Walk into My Parlor: Chapters from Inviting Books

INTRODUCTION

It is difficult to refrain from extending the spider's invitation to the fly when one finds fellow readers who have not been entangled in the particular bookwebs to which one gladly submits. It is not that one wishes to dine on fellow readers, but rather that he hopes to share the feast, since, paradoxically, these webs are feasts.

This book is an invitation. It is an invitation to blow the figurative dust off a number of books in your town's library, and discover, or rediscover, much that is worth feasting on. In this day of great books lists, a book which was once quite popular but which has not taken its place among the enduring classics tends to disappear from view. Yet often it contains a more vivid picture of its times than does a book of more universal appeal. Also, it is likely to depict the day-to-day life of its time with special clarity. And, frequently, it tells a good story.

Included in this volume are chapters from a number of books which were once popular. If you look up any one of them in your library, and if the library card stuck in at the back is old enough, you will discover that the book was checked out almost constantly for a good many years before 1914, sparingly during the Twenties, and sporadically since that time. It is hoped that none of the samples offered here is from a book of merely antiquarian interest. The stories range from the lightest summer reading to at least one classic, but they all share the interest that attaches to a genuinely good story. In the twentieth century, literary styles have changed as rapidly as all other styles, but today a re-examination is taking place in many fields of thought and endeavor which is emphasizing anew the ways in which we are like former generations of men, rather than the ways in which we differ from them. The question with regard to these books is not so much what change in literary fashion caused them to go out of style, but rather what wealth was lost when they did go out of style.

For one thing, an interestingly unmodern way of writing was lost. The figures of speech were drawn from a life which was keenly aware of each advancing day in the year's cycle of planting and harvesting and lasting out the winter. Qualifying phrases and clauses softened and added subtlety, instead of hammering at the main idea as if all thinking had to be done in headlines.

Another merit of these books which we can ill afford to lose is the picture they present of individual human beings living nineteenth century lives. Such portraits can do much to help us correct the black-and-white over-simplifications which we are especially prone to make about that part of history which is just back of our own times. See Tom Brown at Oxford for an unstereotyped Victorian father, and, for unstereotyped Puritans, Oldtown Folks.

Finally, these books, like many another from other times which is not today numbered among the great books, contain part of the treasure of good writing which it is our privilege to store up and use. They contain vivid scenes and memorable events. If in addition many of them contain an attitude toward life which is foreign to us-and to which we attach the modern swearword sentimental-this fact should not prevent our finding their riches. No age was ever more bound by a fashion in thought than is our own, and we should sympathize. After all, the so-called modern in art was born seventy-five years ago, and soon an upstart generation will be pointing out that modern art is an old lady rustling in black taffeta.

John Milton was right. As good almost kill a man as kill a good book.

WALK INTO MY PARLOR

Chapters from Inviting Books

1.  THE LONG VACATION LETTER-BAG

from Tom Brown at Oxford [Chapt. XXIX]

by Thomas Hughes, 1861

There is an old German fable about some young porcupines who were born one spring and spent much of the early summer tumbling and playing together, as the young of most species are inclined to do. One day in the late fall, after they had grown so independent and daring that each of them spent much of his time scampering and exploring alone, they felt the nip of the first really cold day they had known. They ran together for warmth and comfort, but, alas, their quills had grown stiff and strong during the summer. Ouch! said the outraged young porcupines, and ouch they repeated each time the cold drove them to repeat their experiment, until finally they appealed to their mother for a solution to their problems. Ah, my dears, she said, that is the secret of the good life-to stay close enough together to keep warm, yet not so close as to stick one another.

In an age in which too-anxious togetherness and too-anxious separation cause trouble for both parents and children, it is interesting to note that not only an old German fable but also a mid-Victorian novel understood the delicate matter of keeping a proper distance in human relations. Tom Brown at Oxford, not so famous as Thomas Hughes's story of Tom at Rugby, Tom Brown's School Days, is well worth reading not only for its account of a young man's growing up at Oxford a century ago but also for a picture of father-son relationships 'which runs counter to the stereotype of the stern, uncomprehending paterfamilias so often associated with Victorian life and literature. In the chapter given here, the elder Brown, Squire John Brown, wrestles with the problem of a chastened son whose first year at Oxford has brought him few triumphs and many problems. Tom has recklessly acted as co-signer of a note which two of the sporting set in college have used to raise additional funds for wine, women, and horses. The thing which Tom has not told his father, but feels he should confess, is that he has just avoided seducing a nice young bar-maid in the nearby pub. It had been an eventful freshman year.

