VANITY FAIR

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 74, Issue 189, 12 August 1931, Page 2

VANITY FAIR

THROUGH THE LAND OF BOOKS

All those years I had been reading tremendously, voraciously. I adventured into a many-hued land of enchantment. I came to know every bookshop, new and second-hand, in the [Vest End of London, as well as in other towns to which 1 frequently went. The day was barren on which 1 did not have a book in my hand, and I read riding, walking in crowded streets, at mealtimes. Captain Marryat took me by storm and I read everything of his that 1 could lay hands on. Then Mayne Reid captured me, and upon what glorious crusade I entered when I came to know his sun-tanned, alkali-dusted scalp hunters. Incidentally hundreds of Western tales of Writers of lesser calibre delighted me, but 1 abandoned them when I found Bert Harte. In his characters I first made acquaintance with living, illumined human beings and with fictional folk that made distinct impressions: Jack Oakhurst with his sublime self-control, with his cool sanity, with his wide sympathies and his sense of humanity. . . Harte’s poems were the first poems 1 read with understanding and interest, and, strangely, through them my horizon became widened, for I came across his Dickens in Camp, and so came to Dickens by Way of Oliver Twist. Next came the Pickwick Papers which 1 read avidly and with shouts of laughter. The world of to-day has outgrown Dickens, we are told, and if that be true, all the Worse for the world. I revelled in all those odd people whom I found to be far more interesting than the constrained folks of the real world; the inimitable Sam libeller who sent me into gales of merriment whenever he opened his mouth; Pecksniff, who, to this day, stands for me as a type of which the world is full; Peggotty whose double I know as a neighbour here in the Ozark Mountains; Ruth Pinch on whom I framed my feminine ideal; Mrs Camp who is, and was, and always must be in this world; Mercy Pecksniff, the emptyheaded giggler, whose prototype I see whenever I walk on the campus at Fayetteville; all those strange creatpres in Martin Chuzzlewit and in American Notes with their flamboyant boastings and their tawdry oratory and that reflex egotism called local patriotism; all those canting knaves and office-seekers, and those pinchbeck emotionalists, and those fellows ready with mouthfilling phrases. Year after year, unguided, 1 passed through the pleasant land of books, glad to be unguided and unnoticed. There Were literary gardens of much graciousness that I utterly missed; Jane Austen, Trollope; Shakespeare and his contemporaries, who came to me by strange Ways later; Hawthorne, Washington Irving; almost all of the world of poe try; everything controversial and everything dogmatic and everything of religious savor. Of tales of chivalry I read Ivartoe and Quentin Durward, but nothing else written by Walter Scott. . . And of course there was Thomas Hughes with his Tom Brown’s Schooldays, and his Tom Brown at Oxfoid, after which I swept back t° Dickens by Way of A Tale of Two Cities, then Sketches by Boz—at this point I became full of the desire to write. If, I thought, I could see in a school reader the shories t of short stories of my own making, then the world would hold no greater joy. That has come to pass, and my boyish expeclaiiens of joy was no false hope.—Charles J. Finger, in “Seven Horizons.’’