Kitabı oku: «The Book of Delight and Other Papers», sayfa 5

The dogs did me one service, they made me get up early. I walked through a bluish-gray atmosphere. Colors in Judea are bright, yet there is always an effect as of a thin gauze veil over them. I went, then, into the streets, and at five o'clock the sun was high, and the bustle of the place had begun. The air was keen and fresh, and many were already abroad. I saw some camels start for Jerusalem, laden with straw mats made in Hebron.

Next went some asses carrying poultry for the Holy City, then a family caravan with its inevitable harem of closely veiled women. Then I saw a man with tools for hewing stone, camels coming into Hebron, a boy with a large petroleum can going to fetch water,—they are abandoning the use of the olden picturesque stone pitchers,—then I saw asses loaded with vine twigs, one with lime, women with black dresses and long white veils, boys with bent backs carrying iron stones. I saw, too, some Bethlehemite Christians hurrying home to the traditional site of the nativity. You can always distinguish these, for they are the only Christians in Palestine that wear turbans habitually. And all over the landscape dominated the beautiful green hills, fresh with the morning dew, a dew so thick that I had what I had not expected, a real morning bath. I was soaked quite wet by the time I returned from my solitary stroll. I had a capital breakfast, for which we supplied the solids, and our host the coffee. Butter is a luxury which we neither expected nor got. Hebron, none the less, seemed to me a Paradise, and I applauded the legend that locates Adam and Eve in this spot.

Alas! I had not yet seen Hebron. The doctor lived on the outskirts near the highroad, where there are many fine and beautiful residences. I was soon to enter the streets and receive a rude awakening, when I saw the manner in which the fifteen hundred Jews of Hebron live. Hebron is a ghetto in a garden; it is worse than even Jerusalem, Jerusalem being clean in comparison. Dirty, dark, narrow, vaulted, unevenly paved, running with liquid slime—such are the streets of Hebron. You are constantly in danger of slipping, unless you wear the flat, heel-less Eastern shoes, and, if you once fell, not all the perfumes of Araby could make you sweet again.

I should say that, before starting on my round, I had to secure the attendance of soldiers. Not that it was necessary, but they utilize Baedeker's assertion, that the people are savage, to get fees out of visitors—a cunning manner of turning the enemy's libels to profitable account. I hired two soldiers, but one by one others joined my train, so that by the time my tour was over, I had a whole regiment of guardians, all demanding baksheesh. I would only deal with the leader, a ragged warrior with two daggers, a sword, and a rifle. "How much?" I asked. "We usually ask a napoleon (i.e. 20 francs) for an escort, but we will charge you only ten francs." I turned to the doctor and asked him, "How much?" "Give them a beslik between them," he said. A beslik is only five pence. I offered it in trepidation, but the sum satisfied the whole gang, who thanked me profusely.

First I visited the prison, a sort of open air cage, in which about a dozen men were smoking cigarettes. The prison was much nicer than the Mohammedan school close by. This was a small overcrowded room, with no window in it, the little boys sitting on the ground, swaying with a sleepy chant. The teacher's only function was represented by his huge cane, which he plied often and skilfully. Outside the door was a barber shaving a pilgrim's head. The pilgrim was a Muslim, going on the Haj to Mecca. These pilgrims are looked on with mingled feelings; their piety is admired, but also distrusted. A local saying is, "If thy neighbor has been on the Haj, beware of him; if he has been twice, have no dealings with him; if he has been thrice, move into another street." After the pilgrim, I passed a number of blind weavers, working before large wooden frames.

