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Page 17
Still I find it hard to inveigh against kings when I recall the
goodness of Alexander to Aristotle, for without Alexander we
should hardly have known of Aristotle. His royal patron provided
the philosopher with every advantage for the acquisition of
learning, dispatching couriers to all parts of the earth to
gather books and manuscripts and every variety of curious thing
likely to swell the store of Aristotle's knowledge.
Yet set them up in a line and survey them--these wearers of
crowns and these wielders of scepters--and how pitiable are they
in the paucity and vanity of their accomplishments! What knew
they of the true happiness of human life? They and their
courtiers are dust and forgotten.
Judge Methuen and I shall in due time pass away, but our
courtiers--they who have ever contributed to our delight and
solace--our Horace, our Cervantes, our Shakespeare, and the rest
of the innumerable train--these shall never die. And inspired
and sustained by this immortal companionship we blithely walk the
pathway illumined by its glory, and we sing, in season and out,
the song ever dear to us and ever dear to thee, I hope, O gentle
reader:
Oh, for a booke and a shady nooke,
Eyther in doore or out,
With the greene leaves whispering overhead,
Or the streete cryes all about;
Where I maie reade all at my ease
Both of the newe and old,
For a jollie goode booke whereon to looke
Is better to me than golde!
VI
MY ROMANCE WITH FIAMMETTA
My bookseller and I came nigh to blows some months ago over an
edition of Boccaccio, which my bookseller tried to sell me. This
was a copy in the original, published at Antwerp in 1603,
prettily rubricated, and elaborately adorned with some forty or
fifty copperplates illustrative of the text. I dare say the
volume was cheap enough at thirty dollars, but I did not want it.
My reason for not wanting it gave rise to that discussion between
my bookseller and myself, which became very heated before it
ended. I said very frankly that I did not care for the book in
the original, because I had several translations done by the most
competent hands. Thereupon my bookseller ventured that aged and
hackneyed argument which has for centuries done the book trade
such effective service--namely, that in every translation, no
matter how good that translation may be, there is certain to be
lost a share of the flavor and spirit of the meaning.
``Fiddledeedee!'' said I. ``Do you suppose that these
translators who have devoted their lives to the study and
practice of the art are not competent to interpret the different
shades and colors of meaning better than the mere dabbler in
foreign tongues? And then, again, is not human life too short
for the lover of books to spend his precious time digging out the
recondite allusions of authors, lexicon in hand? My dear sir, it
is a wickedly false economy to expend time and money for that
which one can get done much better and at a much smaller
expenditure by another hand.''
From my encounter with my bookseller I went straight home and
took down my favorite copy of the ``Decameron'' and thumbed it
over very tenderly; for you must know that I am particularly
attached to that little volume. I can hardly realize that nearly
half a century has elapsed since Yseult Hardynge and I parted.
She was such a creature as the great novelist himself would have
chosen for a heroine; she had the beauty and the wit of those
Florentine ladies who flourished in the fourteenth century, and
whose graces of body and mind have been immortalized by
Boccaccio. Her eyes, as I particularly recall, were specially
fine, reflecting from their dark depths every expression of her
varying moods.
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