A Port Of Age

( Originally Published 1922 )

READER, when for you as for me the wild heyday of youth is past, and the heart of adventure all but pulseless, there is yet remaining to us a wonderful and untried realm of romance. When churlish Time shall think to retire us from the heat and zest of life, classing us, too prematurely, as "old boys," there is still a trick we may turn to his discomfiture. When the younkers club their foolish wits for a poor joke at our expense—what is so utterly inane to maturity as juvenile humor, green-cheese pleasantry, pithless, fledgeling conceits?—we who are wise know that the best of the game is still for us; nor would we change with the reckless spendthrifts who mock us from the vanity of twenty year.

It's ho for candles, a book and bed!

For candles, the modern equivalent, of course. I prefer a strong, well-shaded lamp to electric light or gas; the rockefeller burns with a steady flame, does not sputter, or dwindle, or go out entirely, leaving you in a sulphuric darkness. But the wick should be trimmed by the hand of her who loves you best in the world; by her, too, must the reading table be adjusted cosily at the head of the bed, so that the incidence of the gently burning flame may be just right—the more or less in these matters is of infinite significance; by her must the books and, above all, The Book, be disposed ready to the discriminating hand of the Sovereign Lector.

Oh !—and, of course, the pipes or cigars. No smokeless person hath any rights in this kingdom; he cometh falsely by his investiture; he is a Bezonian without choice; a marplot and spy—out with him! . . .

As to the time of going to bed, I would say eight o'clock, or half after eight; not earlier nor later, though the point need not be strained to a finical nicety. But one can not conveniently go to bed amid the daylight business of the house, nor before supper, nor too soon after it. I knew a man who perversely insisted upon going to bed at five o'clock; he never rose to the dignity of a true bed-reader, and that which is, properly used, the most delightful of indulgences, became in the end, to this person, a formidable dissipation. Like a bad mariner, he was constantly out of his reckoning and at last came to grief: the fact that he was a hater of the emollient weed no doubt aided the catastrophe.

But assuming that all the unities have been fulfilled, that the Book, the Reader and the Bed are in the most fortuitously fortunate con-junction, will you tell me that the world has a sweeter pleasure to bestow, a more profoundly satisfying, yet not enervating, luxury of indulgence?

Recall an instant that first delicious thrill of relaxed ease, of blissful security, of complete physical well-being--every nerve telegraphing its congratulations and your spinal column in-toning a grand sweet song of peace ! You are now between the snowy sheets, and the Elect Lady is looking tenderly to the pillows, etc., while you are tasting the most exquisite of sensations in the back of your calves. This is the veritable nunc dimittis moment of the experience; you are prepared, soothed and dulcifled for what the Greeks called euthanasy; could that old classic idea of dissolution afford you a sweeter pang?

But, man, you're not dying like a rose in aromatic pain—you're simply going to bed to read. And here the Elect Lady, giving a final pat to the pillows, leans over, kisses you fondly and says, "All right now, dear?"

To which you reply (dissembling an internal satisfaction violent enough to alarm the police)—"All right now, darling, thank you—but just push the cigars a bit nearer—there. And be sure you tell Mary to keep the children quiet. And, of course, you won't forget to bring it up later—with a good bit of ice; so soothing after the mental excitement of a strong author. Thank you, dear."

These details will often be varied—the unwedded reader is not, I think, steeped in such felicity, and of course there be instances where the married lector does not come at his desire so featly—but the outline remains the same. And the result arrives, as the French say: that is, my gentleman comes to book and bed.

Then truly is he in that happy state de-scribed by the poet,

"The world forgetting, by the world forgot";

raised to the Nirvana of the mind; close-wrapped in the eider-down security of his little kingdom that knoweth no treasons, stratagems or insurrections ; in the world and yet not of it, like unto, though in a different sense from, the Apostolic figure; tasting the pure pleasures of the intellect with a delicious feeling of mental detachment and at the same time a caressing consciousness of bodily ease; no other troubling imperium in his imperio—no thief in his candle—no fly in his ointment—nothing but the Book and his Absoluteship !

It is, Socratically considered, the only rational method of reading—the most universally abused of all the liberal arts. Are there not persons who make a foolish pretence of reading on railways trains, or in public restaurants, or in hotel lobbies, or even in theatres between the acts;—nay, sometimes, by a piece of intolerable coxcombry, during the play it-self? Whip me such barren pretenders!—there is not a reader among them all.

I am not sure that there is higher praise (for the intellectuals) than to be called a good reader, which is to say, a bed-reader. For the true reader (lector in sponda) is only less rare than the genuine writer; his genius no less a native and unacquired attribute; his setting apart from the common herd as clearly defined and delimited. To be a reader in this, the only true sense, is to belong to the Aristocracy of Intellect, and to be assured of a philosophy which brings to age a crown of delight.