But now for the Jewish quarter. This is entered by a low wooden door, at which we had to knock and then stoop to get in. The Jews are no longer forced to have this door, but they retain it voluntarily. Having got in, we were in a street so dark that we could not see a foot before us, but we kept moving, and soon came to a slightly better place, where the sun crept through in fitful gleams. The oldest synagogue was entered first. Its flooring was of marble squares, its roof vaulted, and its Ark looked north towards Jerusalem. There were, as so often in the East, two Arks; when one is too small, they do not enlarge it, but build another. The Sefardic Talmud Torah is a small room without window or ventilation, the only light and air enter by the door. The children were huddled together on an elevated wooden platform. They could read Hebrew fluently, and most of them spoke Arabic. The German children speak Yiddish; the custom of using Hebrew as a living language has not spread here so much as in Jaffa and the colonies. The Beth ha-Midrash for older children was a little better equipped; it had a stone floor, but the pupils reclined on couches round the walls. They learn very little of what we should call secular subjects. I examined the store of manuscripts, but Professor Schechter had been before me, and there was nothing left but modern Cabbalistic literature. The other synagogue is small, and very bare of ornament. The Rabbi was seated there, "learning," with great Tefillin and Tallith on—a fine, simple, benevolent soul. To my surprise he spoke English, and turned out to be none other than Rachmim Joseph Franco, who, as long ago as 1851, when the earthquake devastated the Jewish quarter, had been sent from Rhodes to collect relief funds. He was very ailing, and I could not have a long conversation with him, but he told me that he had known my father, who was then a boy, in London. Then I entered a typical Jewish dwelling of the poor. It consisted of a single room, opening on to the dark street, and had a tiny barred window at the other side. On the left was a broad bed, on the right a rude cooking stove and a big water pitcher. There was nothing else in the room, except a deep stagnant mud pool, which filled the centre of the floor.

Next door they were baking Matzoth in an oven fed by a wood fire. It was a few days before Passover. The Matzoth were coarse, and had none of the little holes with which we are familiar. So through streets within streets, dirt within dirt, room over room, in hopeless intricacy. Then we were brought to a standstill, a man was coming down the street with a bundle of wood, and we had to wait till he had gone by, the streets being too narrow for two persons to pass each other. Another street was impassable for a different reason, there was quite a river of flowing mud, knee deep. I asked for a boat, but a man standing by hoisted me on his shoulders, and carried me across, himself wading through it with the same unconcern as the boys and girls were wallowing in it, playing and amusing themselves. How alike children are all the world over!

And yet, with it all, Hebron is a healthy place. There is little of the intermittent fever prevalent in other parts of Palestine; illness is common, but not in a bad form. Jerusalem is far more unhealthy, because of the lack of water. But the Jews of Hebron are miserably poor. How they live is a mystery. They are not allowed to own land, even if they could acquire it. There was once a little business to be done in lending money to the Arabs, but as the Government refuses to help in the collection of debts, this trade is not flourishing, and a good thing, too. There are, of course, some industries. First there is the wine. I saw nothing of the vintage, as my visit was in the spring, but I tasted the product and found it good. The Arab vine-owners sell the grapes to Jews, who extract the juice. Still there is room for enterprise here, and it is regrettable that few seem to think of Hebron when planning the regeneration of Judea. True, I should regret the loss of primitiveness here, as I said at the outset, but when the lives of men are concerned, esthetics must go to the wall. The Jewish quarter was enlarged in 1875, but it is still inadequate. The Society Lemaan Zion has done a little to introduce modern education, but neither the Alliance nor the Anglo-Jewish Association has a school here. Lack of means prevents the necessary efforts from being made. Most deplorable is the fact connected with the hospital. In a beautiful sunlit road above the mosque, amid olive groves, is the Jewish hospital, ready for use, well-built, but though the very beds were there when T saw it, no patients could be received, as there were no funds. The Jewish doctor was doing a wonderful work. He had exiled himself from civilized life, as we Westerns understand it; his children had no school to which to go; he felt himself stagnating, without intellectual intercourse with his equals, yet active, kindly, uncomplaining—one of those everyday martyrs whom one meets so often among the Jews of Judea, men who day by day see their ambitions vanishing under the weight of a crushing duty. It was sad to see how he lingered over the farewell when I left him. I said that his house had seemed an oasis in the desert to me, that I could never forget the time spent with him. "And what of me?" he answered. "Your visit has been an oasis in the desert to me, but you go and the desert remains." Surely, the saddest thing in life is this feeling that one's own uninteresting, commonplace self should mean so much to others. I call it sad, because so few of us realize what we may mean to others, being so absorbed in our selfish thought of what others mean to us.

There are two industries in Hebron besides the vintage. It supplies most of the skin-bottles used in Judea, and a good deal of glassware, including lamps, is manufactured there. The Hebron tannery is a picturesque place, but no Jews are employed in it. Each bottle is made from an entire goat-skin, from which only the head and feet are removed. The lower extremities are sewn up, and the neck is drawn together to form the neck of the water bottle. Some trade is also done here in wool, which the Arabs bring in and sell at the market held every Friday. In ancient times the sheep used in the Temple sacrifices were obtained from Hebron. Besides the tannery, the glass factories are worth a visit. The one which I saw was in a cavern, lit only by the glow of the central furnace. Seated round the hearth (I am following Gautier's faithful description of the scene) and served by two or three boys, were about ten workmen, making many-colored bracelets and glass rings, which varied in size from small finger rings to circlets through which you could easily put your arm. The workmen are provided with two metal rods and a pair of small tongs, and they ply these primitive instruments with wonderful dexterity. They work very hard, at least fifteen hours a day, for five days a week.

