Books Which Have Influenced Me

BOOKS WHICH HAVE INFLUENCED ME[1]

The Editor[2] has somewhat insidiously laid a trap for his
correspondents, the question put appearing at first so innocent, truly
cutting so deep. It is not, indeed, until after some reconnaissance
and review that the writer awakes to find himself engaged upon
something in the nature of autobiography, or, perhaps worse, upon a
chapter in the life of that little, beautiful brother whom we once all
had, and whom we have all lost and mourned, the man we ought to have
been, the man we hoped to be. But when word has been passed (even to
an editor), it should, if possible, be kept; and if sometimes I am
wise and say too little, and sometimes weak and say too much, the
blame must lie at the door of the person who entrapped me.

The most influential books,[3] and the truest in their influence, are
works of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must
afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson,
which he must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they
clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they
constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web
of experience, not as we can see it for ourselves, but with a singular
change--that monstrous, consuming _ego_ of ours being, for the nonce,
struck out. To be so, they must be reasonably true to the human
comedy; and any work that is so serves the turn of instruction. But
the course of our education is answered best by those poems and
romances where we breathe a magnanimous atmosphere of thought and meet
generous and pious characters. Shakespeare has served me best. Few
living friends have had upon me an influence so strong for good as
Hamlet or Rosalind. The last character, already well beloved in the
reading, I had the good fortune to see, I must think, in an
impressionable hour, played by Mrs. Scott Siddons.[4] Nothing has ever
more moved, more delighted, more refreshed me; nor has the influence
quite passed away. Kent's brief speech[5] over the dying Lear had a
great effect upon my mind, and was the burthen of my reflections for
long, so profoundly, so touchingly generous did it appear in sense, so
overpowering in expression. Perhaps my dearest and best friend outside
of Shakespeare is D'Artagnan--the elderly D'Artagnan of the _Vicomte
de Bragelonne_.[6] I know not a more human soul, nor, in his way, a
finer; I shall be very sorry for the man who is so much of a pedant in
morals that he cannot learn from the Captain of Musketeers. Lastly, I
must name the _Pilgrim's Progress_,[7] a book that breathes of every
beautiful and valuable emotion.

But of works of art little can be said; their influence is profound
and silent, like the