WHAT I READ

I was in and out of school until my seventeenth year. Toward the last I must have had queer teachers, or I may have been a trifle out of drawing myself, for I was permitted to choose the books I studied from father’s library. This was an old and honorable one, collected by two generations of leisure-loving men with reading minds. I recited lessons from Plutarch’s ‘Lives’ and Paley’s ‘Moral Philosophy.’ Poor old Paley! It turns out that he was entirely wrong about morals. I doubt now if it makes much difference whose philosophy you study on this subject. Morals change like rules for pronunciation, and are more confusing to learn than a foreign language. When you know the language you know how to speak it, but one never gets a working knowledge of morals until he learns how to compromise them with a good conscience and an upright mind. It is an obtuse subject and requires much experience in honorable living to master it.

Another book I studied was Tasso’s ‘Jerusalem Delivered.’ Why I chose this poem I cannot imagine, but it has left a trail of flaming angels at war, memories of many flashing colors, and a sort of golden cadence in my mind, although I cannot recall a single line. What I do recall, with that mischievous retrospect we sometimes cast back upon our earliest follies, is the way the good little lady teacher used to look when I switched forward to read from this book. She used to turn her head sidewise with that weary air polite people have when they must listen to a bore. I always let her have as many pages of the stuff as she would bear.

I have spent a good deal of my life beyond the bounds of the times in which we now live. Most people do who read and think without adding the experience as a fact to their consciousness. If life is brief, I shall never know it. I am not really old in years, but it seems to me that I have been living for ages. Much of my youth was passed a long way back in the centuries. I had a widely assorted companionship then, reaching all the way back to Genesis. Besides the first and closest relation I acquired with Nature, there were the prophets from the Old Testament; pagans of one sort and another from histories of the Greeks and Romans; heroes chosen from poetry and mythology; ghosts, angels of the covenant, Jesus Christ, with a sort of secret hankering for many of the Catholic saints, whose lives had drawn me to them.

These people were amazingly real to me, because I did not know any living people so intimately. The topography of my mind must have been a curious map of ancient lands. Years later, when at last I saw Rome, really it was a disappointment to me; the shattered shell of a great civilization left half buried in the dust of centuries, a frailer, unsubstantial city built into these ruins and filled with little men. No gods on Mount Olympus. I am a Christian, but I did miss the altars and oracles of those fine old deities in Rome! The sunken place where the Forum had been, but no signs of Lycurgus or of Cæsar.

We never shall know how many great men were created by their biographers, but we may infer how insignificant these same men would be twenty centuries later. I do not think Brutus or Mark Antony would cut much of a figure in the Rome I saw. Still, I have a sort of sympathy for Mussolini, not with him. A modern politician giving himself the airs of a Roman tribune. Who knows but he may be the whelp of atavism? Grant him a Plutarch for a biographer and he might shine for centuries to come as a great man. After a while, it all depends on your biographer whether you live in the memories of men or are forgotten along with the rest of us.

The people I knew in those days stalked through the Scriptures, or they had been poets and gifted men, according to their biographers.

I was not conscious of being different from others of my own age; but I must have been, now that I consider what substance my mind was made of, what scenes my imagination dwelt upon--creation, the slow-traveling patriarch of the Scriptures. I was not allowed to read fiction, but I read a translation of the tragedies by Sophocles. To this day I still have a clearer memory of one scene in the ‘Œdipus at Colonus’ than of anything I have ever seen acted upon the stage. Œdipus, eyes cut out with Jocasta’s golden buckle, with bloody cheeks and beard, standing above her dead body, and the halls of the palace filled with wailing women and woe-stricken men.

This is terrible stuff to be laid away in the mind of a young girl. Later I added ‘Prometheus Bound.’ And after so long a time, out of the memory of such scenes, I found out what tragedy is if you write it--an act of fate which we perform unwillingly or without knowing what we do. Terribly simple, in a bleak place, or in a place of great splendor like a palace; all in the scene, not to be told in many words.

Along with this I read Dean Swift, Sut Lovingood and Byron’s poetry. Mother was no great reader. I doubt if she knew of some of the lands through which Gulliver traveled, and my impression is that she thought all poetry was virtuous.

I must have acquired a certain boldness of mind from these various sources in an age when the maiden mind was actually tainted with modesty. In reading a Latin fable I was the only girl in the class who would translate the word ‘_asinus_’ into the little English word it means. I remember this instance on account of the blushing embarrassment of my companions. I was not aware of the almost universal existence of the vulgar.