This is one of the curiosities of the East. Either the men there are loafers, or they work with extraordinary vigor. There is nothing between doing too much and doing nothing. The same thing strikes one at Jaffa. The porters who carry your baggage from the landing stage to the steamer do more work than three English dock laborers. They carry terrific weights. When a family moves, a porter carries all the furniture on his back. Yet side by side with these overworked men, Jaffa is crowded with idlers, who do absolutely nothing. Such are the contrasts of the surprising Orient.

Many of the beads and rosaries taken to Europe by pious pilgrims are made in Hebron, just as the mother of pearl relics come chiefly from Bethlehem, where are made also the tobacco-jars of Dead Sea stone. Hebron does a fair trade with the Bedouins, but on the whole it is quite unprogressive. At first sight this may seem rather an unpleasant fact for lovers of peace. Hebron has for many centuries been absolutely free from the ravages of war, yet it stagnates. Peace is clearly not enough for progress. As the Rabbinical phrase well puts it, "Peace is the vessel which holds all other good"—without peace this other good is spilt, but peace is after all the containing vessel, not the content of happiness.

I have left out, in the preceding narrative, the visit paid to the Haram erected over the Cave of Machpelah. The mosque is an imposing structure, and rises above the houses on the hill to the left as you enter from Jerusalem. The walls of the enclosure and of the mosque are from time to time whitewashed, so that the general appearance is somewhat dazzling. It has already been mentioned that certain repairs were effected in 1894-5. The work was done by the lads of the Technical School in Jerusalem; they made an iron gate for Joseph's tomb,—the Moslems believe that Joseph is buried in Hebron,—and they made one gate for Abraham's tomb, one gate and three window gratings for Isaac's tomb, and one gate and two window gratings for Rebekah's tomb. This iron work, it is satisfactory to remember, was rendered possible by the splendid machinery sent out to the school from London by the Anglo-Jewish Association. The ordinary Jewish visitor is not allowed to enter the enclosure at all. I was stopped at the steps, where the custodian audaciously demanded a tip for not letting me in. The tombs within are not the real tombs of the Patriarchs; they are merely late erections over the spots where the Patriarchs lie buried.

No one has ever doubted that Machpelah is actually at this site, but the building is, of course, not Patriarchal in age. The enclosure is as old as the Wailing Wall at Jerusalem. It belongs to the age of Herod; we see the same cyclopean stones, with the same surface draftings as at Jerusalem. Why Herod built this edifice seems clear. Hebron was the centre of Idumean influence, and Herod was an Idumean. He had a family interest in the place, and hence sought to beautify it. No Jew or Christian can enter the enclosure except by special iradé; even Sir Moses Montefiore was refused the privilege. Rather, one should say, the Moslem authorities wished to let Sir Moses in, but they were prevented by the mob from carrying out their amiable intentions. The late English King Edward VII and the present King George V were privileged to enter the structure. Mr. Elkan Adler got in at the time when the Alliance workmen were repairing the gates, but there is nothing to see of any interest. No one within historical times has penetrated below the mosque, to the cavern itself. We still do not know whether it is called Machpelah because the Cave is double vertically or double horizontally.

The outside is much more interesting than the inside. Half way up the steps leading into the mosque, there is a small hole or window at which many Jews pray, and into which, it is said, all sorts of things, including letters to the Patriarchs, are thrown, especially by women. In the Middle Ages, they spread at this hole a tender calf, some venison pasties, and some red pottage, every day, in honor of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the food was eaten by the poor. It is commonly reported, though I failed to obtain any local confirmation of the assertion, that the Jews still write their names and their requests on strips of paper and thrust them into this hole. The Moslems let down a lamp through the hole, and also cast money into it, which is afterwards picked up by little boys as it is required for the purposes of the mosque and for repairing the numerous tombs of prophets and saints with which Hebron abounds. If you were to believe the local traditions, no corpses were left for other cemeteries. The truth is that much obscurity exists as to the identity even of modern tombs, for Hebron preserves its old custom, and none of the Jewish tombs to this day bear epitaphs. What a mass of posthumous hypocrisy would the world be spared if the Hebron custom were prevalent everywhere! But it is obvious that the method lends itself to inventiveness, and as the tombs are unnamed, local guides tell you anything they choose about them, and you do not believe them even when they are speaking the truth.

