INVALID LITERATURE.

Dominion, Volume 2, Issue 533, 19 June 1909, Page 9

INVALID LITERATURE.

The. New York "Post" has been, talking of "invalid'literature." Its conclusions: An ideal library for the sick room, therefore 1 , ought to include such authors as Dickens, Thackeray, 1 Qeorgo Eliot, Trollopo, Kingsloy, Lytton, "\Vilkio Collins, Macaulay, Froude, Carlyle, : Ruskin, Jano Austen, Fielding, Addison,' Milton, Shakespearo, Bryant, Whittier, l'oo, Hawthorne, Emerson, Howells, Henry 'James, Mark Twain, Balzac, Dumas, Victor Hugo, Goethe, Heine, Hauptmann, Tolstoy, Turgenieff, lbsen, • Dante, Virgil, Epictetus,' tho Greek 'tragedians, and, Homer, to mention only a few. -'President Eliot's fivo feet of books will satisfy tho man, who is getting back his strength .quite as well a3 the .man who has never lost it. ' It would bo natural to slip-, posothat f.ick-bed literature must necessarily bo light, flimsyinconsequential, of, the type, that is advertised as positively.,"fatal to tho tedium'<f a dusty railroad trip. But our English authority, who has thought deeply on tho matter, comes out strong for the classics, for the fat books with 'their long chapters and built-up sentences. Tho length and the roll and tho polish of tile Victorian sentence is to tho tired.nerves liko the, long swell of the sea. Our modern brilliant, stacatto literature would soon wear down our. invalid's nerves. Tho ordinary funny story will not do; for in that intensely, clear-minded,. impersonal , world wo livo in, when tho doctor's visits begin . to grow less frequent, the point of much that 'our robust state finds humorous is quite gone. ..Loud is bad for convalescents, ' but as a matter of fact, very few convalescents havo the desire to laugh much. Reconquering one's world is a sober-minded occupation; the senso of wonder in the sickroom 'is stronger' than the appetito for sensation. ',

That is why the man who has been used to good literature will naturally turn to it wlion he is down on his back. Hie . French Protestant scholar and polemist Arnaud, wheir.advised to rest, useu to retort, "ilest? Have I not all .'eternity ,t!o rest in?!' Our own times are busier still than the days of the Jansenists,'and the averago man finds •in',''sickness' his'very best opportunity for .'getting at tho books lie has .long wanted to iknow. As for thoso who havo not read mid had no .dcsiro to read, illness may be'mado to. do for them what it has done for niariy famous idlors and sinners who have gotten up from a sick bed to enter tho paths of useful labour and sanctity. Good literature will coino to (.iich a man with all the charm of freshness. A sound diet. will bo all the more a novelty to him-when lie is ill, because ho has been fed: 011 such an invalid diet whisn ho wm welL Whnn ho vis tt'alL

the reading that ho did was carefully. planned not to tiro him when ho ca'mo home from a hard clay at tlio office, or when ho lay dozing in a hammock under tho trees. To give him tho samo thin food now would bo to foreo his mind, working actively nwnv at nothinu in particular, to go without food at all. The. convalescent will read anything. Tied to his bed, ho is in this respect like that • imaginary person who is so frequently banished to a desert island with a half-dozen books Everything would be welcome on a desert island, even the real estate advertisements of a Sunday paper. But the man in bed as the man on tho desert island ought to make use of his full opportunities. ' ;