The republic of beauty is not an important territory or marked very clearly on the current maps of Democracy. But there are still some who cherish the ancient boon of poetry and beauty, and such will appreciate a volume like “The Bibelot,” filled with the literature that blows through our foetid life like God’s wind through a hospital. It is one of the few books that cannot fail to hit the taste of any real book lover. It contains selections from William Blake, James Thomson, Francois Villon, a discourse of Walter Pater’s on Marcus Aurelius, Fragments from Sappho, Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets, the Pathos of the Rose in Poetry, extracts from Rossetti’s “Hand and Soul,” Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Lodging for the Night: A Story of Villon,” and other masterpieces of literature. It is a priceless book for the poor student, for these selections have been culled from scarce editions and sources not generally accessible.
If our young readers will read the Bibelot, they may acquire the sense of beauty and power of discrimination, and the taste for the best in literature, old and new. They will then become callous to the tawdry domestic twaddle that has been circulated as “literature” in the respectable domestic periodicals, for the past two decades, in this country, and will learn to distinguish genuine literature from mere merchandise. Perhaps then it will be possible for sincere and earnest work to find currency in books in America, as it has not been since the popular picture periodicals took the place of books in our breakneck economy.
Anthony Hope is one of the few authors of the day honest enough to confess that he reads very little. He is too busy writing. This is one of the evils of the age. The writers outnumber the readers. Every man or woman who takes to writing is a reader lost, for writers almost invariably only read and reread their own works. But all authors are not as candid as Anthony Hope.
That volume of lectures on “The Art of Making a Newspaper,” which all “the bright young men” in American journalism have been studying, is marred with the omission of an important historical matter. This is the origin and career of Mr. Dana’s “office cat.” Charles A. Dana is the most picturesque personality in contemporary American public life. He is more definitely in the popular imagination of this generation than any man engaged in literature proper, and so every characteristic detail and whimsy of the “Sun’s” school of journalism should be recorded for the benefit of posterity. The “office cat” has played a great part in the “Sun’s” art and artifice, and its omission is a national catastrophe.