A Reader's Confessions

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

During my boyhood I could never eat peas. It was beyond me to imagine how anybody could eat them. Beans ? — yes, indeed, that was another story. In the green stage, both beans and pods, they were among the choicest of summer delicacies. Baked beans, too (but I think we said “bake beans,” as we surely said “string beans,” and as to this day I say “roast beef,” not “roasted beef” — what is grammar between courses?),— baked beans, too, I ate, though with something less of relish. But peas — faugh! I would as soon have eaten I know not what.

It may have been “a childish ignorance;” there were plenty to tell me so; but to all such my reply was ready: “They don’t taste good.”

And now, a certain number of years having elapsed, peas to my better instructed palate are nothing less than a luxury. To what was the change due? That is to ask more than I can answer. You may say that Time, which is supposed to make us over new once in so often, brought the alteration about. Or you may say it was Destiny. What I say is only this: that some years ago, I have no recollection how or when, I happened upon the discovery that old things were passed away, and what I formerly distasted now tasted good. As far as the appetizing nature of peas is concerned, this is all I know on earth, and all I need to know.

Other similar gastronomic revolutions I have experienced in the course of my long career at the table. And all have been welcome. A new dish is a new pleasure, and marks a date. Every one does its modest but appreciable part to keep life from degenerating into that tedious thing, an old story. Perhaps every one contributes its mite to keep the wheels a little longer running. A varied diet is good for us, the doctors say. They know very little about it, I suspect, but it is a point in favor of their theory, I must admit, that Nature seems to have taken it upon herself to insure a varied diet.

Well, the life is more than meat, and I have spoken of peas and beans, not in the way of allegory, to be sure, yet not for their own sakes, neither, — though both are spoken of in a more than respectable connection, unless I misremember, in the best of old books, — but as a convenient and becoming prelude to a paragraph or two touching revolutions in taste of another and perhaps more elevated sort, — I mean in the matter of books.

One of the most striking of these, in my own case, has to do with the Sentimental Journey. It was perhaps fifteen years ago that a friend looked at me with astonishment, “a wild surmise,” I might almost say, when I remarked indifferently that I had been running the book over, but could see nothing in it. He is a polite man, my friend; he said little, a mere word or two of soft disclaimer; but it was plain to see he was shocked.

I ought to have accepted his feeling as a kind of compliment, a testimonial, all the better for being indirect, to my general reputation as a reader. “You,” his look said “to speak in that way.” And I am proud to think now that his look was justified; for now, fifteen years afterward, though I could not make oath to having ever read it through, I should be straitened to name half a dozen books that I take down oftener than this same Sentimental Journey.

I still find it rather insubstantial. If Sterne ever had any ideas, he wars pretty careful not to let his pen into the secret of them. He was an artist. He knew what he was about. Ideas were not in his line. They would have spoiled the brew. As well put slices of beef into an ice cream or a pudding sauce! Dainties should be dainties. They should melt on the tongue. Yorick was not a chef, but a pastry cook. Every man to his trade, quoth he, — and happy is the man that knows it.

And I like his pastry. Perhaps I should have done as much fifteen years ago, had I had the wit to accept it for what it was. Perhaps I was trying to make a meal of it; which is an unfair way of treating what the pastry cook sends you. Nothing is good in itself, but in the way it is taken.

And so with the Journey. In these days I take it in bits. The chapters are short (as dessert plates are small), and one or two at a time go sweetly into the mind. There never was prettier English, — after you have read it long enough not to be put out by the crazy punctuation, — and for my part I love the sound of it as I love sweet music. As for the indecency there is in it, — for that, I suppose, a man must prove his own spotless moral character by always showing himself conscious of, — I have grown to pass it over, in the spirit of Sterne’s reputed apology, as I would the innocent freedoms of a child playing on the carpet. The main thing with me is the writing, the exquisite, unpremeditated perfection of the sentences. I am going to read some now.

But first let me say that what we are talking about has, like everything else, another side to it; for, alas, there are books not a few that I used to read with delight, which now, for reasons better or worse, I can hardly endure to look into. As I said in my boyhood, they don’t taste good. If I were to turn all such with their titles to the wall, my shelves, I fear, would look like shelves in Bedlam.

I have no thought of naming these melancholy castaways. Some of them would awaken surprise for their goodness, it may be, and some, quite as likely, for their badness, though I have no Tuppers on my conscience, and modestly flatter myself that in this regard I am not greatly worse than the general run of bookish people. We are all in the same boat, I think. To all of us time has brought its changes. We may have grown wiser with years, or we may have grown foolisher; at any rate, we are different. To a reading man, whatever may be true of people in general, life is not all a sameness.

But now for a page or two of Sterne, or an essay of Elia, which latter is a dish I have always liked. Pray Heaven I always may. A dainty dish, I call it, to set before the king.