Quick Review

Readings from the Best Authors by Archibald Hamilton Bryce

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


And, here's another one. I've been hunting up these old anthologies -- this one's from 1869 -- looking for pieces to read aloud. Poetry, as you might imagine, there is everywhere, but prose? Not so much. What's wanted are brief selections from great authors. (You'd be amazed how much that was once thought worthy to be anthologized is now not only unfamiliar, but by authors now so thoroughly forgotten as to not even have left another trace online. Imagine.) I've been looking at all the books now available for reprint on the Espresso Book Machine, hunting specifically for what might not only serve the purpose of my reading aloud then, but what I might myself enjoy reading just for the pleasure of it. Yes, I want new discoveries, but I'm also looking for old friends. The great selling point for this book? Right there in the preview, first thing in the Table of Contents: two selections from Macaulay. Comrade!

Macaulay is the perfect example of what I'm looking to read aloud, so I'll use him to stand for all the rest here. When this book was published, Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay PC (25 October 1800 – 28 December 1859), was the very model of a modern Whig historian. True, the gentleman had gone into the ground ten years before, his great History of England not finished, but done. However, thanks to that book, his essays and reviews, Macaulay was not only perhaps the bestselling author in the English speaking world after, say, Bunyan and The Bible, he was also considered to have possessed an exemplary prose style. His liberal prejudices -- by the standard of his day -- might even then have somewhat colored his reputation as an historian, but nearly everyone agreed as to the perfection of his prose. (Ironically, it would now be his high Victorian style: wordy, classically educated and influenced, rhetorically pompous, as much as his Imperialist politics -- he served on the Supreme Council of India between 1834 and 1838 -- that will have left even his best books consigned to both academic and general neglect.) I've come to be not only a serious student and admirer of the writer, but genuinely fond his memory, specially after reading the classic Life & Letters made by Macaulay's nephew, Sir George Trevelyan. Here was the opportunity to share one or two brief selections from his great history; stories of a discreet length and real pathos, told expertly, and already edited, as it were, exactly to meet my needs for a reading online*.

I started then with "The Capture and Execution of Monmouth." Know it or him? The sad natural son of Charles II, caught in rebellion one last time, goes rather nobly to his end. It's a lovely thing.

What else? Well, unknown to me as history and quite a discovery as prose was a short, acid essay by playwright and mid-Victorian editor of Punch, Douglas Jerrold, called "The Cave at Dahra." In it, Jerrold brilliantly contrasts the "civilized" and the "savage" by describing the colonial French, massacring roughly 800 souls by means of fire and smoke in a cave in Algiers. Powerful stuff. (And it reminded me to look for more by and about Douglas Jerrold, so now I'm reading the quite remarkably good biography of him written by his son.) And? Well, "The Brothers Dorritt," which proved my first go at Dickens in some months, poems by Byron and Landor, and just lots of good things I might not have known, or thought to read again had I not found them here. All to the good.

Unlike the other I had printed the same day, this anthology, though probably likewise produced for a student reader, has a quite readable, and even enlightening preface, this by Archibald H. Bryce -- someone now on my list to look more into hereafter.

All in all then, this little book, with bits of everything from Cicero to Tennyson, has proved a good and crowded van and should be welcome wherever it may go in it's new incarnation as a Google book.

*Just a brief note on this hobby of mine, for any that might not know and more surprisingly, might care. I read aloud and post the short videos on Youtube.com, to maybe encourage folks to pick up either unfamiliar books and authors, or revisit old favorites, but also to encourage others to practice or at least try reading aloud, an all but lost pastime and, I think, a necessity if one is to understand and truly enjoy our literature. And yes, it's very nice when people say nice things to me about my readings, but trust me, were I to depend on such compliments to sustain my enthusiasm for reading aloud, I would long since have reverted to just moving my lips in the privacy of me room.



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