No man should take up the noble habit of reading abed before the age of discretion, that is to say, the fortieth year—for at the eighth lustrum comes the dry light of reason, which is the true essential flame of the bed-reader, and, lacking which, he hath as little profit of his vocation as the owl at noonday.

HAVE for some years made a practice of I shrewdly canvassing my friends and correspondents (more or less bookish) on this delicate subject. I say delicate because, owing to a sort of housewifely intolerance much to be deplored, the pleasure of reading abed is here and there regarded as an illicit and reprehensible one—I have even heard of one or two strong-minded ladies who condemned it as "positively immoral". However, as a result of my inquiries, I am enabled to pronounce that the most delightful of intellectual pastimes is in no likelihood of falling into neglect. This, too, in spite of the fact that the habit of smok ing at the same time—a necessary concomitant, as I have shown—makes of the indulgence a "fearful joy", and occasionally creates a little business for the insurance companies.

But there is scarcely an act of our daily life that does not involve some risk or peril, and the stout bed-reader (and smoker) will not suffer himself to be daunted by a slight accident or so, or even a hurry call from the fire department. Besides, there are some obvious precautionary measures which elderly gentle-men (in particular) might take in order to combine the two delicious habits of reading and smoking abed with reasonable safety: e.g., neat, removable book-covers of asbestos might be provided, with gloves of vulcanized rubber or some similar non-inflammable material; and if one have the unlucky habit of nodding into the lamp, the bonnet de nuit might also be of rubber or asbestos. Such an apparatus should render the careless bed-reader immune against any but the most extraordinary accidents. I would not have him feel too safe, however, for as stolen pleasures are known to be sweetest, so in this matter the bed-reader's gratification is heightened and dulcified by a titillant sense of lurking danger. Indeed, I make no doubt that a spark now and then dropping in the bed-clothes, or in the folds of the reader's nighty, or in his whiskers (should he haply be valanced) and discovered before any great dam-age is done or profanity released, adds appreciably to the pleasure of the indulgence, and is not a thing to be sedulously guarded against. However, this is all a matter of taste, for we know, without reference to theology, that some persons can stand more fire than others.

This point being settled, I am asked to give a list of books or authors suitable to the requirements of the mature bed-reader (there are no others). I do not much relish the task, as I can not bear to have my own reading selected for me, and the priggish effrontery of those lettered persons who are constantly pro-posing lists of "best books" (in their estimation, forsooth!) moves my spleen not less than the purgatorial industry of the Holy Office. But perhaps I may indirectly oblige my friends by glancing slightly at the preferences—or mere crotchets, if you will—of an irreclaimable bed-reader, who, being entirely quit of the vanities of careless youth, has now reached that mellowed philosophic age when he would rather lie snugly abed with a bright lamp at his pillow and a genial author to talk to him than do anything else in the world. Oh, by my faith!

In the first place, then, I would put books of a meditative personal cast, such as have the privilege of addressing themselves to the reader's intimate consciousness and of beguiling him into the illusion that their written thoughts and confessions are his very own. Of such favored books, beloved and cherished of the true bed-reader, are the great essayists or lay preachers, Montaigne, Bacon, Swift, Addison, Voltaire, Rousseau, Rochefoucauld, Macaulay, Lamb, Emerson, Carlyle, Thackeray (in his Lectures and Roundabouts), Renan, Amiel—but I am resolved not to catalogue. These and such as these are emphatically thinking books, fit for the quiet commerce of the midnight pillow; trusted confessors of the soul, through whom it arrives the more perfectly to know itself; faithful pilots in the perplexed voyage of life; wise and loving friends whose fidelity is never suspect or shaken; solemn and tender counsellors who give us their mighty hearts to read; august nuncios that de-liver the messages of the high gods.

I would bar all modern fiction, books of the hour—that swarm of summer flies—all trumpery love stories founded on the longings of puberty and green-sickness, all works on theology and hagiography (except St. Augustine's Confessions), political histories, cyclopedias, scientific treatises, the whole accursed tribe of world's condensed or canned literatures and such like compilations, the books of Hall Caine, Marie Corelli and G. Bernard Shaw,* newspapers—that fell brood of time-devourers —and magazines—those pictured inanities.

After this summary clearing of the field, the task of selection should not be difficult; but even at this stage the prudent bed-reader can not afford to go it blind.

I would not advise books of a violently humorous character more recent than Rabelais, Don Quixote or Gil Blas, even though I may here seem to utter treason against my beloved Mark Twain. But I must be honest with my readers—bed-readers, of course—and truth compels me to say that a recumbent position is not favorable to much exercise of the diaphragm, which such reading calls for. I took Huck Finn to bed with me once when I lay down for a long illness, and hung to him in spite of the doctor and the nurse, until the happy meeting with Tom Sawyer, when I wandered off into a fantastic world where fictions and realities were one. The doctor afterward said I might have died laughing at any time, and now I sometimes think that it wouldn't have been such a bad thing—nay, I even believe that one couldn't chance upon a happier kind of death. . . .

