I

ATELY I have had an entirely new experience. Every day, and several times a day, I have been bored. Hitherto, I had supposed, in all good faith, that no subject, if intelligently and enthusiastically presented, could fail to interest me. I had supposed, further, that boredom was a negative sort of thing -merely the absence of interest or pleasurable excitement. I find that I was in error in both suppositions. There are subjects which, as far as I am concerned, are inherently uninteresting; and boredom is as positive a sensation as toothache.

Recently I became acquainted with a strikingly attractive young woman. She is now in her late twenties, I judge; dark and quick and birdlike; touchingly friendly, and altogether charming, if-! If it were not for the hobby which she never for one moment abandons. Her sole interest in life, as far as one may discover, is the Subjunctive Mood. Out of all the subjects under heaven, in a marvelous and dangerous world! It is not feasible, and life is too limited, for the individual to take all the divisions of knowledge as his province; and in the great shuffle, English grammar was one of the things that I missed outright. As a very small child, my father, then

nearing seventy, taught me Greek, while my mother, well over fifty, compelled me to put my numerous questions to her in Latin. But no one mentioned English syntax. And when, finally, I did get around to going to school, I was so nearly grown up my examiners must have taken it for granted that the more elementary branches of study had been completed.

From time to time, throughout my life, I have heard a good deal of grammatical hair-splitting; but such discussions were always purely academic, and the only impression I carried away from them was that there are people in the world who like to hypnotize themselves into bewilderment over perfectly simple arrangements of words.

As an example, and illustrating my abysmal ignorance on the subject, a few days ago I heard two able grammarians agree (and such agreement in itself was a sort of miracle) that the sentence, "All of the persons who were gambling were arrested," had no meaning whatsoever. I was not involved in the discussion, and I offered no comment, but I set these two people down in my mind as a little mad. The meaning of this unpunctuated arrangement of words seemed to me unmistakable; namely,

T

O PICK up a book and settle down comfortably to its pages

may seem the most innocent act of man, yet it involves a responsibility almost too terrible to bear thinking about. I refer to the responsibility of choice. Last year there were published in the United States alone 7614 new volumes (I take the figures from the "Publisher's Weekly"), not including 1562 new editions and 1178 pamphlets. If one were to attempt to keep completely abreast merely of the current literature published in one's own country, one would have to read 146 new books a week, or twenty-one a day. If one were to throw out every volume that could possibly be called "technical," including every book on science, philosophy, religion, music, the fine arts, and were to confine one's self solely to general literature, poetry, the drama, history, biography and fiction, the task would still be staggering. There would be more than three thousand volumes to get through, or about sixty a week. And if, heaven forbid, one confined the

diet strictly to the year's new fiction, there would still be twenty-two books a week to read.

I have omitted, mercifully, the nine thousand new volumes published last year in Great Britain, the eleven thousand in France, the thirty thousand in Germany. What is vastly more important, I have passed over the millions of books already in existence. A glance at the list of titles in Everyman's Library or a similar series of popular reprints is enough to remind us that even the "classics" run into thousands.

Now even if we confine ourselves to books published during the current year, and are able to read as many as one a week (a high average for most of us) we are reading that one at the expense of about a hundred and fifty others. If, displaying a modicum of common sense, we do not confine our reading to volumes of the current year, we are reading each book at the expense of at least several thousand others.

As I say, the responsibility does not bear thinking about. The prob

When we consider the volumes of 1928 with this standard in mind, among the first we turn to, almost inevitably, is "Elizabeth and Essex." It is not, perhaps, a definitive picture either of Elizabeth or of Essex: it may be true, as some critics have charged, that Lytton Strachey, for the sake of a preconceived effect, has sometimes distorted his perspective, or made an inference not altogether justified by the facts; but I think his offenses in this direction have been slight. As his imitators have too often forgotten, Mr. Strachey is an indefatigable scholar, but even if "Elizabeth and Essex" were wholly false as biography or history, it would still stand as an imaginative work of the first rank, as a tragedy superbly told. Never before has Elizabeth been so brilliantly brought to life.