There is only one other fact to tell about the Cave. The Moslems have a curious dread of Isaac and Rebekah, they regard the other Patriarchs as kindly disposed, but Isaac is irritable, and Rebekah malicious. It is told of Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt, he who "feared neither man nor devil," that when he was let down into the Cave by a rope, he surprised Rebekah in the act of combing her hair. She resented the intrusion, and gave him so severe a box on the ears that he fell down in a fit, and could be rescued alive only with much difficulty. It is with equal difficulty that one can depart, with any reverence left, from the mass of legend and childishness with which one is crushed in such places. One escapes with the thought of the real Abraham, his glorious service to humanity, his lifelong devotion to the making of souls, to the spread of the knowledge of God. One recalls the Abraham who, in the Jewish tradition, is the type of unselfishness, of watchfulness on behalf of his descendants, the marks of whose genuine relationship to the Patriarch are a generous eye and a humble spirit. As one turns from Hebron, full of such happy memories, one forms the resolve not to rely solely on an appeal to the Patriarch's merits, but to strive to do something oneself for the Jewish cause, and thus fulfil the poet's lines,

 
Thus shalt thou plant a garden round the tomb,
Where golden hopes may flower, and fruits immortal bloom.
 

THE SOLACE OF BOOKS

In the year 1190, Judah ibn Tibbon, a famous Provençal Jew, who had migrated to Southern France from Granada, wrote in Hebrew as follows to his son:

"Avoid bad society: make thy books thy companions. Let thy bookcases and shelves be thy gardens and pleasure grounds. Pluck the fruit that grows therein; gather the roses, the spices, and the myrrh. If thy soul be satiate and weary, change from garden to garden, from furrow to furrow, from scene to scene. Then shall thy desire renew itself, and thy soul be rich with manifold delight."

In this beautiful comparison of a library to a garden, there is one point missing. The perfection of enjoyment is reached when the library, or at least a portable part of it, is actually carried into the garden. When Lightfoot was residing at Ashley (Staffordshire), he followed this course, as we know from a letter of his biographer. "There he built himself a small house in the midst of a garden, containing two rooms below, viz. a study and a withdrawing room, and a lodging chamber above; and there he studied hard, and laid the foundations of his Rabbinic learning, and took great delight, lodging there often, though [quaintly adds John Stype] he was then a married man." Montaigne, whose great-grandfather, be it recalled, was a Spanish Jew, did not possess a library built in the open air, but he had the next best thing. He used the top story of a tower, whence, says he, "I behold under me my garden."

In ancient Athens, philosophers thought out their grandest ideas walking up and down their groves. Nature sobers us. "When I behold Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained; what is man that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that Thou visitest him?" But if nature sobers, she also consoles. As the Psalmist continues: "Thou hast made him but little lower than the angels, and crownest him with glory and honor. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet." Face to face with nature, man realizes that he is greater than she. "On earth there is nothing great but man, in man there is nothing great but mind." So, no doubt, the Athenian sages gained courage as well as modesty from the contact of mind with nature. And not they only, for our own Jewish treasure, the Mishnah, grew up, if not literally, at least metaphorically, in the open air, in the vineyard of Jamnia. Standing in the sordid little village which to-day occupies the site of ancient Jamnia, with the sea close at hand and the plain of Sharon and the Judean lowlands at my feet, I could see Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakkai and his comrades pacing to and fro, pondering those great thoughts which live among us now, though the authors of them have been in their graves for eighteen centuries.

