Among the French poets were Corneille, Racine, Lafontaine and Victor Hugo, though, oddly enough, of Lamartine the poet there was not a page, nor yet of Chenier, Vigny or Musset. Among French prose classics there were, of course, Sainte-Beuve’s “Lundis,” bracing fare for a young mind, Sevigne the divinely loitering, Augustin Thierry and Philarete Chasles. Art history and criticism were represented by Lacroix’s big volumes, so richly and exquisitely illustrated, on art, architecture and costume in the middle ages, by Schliemann’s “Ilias” and “Troja,” by Gwilt’s Encyclopaedia of Architecture, by Kugler, Mrs. Jameson, P.G. Hamerton, and the Ruskin of “Modern Painters” and the “Seven Lamps,” together with a volume of “Selections” (appropriately bound in purple cloth) of all his purplest patches; to which my father, for my benefit, added “Stones of Venice” and “Walks in Florence” when we returned to Europe and the too-short days of our joint sight-seeing began.
In philosophy, I recall little but Victor Cousin and Coleridge (“The Friend” and “Aids to Reflection”); among essaysists, besides Addison, there were Lamb and Macaulay; in the way of travel, I remember chiefly Arctic explorations. As for fiction, after the eighteenth century classics, Miss Burney and Scott of course led the list; but, mysteriously enough, Richardson was lacking, save for an abridged version of “Clarissa Harlowe” (and a masterly performance that abridgement was, as I remember it). No doubt Richardson, with Smollett and Fielding, fell to my uncle’s share, and were too much out-of-date to be thought worth replacing. Thus, except for Scott, there was a great gap until one came to Washington Irving, that charming hybrid on whom my parents’ thoughts could dwell at ease, because, in spite of the disturbing fact that he “wrote,” he was a gentleman, and a friend of the family. For my parents and their group, though they held literature in great esteem, stood in nervous dread of those who produced it. Washington Irving, Fitz-Greene Halleck and William Dana were the only representatives of the disquieting art who were deemed uncontaminated by it; though Longfellow, they admitted, if a popular poet, was nevertheless a gentleman. As for Herman Melville, a cousin of the Van Rensselaers, and qualified by birth to figure in the best society, he was doubtless excluded from it by his deplorable Bohemianism, for I never heard his name mentioned, or saw one of his books. Banished probably for the same reasons were Poe, that drunken and demoralized Baltimorean, and the brilliant wastrel Fitz James O’Brien, who was still further debased by “writing for the newspapers.” But worse still perhaps in my parents’ eyes was the case of such unhappy persons as Joseph Drake, author of “The Culprit Fay,” balanced between “fame and infamy” as not quite of the best society, and writing not quite the best poetry. I cannot hope to render the tone in which my mother pronounced the names of such unfortunates, or, on the other hand, that of Mrs. Beecher Stowe, who was so “common” yet so successful. On the whole, my mother doubtless thought, it would be simpler if people one might be exposed to meeting would refrain from meddling with literature.
相关的主题文章：
没有评论:
发表评论