Have You 'Martin Chuzzlewit'?

No, not this time in your library, in those tall old green books, ten by twelve, with bifurcated pages and Cruikshank illustrations. But in your hand. For in mine are three other cards marked respectively Great Expectations, David Copperfield, and A Tale of Two Cities, and each, like your own (if you have it), surmounted by a rugged, kindly face, the beard flowing and silky, the forehead lined, the hair thinning. I want Martin Chuzzlewit to complete my ‘book.’ Once he is mine, and the four cards laid aside, I am given another ‘turn’ to ask for Snowbound, with its bald and patriarchal creator, or Sartor Resartus, its name strange and alluring, or The Newcomes, or perchance only for Evangeline, whose familiar title I pronounce with some scorn as not having the charm of the new and mysterious, and whose meticulous and benevolent author I accept on terms of good-natured tolerance.

‘Have you King Lear?’ ‘Have you The Mill on the Floss?’ ‘Have you The Fair Maid of Perth?’ These were the celestial questions asked twenty years ago in half the sitting rooms of the country. For the game of Authors was a national institution. Few children reached the age of ten without having found it in their Christmas stockings or beside their birthday plates. It supplemented the so-called education of the schools in a manner at once difficult to gauge and well-nigh impossible to overestimate. It stamped upon our careless minds, intent, first of all, on completing our ‘books’ and winning the game, the names of great pieces of literature; it stored up in our memories ineradicable pictures of great men and women — George Eliot with her brooch and her parted hair, the genial and wry smile of Oliver Wendell Holmes, the massive, sad face of Carlyle, the wrinkled waistcoat of Sir Walter; it ensured us against a sense of embarrassed incompetence when we were later to roam among library shelves. Even those children to whom reading was not to become a passion, whose literary knowledge doubtless never progressed beyond those pieces of cardboard, must have retained at least a refining acquaintance with names, titles, and faces; and as for that goodly number of us to whom books have proved better companions than persons, we owe to that evening game around the sitting-room table the obligation and the desire to seek out that aristocracy of letters and to make our own its long and beneficent effects.

One hopes, a little wistfully, that the game was in truth more than just a pastime; that it reflected, to some small extent at least, the tenor of an age before education had become a fad and ‘wide reading’ an open sesame to social and pseudo-intellectual circles. And yet the claim must rest on a less secure footing than that identical one which is unhesitatingly made in these latter days for the prevalence of electric trains, toy monoplanes, and those various and terrifying means of locomotion which scoot and spin along our sidewalks. Doubtless, however, all idealism aside, the game was simply a means of entertainment, designed by certain clever persons for their own ends and neither reflecting an age nor intended for the better living of the younger generation.

And yet, whatever its origin, its end justified both ways and means. There was more than a request in ‘Have you Henry Esmond?’ There was a foretaste, a prophecy, of the day when we ourselves should see Beatrix descending the stairs and the Marchioness of Castlewood holding her own against the soldiers of the king. In the familiar bandying about of such names there was the graciousness of good company, and in our love for the cards themselves there was the suggestion of hero worship not to be despised.

I remember the reign of terror which swept our family circle upon the discovery, one snowy afternoon, that the baby had chewed The French Revolution into an unseemly pulp. The red scrollwork of the back was liquefied and running down his chin; the face of Carlyle was quite obliterated, ‘spit upon,’ in very truth. This tragedy was rivaled a few days later by the complete extinction in the open fire of The Idylls of the King. Both losses were made good by my brother John, who constructed from pasteboard two substitute cards. Upon these he placed not only the lists of productions, but also representations of Carlyle and Tennyson, which he enhanced, somewhat to our consternation, by inserting generous pipes between their lips. And yet, recalling those smoky colloquies by the kitchen fire at 5 Cheyne Row, what could have been more fitting?

It was gratitude for such recollections as these which sent me in the last Christmas season to purchase a copy of the old game for my nephews and nieces. I found it with surprisingly little difficulty, and to my rejoicing comment that it must be still in good repute the saleslady rejoined that she sold a most satisfying number each year. Reassured and somewhat chagrined at my lack of faith, I began, while waiting for my parcel, to turn the cards of a duplicate box before me. I paused at the first to make a foolish wish. I hoped it might be my luck to find upon its face the thinning hair of Dickens and that title which had opened the door for me to Air. Pecksniff and Sairey Gamp. In my fear of turning the card I was frankly sentimental. When I summoned courage to do so, I was confronted by the placid and assured smile of a lady whose face was new and portentous in spite of its benign good-will. Beneath I read: —

GENE STRATTON PORTER

A GIRL OF THE LIMBERLOST
Freckles
The Harvester
The Keeper of the Bees

My wish denied, my citadel in ruins, what was there to do but continue my inspection? What but to know the worst?

When, five minutes later, I left the counter, I was beleaguered by emotions so painful that the simple wrath of the saleslady at the return of my package and request for my money was as balm and ointment upon a troubled spirit. Descending thus into an Avernus of anger and disgust, disillusionment and irony, I was neither stayed nor comforted by the ill-timed remembrance of a recent article, entitled ‘The Hygiene of Reading,’ which had found its way to my table. Its author, one of our leading professional ‘educators,’ therein warns all teachers and mothers against a pernicious malady he is pleased to call ‘a premature reverence for great books,’ which, he says, not infrequently sadly infects the young child. Perhaps some disciple of his had compiled this new and revised edition of the game of Authors as an antidote or antitoxin!

With most of the other shoppers I hurried into the toy department. I inspected miniature pile drivers, steam shovels, and self-starting trucks. Here at least, I told myself, was no pretense. By shopping here I could at all events secure myself against hearing on Christmas night, above the carols over the radio, my nephews and nieces calling:

‘Have you The Little Colonel?’ ‘Have you Freckles ? ’ ‘ Have you Pollyanna? ' ‘Have you Riders of the Purple Sage?'