Not least of all, here is a work by one of the finest prose writers of our time. I choose a paragraph almost at random; certainly it could be matched by a score of others in the book:

"King Philip sat working in the Escurial-the gigantic palace that he had built for himself, all of stone, far away, high up, amid the desolation of the rocky Guadarrama. He worked incessantly, as no monarch

had ever worked before, controlling from his desk a vast empire-Spain and Portugal, half Italy, the Netherlands, the Western Indies. He had grown old and white-haired in his labors, but he worked on. Diseases had attacked him; he was tortured by the gout; his skin was cankered, he was the prey of a mysterious and terrible paralysis; but his hand moved over the paper from morning till night. He never emerged now. He had withdrawn into this inner room of his palace-a small room, hung with dark green tapestriesand there he reigned, secret, silent, indefatigable, dying."

Suppose it should turn out that this picture did not precisely accord with all the actual facts-that the tapestries were not dark green, but purple, or that they did not exist, or even that King Philip himself had been but a legend and a shadow? Do you really think it would matter?

The best biography I have encountered during the present yearindeed, perhaps the best biography ever written about an American man of letters-is Lewis Mumford's "Herman Melville." The career of Melville has seemed hitherto one of the great enigmas of our literary history. Here was a man who wrote his first book at twenty-five; who followed it rapidly by five others, completing the last and by far the greatest of them, "Moby-Dick," at thirty-two-and then lapsed into relative silence for the remaining forty years of his life. What brought about so strange and abrupt a quietus?

Mr. Mumford presents the reasons as clearly and convincingly as they are ever likely to be presented. The real mystery is not Melville's silence, but the appallingly stupid criticism with which "Moby-Dick" was received. For here, on one level, was the best handbook on whaling in existence; here, on a higher level, was the greatest tale of the sea that had ever been written; here, on a still higher level, was a parable on the mystery of evil and the accidental malice of the universe, "one of the first great mythologies to be created in the modern world," "the best tragic epic of modern times and one of the fine poetic works of all time." And how was this monumental work saluted? The "Literary World," in charge of Melville's friend Duyckinck, called it "an intellectual chowder of romance, philosophy, natural history, fine writing, good feeling, bad sayings"; the "Dublin University Magazine"found it eccentric and monstrously extravagant; the "Atheneum" spoke of "horrors," "heroics," "trash"; the "New Monthly Magazine" described the style as "maniacal gibbering, screaming."

...

And Melville knew, even as he wrote it, that "Moby-Dick" was and would remain his masterpiece; that it represented the full expression of his genius; that he could never exceed it. He immediately composed "Pierre," a tale on the incest theme, preposterous in many of its details; but what is important is that he put into his novelist-hero's mind his own bitter reflections. Pierre learns that "though the world worship mediocrity and commonplace, yet hath it fire and sword for contemporary grandeur"; that "the wiser and profounder he should grow, the more and more he lessened his chances for

Melville's long years of silence become clear: if the world did not care to hear him, he did not care to speak. But this silence, as Mr. Mumford shows, was not merely the result of personal despair: as his insights deepened, as he glimpsed the unfathomable mysteries of the universe, literature itself seemed hollow, silence the highest utterance. It is true, as Mr. Mumford points out, that the silence was never as complete as it has commonly been pictured. Yet the handful of volumes that came in the last forty years of Melville's life were separated sometimes by a decade; and they were of comparatively negligible importance. Melville was forced to become an inspector in the Custom House, one of the lowest offices open to patronage.

It is not merely that Melville's books were ignored, derided or completely "muffed" by the routine reviewers. What is more appalling, of all the leading writers of the dayEmerson, Thoreau, Lowell, Holmes, even Hawthorne, whom Melville knew and whose outlook was most nearly akin to his own-there is no evidence that one of them regarded Melville as an equal. Though Mr. Mumford is perhaps inclined to minimize unduly the defects in Melville's work which tended to prevent recognition of its essential