MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
AYOUNG man recently, gazing at the book-shelves in my room, asked me to tell him what book had had the greatest influence upon my mind. I found that question difficult to answer. There is in the first place the temptation (a temptation to which elderly men of letters are, I fear, terribly apt to succumb) to reply to such questions in terms of vanity. There is in the second place the difficulty of defining the word " influence." There are three main forms which such influence can assume. There are the books which, whatever their real quality, first encouraged one to read for pleasure ; few influences can have been more potent or more durable than that. There are those books which, by their positive or negative effect upon one, by arousing like or dislike, contributed to the mould- ing of taste. And there are those books which, if only for a time, opened up for one new areas of curiosity or perception or affected one's own attitude towards life. There is, moreover, another pre- caution which, in answering such a question honestly, one is bound to take. The influence of any given book or writer upon oneself is due largely to fortuitous circumstances. At a given stage of one's development, at some phase of receptiveness or emotion, a certain book may have exercised an influence which bears but a chance relation, either to the merits of the book itself, or to one's own character and intelligence. A powerful book read at the wrong
moment can make but slight impact ; a weak book, read in a special mood of receptiveness, may have important results. And since we know that experience is not transferable, it is scarcely correct to tell a young man that this or .that book " exerted a profound influence." All one can say is: " At a phase of special receptivity, and exposed as I then was to special emotional influences or personal affections, it happened that such or such a book appeared to me to possess immense significance."
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I can remember distinctly the book which first (stirred in me feelings of literary delight. I do not remember what it was about or by whom it was written. I can remember only that it was bound in blue cloth and that upon the cover was stamped in gold the picture of a dove beating against the bars of a cage. It was called The Angel of Love, and I can still recall my mother's amused surprise when I asked her to read it to me all over again. It must have been a very sickly work. Then followed the period when every evening the novels of Scott and Dickens were read to me while I lay sprawled upon the carpet, playing with little bits of string, or scribbling end- less chalk drawings upon a pad. A gap then intervenes, and the next milestone in my literary development were the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, then appearing in the Strand Magazine. I am indebted to Conan Doyle for having first taught me to read to myself with enjoyment. My schoolmaster objected to Sherlock Holmes, believing that those admirable moral stories might encourage juvenile delinquency. But it was the dramatic interest of the stories, coupled with the joy of feeling that they were forbidden fruit, which enabled me to overcome the labour of deciphering the printed word and to pass from the period when with careful forefinger I followed each syllable across the page to the period when the meaning of whole lines would leap quite quickly into my mind. And if it be true that the book which influenced one most is the book which first enabled one to read with delight, then assuredly I should answer the question put to me by the two reputable words "Sherlock Holmes."
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More difficult is it either to remember or to define those books which, whether by their positive or their negative effect, influenced the gradual formation of literary taste. One of the main mile- stones on this long, pleasurable, and I trust unending, road marks the day when, in sickened disgust, I threw from the window of a railway carriage The Picture of Dorian Gray. That certainly was the moment when my literary taste became sufficiently self-assertive to reject the Yellow Book atmosphere which might well have affected my adolescence. I can indeed trace the first formation of firm literary predilections to my last year at school, when I certainly became aware that, for me at least, Catullus was more interesting than Ovid and the choruses of The Clouds or The Birds more lovely far than those of the Bacchae. We were not taught English litera- ture at school, and although during those years I read novels with voracity, I cannot recall that I read them with any effort of dis- crimination. At my private school I had read' Henty with enjoy- ment, even as at my public school I read Merriman, and Wells, and Anthony Hope, and Zangwill, and even Marie Corelli. I did not read Hardy, or Meredith, or Henry James. The birth of personal taste must always date from the moment when one starts to read, not merely with a critical attention, but with actual enthusiasm. That moment is governed by the emotional changes caused by the passage from boyhood to manhood, rnd is coloured by chance affec- tions and associations. The books which swim into that turbulent and receptive area certainly become events in the mind. Thus for me Marius the Epicurean (read during my first term at Balliol) was an immense excitement. Yet such influence as it exercised was, I now recognise, purely fortuitous. I find it difficult to read Pater today, becoming bored, too readily perhaps, by the drowsy languor of his style. I cannot honestly say that my taste was in any way con- ditioned before I reached the age of twenty-one. And even then, owing to the chance circumstance that I was studying abroad, it was conditioned far more by foreign, and especially by French books, than by English books.
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There are, I suppose, many people who could definitely state that their whole attitude towards life had been changed by reading such or such a book at such or such a date. I could• not make any posi- tive assertion on that point. I could say only that at a certain period of my life circumstances brought me into contact with certain writers, who, by introducing me to other writers, did permanently affect both my taste and the incidence of my curiosity. All people of my generation have, I suppose, been " influenced " by. Freud and Jung and Adler, even as they have been " influenced " by T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Joyce. But I am not conscious in my own development of any influence as formative as that, for instance, which was exercised upon the young C. E. M. Joad by Wells and Shaw. Yet I must admit that for two or three years my mental attitude was shaped by the works of Maurice Barres. Who today reads Un Homme Libre or Le Jardin de Berenice or Le Voyage a Sparte? Yet to me, at a formative stage of my existence, the Culte
du Mai, the gloomy epicurean ideal of Barres, certainly appeared admirably appropriate. " We should," he wrote, " seek for our felicity in actual experience and not in the results which our experi- ences may seem to promise." "Let us," he enjoined, " be both ardent and sceptical." " We were created," he wrote, " in older to analyse our sensations, and to become sensitive above all to those which are either subtle or inspired." His lesson was that we should seek to beautify the universe by cultivating our own sensibility and disquiet. " I will welcome," he wrote, " all the tremors of the world ; I shall take delight in every vibration of my nerves ; it will be a paradise for me to be both fevered and lucid." Barres seems dead enough to me today : but it was a comfort to a young man to be told that his uncertainty was both respectable and productive.
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I took down from the shelf the faded copy of Un Homme Libre and handed it to my young friend. He turned the yellow pages. " There is a pencil note," he said, " in the margin here which I can't quite read." He handed the book back to me and I took it to the light. " While reading this," I had scribbled, " I saw an aeroplane for the first time. May r6th, two. 10.15 a.m." I remembered the occasion: I had been sitting in the little train which runs from Rye to the golf course. A clumsy biplane had risen with the larks above the marshes. He looked at me strangely. " I never realised," he said, " that you were quite as old as that."
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