Books for a Cold

I remember reading some time ago about a Russian composer who made his living in a bank or an office. He had no time to devote to composition, except an occasional short period when he was confined to the house by a severe attack of influenza. Composition was his heart work, his ruling passion, so the attacks of influenza — and they were asserted to be genuine — were welcomed by him as angels’ visits.

As we who are living — or trying to live — in New York are pretty sure to have colds next spring if we have not got them now, it might be well for us to show a spirit of what the statesmen awkwardly term “ preparedness,” if we cannot attain to the thankful mind of the inspired Russian. That this is not a Christian Scientific attitude the writer is perfectly conscious; but the writer is suffering from a cold in the head and does not care.

My cold was, perhaps, well timed in coming just after Christmas, when, besides the What is Worth While and Friendship series, and the calendars, cards, and Henry van Dykelets symptomatic of the time, some real books found their way into the house. The writer feels that he has hit upon some that are really adapted to the needs of a cold, and is willing to prescribe them to others.

The very best of all his discoveries is Tolstoï’s War and Peace. You have in the first place the change of climate so beneficial to the sufferer. You simply exchange this atmosphere of drafts and sniffles for another quite as real and human, — indeed more so. For if dear stupid Pierre and the little Princess with the downy upper lip, and Natasha in love with all the world, and Prince Andrei, and Dolukhof, and the entire Restof family are not more real and more human than many of the people you meet, then you have been singularly fortunate in your New York acquaintance.

Of course it is long — one really needs a slight cold as a pretext for escaping so long from one’s duties, or from the many distracting pursuits that we who might have leisure make duties of. But life is long while we are living it, and War and Peace, Mr. Howells has said, is life. It is Russia and a hundred years ago, but it is also America and to-day, for life is eternal in the sense of being continuous and unchanging. Here we are, then, in a new society, privileged to listen to their diverting talk; to see with divining eyes into a thousand wonderfully various souls; and this without having to raise our husky voices in reply, or feel the least conscious in blowing our noses. I have not yet finished War and Peace, and I may tire of it, as I may tire of life before I get through with it; but I do not expect to tire of either.

I have found another book, and I anticipate that some to whom I prescribe it will put themselves out to thank me as I intend to thank the lady — of course it was a lady — who called my attention to its “ delicate air.” This is Henry James’s French Poets and Novelists. It is not a new book (the first edition appeared in 1878), but if there were any new books of such clarity, such elegance of style, such flattering, tickling wit, and such discriminating enthusiasm, how gladly would we read them, and even buy them! There are eloquent little essays (constructive criticism indeed) on George Sand, Balzac, Baudelaire, de Musset, etc., and we have in each its subject preserved for us in miniature perfection, and in the permanent amber of an unapproachable style. The charm of this little book cannot be written down; to do it justice would be to write another such book, and who to-day is to write it ? How illuminating it would be to have such a writer turning his lantern on the literary productions of our day, — for example, on The Sacred Fount! These two “discoveries” are, I admit, balancing the egg considerably after Columbus; but I will do worse and affirm that during this same beneficent cold I have discovered also two excellent plays, Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing, besides The Gentle Reader and the Essays of Douglas Jerrold. I will not claim for all an equal efficacy, but the fact that the fair Beatrice is “stuffed and cannot smell” proves that one touch of influenza makes the whole world kin.

I take the thanks of my fellow sufferers for granted. I congratulate them on their opportunity. “The writer of these lines,” says Henry James in the essay on Madame de Sab ran, “lias read the book with extreme pleasure, and he cannot resist the temptation to prolong his pleasure and share it with such readers as have a taste for delicate things.”

I have shared my pleasure, — or my medicine, and I hope I shall be rewarded by hearing of the discoveries of others in this same direction, or, at least, an explanation as to why some books are a sovereign remedy, while others, like The Making of an American, Robert Browning’s poems, the books of Elinor Glyn, the magazines with their interesting articles on radium (it is needless to say that I cite at random) are, however valuable they may be at other times, distinctly not to be recommended as books for a cold.