# St. Nicholas/Volume 40/Number 4/Books and Reading

BOOKS AND READING
BY HILDEGARDE HAWTHORNE
A NEW IDEA
I have been telling you for a long while now about such books as I believe to be entirely worth your while, books that, if you missed them out of your experience, would mean a real loss, such as the missing of a fine friendship or a noble adventure would bring to you. I have gone hither and thither for these books, following no special plan, but turning to one author or another, or to different periods of time, as the fancy took me. And I have had to leave out many great books because you were not yet old enough completely to understand and enjoy them. But though there are many I have not spoken of, I think I have at least given you a hint of the various types, and mentioned most of the authors it will be good for you to be familiar with while you are still boys and girls, and which will teach you to find the rest for yourselves in good time; helping you to such a love of literature that even, when the crowded life of grown-upness comes along, you will still want to read the great books.
Now, however, I want to propose a certain course of reading, a definite plan, and to take up each month two or three books in sequence; books of a historical nature, but each one a story in itself—and a good story.
You have real history in your school hours— English, European, American. It does not always read like a story, and often you find it rather dull work; yet it is the tale of man’s existence, of his struggles from century to century, his advances and retreats, his immense adventures, his wonderful travels and discoveries—the most thrilling story there is!
The trouble with straight history is that it insists on dates and names; it has so much to tell that it is often forced to give no more than the dry fact, leaving out all the story part, all the heart interest, the personal feeling. The battles and cities get in the way of the people. It is about like reading in the papers of the war in Turkey, instead of mixing with that war yourselves, or having an older brother who is a war-correspondent, or a missionary, come home and tell you the odd stories and exciting adventures he had met or heard or seen right on the ground—stories that never got into his reports. Sitting there and listening to him, you would get the thrill of the human side of it all, the little, but moving, personal adventures that are lost in the great impersonal adventure. History is the story of the impersonal adventure of this world; romance and fiction of the personal one.
This is what the books I mean to tell you about will give; just this same “I ’ve been there and it happened to me” side of it which is so exciting. They will put you into close touch with the boys and girls, their parents, the homes they lived in, and the things they hoped for and tried after. If you read these books so that they run parallel with the period of the world’s life that you are learning about in your school histories, you will get nearer to it, almost become one of the people whose cities and battles you are studying about. The whole period will seem real to you, for you will have friends and foes among the population. Your interest will not be confined to kings and captains and elderly folk, but will spread to the daily life of the kind of people you would most likely have known if you had actually been alive at that time, even to boys and girls of your own age.
Of course these books were not written—or not often—by actual participants in the incidents they relate. Once in a while, a real romance comes down through the ages picturing the story of the day rather than its facts; but these are rare. Nevertheless, by turning over many old documents and letters and fragmentary anecdotes, by steeping himself in his period, an author gets almost to believe that he is bodily, instead of simply mentally, in the thick of what he is writing; and if he is good, he makes us feel the same way.
After all, men and women have an amazing habit of being a lot like each other even though separated by some hundreds of years. The circumstances amid which they exist are very different, to be sure; manners were rougher, men more apt to give their will a free rein, ideas were crushed or unborn in those old times, ways of building, eating, and working were different. ​But people felt much the same, loved and hated, laughed and sorrowed, as they do nowadays. There was the same struggle for daily bread among the poor, and the rich lived as sumptuously as they knew how; people traveled, hunted, played, and studied then as now. So they can be re-created for us, in the midst of their so different surroundings and problems, because we are all human and related.
It is somewhat difficult to choose among all the many periods of history that have been turned into story by the writers. Ancient Greek, and Roman, and Persian, and Biblical times have produced their share of fiction, as have the shifting scenes in Italy and the tumultuous centuries in France.
But, tempting as these certainly are, I am going to leave them, for the present at least, and devote my attention to England and America, beginning with the Norman Conquest in 1066. This marked the birth of the complex English race, and therefore of our own. And it seems to me that it will be extremely interesting to begin with some stories of those far-away wild days when Norseman and Saxon and Norman fought their battles and struggled upward into a united race, and then to go on gradually through the centuries, taking up one interesting book after another, stories of the old times of chivalry, of the feudal state, of the “spacious times of great Elizabeth,” on to Cromwell and the Cavaliers and the Pretender, following the thread of fiction till it leads us to our own land, among the settlers of its East and West, and so on down to our own day.
