HOLIDAY READING—ANCIENT AND MODERN.*

TITERE. is. no more important preliminary question to a.family or individual when. going, on holiday than " What books shall we take ? " On the answer to that question depends for many. people, -indeed for most, the -success of their adventure in,new fields. -I suppose that the question of " Quo vadis ? " must be admitted to be .actually more necessary, since it is a sine qua non. If you do not know where you are going you cannot very well go there, and so you cannot very well .have -a holiday. All the same, I am quite sure that even if it is not the sine ,qua non of a .holiday, -your pleasure, rest, . ease, and comfort depend absolutely on the books you take. All physical pleasure, whether on the sea, in the mountains, 'in picture galleries, in discovering new cities, or tracking the course of new rivers and strange streams, means physical -exertion often pushed to the point of muscular and nervous exhaustion. We require a safe anodyne ; and that can only be successfully obtained by most people in reading.

If your books are carefully and successfully selected, you are insured against a- holiday of ruin. But variety in selection is essential—an easy thing to say, but by no means an easy thing to do, so fickle is the human breast. You are eager to read .a magnum opus on one day, and absolutely deter- mined not to -read -it on •the next. The man who selects solely for his own reading must remember that he is catering for the most wayward appetite. What may look delightful -in Surrey or Belgravia may be a positive torment at the Belalp -or Malaga, or the North Cape, or Paris, or Chamonix. Books which seem engaging and attractive at Lausanne may be a nightmare at Trouville or Quimper, • (1) Babbitt. By Sinclair Lewis. London : Cape. [7s. ed. net —(2) Cieero's Letters. 8 vols. Loeb Series. London : Heinemann. [10s. net each.)—(3) ;ficriptores Augestae. Same Series. Same Publisher. [105. net}--(4) The Love . Poems .of John Donne. London : Nonesuch Press. [10s. ed. net.]—(5) Main ;Street. By Slnrl.tr Lewis. London : (tape. [7s. 6d. net.]—(6) The .14e and .Prineinate of the Emperor .Hadrian, a n. 76-188. By Bernard W. Henderson. London : Methuen. 115s. neta--(7) The Riddle, and Other Stories. By Walter De La Mare. London : &luta and-Hieunt. [Ts. 85. net.]--8) Pen :Mason's Conversations with }Valise; 'Drummond or Hawthornden, • LandOn Markle. Us. ed• net.]

or Naples, or on the deck of a P. and 0. in - the Straits of Gibraltar.

What makes the selection such a desperate adventure is the fact that you cannot carry a library about with you, and even in foreign capitals, let alone hotels at the edge of glaciers, at the summit of mountain passes, or in what the French call little holes by the sea—real books are absolutely unprocurable.

Your party must take its books with it or else " perish each alone." Of course, if you are .a fairly good-hearted family you can do-a good deal by pooling, especially if the readers are not too fastidious or too prejudiced. If the heavy son will not insist upon taking nothing but Proust, which is incon- sumable food to his light-minded father and lighter mother, and if Marianne will not insist on psychological manuals or " studies in the herd instinct," and again if the parents will not be too frivolous in their fiction or too Victorian in their biographies, a, divine average may be struck which will smooth many a weary mile and halting hour.

It is usually supposed that fiction is the right material with which the lowest layer of one's portmanteaux and suitcases should be stuffed.; but though this may be a good general rule, there are, of course, a great number of exceptions. I myself am by no means averse to a good novel in season and " in its place," whatever its place is, and especially a good new novel ; but I am perfectly sure that I should die of despair if I had nothing but novels, ancient and modern, to

read on a holiday. I know it is my duty. as well as my pleasure to keep abreast with modern fiction ; but, to be plain, on. a holiday I have not always the strength to tackle the newest writers on the oldest themes. I make this confession though I am most honestly .and whole-heartedly of opinion that we ought to read new ,books; and that if we do not we lose an immense deal, and are tending to drop into that worst of all barbarisms, Byzantinism. Indeed, I am not sure that old books, great classical authors and so on, ought not to be put on a kind of index and that no-one should be allowed to read them without a-certificate jointly signed by a doctor, a, psycho- analyst, and a publisher of modern literature. To live upon the half-cold viands which once furnished the marriage and funeral feasts of our ancestors is a wretched business. Yet unquestionably the new meat is often very tough and requires great strength of appetite and of digestion to assimilate it.

Therefore many people who want their holiday anodyne must be allowed some of their old books—something to fall back upon if they get the new upon their nerves. But here again, of course, selection comes in. Though I have got the weak digestion of old age, I confess that a recent agitated holiday was made delightful to me by browsing in Proust. I said I could not and would not read any of it because I was on a holiday. Having made that vehement proclamation I began to nibble at. Du. COM de. chez Swann, and came away charmed, or, at, any rate, satisfied that here was a really great book. -But though I ended by getting so profound and so interesting an impression from Proust, I must add that what made me really sit up on the holiday in question was Benjamin Constant's Adolphe. There is a book in a thousand, and it led on to equally delightful pastures in the Journal Intime. But, after all, the most delightful holiday reading that I have had in recent years was when I took Babbitt' into Wales with me, and became at once one of Mr. Sinclair Lewis's most ardent slaves. In fact, my servitude to Babbitt is so great that I am almost ashamed to speak of him lest people regard-me with that contempt which is the lot of the bondman, whether intellectual or physical.