It is curious how often this habit of movement goes with thinking. Montaigne says: "Every place of retirement requires a Walk. My thoughts sleep if I sit still; my Fancy does not go by itself, as it goes when my Legs move it." What Montaigne seems to mean is that we love rhythm. Body and mind must move together in harmony. So it is with the Mohammedan over the Koran, and the Rabbi over the Talmud. Jews sway at prayer for the same reason. Movement of the body is not a mere mannerism; it is part of the emotion, like the instrumental accompaniment to a song. The child cons his lesson moving; we foolishly call it "fidgeting." The child is never receptive unless also active. But there is another of Montaigne's feelings, with which I have no sympathy. He loved to think when on the move, but his walk must be solitary. "'Tis here," he says of his library, "I am in my kingdom, and I endeavor to make myself an absolute monarch. So I sequester this one corner from all society—conjugal, filial, civil." This is a detestable habit. It is the acme of selfishness, to shut yourself up with your books. To write over your study door "Let no one enter here!" is to proclaim your work divorced from life. Montaigne gloried in the inaccessibility of his asylum. His house was perched upon an "overpeering hillock," so that in any part of it—still more in the round room of the tower—he could "the better seclude myself from company, and keep encroachers from me." Yet some may work best when there are others beside them. From the book the reader turns to the child that prattles near, and realizes how much more the child can ask than the book can answer. The presence of the young living soul corrects the vanity of the dead old pedant. Books are most solacing when the limitations of bookish wisdom are perceived. "Literature," said Matthew Arnold, "is a criticism of life." This is true, despite the objections of Saintsbury, but I venture to add that "life is a criticism of literature."

Now, I am not going to convert a paper on the Solace of Books into a paper in dispraise of books. I shall not be so untrue to my theme. But I give fair warning that I shall make no attempt to scale the height or sound the depth of the intellectual phases of this great subject. I invite my reader only to dally desultorily on the gentler slopes of sentiment.

One of the most comforting qualities of books has been well expressed by Richard of Bury in his famous Philobiblon, written in 1344. This is an exquisite little volume on the Love of Books, which Mr. Israel Gollancz has now edited in an exquisite edition, attainable for the sum of one shilling. "How safely," says Richard, "we lay bare the poverty of human ignorance to books, without feeling any shame."

Then he goes on to describe books as those silent teachers who "instruct us without rods or stripes; without taunts or anger; without gifts or money; who are not asleep when we approach them, and do not deny us when we question them; who do not chide us when we err, or laugh at us if we are ignorant."

It is Richard of Bury's last phrase that I find so solacing. No one is ever ashamed of turning to a book, but many hesitate to admit their ignorance to an interlocutor. Your dictionary, your encyclopedia, and your other books, are the recipients of many a silent confession of nescience which you would never dream of making auricular. You go to these "golden pots in which manna is stored," and extract food exactly to your passing taste, without needing to admit, as Esau did to Jacob, that you are hungry unto death. This comparison of books to food is of itself solacing, for there is always something attractive in metaphors drawn from the delights of the table. The metaphor is very old.

"Open thy mouth," said the Lord to Ezekiel, "and eat that which I give thee. And when I looked, a hand was put forth unto me, and, lo, a scroll of a book was therein…. Then I did eat it, and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness."

What a quaint use does Richard of Bury make of this very passage! Addressing the clergy, he says "Eat the book with Ezekiel, that the belly of your memory may be sweetened within, and thus, as with the panther refreshed, to whose breath all beasts and cattle long to approach, the sweet savor of the spices it has eaten may shed a perfume without."

Willing enough would I be to devote the whole of my paper to Richard of Bury. I must, however, content myself with one other noble extract, which, I hope, will whet my reader's appetite for more: "Moses, the gentlest of men, teaches us to make bookcases most neatly, wherein they [books] may be protected from any injury. Take, he says, this book of the Law and put it in the side of the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord your God. O fitting place and appropriate for a library, which was made of imperishable shittim [i.e. acacia] wood, and was covered within and without with gold."

Still we must not push this idea of costly bookcases too far. Judah the Pious wrote in the twelfth century, "Books were made for use, not to be hidden away." This reminds me that Richard of Bury is not the only medieval book-lover with whom we might spend a pleasant evening. Judah ben Samuel Sir Leon, surnamed the Pious, whom I have just quoted, wrote the "Book of the Pious" in Hebrew, in 1190, and it has many excellent paragraphs about books. Judah's subject is, however, the care of books rather than the solace derivable from them. Still, he comes into my theme, for few people can have enjoyed books more than he. He had no selfish love for them: he not only possessed books, he lent them. He was a very prince of book-lenders, for he did not object if the borrowers of his books re-lent them in their turn. So, on dying, he advised his sons to lend his books even to an enemy (par. 876). "If a father dies," he says elsewhere (par. 919), "and leaves a dog and a book to his sons, one shall not say to the other, You take the dog, and I'll take the book," as though the two were comparable in value. Poor, primitive Judah the Pious! We wiser moderns should never dream of making the comparison between a dog and a book, but for the opposite reason. Judah shrank from equalling a book to a dog, but we know better than to undervalue a dog so far as to compare it with a book. The kennel costs more than the bookcase, and love of dogs is a higher solace than love of books. To those who think thus, what more convincing condemnation of books could be formulated than the phrase coined by Gilbert de Porre in praise of his library, "It is a garden of immortal fruits, without dog or dragon."

