BOOKS ABOUT BOOKS.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1431, 4 May 1912, Page 9

BOOKS ABOUT BOOKS.

There is a prejudice against books about books (says an English writer) that is too widely spread not to be to some extent justified. It probably springs from tho fact that there are readers who read nothing else and are smatterers; as they cannot give chapter and verse for their critical opinions thefr manner is authoritarian, and to challenge their opinions is to dispute absolute wisdom. Nevertheless, it is easy to speak a good word for books about books, and to maintain that they have for the judicious an interest and a uso. For one thing, they may be useful for the provisional guidance they give. If, for example,' there is an author'about whom the public has notyet made up its mind, and whose best work it is necessary that we should know, wo must trust some critic to tell us what is his' best work. Of course, there is, theoretically, a more excellent way; one may read through the whole series of his works irith the critical faculties.on tho alert'all the time, and mako up one's mind -for."pneselfcbut "0, the labour;' 0 l , rince7the.'pain 1 ! -:"--"There, for example, is Oscar Wilde. Jle. has counted fori, something already in .contemporary- literature,, and. Iris star is still rising. To relieve us of tho task of'-picking and choosing among the volumes which Mr.. Methuen has 'published ■ comes ■ Sir. Kansome with his line examination of his work;- and ono finds that to bo ignorant of "Intentions," of "The Importance .of Being Earnest," is to ba ignorant of Wilde at his best, and that to appreciate his poetry one must .enter sympathetically into works so diverse as "The Sphinx and "Tho Ballad of Heading.Gaol.": Of course the acc'cplanco of Such'judgments is ouly provisional. If ..-.'another critic arises with dillcrtht'.-preferences,-he' also is entitled to : .his hearing, and a reader is to make up his mind'after a comparison of the volumes with which he is now familiar with thoso recommended. I'rom [this point of view the "best name of the writer of the book about books is still "Indicator." But in truth ho has jus office even when the books he is writing about are familiar. He gives us one of. tho greatest of literary pleasures; ho talks with us about mutter which we know as well as ho does iu a languago statelier than our own and from a point ot view which enables us to see it through a new pair of eyes. Thus in a day of lennysonian fervour if. was a delight to course through the pages of Mr. Stanford Brookes monograph. They were jewelled with the choicest of quotations, and the comment was the "tone of meditation slipping in between the beauty coming and/the •beauty gone. Even if he talked unfavourably abo.it some poem that was much to our fancy, it was better that he should talk so than that he should not talk at all; as it is written, "Speak weel o my love, speak ill o' my love, but aye keep speaking." Years have passed, and tho. Tennvsonian mood has passed with them, but To this dav, if it is notjsome particular poem of his that one wishes to read, but simply to get into the atmosphere of his poetry, it is to Mr. Brooke s monograph that "one turns. . It may be urged even .that there is literature of this secondary sort which mav be enjoyed without either reminding us'of or referring us to tho books witli which it deals. , Or rather, let us say, there are moods when wo may read sucli a bouk for its intrinsic interest. After the night's work is over and one is smokin" his last pipe ere composing himself to°his little image of death one mav cc-nfess to a lowered mentality. At such an hour a novel' would be a cup of gunpowder tea which would scare sleep the Mmy-eycd back to his poppied cave, but WnrtoiVs "Observations on the Fairy Queen" just hits off the mood of honeyed indolence. Its leather binding smells of thf eighteenth century, its capital letters and long s - s and quotations in archaic English give a delightful sense of remoteness and unreality; you may open it anywhere, and if you have luck may go oil to bed chortling over a passage like this:— "Our author frequently introduces an allcgorv. under which no meaning is couched-viz., 11. ix. 21. ALMA is lie mind, and her CASTLE the body. the. tongue is the porter of the castle, he nose the portcullis, and the month the porch, about the inside ot which are placed twice sixteen warders clad in white, which are the teeth; these ALMA passes bv7 who rise up, and do obeisance to her. —St. '20. But how can the teeth be said to riso up and bow to the mind.'