see it is to impose penalty or bestow reward. Browning1 implies that indifference is possible-for a Setebos or a Caliban! Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs And if we judge, are we but stupid moralistic hypocrites, unfit to tie the shoes of art? Every created being, we are told, is to be thought of only as more or less successful in getting what it wants, in adapting available means to instinctive ends. And to pass moral judgment upon the means and ends of any man, most of all an artist, is to the emancipated to stultify oneself as bourgeois, or professorial, or Americanor all three. To which the one who is happy in blindness and chains replies once more with the terms of Matthew Arnold. "How to live" is a moral question, and everything that affects us with pleasantness or unpleasantness, everything we feel about as ugly or beautiful, everything that induces either sensual or spiritual enjoyment, that moves us to an exertion or a suspension of will to get or be, contributes to determine our solution of the problem of living. Art does immensely affect us in these ways, and we shall naturally go on recognizing our reactions to it as life-enlarging or life-diminishing and instinctively, but also with good reason, rating particular pieces of art as good or bad on the score of their general human influence. Yet the supporters, like the opponents, of Arnold make too little of the fact that he was a poet as well as an ethical critic. When we argue about his insistence upon greatness of substance in poetry, we need to recall the accompanying insistence upon a due perfection of form. It is his sense of inevitable form in the "touchstones" that makes him refuse to offer any abstract paraphrase to serve as divining rod for poetic greatness. He explicitly "I refer to Robert Browning, an early Victorian verse-writer still studied in some universities, mainly to form the style of prospective Ph. D's. The high rating of Browning by the Ten Judges-his average is 5.5, while that of the thoroughly up-to-date Mr. Theodore Dreiser, for example, is only 8.2 is but too likely to cause a recrudescence of his vogue. It is regrettable that the Judges could not in every case weigh the probable consequences of their genial tolerance. recognizes that in art as in life it is substance that produces and determines form-its humanly apprehensible aspect. Given high truth and high seriousness, or intense naive emotion which can ever so little contemplate itself, then the expression of these in concrete forms will achieve a blossomy grace, a rough-hewn earthiness, or a melodious poignancy, proportionate to the quality of the substance and the degree of its possession by the artist. What is tinkling and tinselled, or grovelling and toadlike, can have those qualities only because the incarnate thought and feeling were antecedently such. What rainbows through the mind, whether as misty intimation or full-circling conception, attains to selfconscious existence only with concrete embodiment, and it then proves to be something different than even its creator knew. The Balzacs are held to their anguished wrestling with form not by any childish craving to be hailed as stylists, but by an awed sense of grappling in the dusk with some demon-angel which, if but dragged across the dawn, may serve mankind in palpable divinity. We capture substance and know the nature of it only through and to the measure of an individual shape. Form is bulking, shining substance, as life is living things. Straybrook, Ann Arbor, December 25, 1922. H. S. M. BACKGROUNDS OF BOOK REVIEWING X THE BOOKS THAT I READ By THEODORE ROOSEVELT I am asked to tell when and how I do my reading, and what books I read. I am afraid my answer will not be so instructive as it ought to be, for I have never followed any definite plan in reading; and it seems to me that no plan can be laid down that will be generally applicable. If a man is not fond of books, to him reading of any kind will be a drudgery. I most sincerely commiserate such a person, but I do not know how to help him. If a man or a woman is fond of books he or she will naturally seek the books that the mind and soul demand. Suggestions of a possibly helpful character can be made by outsiders, but only suggestions; and they will probably be helpful about in proportion to the outsider's knowledge of the mind and soul of the person to be helped. Train the mental muscles Of course if anyone finds that he never reads serious literature, if all his reading is frothy and trashy, he would do well to try to train himself to like books that the general agreement of cultivated and sound-thinking persons has placed among the classics. It is as discreditable to the mind to be unfit for sustained mental effort as it is to the body of a young man to be unfit for sustained physical effort. Let a man or woman, young man or girl, read some good author, say Gibbon or Macaulay, until sustained mental effort brings power to enjoy the books worth enjoying. When this has been achieved the man can soon trust himself to pick out for himself the particular good books which appeal to him. Reprinted from the Ladies' Home Journal, April, 1915, by courtesy of the Editor and of Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt. Personal taste The equation of personal taste is as powerful in reading as in eating; and within certain broad limits the matter is merely one of individual preference, having nothing to do with the quality either of the book or of the reader's mind. I like apples, pears, oranges, pineapples and peaches. I dislike bananas, alligator pears and prunes. The first fact is certainly not to my credit, although it is to my advantage; and the second at least does not show moral turpitude. At times in the tropics I have been exceedingly sorry I could not learn to like bananas, and on round-ups, in the cow country in the old days, it was even more unfortunate not to like prunes; but I simply could not make myself like either, and that was all there was to it. In the same way I read over and over again “Guy Mannering," "The Antiquary," "Pendennis," "Vanity Fair," "Our Mutual Friend," and the "Pickwick Papers"; whereas I make heavy weather of most parts of the "Fortunes of Nigel,” “Esmond," and the "Old Curiosity Shop"-to mention only books I have tried to read during the last month. I have no question that the latter three books are as good as the first six; doubtless for some people they are better; but I do not like them, any more than I like prunes or bananas. In the same way I read and re-read "Macbeth" and "Othello"; but not "King Lear" nor "Hamlet." I know perfectly well that the latter are as wonderful as the former-I wouldn't venture to admit my shortcomings regarding them if I couldn't proudly express my appreciation of the other two! But at my age I might as well own up, at least to myself, to my limitations, and read the books I thoroughly enjoy. But this does not mean permitting one's self to like what Vicious or worthless books is vicious or even simply worthless. If any man finds that he cares to read "Bel Ami," he will do well to keep a watch on the reflex centers of his moral nature, and to brace himself with a course of Eugene Brieux or Henry Bordeaux. If he does not care for "Anna Karenina," "War and Peace," "Sebastopol," and "The Cossacks," he misses much; but if he cares for the "Kreutzer Sonata" he had better make up his mind that for pathological reasons he will be wise thereafter to avoid Tolstoy entirely. Tolstoy is an interesting and stimulating writer, but an exceedingly unsafe moral adviser. It is clear that the reading of vicious books for pleasure should be eliminated. It is no less clear that trivial and vulgar books do more damage than can possibly be offset by any entertainment they yield. There remain enormous masses of books, of which no man can read more than "Best books" a limited number, and among which each reader should choose those which meet his own particular needs. There is no such thing as a list of "the hundred best books," or the "best five-foot library." Dozens of series of excellent books, one hundred to each series, can be named, all of reasonably equal merit and each better for many readers than any of the others; and probably not more than half a dozen books would appear in all these lists. As for a "five-foot library," scores can readily be devised, each of which at some given time, for some given man, under certain conditions, will be best. But to attempt to create such a library that will be of universal value is foreordained to futility. Colonel Roosevelt's tastes Within broad limits, therefore, the reader's personal and individual taste must be the guiding factor. I like hunting books and books of exploration and adventure. I do not ask anyone else to like them. I distinctly do not hold my own preferences as anything whatever but individual preferences; and this article is to be accepted as confessional rather than didactic. With this understanding I admit a liking for novels where something happens; and even among these novels I can neither explain nor justify why I like some and do not like others; why among the novels of Sienkiewicz I cannot stand "Quo Vadis," and never tire of "With Fire and Sword," "Pan Michael," the "Deluge," and the "Knights of the Cross." Of course, I know that the best critics scorn the demand among novel readers for the "happy ending." Happy Now, in really great books, in an epic like Mil- ending ton's, in dramas like those of Aeschylus and Sophocles, I am |