Hopkins, Gerard

[From the Introduction to Great Modern Reading, Doubleday, 1943, pp. xi-xvi:]

It is for the people of America that I have devised this anthology. It occurred to me that it would be useful to them and I hoped interesting, if I could give them, as it were, a bird’s eye view of literary production in England and America during the last forty or fifty years. That is what I have tried to do in this volume. The result is imperfect, partly owing to my own inadequacy for the task, since my reading, except in special subjects, has been desultory, and it is only too probable that I have remained unacquainted with certain authors a selection from whose works would have made my picture more complete; but it is imperfect also because my space was severely limited. I wished this book to be published at so cheap a price that it would strain no one’s resources to buy it, and the cost of production set definite bounds to the quantity of material I could include.

I have made this anthology for the people of this country, for the woman who goes into the store to buy a spool of cotton or a cake of soap, for the man who goes in to buy a packet of nails or a pot of paint; I wish no one to think that on that account I have allowed my choice to be qualified by any consideration that what I was offering the readers might be above their heads. Far from it. With the object I had in mind of giving a survey of literary production during a certain period, I have chosen what seemed to me best and most significant. I believe in the people and I believe in their taste.

[...]

I am not so stupid as to mean that all people have such a naturally good taste that they will always prefer what is best to what is of no great value. After all, we none of us do that, and few of us are so delicately constituted that we can put up with nothing but the first rate. Most of us can like very much things of unequal merit. I know for my part I can get a great deal of pleasure out of an opera of Puccini’s; but it is a different sort of pleasure from that which I get out of an opera of Mozart’s. There are times when I would rather read the stories of Conan Doyle than Tolstoi’s War and Peace. I mean only that there are many people in this country, many millions it may be, who are quite as capable of enjoying great music, great painting, and great literature as those others who have had ampler opportunities to form their taste and confirm their judgment. So in this anthology I have made no compromise. I would not claim that all pieces in it are great literature; during the last twenty-five hundred years, all the world over, not so much of the literature that has been produced can truly be called great; indeed, we have been told that it can be got into a five-foot shelf; and this is a necessarily incomplete selection from the writing in England and America of half a century. I do claim, however, that none of these pieces can fail to appeal for one reason or another to a curious and intelligent mind.

I have always felt that reading should be a pleasure. Of course, to get anything out of it, you must give it your full attention, but to a healthy understanding there is nothing disagreeable in the activity of the intellect. It is, however, the business of an author to make your perusal of his work enjoyable. There are writers who have things to say that are interesting and useful for us to know, but by some unfortunate accident of nature they cannot say them with grace or elegance, so that to read them is a burden. Since this anthology is designed also to persuade people to the habit of reading, I have, so far as I honestly could, left out writing of this sort; I wanted to show that good reading could very well be pleasant reading.

[...]

Some of the pieces are by English authors and some by American, but I have not sought in any way to distinguish them, for I think the time has passed when there was any point in speaking of English literature and American literature; I prefer now to speak of it as one, the literature of the English-speaking peoples. I have started with the writers of our own day and gone backward to those who were writing at the beginning of my period. This I have done because, for us who live now, the present is our more pressing concern. The literary productions of our contemporaries speak our own language and are dressed in the clothes we wear; they use the conveniences we are accustomed to, the telephone, the motorcar, the radio, the plane, so that when we come to make ourselves acquainted with them, it is with a sense of familiarity which is a help to such of us as have never acquired the habit of reading. Because they deal with a life that is our life, they have an immediate interest.

[...]

People will not read the classics because they have got it into their heads that they are dull. They have formed this impression, I think, because they have been forced to read them in schools and colleges, and the reading prescribed by scholastic authorities is not as often as it should be chosen to persuade the young that great literature is good to read. It is natural enough that, when they arrive at maturity, many persons should suppose that there is little in the great works of the past that can help them to deal with the anxious and harassing present. But a work becomes a classic only because succeeding generations of people, ordinary readers like you and me, have found pleasure in reading it. It does that because it appeals to the human problems that we are all confronted with.

I have included in this anthology nothing that to my mind has not a merit of its own, but to fulfill my intention in making it, I have put in some pieces of which the literary merit is small because they seemed to me significant of the time at which they were written. I have had, on the other hand, to leave out some things that I thought both significant and of literary value simply because I had not room for them. For this reason I have been obliged to omit Joseph Conrad’s Youth and Richard Wright’s Fire and Cloud. I wish to stress this point because, after I published the anthology called Tellers of Tales, I was made aware that some of my fellow authors were affronted because I had not included any story of theirs. One wrote to me very acrimoniously, pointing out that his stories had appeared in anthologies for twenty years and the fact that I had not thought fit to insert one proved to his complete satisfaction that I did not know a good story when I saw it. Well, I had read the stories of this irascible author and had received pleasure from them, but here again my space was limited; I was making a choice from stories written since the beginning of the nineteenth century in the five countries that have cultivated the art to best advantage, and I thought that each country should be adequately represented; though I thought the stories of this particular author good, I could not but know that Jack London had done the same sort of thing, if not better, at least before him, and so it seemed to me unnecessary to give an example of his work. I hope then that no writer will be angry with me if in this brief anthology I have not asked him for permission to print a piece of his. It may be that I would have liked to, but it did not quite fit into my scheme. It is no reflection on his merit. I do not pretend that my taste is perfect, nor do I presume it to be as impartial as that which a professional critic is in duty bound to have. I have my likes and dislikes, and though I am not blind to the merit of what I dislike, and will freely admit it, I do not like it any the better for that.

In 1943, Somerset Maugham published this anthology of what he considered to be some of the best examples of Modern English and American Literature at that time. This is a thick, robust, wonderful collection filled with short stories, essays, bits of histories and biographies and poems. The book is broken up into a couple of dozen sections, each one with an introduction by Maugham. In my opinion, this is a priceless collection. Not in terms of financial value, but in terms of its value as a specimen of literature, a large collection of works hand selected by a great contemporary writer, with each work introduced with Maugham's witty, informed, passionate opinions about the art of writing. I read through this book slowly, as one of my between books, and savored each session with it. It's definitely one of the gems of my entire 2000-plus volume library. ( )