Dangerous Reading

An anthology is a dangerous thing, for the insatiable reader. That's what I like to think I am; greedy rather than just self-indulgent or incapable of deeper study. I read so widely as I do then not because I can not concentrate long enough to finish half of what I start, but because I can not wait until I've finished the books I've started before picking up first one other, then another, and another, for fear I suppose of not having time -- or patience -- to read all that I would. Johnson of course offers me many a defense for this, but just here let me say only that I read nowadays mostly according to my "immediate inclination," and I am content to do just that. As for reading every book through, Johnson again:

"This is surely a strange advice; you may as well resolve that whatever men you happen to get acquainted with, you are to keep them for life. A book may be good for nothing; or there may be only one thing in it worth knowing; are we to read it all through?"

And there's the end of it.

Anthologies then offer a reader such as myself a perfect excuse, not only to read only those pieces of particular appeal, but to read from the selection to other books. Now, if the anthology is an old one, as most of mine are, then this can take some doing. Reading an anthology dated 1909 of the great English essayists, I am prepared to say that there will be few surprises that can not be met with further reading from my own shelves. One of the chief pleasures of such a little book comes in meeting old friends. Even here though, there can be something unfamiliar. In the best such books, there is always the chance of the editor having picked something unfamiliar from even the most well-trodden ground. There are also authors in any such collection one will not have read, unless one is a scholar as I am not, and reading even one such unknown with any enjoyment may inspire a whole new horizon of possibilities. There are always authors one has read more references to than read. I may or may not ever take up Richard Baxter, 1615 - 1691, based on his contribution here of "The Saints' Rest." I should think Baxter just the kind of fellow so beloved of my own dear old Charles Lamb, but neither Lamb nor this selection will have persuaded me yet to hunt up more of the man than this one pretty thing I've now read. Might do, someday. More than this though, there is always the chance of reading someone heretofore unknown, but of such an immediate sympathy as to inspire quick action.

Elsewhere I recently read something quite charming by Andrew Lang, an author otherwise known to me, as to most people I should think nowadays, only as the maker of the "Coloured" Fairy Books: the twelve volumes, never out of print, from The Blue Fairy Book to the Violet, Lilac, et al. A collector of folk tales and fables, from his native Scotland and elsewhere, Andrew Lang was actually much more than this of course. A poet as well as an anthropologist, a novelist and critic, Lang, more to my taste, was also a charming occasional essayist. His essay on Dumas, an excellent thing, made me want more. When I read that Lang had a whole little book titled Letters to Dead Authors -- a variation on the letter essay that was once a mildly popular form, practiced among others by Maurice Hewlett and, after his fashion, by Landor, among others -- I was interested enough to have this and the other volume of Lang's essays printed up for me on the bookstore's EBM, Homer. Writing to dead authors as English as Dickens and Austen, as well as more ancient writers, allowed Lang to rather sweetly imitate the style appropriate to each. Not perhaps always a happy thing, but I am glad I got it. (The Dumas essay, in Lang's Essays in Little, I can recommend as one of the best and brightest things I've ever read on the great novelist.)

From the old anthology I've mentioned, I found not Lang, but another Victorian gent of letters, completely unknown to me, author of a selection titled "My Copy of Keats." This being a charming defense of a much read and hence much the worse for wear old book, I warmed to the writer and his subject immediately. Even at the time of the anthology's publication, the editors could describe Richard Dowling as "neglected." I could find next to nothing about him, even on the Internet. When I turned to the bookstore's EBM, however, I was delighted to find both his Indolent Essays and Ignorant Essays, in which his piece on Keats may be found, and had both printed immediately, at only eight bucks apiece!

(This is what I always tell myself, when spending money I don't have on books I don't need. Best not to examine such things too closely, I find.)

My one regret resulting from this latest flurry of reprints being that another of Dowling's books was not available. Alas. The title is just so good, On Babies and Ladders, that I'm pretty sure I will have to someday own that one as well. So the search is on.

All of this is just idle entertainment, of course, and perhaps not the best use of my time, but who better to judge that than me?

"One of the amusements of idleness is reading without the fatigue of close attention; and the world therefore swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read."

-- Johnson again, naturally. Impossible not bring him back into something like this. Try.

You see the danger, don't you? I certainly don't lack for books to read already, and good ones too. With at least three new books I'd already been excited to finally see just started and on my nightstand, and a pile still to be read for my committee work, the last thing I needed to catch my eye was something called The Great English Essayists, yet how could it not, given my taste and habits? Picking that up in preference to the others and taking it to lunch just the one day and home that night, I now have at least four other books, printed up just for me, and no one to blame but myself if the whole pile should fall on my head some night soon and crush me to death in my sleep.

Books can be dangerous in more ways than one, you know.