Tom Brown, and Thomas Hughes, seem to have passed through Oxford without having been drawn into the religious and philosophic ferment which some of Dr. Thomas Arnold's disciples, including his own son Matthew, knew. But Dr. Arnold's influence on education was broad enough to affect not only the era's movements in thought, but also the move toward muscular Christianity which made Tom Brown an enthusiast for football and cricket at Rugby and for boating at Oxford. It was also broad enough to endow his disciples with deep social concern, so that Tom Brown's discovery of Carlyle's Past and Present was the one great intellectual excitement of his college career, and so that Thomas Hughes in middle life could throw all of his enthusiasm and most of his money into building a Rugby-ian cooperative colony for unemployed and muscular English gentlemen in the uncooperative soil of Tennessee. Rugby, Tenn., is still a dot on sufficiently detailed maps.

June24, 184-

MY DEAR TOM: Your letter came to hand this morning, and it has of course given your mother and me much pain. It is not the money that we care about, but that our son should have deliberately undertaken, or pretended to undertake, what he must have known at the time he could not perform himself.

I have written to my bankers to pay £100 at once at your account at the Oxford Bank. I have also requested my solicitor to go over to Oxford, and he will probably call on you the day after you receive this. You say that this person who holds your note of hand is now in Oxford. You will see him in the presence of my solicitor, to whom you will hand the note when you have recovered it. I shall consider afterward what further steps will have to be taken in the matter.

You will not be of age for a year. It will be time enough then to determine whether you will repay the balance of this money out of the legacy to which you will be entitled under your grandfather's will. In the meantime, I shall deduct at the rate of £50 a year from your allowance, and I shall hold you bound in honor to reduce your expenditure by this amount. You are no longer a boy, and one of the first duties which a man owes to his friends and to society is to live within his income.

I make this advance to you on two conditions. First, that you will never again put your hand to a note or bill in a transaction of this kind. If you have money, lend it or spend it. You may lend or spend foolishly, but that is not the point here; at any rate, you are dealing with what is your own. A gentleman should shrink from the possibility of having to come on others, even on his own father, for the fulfillment of his obligations as he would from a lie. I would sooner see a son of mine in his grave than crawling on through life a slave to wants and habits which he must gratify at other people's expense.

My second condition is, that you put an end to your acquaintance with these two gentlemen who have led you into this scrape, and have divided the proceeds of your joint note between them. They are both your seniors in standing, you say, and they appear to be familiar with this plan of raising money at the expense of other people. The plain English word for such doings is swindling. What pains me most is that you should have become intimate with young men of this kind. I am not sure that it will not be my duty to lay the whole matter before the authorities of the college. You do not mention their names, and I respect the feeling which has led you not to mention them. I shall know them quite soon enough through my solicitor, who will forward me a copy of the note of hand and signatures in due course.

Your letter makes general allusion to other matters; and I gather from it that, you are dissatisfied with the manner in which you have spent your first year at Oxford. I do not ask for specific confessions, which you seem inclined to offer me; in fact, I would sooner not have them, unless there is any other matter in which you want assistance or advice from me. I know from experience that Oxford is a place full of temptation of all kinds, offered to young men at the most critical time of their lives. Knowing this, I have deliberately accepted the responsibility of sending you there, and I do not repent it. I am glad that you are dissatisfied with your first year. If you had not been, I should have felt much more anxious about your second. Let bygones be bygones between you and me. You know where to go for strength, and to make confessions which no human ear should hear, for no human judgment can weigh the cause. The secret places of a man's heart are for himself and God. Your mother sends her love.

I am, ever your affectionate father,

JOHN BROWN

*    *    *

June 26, 184-

MY DEAR BOY: I am not sorry that you have taken my last letter as you have done. It is quite right to be sensitive on these points, and it will have done you no harm to have fancied for forty-eight hours that you had in my judgment lost caste as a gentleman. But now I am very glad to be able to ease your mind on this point. You have done a very foolish thing; but it is only the habit, and the getting others to bind themselves, and not the doing it one's self for others, which is disgraceful. You are going to pay honorably for your folly, and will owe me neither thanks nor money in the transaction. I have chosen my own terms for repayment, which you have accepted, and so the financial question is disposed of.

I have considered what you say as to your companions-friends I will not call them-and will promise you not to take any further steps, or to mention the subject to anyone. But I must insist on my second condition, that you avoid all further intimacy with them. I do not mean that you are to cut them, or to do anything that will attract attention. But, no more intimacy.

