Lector

“ Doubtless there are classes of literature in which form or expression predominates, and we cannot read poetry, for example, or the drama, or even the higher class of fiction, without lingering upon the finer passages, to get the full impression of their beauty. In reading works of the imagination, we read not for ideas alone, but for expression also, and to enjoy the rhythm and melody of the verse, if it be poetry, or, if prose, the finished rhetoric, and the pleasing cadence of the style. ”

“ Reader, I see you looking with misgivings at the author of these lines! In fact, I am telling you of this hero, drag out hundreds of verses on him, analyze his soul for you,—and yet, contrary to all proprieties, I have forgotten to describe him or at least to introduce him! You have probably said ten times: behold, the older generation is right when it says that the younger is slovenly in everything! Reader, I ask you in all earnestness, recall all the books that you have read, recall all the descriptions of people, which authors have given with praiseworthy minuteness! ”

“ And the Art of Letters is the method by which a speaker or writer brings out in words, worthy of his subject, and sufficient for his audience or readers, the thoughts which impress him. Literature, then, is of a personal character; it consists in the enunciations and teachings of those who have a right to speak as representatives of their kind, and in whose words their brethren find an interpretation of their own sentiments, a record of their own experience, and a suggestion for their own judgments. ”

“ When they write their books, they write the history of their inner life. You open a book and you read twenty lines, and in the tone and character of those twenty lines you seem to feel the beating of the writer’s pulse. ”

“ In short stories, novels, and dramas the analysis of plot, the delineation of character, and similar consideration of the principles of narration and description will naturally receive due attention. In essays and orations the study of corresponding principles of exposition and argumentation gives the pupil a clearer conception and better appreciation of the writer’s purpose and the means that he uses to accomplish it. A study of metre and verse form is necessary for an appreciation of the poetry read and studied in class. ”

“ And to listen to a reader, be he preacher, lawyer, judge, or orator, reading in public to a large audience, or for the pleasure and instruction of his own loved ones, or a few chosen friends, whose voice is melodious in every cadence, whose every intonation is musical and in good taste, what joy such a reader is able to bestow. How memory thrills as we recall a few readers of this type. Why should they be so few? ”

“ For among other odd burs and kecksies, the misgrowth of our luxuriant activity, we have a Reading Public, as strange a phrase, methinks, as ever forced a splenetic smile on the staid countenance of meditation; and yet no fiction! For our readers have, in good truth, multiplied exceedingly, and have waxed proud. ”

“ Politics, Essays, Travels, Biography, History;—are these subjects on which one is more likely to obtain a decent, a tolerably durable reputation, than one is by the composition of novels? I fear not. Let us look around! What encouragement to any of these subjects is held out to us? Are not writings of this sort far more the ephemerals of literature than writings of fiction? [3] Does the biography, or the essay, or the treatise, last even the year for which a novel endures? And if it does not exceed the novel in durability, it can scarcely equal it, you will allow, in popularity. ”

“ But novelists of another class prefer to admit frankly to the reader that the narrator who stands apart from all the characters and writes about them in the third person is the author himself. They give a personal tone to the narrative; they assert their own peculiarities of taste and judgment, and never let you forget that they, and they alone, are telling the story. The reader has to see it through their eyes. ”

“ The listener's visage seemed to grow rounder in progressive astonishment; his eyes declared an emotion akin to awe; his little mouth shaped itself as if about to whistle.
'A book, sir? You are writing a book? You are a literary man?'
'Well, a beginner. ”

“ The orator and the listener, the writer and the reader, in proportion as they become alive to one another, come into the same spirit—the spirit of mutual listening and utterance. At the very best, and in the most inspired mood, the reader reads as if he were a reader and writer both, and the writer writes as if he were a writer and reader both. ”

“ The keen inquiring reader, however, the reader who wants to know values and to get, in the eloquent phrase of the day, all that's coming to him, will have the whole story by beginning the book with the note on the Appreciation of Scenery, and reading it consecutively, interpolated notes and all. ”

“ It seems time that some lamps should be lighted to guide the steps of the writer of Fiction. Think what the influence of novelists now is, and how some of them use it! Think of the multitudes who read nothing but novels, and then look into the novels which they read! I have seen a young man's whole library consisting of thirty or forty of those paper-bound volumes, which are the bad tobacco of the mind. In England, I looked over three railway book-stalls in one day. ”

“ The study of the structure, the form, the author’s purpose, his style, the revelation of the author’s personality, the relation of the piece of literature to the age in which it was written, and a comparison with other pieces of the same type, all give a clearer understanding of literature. The other purpose of the reading is to stimulate the pupils’ interest in good literature, and to lead them to read what is worth while, on their own initiative. ”

“ You see as plain as can be, that I write as a man of erudition;—that even my similies, my allusions, my illustrations, my metaphors, are erudite,—and that I must sustain my character properly, and contrast it properly too,—else what would become of me? ”

“ Otherwise I should not have been asked to write one about the lighter work of an author who in virtue of a shelf-full of books comprehending all varieties of literary activity—novels and tales, biography, autobiography, history, linguistics, literary and social criticism, the drama, versification and verse as well as prose, even juvenile fiction—is widely recognized both at home and abroad as one of the particularly representative men of letters of our time. ”

“ The writer finds the scope and worth of his book growing as he proceeds with the writing. The student, beginning doubtfully on his construction in geometry, finds the truth growing clearer as he proceeds. The child with a dim and hazy notion of the meaning of the story in history or literature discovers that the meaning grows clear as he himself works out its expression in speech, in the handicrafts, or in dramatic representation. ”