Sometimes there will be a number of delightful books having to do with an especially vital time in history, and sometimes, of course, it will be hard to find more than one; but, oddly enough, the entire great lapse of time is practically covered by the story-writers old and new. There is no long gap.
The reading of such a line of books ought to be a help to you in your study of history. Often you will be able to discover mistakes the story-writers have made—but that will only make it more interesting. You will become a critic of the story from the historical standpoint, at the same time that your study of authenticated fact is made alive and vivid to you by the imagination of the romance. And you will surely be delighted to discover that history is no such dry affair as it occasionally appears to be in your school-books. Fun and frolic, intrigue, danger, courage, and excitement have crowded all the centuries, and your story-writer has found these entertaining things where the historian has missed them.
These books must necessarily be for the older among you, boys and girls in your ’teens, who like a good story, certainly, but who are beginning to be interested in the truth about this world and its people, and who do not mind helping out your school work with your home fun. Keeping your mind alert and keen is a more important thing than cramming it with facts. And I believe that you will find the list of books I shall talk about will do just that for the history part of your minds. The facts, too, will stick all the better for such a story background. If your hero does a noble thing at some particular siege, or barely escapes with his life from the beleagured town, or goes-on a perilous mission between two opposing armies, you will be far more apt to remember what the history says of that same siege, or town, or those armies, than if you did not have a warm, personal interest in these matters, an interest your fiction friend has aroused in you.
So it seems to me your teachers might be interested in such a course of reading, and would like to know just the books you have found to go with your study. Perhaps they will at times suggest others to you; perhaps they will enjoy reading yours.
Possibly, too, and I should like that very much, you yourselves will have stories to suggest to me. If you knew of some fine, exciting book on a particular period in English or American history, no matter how little known the period might be, why could n’t you send me the title, so that all the readers of St. NicHotas could enjoy it with you?
It is impossible for me, with the best will in the world, to know all such books, and I might miss something excellent—which would be too bad! So speak right up, if you have any suggestion you care to make, and I will be most thankful, and glad to tell my readers from whom the title has come.
It may take most of the year to tell about the various books I have in mind, and which will follow each other month by month according to their date in history. Then, if the idea works out nicely, we may take up this story side of the world’s life in other countries.
You will find there is no country or people you can turn to whose history does not give the most superb opportunities to the writers of adventure and romance—opportunities that have been taken advantage of time and time again, if we only knew it, and that are still being made use of by writers to-day. I shall not confine myself to the older authors, but will tell you about the newest one as well, if his story is a good one.
Many of you will have passed the point in history to which the earlier among these books are related, but it will be almost as interesting to ​read them in the light of what you already know or can remember; and, since the study of the facts of history is a much slower process than reading the romance of it, you will soon find me catching up with wherever you are. I shall have to move as fast as a hundred years at a jump occasionally, you know, for a hundred years is n’t very long in the story of such an old-timer as this world.
Next month, then, I will begin with a book or two that tells a story of the time of William the Conqueror. Possibly William himself will appear; possibly not. That you ’ll find out when we take up the books. For all these historical tales will by no means interest themselves in the great figures belonging to their period; it is the time itself they will represent and illumine. Kings and such are not always important in the story side of the world’s life. A king must manage to make himself interesting as a man before he gets into our story world. Just wearing a crown and issuing proclamations won’t help him. Perhaps it will be only the adventures of a little child or the life of two young lovers that we shall choose to tell the story of an entire reign. That ’s as it may be; the great point will be that the books are interesting to read, and as true to the life of their times as can be managed.
The three books of which I shall tell you next month are Miss Yonge’s “The Little Duke,” Bulwer Lytton’s “Harold,” and Charles Kingsley’s “Hereward the Wake.” I will tell something of their story and just what part of the Norman times they are set in—enough to stir your interest.
And so here ’s hoping you will like my idea, and that, if any part of our long story runs thin, an author may be found to step into the breach and give us a rousing tale to bridge the gap.