But, once more, though agree that fiction must be the predominant.partner in the traveller's library, I have a strong and secret admiration for what I may call the eccentrics of holiday reading. If I was- to .go for a longish holiday alone I should take a selection of books which would probably turn the stomachs even of the Custom House officers. For example, I should put in the three 'volumes of Cicero's Letters2 in the

Loeb Series, not because I want to study Cicero (Heaven knows I don't !), but because it is the most delightful twaddle in the world and yet deals with a great epoch, great men, and world-wide affairs, and shows that the past was not only not better than the present, but a great deal worse, as to selfishness, party quarrels, meanness, and misery. Still,

that, of course, is not the real reason why I like to read Cicero's Letters. The real reason is thrit the old gentleman is so

thoroughly human, so sly, so wicked, and such an amusing humbug. " I did this solely for the sake of my country. Besides, the circumstances would not allow me to do anything

else, and it was my best, perhaps my only chance. You say I did not come out as a whole-hearted hater of Caesar till they had killed him, and that I had the good sense to keep out of the conspiracy. Well ! What if I did ? All the same, I loved my country and was a respectable, good citizen, and never behaved like those scandalous demagogues of the popular party. Did I ever trapes about Italy with a music- hall artiste in a litter without proper curtains ? And then you dare to say that Antony was as good a man as I ? " That is the intimate Ciceronian mood. " Beat it," as Mr. Babbitt would say, for holiday reading. But there are moods when I am sure I should put another book into my holiday box, if I could fill it without thought of anybody else, and that book would be my latest discovery in the Loeb Classics, the Scriptores Augustae? The poor little book is derided by all the great scholars and historians as bad Latin, bad history, and scandalous lies, and so forth. Yet it is, in fact, as good light reading as anything in the world. There you may canvass the tremendous question why Hadrian was so fond of getting up to see the sun rise, and actually performed that feat twice on Etna, and what made Pertinax think of the excellent maxim when he asserted the principle of limiting dinner-parties to seven : " Seven make a dinner ; more make a din."

Again, low be it spoken, I should like very much to put a work on Algebra into my box. I should not understand it, but it would console me. And then, too, Xenophon's Economics, Dakyns's translation, Vol. V., might save my life on a wet day in the Alps. Dryden's poems on thin Indian paper, Clarendon Press edition, take up very little room, and the new volume of Donne's love poems' is very thin and flat, though rather large. And then my little Eighteenth- Century edition of Pope is tiny, and so is the little Prior in the same series. It is bad for one's eyes to read much of them ; but then one only wants an occasional ration of Pope. One or two very thin plays of Shakespeare in single volumes would be nice, and the Sonnets in a plain edition take up no room whatever. As to plays, at the moment I should take Julius Caesar, Timon of Athens, and All's Well that Ends Well— gritty, but fascinating. Then there would be for modern fiction Main Street,' and some other novel, and two volumes of short stories to be recommended by the junior members of my family, with a plea for mercy in the matter of emotional disturbance. I am not of an age when it is safe to be harrowed. I should like to take the new Life of Hadrian,' though it is rather too fat. De La Mare's The Riddle, and Other Stories,7 would be thrilling for most people ; but I am not sure whether I could trust myself with anything so poignant on the sea, or near precipices. However, I am a special and willing victim of Mr. De La Mare's ; but I don't like to come down to table d'hôte with red eyes ! I know he does not have this effect upon everybody ; but The Almond Tree certainly had that effect upon me.

I should certainly put in the new edition of Ben Jonson's Conversations with William Drummond of Ilawthornden.8 It is a delightful book, and the notes are most illuminative. Drummond of Hawthornden is a good poet, and so was old Jonson, although one of the most monstrous egoists that the world has ever seen ; and between them they got through some very good talk in spite of the fact that Drummond thought Jonson a cad and Jonson thought his host a " poop."

But, after all, it is not much use merely to talk at large about holiday reading. The list's the thing. Therefore, though with some trepidation, I give lists for a family party. It excludes, for reasons of variety, the books which are reviewed in this number of the Spectator, and is as follows :— FATHER'S LIST : Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis (Cape. 7s. ad. net) • Life of Hadrian, . supported by the three volumes of Cicero's Letters and Scriptores Auguskie (Loeb Series) (Heinemann. 10s. net each); -Drummorrd of Herwthornden's Conversations (Blackie. 7s. 6d. net); Andrew Marvelrs Poems (15s. net) and -Love Poems of John Donne (10s. 6d. net), both in the Nonesuch Press Edition.

MOTHER'S LIST :

Laughter from a Cloud, by Sir Walter Raleigh (Constable. 21s. net); The Back Seat, by G. P. Stern (Chapman and Hall. 7s. 6d. net) ; Miss Bracegirdle and Others, by Stacey Aumonier (Hutchinson. 7s. 6d.) ; The Heart Knoweth, by Mrs. Horace Tremlett. (Hutchinson. 7s. 6d. net).

SON'S LIST :

Memories of the Future, by Ronald Knox (Methuen. 7s. 6d. net) ; a volume from Messrs. Dent's new edition of Conrad (10s. 6d.) ; The Landscape of Cytherea, by W. J. Turner (Chatto and Windus. 4s. 6d. net) ; American Poems and Others, by W. J. Squire (Hodder and Stoughton. 5s. net) ; and Reason in Art, from George Santayana's Life of Reason (Constable. 8s. net.)

DAUGHTER'S LIST :

The Grand Tour, by Romer Wilson (Methuen. 7s. 6d. net); The Black Dog, by A. E. Coppard (Cape. 7s. (id. net); Bucolic Comedies, by Edith Sitwell (Duckworth. 3s. Cxl. net) ; ant Oui of the Flame, by Osbert Sitwell (Grant Richards. 6s. net).

Readers who dislike these lists should send us lists of their own, naming not more than six books in all, and we will do