Transcribed from the 1912 Longmans, Green and Co. edition by DavidPrice, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
Contents:
Preface
Adventures Among Books
Recollections of Robert Louis Stevenson
Rab’s Friend
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Mr. Morris’s Poems
Mrs. Radcliffe’s Novels
A Scottish Romanticist of 1830
The Confessions of Saint Augustine
Smollett
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Paradise of Poets
Paris and Helen
Enchanted Cigarettes
Stories and Story-telling
The Supernatural in Fiction
An Old Scottish Psychical Researcher
The Boy
Of the Essays in this volume “Adventures among Books,”and “Rab’s Friend,” appeared in Scribner’sMagazine; and “Recollections of Robert Louis Stevenson”(to the best of the author’s memory) in The North AmericanReview. The Essay on “Smollett” was in the Anglo-Saxon,which has ceased to appear; and the shorter papers, such as “TheConfessions of Saint Augustine,” in a periodical styled Witand Wisdom. For “The Poems of William Morris”the author has to thank the Editor of Longman’s Magazine;for “The Boy,” and “Mrs. Radcliffe’s Novels,”the Proprietors of The Cornhill Magazine; for “EnchantedCigarettes,” and possibly for “The Supernatural in Fiction,”the Proprietors of The Idler. The portrait, after Sir WilliamRichmond, R.A., was done about the time when most of the Essays werewritten—and that was not yesterday.
In an age of reminiscences, is there room for the confessions ofa veteran, who remembers a great deal about books and very little aboutpeople? I have often wondered that a Biographia Literariahas so seldom been attempted—a biography or autobiography of aman in his relations with other minds. Coleridge, to be sure,gave this name to a work of his, but he wandered from his apparent purposeinto a world of alien disquisitions. The following pages are franklybookish, and to the bookish only do they appeal. The habit ofreading has been praised as a virtue, and has been denounced as a vice. In no case, if we except the perpetual study of newspapers (which cannotfairly be called reading), is the vice, or the virtue, common. It is more innocent than opium-eating, though, like opium-eating, itunlocks to us artificial paradises. I try to say what I have foundin books, what distractions from the world, what teaching (not much),and what consolations.
In beginning an autobiographia literaria, an account of how,and in what order, books have appealed to a mind, which books have everabove all things delighted, the author must pray to be pardoned forthe sin of egotism. There is no other mind, naturally, of whichthe author knows so much as of his own. On n’a que soi,as the poor girl says in one of M. Paul Bourget’s novels. In literature, as in love, one can only speak for himself. Thisauthor did not, like Fulke Greville, retire into the convent of literaturefrom the strife of the world, rather he was born to be, from the first,a dweller in the cloister of a library. Among the poems whichI remember best out of early boyhood is Lucy Ashton’s song, inthe “Bride of Lammermoor”:—
“Look not thou on beauty’s charming,
Sit thou still when kings are arming,
Taste not when the wine-cup glistens,
Speak not when the people listens,
Stop thine ear against the singer,
From the red gold keep thy finger,
Vacant heart, and hand, and eye,
Easy live and quiet die.”
The rhymes, unlearned, clung to my memory; they would sing themselvesto me on the way to school, or cricket-field, and, about the age often, probably witho