BOOKS AND READING
BY HILDEGARDE HAWTHORNE
A NEW IDEA
I have been telling you for a long while now about such books as I believe to be entirely worth your while, books that, if you missed them out of your experience, would mean a real loss, such as the missing of a fine friendship or a noble adventure would bring to you. I have gone hither and thither for these books, following no special plan, but turning to one author or another, or to different periods of time, as the fancy took me. And I have had to leave out many great books because you were not yet old enough completely to understand and enjoy them. But though there are many I have not spoken of, I think I have at least given you a hint of the various types, and mentioned most of the authors it will be good for you to be familiar with while you are still boys and girls, and which will teach you to find the rest for yourselves in good time; helping you to such a love of literature that even, when the crowded life of grown-upness comes along, you will still want to read the great books.
Now, however, I want to propose a certain course of reading, a definite plan, and to take up each month two or three books in sequence; books of a historical nature, but each one a story in itself—and a good story.
You have real history in your school hours— English, European, American. It does not always read like a story, and often you find it rather dull work; yet it is the tale of man’s existence, of his struggles from century to century, his advances and retreats, his immense adventures, his wonderful travels and discoveries—the most thrilling story there is!
The trouble with straight history is that it insists on dates and names; it has so much to tell that it is often forced to give no more than the dry fact, leaving out all the story part, all the heart interest, the personal feeling. The battles and cities get in the way of the people. It is about like reading in the papers of the war in Turkey, instead of mixing with that war yourselves, or having an older brother who is a war-correspondent, or a missionary, come home and tell you the odd stories and exciting adventures he had met or heard or seen right on the ground—stories that never got into his reports. Sitting there and listening to him, you would get the thrill of the human side of it all, the little, but moving, personal adventures that are lost in the great impersonal adventure. History is the story of the impersonal adventure of this world; romance and fiction of the personal one.
This is what the books I mean to tell you about will give; just this same “I ’ve been there and it happened to me” side of it which is so exciting. They will put you into close touch with the boys and girls, their parents, the homes they lived in, and the things they hoped for and tried after. If you read these books so that they run parallel with the period of the world’s life that you are learning about in your school histories, you will get nearer to it, almost become one of the people whose cities and battles you are studying about. The whole period will seem real to you, for you will have friends and foes among the population. Your interest will not be confined to kings and captains and elderly folk, but will spread to the daily life of the kind of people you would most likely have known if you had actually been alive at that time, even to boys and girls of your own age.
Of course these books were not written—or not often—by actual participants in the incidents they relate. Once in a while, a real romance comes down through the ages picturing the story of the day rather than its facts; but these are rare. Nevertheless, by turning over many old documents and letters and fragmentary anecdotes, by steeping himself in his period, an author gets almost to believe that he is bodily, instead of simply mentally, in the thick of what he is writing; and if he is good, he makes us feel the same way.
After all, men and women have an amazing habit of being a lot like each other even though separated by some hundreds of years. The circumstances amid which they exist are very different, to be sure; manners were rougher, men more apt to give their will a free rein, ideas were crushed or unborn in those old times, ways of building, eating, and working were different.380
