, of educated men in the leading nations of the modern world. ”

“ To supply these in the picture of humanity is the distinct office of fiction, which, while free in many respects, should still be essentially true. The poetry and fiction of a country should be the worthy companion to its history. The true poet should be the interpreter and illustrator of life. ”

“ With ourselves, the instantaneous diffusion of books through all ranks of the community, places a modern author too nearly in the presence of his contemporaries to allow him to think much of posterity. ”

“ So the novel was born, expressing, though in a different way, exactly the same ideals of personality and of the dignity of common life which were later proclaimed in the American and in the French Revolution, and were welcomed with rejoicing by the poets of the romantic revival. To tell men, not about knights or kings or types of heroes, but about themselves in the guise of plain men and women, about their own thoughts and motives and struggles, and the results of actions upon their own characters,--this was the purpose of our first novelists. ”

“ The authors, as far as literary ability and reputation are concerned, represent the foremost men and women of their time. The books, without exception, are of entrancing interest and manifestly those most desired by the American reading public. ”

“ But if, on the other hand, our theory should allow that a book may well be a revelation in spite of errors and passions and deliberate human composition, if only it be a true record of the inner experiences of great-souled persons wrestling with the crises of their fate, then the verdict would be much more favorable. ”

“ It is because this modern form of fiction upon which we fix the name Novel to indicate its new features has seized the idea of personality, has stood for truth and grown ever more democratic, that it has attained to the immense power which marks it at the present time. ”

“ But I will not go on turning over the pages of books and reciting prose and poetry to you. I cannot even begin to remind you of the immense treasure of noble and ennobling prose and verse that this world has accumulated in the past three thousand years. Not one soul in ten thousand that is born into this world even tastes from that store. ”

“ The librarian has wisely mapped out for her story hour such a course, gleaned from the parables, and from the vast treasure houses of narrative abounding in both Testaments and in fables.
Turn to your colleges and your schools, and you will find that, generally speaking, there is dug a deep channel between literature and life, which has no right to be. We should study our ethics as one of the inherent elements in poetry and in prose. ”

“ The history of literature is but an applied history of civilization. As in the history of civilization we watch the play of the three constituent classes of society,—clergy, nobility, and commoners,—we can see, in the history of literature, how that class which is supreme politically shows for the time being its supremacy in the literary productions of the age, and impresses its mark on the works of poets and philosophers. ”

“ Amenities of Literature.—We have ever considered the author of these volumes as a literary benefactor, one, who in his own peculiar province has done more to advance the cause of letters than any other writer, by rescuing from oblivion and doing justice to the primitive sons of genius who laid the basis of English literature. ‘The Amenities’ we regard superior to its brothers, ‘The Curiosities’ and ‘The Miscellanies,’ inasmuch that there is more unity in its design, a greater depth of research, and as it were, a kind of history of the minds of authors as well as of their writings. ”

“ But our point is that there is no appearance of accident or confusion, but that all these various authors have been employed to bring out one perfect whole; that the historian, the poet, the biographer, the letter writer, and the logician, have all their exact place, and have all, by God’s inspiration, exactly filled it. What some men regard as a difficulty we regard as the wonder of the Book. We see many rays in the spectrum, but all are blended so as to give one perfect light, and when we think on p. ”