The Arkansaw traveler., 1888-09-22
BOOKS AND SOCIETY.
BY JULIAN HAWTHORNE.


 teristic of secluded persons; and pie lures are drawn of lonely scholars seated in dim libraries, amidst piled up and serried volumes. Poets and moral essayists bid the world weary voluptuary have recourse to books for consolation, assuring him that he will find in them ali the good that he has missed out of his own lite. And cer- tainly, when one reflects upon all that literature contains of pleasure, in struction, and stimulus, 1t seems well adapted to compensate one for the re- buffs or disappointmentso of the world, if not to act as & substitute for the world altogether.
 Ii such be the case, we should ex- pect to see the multitude of books coincide with the decrease ot human gregariousness. The moro books l read, the less shall be solicitous for the society of my fellow beings. Not that literature will make me misan- thropic; but l shall confine my ac- quaintance to the compsnionship of my immediate friends, and let the great weltering chaos of people whom l merely know go by. Consequent upon this would be the gradual growth of 6 tendency to eschew cities and large centers of human activity, and to return more and more to some- thing resembling the old patriarchal forms of life. Men would pass their existence in or near the place where they were born; families would not be scattered foreign countries would again become foreign; railroads and telegraphs and all the endless striving and jealous competition that they inn ply would cease to be in vogue. The men of the world will be the men of libraries.
 It need not be pointed out that this is the case the case is the very oppo- site of this. There were never so many books in the world as there are now, and never were mankind so gregarious. In fact, now thing of privacy is almost unknown, and hardly conceiva- ble; people live under one another's noses, and looking down one another's threats. The newspapers tell all that is, and are accused of telling even more, sometimes. The windows of our bed rooms are at the mercy of passengers in the elevated trains. If distin- guished man is i'll, we pass our days and nights at his bedside, and watch the operations of his physician and surgeon; if there happens war at the ends of the earth, it is fought at our own hearthstone, and the map of the seat of the conflict is drawn on our dining table. The obscurest murderer or swindler is our familiar companion, and we discuss the domestic affairs of European sovereigns as confidently as those of our next-door neighbor.
 Whether this will be well or i'll is not now the question; at any rate, it is so, and not only have books not pre- vented or abated it, there is reason to suspect that they are, in a measure, responsible for 1t. They stimulate in- stead of decreasing our mutual asso- ciation with one another. The more we read, the more time and inclination do we find for herding together.
 A certain eminent writer once said that his books were not Gas was com- monly supposed) the talk of solitary man with himself; but his attempts to open an intercourse with the world. What was true of him Is true of the majority of his profession; they talk, not to themselves, but to the public {; and if what they say has any effect at all, it is to make the public talk back The public, of course, cannot address its conversation directly to the author but what he says suggests things to say to one another, and so the ball ia kept rolling. The books that are most widely read are novels; and after them comes works of travel and ad- venture, histories, biographies and au- tcbiographies, and pictures of current manners and customs. Popular poetry treats of love, effort and disappoint- ment; while moral and philosophical essays, and religious treaties --u nless concerning some new sensational re- ligion-are found, if any where, on the shelves of the bookseller. In short, the books that circulate are books that treat of human relations and activi- ties; they keep us in mind thereof, and therefore they serve to augment and forward them. They maintain the heat of discussions, the sharpness of rivalries, the rumor of success; they spur us when we flag, invite us when we finger, and assure us when we doubt: we return from realities to them, and they drive us back with fresh impulse to realities. For the books that would keep us at home we have no taste nor leisure.
 Thus our actual literature contra diets the supposed tendency of litera- ture in the abstract, and what was thought to be the solace Of our quiet becomes the stimulus of our action. Is this the true end of books, or only a femnnrarY and accidental nI.e2 Per.