mysteries, as the waters that splash at his feet are the same that surround some sunbaked, South Sea Treasure Isle.

At the desk opposite me, a student with furrowed brow reads a calf-skin volume. I have noted the title: "The Speeches of Henry Clay." Perhaps this fellow is a young lawyer or an aspiring politician. He wishes to absorb the ideas of the silver-tongued "Harry of the West," the popular idol of seventy years ago, and to consider their bearing upon the tariff questions of to-day. He must agree with Napoleon Bonaparte: "Read and reflect on history; it is the only true philosophy." And there is a girl reading the poetry of Alfred Noyes, and a bespectacled, bearded old man with a volume of Pope. They have both turned to poetry to find the beauty and truth those poets have seen. How much will their spirits be affected, the one by the lyric note of our contemporary singer, the other by the didactic moralizing of the philosopher wit?

So it goes! The boy sees visions of pirates and adventure, the old man dreams dreams and seeks new truth; the young man desires armor for his life's battle, the girl finds beauty, a refreshing and invigorating draught. It rains to-day but they will all be more richly endowed to welcome the sun and sea breezes of the morrow.

CHAPTER III

READING FICTION WITH AN EYE ON LIFE

Our good Brother, Lippo Lippi, has started off two of my chapters, and it is well that he should, as no artist had a keener appetite for life than had he. He grasped all there was of the best in life—color, love, work—and he enjoyed it.

Librarians, booksellers, and blatant advertisements assure us that we are a novel-reading public. The number of copies sold of this and that best seller are at first sight staggering, and even more so after having read the book! A certain novel becomes the fashion in the same inconsequential manner as does an especially uncomfortable type of collar—another season both are forgotten and something new is taken up. The writing, publishing and advertising of such books have become a purely commercialized art upon the part of the authors and booksellers. "Where are the snows of yesteryear?" sighed François Villon, "Where are the masterpieces of last summer?" sighs the meditative consumer of fiction. Almost every novel which has those qualities which publishers believe will appeal to an idle, amusement-loving populace is proclaimed in display advertising as "the greatest novel of the decade," "the great American novel," or in some other equally false manner. The author, the publisher, and even the readers know that such statements are utter falsities and yet the sale goes up into the hundreds of thousands. I often wonder what has become of the stupendous number of copies of a certain book the World was reading some ten years ago. It is never mentioned; it is never read; it is seldom seen on anyone's bookshelves, yet the material volumes must be lying about somewhere. Perhaps such books are indeed as "the snows of yesteryear" and melt away when their day is done. One who wishes seriously to acquire the riches there are in books might well make it a rule never to read a novel until it has stood the test of time. What, bye the bye, is the use of reading, unless you mean to get the best out of it? Walking is better exercise, conversation more sociable, gambling more risky and therefore more full of zest! Any story worth reading this summer must surely be worth reading five years from now. Life is too short, there are too many great books that are eminently worth reading, to spend our time wading through the ruck of tastefully bound, hurriedly illustrated, widely advertised novels that greet us every season. I repeat—Do not read a book that you may be in the swing of up-to-date conversation. If you do, you prove yourselves the gull of everyone concerned. Let time do your winnowing, and if after five years the people of taste are still talking of the book, you may turn to it and probably find something of true merit. You may say that with such a plan you will read but few modern novels. Quite true, there will be but few that stand the test of even five years, but how much better it is to conserve your energies and time for reading the great works of fiction that have stood the test of generations.

As in all other reading, novels should awaken you to a new life. You should choose those that have the truest effect upon your goings and comings after you have put them aside. You must agree that those treating of an impossible, untrue social condition, as some money-grabbing manufacturer of stories pretends to see it, will not have this effect. Neither will those of untrue chivalry and sentiment in which untrue ladies weep unnatural tears, and untrue heroes do impossible deeds. Such trivial falsities merely chew up the all too few hours allotted mortals upon this good ship, the Earth. Which then are those novels that are to be read not for the purpose of passing the time, but of holding up the time, and of making every minute more real, more full of meaning,—for that is the function of all great books?

There is a poem of John Keats beginning,

Lo—I must tell a tale of chivalry;

For large white plumes are dancing in mine eye.

 

Perhaps these lines to every one do not carry the same magic beauty and promise of long-dreamed-of things that they do to me. The poem was never finished, and I, for one, deeply regret it, as surely we would have had a tale to set our hearts afire with the clangor of the mediæval tournament, or the lone quest of a golden armored knight.

Sir Walter Scott told such tales in prose and his novels are of the greatest in literature. Honoré de Balzac told stories of French life in which there is nothing specially chivalric, nothing in that sense bewitching, and yet his tales, too, are of the greatest in literature. The terms Realism and Romanticism are used to describe two different aspects of art, music and literature. We will use them in considering the relation of novels to life.

Balzac is considered the father of modern realism. This is partly due to the fact that he presented in a forceful manner the principles upon which he worked. He desired to put the life of France, city, provincial, military and official, within the covers of his books. It is interesting to remember that he wrote at a period in which men were perhaps more interested in the reason and purpose of human life than they had ever been before. Those