And now, my dear boy, as to the rest of your letter. Mine must indeed have failed to express my meaning. God forbid that there should not be the most perfect confidence between us. There is nothing which I desire or value more. I only question whether special confessions will conduce to it. My experience is against them. I almost doubt whether they can be perfectly honest between man and man; and, taking into account the difference of our ages, it seems to me much more likely that we should misunderstand one another. But having said this, I leave it to you to follow your own conscience in the matter. If there is any burden which I can help you to bear, it will be my greatest pleasure, as it is my duty to do it. So now say what you please, or say no more. If you speak, it will be to one who has felt and remembers a young man's trials.

We hope you will be able to come home to-morrow, or the next day, at latest. Your mother is longing to see you, and I should be glad to have you here for a day or two before the assizes, which are held next week. I should rather like you to accompany me to them, as it will give me the opportunity of introducing you to my brother magistrates from other parts of the county, whom you are not likely to meet elsewhere, and it is a good thing for a young man to know his own county well.

The cricket club is flourishing, you will be glad to hear, and they have put off their best matches, especially those with the South Hants and Landsdown, till your return; so you are in great request, you see. I am told that the fishing is very good this year, and am promised several days for you in the club water.

September is a long way off, but there is nothing like being beforehand. I have put your name down for a license; and it is time you should have a good gun of your own; so I have ordered one for you from a man who has lately settled in the county. He was Purdy's foreman, with whom I used to build, and, I can see, understands his business thoroughly. His locks are as good as any I have ever seen. I have told him to make the stock rather longer, and not quite so straight as that of my old double with which you shot last year. I think I remember you criticised my weapon on these points; but there will be time for you to alter the details after you get home, if you disapprove of my orders. It will be more satisfactory if it is built under your own eye. If you continue in the mind for a month's reading with your friend Mr. Hardy, we will arrange it toward the end of vacation; but would he not come here? From what you say we should very much like to know him. Pray ask him from me whether he will pass the last month of the vacation here coaching you. I should like you to be his first regular pupil. Of course, this will be my affair. And now God bless you, and come home as soon as you can. Your mother sends her best love.

Ever your most affectionate

JOHN BROWN

2.  LODGING AT MADRID. . .

from The Bible in Spain [Chapt. XII]

by George Borrow, 1842

The modem small boy, seated comfortably on his shoulderblades beside the driver of a whizzing automobile, sees, or senses, a remarkable number of above-car-roof and below-car-door things. He is aware that it was a jaguar, not a Triumph, that just passed doing eighty, and he is aware that the workmen in yellow helmets at the comer of Main and McCormick were taking down the signal lights, not climbing the telephone pole. In the times when far and near were measured in the distance a man could go on foot, or at the best on horseback, in one day, people saw different things. No matter how keen a modem man's vision is, he will have missed a vast number of things that his great-grandfather saw.

Probably what contributed as much as anything else to the immediate success of George Borrow's The Bible in Spain, when it appeared in 1842, was that George Borrow saw a hundred things for every ten that the rest of our great-grandfathers' generation saw. Borrow had gone out to Spain in 1832 as the agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society to undertake the astonishing mission of selling Protestant Bibles in Catholic Spain. One thing Borrow could not see, or saw through a distorting glass: the Catholic Church. Edward Thomas, who wrote the introduction to the Everyman edition of The Bible in Spain, says that since Luther there has hardly been such a Protestant as Borrow. This one bit of myopia aside, Borrow saw with X-ray clarity. The result, as Thomas says, is three fine things. The book reveals part of a noble, brilliant, and friendly man. It discovers to us a number of men and women (not to speak of the horses). .. who jut out of the common level of life, our own life and the recorded past, like wrecks or crags at sea. It creates a vast, difficult, sublime, romantic Spain for us. (The book makes a wonderful companion-piece to read alongside Don Quixote, as one discovers the life of the byways of Spain.)

The very list of works by Borrow, whose speaking acquaintance with thirty-five languages got him his colporteur's job and the censure of some learned philologists, suggests his romantic leanings. The bibliography includes, among dozens of items, Targum, or Metrical Translations From Thirty Languages and Dialects; El Evangelio Segun S. Lucas, Traducido A1 Romani; and The Sleeping Bard, translated from The Cambrian British; to say nothing of the better known Gypsies of Spain, Lavengro, and The Romany Rye. Anyone glancing down this list should be prepared for the fact that nobody has ever been able to decide where autobiography leaves off and fiction begins in a Borrow book, and also for the fact that Borrow ignores the Carlist wars and other facts of Spanish political life in the 1830's to bring the reader pictures of gypsies, jails, and ponies that remain brilliant when whole mosaics of dynasties have lost their glitter.

In the chapter given here the young Spaniard, Baltasar, is described as a national (nacional). This is a term