However, I must insist that my friends shall sit up to Huck Finn, the Innocents and all that glorious family connection, as also to their co-sharers in a smiling immortality, Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller. Nor let me forget another genial figure who has taken a tribute of harm-less mirth, scarcely inferior to theirs, from thousands of hearts and whom they would welcome to their benign fellowship—I strongly urge the reader who would have a care of his health, not to go to bed with Mr. Dooley.

NEXT to the great essayists mentioned above, the poets offer the best reading for night and the bed—indeed I am not sure but that it is the only way to read certain poets.

I am equally fond of the prose and the poetry of Heine, and think he furnishes a variety of entertainment which, on several counts, is unmatched by any writer. But Heine gives no rest, and one is soon overborne by the charges. of his wit and the unceasing attacks of his terrible raillery.

In the most intimate sense Horace is (of course) without a rival as a companion and comforter of the nightly pillow. This charming Pagan has confessed and will always confess the best minds of the literate Christian world. I know one person who owes his dearest mental joys, his best nocturnal consolations, and the very spring of hope itself to the little great man of Rome. But he must be read in the original—a condition which unfortunately disqualifies too many readers. The songs of Horace, written in the immortal tongue of Rome, can never become antiquated. Though the Pontifex and the Virgin ceased hundreds of years ago to climb the Capitolian hill, though the name of Aufidus is lost where its brawling current hurries down, still that treasure of genius endures, more lasting than brazen column, a joy and a refreshment ever to the jaded souls of men.

Horace has the supreme and almost unique fortune to appear always modern, his genius being of the finest quality ever known and happily preserved in an unchanging tongue. He is, for instance, far more modern than Dante and distinctly nearer to us than the Elizabethans. Alone, he constitutes a sufficient reason for the admirable, though sometimes foolishly censured, practice of reading abed.

I do not care to read the plays of Shakespeare betwixt the sheets—it seems a piece of coxcombry to coolly degust the accumulated horrors of Macbeth and Lear while lolling on your back and sybaritically exploring the softest places in your downy kingdom—truly a case of what's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba ! But I find it quite different with the Poems, which (I may remark) are too frequently overlooked even by those who pride themselves on knowing their Shakespeare. Lately, in Dr. Rolfe's admirable edition, I so re-read the Son-nets, and for the first time arrived at some-thing like a true sense and appreciation of their deep organ melodies, and at least a partial understanding of the strange lawless passion which inspired those wonderful poems that witness forever the glory and mayhap the shame of Shakespeare.

No doubt, the learned Dr. Rolfe had to sit up to write his invaluable commentary, with a thorny desk at his breast; how much more fortunate I to digest it with unlabored impartiality, now and then calmly approving or, it may be, controverting the Doctor, but without heat; reclining at my ease, in a silence and abstraction so perfect that fancy could almost hear the living voices of the actors in this strange, repellent drama of the greatest of poets—stranger and more darkly perplexed than any which his genius gave to the stage—and the mind overleaped three full centuries to that memorable English Spring ---

"When proud-pied April dress'd in all his trim
Did put a spirit of youth in everything,
That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him!"

Letters of memorable men and women are among the pleasantest and most profitable reading for the bed. There is so great a plenty of such books that I need not be at pains to specify—and as said before, I refuse to catalogue.

In this domain Voltaire is facile princeps: his wise, witty, enchanting letters (which have survived in point of living interest the bulk of his hundred volumes) give you the very heart of that wonderful Eighteenth century—that Sphinx rather, some of whose propounded riddles the world is even now striving to answer with enormous travail of blood and tears.

I may confess that, to my humor, Lamb's letters are among the rarest deliciae deliciarum, the most enjoyable reading, of this rather fastidious description.

Dickens's letters are valuable beyond those of most later English moderns, for their brave and hopeful spirit. And to take a more recent instance, Lafcadio Hearn's letters from Japan are worthy to be included in our select bed-reader's library; indeed there are some not unsapient critics who prefer them to his more formal writings.

Books of autobiography are good, so that they be not too veracious, like Franklin's;—a defect which pertaineth not to the far prefer-able Messer Cellini. Memoirs and personal chronicles I would not forbid, though the Pepysian hunt has been run to death, out of compliment to the modern fashion of glorifying the indecent Past, and is too often the mark of snobbery and a vulgar soul. A man shall not leave the empyrean of the poets to put his eye to chamber keyholes and his nose to chamber utensils with Samuel Pepys.