THE PLEASURES OF RE-READING.
THE pleasures of reading cover a far wider field than the pleasures of re-reading. All the delights of novelty, the glorious astonishments of exploration, the interest of unravelling the complicated threads of a story, are exhausted when we have gone through a book for the first time. Curiosity, with all its varied incentives, plays no part after the pages hate once been turned. But there are more subtle satisfactions which we cannot taste till a book is well known to us. The boeks we re-read most constantly are by no means those which make the strongest appeal to our critical judgment. Sometimes, even, we are somewhat ashamed of our dearest book-friends, and do not like to risk our character for literary acumen by saying how much we love them. The feeling is unreasonable. We are not bound to love our human acquaintance in exact ratio to their wit or worth. Sympathy counts for more than judgment in matters of affection. Now and then, of course, there may be quite other reasons for our reticence. We like to talk about intimate friends with intimate friends only. Where books are concerned we know we cannot silence the critics by a mere statement that they are dear to us. Good manners do not forbid any sharp-tongued detractor from saying his worst of our best beloved. When, therefore, we hear them discussed or ridiculed by all and sundry, we prefer to take no part. If we undertake a warns defence, we probably know by experience that we shall regret it, and shall feel that we have given ourselves away and exposed our hearts to strangers.
We all have certain books which we re-read at intervals, and look forward to re-reading at intervals for the rest of our lives. They may be in prose or verse, and may deal with fact or fiction ; but whatever their nature, they give us a pleasure we should find it hard to explain. Perhaps most of them we read for the first time when we were very young, and perhaps, if we really knew it, it is our past self as much as our auther who fixes our attention as we read. Certain books, like certain fragrances, recall not so much forgotten scenes and forgotten incidents as forgotten moods. We enjoy them because we have enjoyed them. The philosophy which blew away for the moment all our mental mists, or the poetry which was not poetry, but which served to express our souls before we had had much experience of life or reading, cannot lose its charm. We love it the more because it is not great. Had it been greater it would have seemed less com- pletely ours. It is what we should have written bad we had a little more gift of writing. It stands now, very likely, for something simpler than the years have made us. Never- theless, it is refreshing to put ourselves once more in tune with its melody. We read for the first time to gain an impression ; we re-read, as a rule, to gain or to regain an expression. The novels, too, that we go back to may, or may not, be the ones which from a critical point of view we admire most. We may read them because their authors were past-masters of the dramatic art, or merely because something personal to ourselves is perpetuated in their pages. What a wonderful hero So-and-so appeared to us once, how charming was that woman, how astonishingly wise that man. As we read again of them we feel again the thrill and the spell, the delicious sense of enlightenment, the ever-present undertone of hope. We do not find these delights in the new books, but they are shut up on the shelves between the boards of the old ones, and we can feel them all, not indeed whenever we will, but at intervals of one, two, or three years, according to the nature of our memory. We must not look for these pleasures too often. We cannot make the past into the present. If we are so foolish as to begin to re-read too soon, we shall be bitterly disappointed, and we may find nothing but a rather commonplace story, the spell of which is broken by familiarity. Certain history books, again, keep an extraordinary charm. In vain the critics assure us that they are discursive and inaccurate. It was from them that we first realised that it is scene and circumstance, not actors and passions, which change, and the delight with which we first grasped the clue to the wondrous works of our fathers' days and of the old time before them is one we must seek again and again. Their writers opened a door for us which can never be any more shut, and we recapture with real and intense pleasure our sensations when the horizon behind us was first thrown back. The book may have been nothing but an historical novel—and it may not have been Scott's—but however large or small our library, we shall never be happy without a copy of it close at hand.
There are, however, many books which we re-read without any egoistic thoughts. Here also we must admit that our affections and our judgments are not always in agreement. An average man or woman of really good education can appreciate in some sense all that is finest in English litera- ture, and can learn to disapprove all that falls below a certain standard. It is so much easier to appreciate than to love. It is so easy to blame with discrimination, so difficult to resist the power of attraction. The truth is that even among the most cultivated the standard of taste to which they heartily subscribe has never in very many instances become their own individual standard. They believe in the tests whidh with their minds they apply, and in the verdicts which they in all sincerity accept, but in their heart of hearts they like something quite different. They would not for anything be without the power of correct discrimination. The exercise of that power gives them intense pleasure, but now and then they must pander to their own private tastes. Again and again they read the books they really like,—the books that give them real satisfaction. Books which have pleased.
ns, but which have laid a strain upon the attention, we seldom re-read. They are among the experiences which we are glad to have had, but which we do not seek again. They stand out in our memory like the peaks the climber has surmounted ; each may give him a fresh appetite for adventure, but he is not likely to perform the same feat twice. It is not always true that the books we re-read have the greatest effect upon our minds; it is not impossible that we may trace our best ideas to a hook we have read but once. Again, the books which attract by their oddity we seldom open twice ; and it may •reasonably be supposed that the public which makes the success of modern novels of vicious .tone will not want to look at them a second time. When an evil sense of surprise has once been experienced it cannot, one would hope, be recaptured. But perhaps the public we are alluding to never re-reads. Vitiated appetites desire nothing so much as change. The books, pictures, and music which most of us would take with us to a desert island are probably not the ones we talk most about. A library composed of the secret favourites of a score of educated men and women of to-day would offer much food for thought. It would, we believe, be neither very large, nor very new, nor very varied. It would not contain much that is great, except, perhaps, of lyrical poetry; it would contain much that is commonplace, and very little that is at all eccentric. The ordinary man or .woman longs instinctively to see the evident well put, to get that answer to his or her own mental expectancy which the ear gets from a correct scale. We -do not often find this primitive satisfaction in real life, and the function of art, in the mind of the ordinary man, is to supply it. He may know better, or rather he way have learned better, but he re-reinds in accordance with his instinct, not his training.
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