“ It is the plan of the writers of the different volumes to enter into the real life of the peoples, and to bring them before the reader as they actually lived, labored, and struggled—as they studied and wrote, and as they amused themselves. ”

“ If we imagine ourselves as seated by the study table reading our favorite poem, we shall recognize that it has been through the reading of literature that much of our highest inspiration has come to us. It is the poet who brings to us true insight into our own experience, who interprets for us the great problems of life. ”

“ And the result of these inquiries cannot fail to be beneficial, both to the writer of fiction and to the reader of fiction. To the story-teller himself they will serve as a stimulus and a guide, calling attention to the technic of his craft and broadening his knowledge of the principles of his art. To the idle reader even they ought to be helpful, because they will force him to think about the novels he may read and because they [pg xxiii] will lead him to be more exacting, to insist more on veracity in the portrayal of life and to demand more care in the method of presentation. ”

“ And I think it is just in this, that the novel is not simply a fictitious record of conduct, but also a study and judgment of conduct, and through that of the ideas that lead to conduct, that the real and increasing value—or perhaps to avoid controversy I had better say the real and increasing importance—of the novel and of the novelist in modern life comes in. ”

“ All the selections, both in prose and in verse, have been made with constant reference to their suitableness for the teaching of reading. They are fitted to exemplify every mode of expression, except, perhaps, that appropriate to a few of the stronger passions. ”

“ What I aim at rather is to expound the history and meaning of each work—to put the intelligent reader in such a position that he may judge for himself of the æsthetic beauty and success of the object before him. ”

“ We must then take the vague but quite adequate concept of literature as the beautiful expression of particular sensation and perception, general emotion and impersonal ideas, merely as the centre from which we move; and form a literary review, not merely on literature, but on what we may suppose to be the interests of any intelligent person with literary taste. ”

“ Whatever may be the merit of the work of which we are speaking, it must be admitted, that few, on their first appearance, and during a long subsequent period after publication, have received greater or warmer applause. The stores of erudition displayed in it, recommended it to the classical scholar, while the happy application of the author's reading to the affairs of human life, drew to it the attention of common readers. ”

“ That part of our work, by which it is distinguished from all others, is the literary journal, or account of the labours and productions of the learned. This was for a long time among the deficiencies of English literature; but, as the caprice of man is always starting from too little to too much, we have now, amongst other disturbers of human quiet, a numerous body of reviewers and remarkers. ”

“ The reviewer, sitting surrounded by them, tier on tier, may rail at the productiveness of the age, and wish that there might not be more than one new book each week. And the omnivorous reader, anxious to keep up with the literature of the day, might fairly re-echo the aspiration. ”

“ In preparing the stories for publication, the aim has been to preserve, as much as possible, in vocabulary and idiom, the original folk-lore language, and to retain the conversational style of the teller of tales, in order that the sympathetic young reader may, in greater or less degree, be translated into the atmosphere of the old-time story-hour. ”

“ Then come the thousands who read the best magazines, and whatever else is for the moment popular in novels and poetry—the last dialect story, the fashionable poem, the questionable but talked-of novel. Let a violent attack be made on the decency of a new story, and instantly, if only it is clever, its author becomes famous. ”

“ In this little volume which the most hard-pressed student can read and ponder in the leisure moments of a single term, the reader is introduced at once into the wonderland of our English literature, which he is made to realize at the outset is an indivisible portion of the greater territory of the literature of the world. ”

“ Thus records of prime truths sometimes remain a dead letter to plain folk; the writers have left so much to the imagination, and imagination is so rare a gift. Here, then, the writer of fiction may be of use to the public—as an interpreter. ”

“ The chief of these obstacles is the deep and sincere interest which every author feels in his own work and which he imagines will be communicated automatically to the reader. 'We are seldom tiresome to ourselves.' Every book that can be called a book has had one interested and excited reader. ”

“ Writing also under the excitement of emulation and rivalry, they seek, by all the artifices and efforts of an ambitious style, to dazzle their readers; and they are wise in their generation, experience having shown that common minds are taken by glittering faults, both in prose and verse, as larks are with looking-glasses. ”

“ Not only will the book prove a useful introduction to the student preparatory to a more detailed study of individual texts, but the reader whose literary interests are more general, and to whom this period has been perhaps a terra incognita, will find much to attract him in the early examples of English epic poetry, romance, lyric, satire, and the short story, with whose later manifestations he is familiar. ”

“ I could point to a dozen novelists who write about the same sort of people, living in the same surroundings, as I do, against whom it would not be brought, because they take the conditions for granted, and their readers take them for granted. If I touch upon such questions here and there it is because they interest me as factors in the lives of my characters; but they are not the factors which I have chosen as the main thesis of my novels, except in one instance. ”

“ When to these admirable qualities are added humor and an atmosphere of appreciative cultivation, the novel-reader feels indeed that his lines have been cast in pleasant places, and he is disposed to linger along in a very contented and uncritical frame of mind. ”

“ The object of 'Great Writers' is to 'furnish the public with interesting and accurate accounts of the men and women notable in modern literature.' The first volume, now before us, is on Longfellow, by the Editor, and gives, in the space of 180 pages, a detailed account of the poet's life, an analysis of his work, and an essay on his place in literature. ”

“ I have often fancied, in penitential moments, a day of judgment for us who write, when we shall stand in flushed array before the Ultimate Critic and answer the awful question, 'What have you done with your language?' There shall be searchings of soul that morning, and searchings of forgotten pages of magazines and 'best sellers' and books of every sort, for the cadence that may bring salvation. ”