I meant to part with Richard of Bury, but I must ask permission to revert to him. Some of the delight he felt in books arose from his preference of reading to oral intercourse. "The truth in speech perishes with the sound: it is patent to the ear only and eludes the sight: begins and perishes as it were in a breath." Personally I share this view, and I believe firmly that the written word brings more pleasure than the spoken word.

Plato held the opposite view. He would have agreed with the advice given by Chesterfield to his son, "Lay aside the best book when you can go into the best company—depend upon it you change for the better." Plato did, indeed, characterize books as "immortal sons deifying their sires." But, on the opposite side, he has that memorable passage, part of which I now quote, from the same source that has supplied several others of my quotations, Mr. Alexander Ireland's "Book-Lover's Enchiridion." "Writing," says Plato, "has this terrible disadvantage, which puts it on the same footing with painting. The artist's productions stand before you, as if they were alive: but if you ask them anything, they keep a solemn silence. Just so with written discourse: you would fancy it full of the thoughts it speaks: but if you ask it something that you want to know about what is said, it looks at you always with the same one sign. And, once committed to writing, discourse is tossed about everywhere indiscriminately, among those who understand and those to whom it is naught, and who cannot select the fit from the unfit." Plato further complains, adds Mr. Martineau, that "Theuth, the inventor of letters, had ruined men's memories and living command of their knowledge, by inducing a lazy trust in records ready to their hand: and he limits the benefit of the litera scripta to the compensation it provides for the failing memory of old age, when reading naturally becomes the great solace of life…. Plato's tone is invariably depreciatory of everything committed to writing, with the exception of laws."

This was also the early Rabbinical view, for while the Law might, nay, must, be written, the rest of the tradition was to be orally confided. The oral book was the specialty of the Rabbinical schools. We moderns, who are to the ancients, in Rabbinic phrase, as asses to angels in intellect, cannot rely upon oral teaching—our memory is too weak to bear the strain. Even when a student attends an oral lecture, he proves my point, because he takes notes.

The ideal lies, as usual, in a compromise. Reading profits most when, beside the book, you have some one with whom to talk about the book. If that some one be the author of the book, good; if it be your teacher, better; if it be a fellow-student, better still; if it be members of your family circle, best of all. The teacher has only succeeded when he feels that his students can do without him, can use their books by themselves and for themselves. But personal intercourse in studies between equals is never obsolete. "Provide thyself with a fellow-student," said the Rabbi. Friendship made over a book is fast, enduring; this friendship is the great solace. How much we Jews have lost in modern times in having given up the old habit of reading good books together in the family circle! Religious literature thus had a halo of home about it, and the halo never faded throughout life. From the pages of the book in after years the father's loving voice still spoke to his child. But when it comes to the author, I have doubts whether it be at all good to have him near you when you read his book. You may take an unfair advantage of him, and reject his book, because you find the writer personally antipathetic. Or he may take an unfair advantage of you, and control you by his personal fascination. You remember the critic of Demosthenes, who remarked to him of a certain oration, "When I first read your speech, I was convinced, just as the Athenians were; but when I read it again, I saw through its fallacies." "Yes," rejoined Demosthenes, "but the Athenians heard it only once." A book you read more than once: for you possess only what you understand. I do not doubt that the best readers are those who move least in literary circles, who are unprejudiced one way or the other by their personal likes or dislikes of literary men. How detestable are personal paragraphs about authors—often, alas! autobiographical titbits. We expect a little more reticence: we expect the author to say what he has to say in his book, and not in his talks about his book and himself. We expect him to express himself and suppress himself. "Respect the books," says Judah the Pious, "or you show disrespect to the writer." No, not to the writer, but to the soul whose progeny the book is, to the living intellect that bred it, in Milton's noble phrase, to "an Immortality rather than a life." "Many a man," he says, "lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life."