Book Description

The sort of autobiography of which 'My Literary Passions' is an example is always interesting. Mr. Howells is by no means the first to write upon the theme of "Books Which Have Influenced Me", but we do not just now think of anyone before him who has made it the subject of a whole volume. Mr. Howells has had many "literary passions"— fifty, or thereabouts, to reckon only from the chapter headings—and in not a few cases it is obvious that he has loved not wisely, but too well. What we particularly like about the book, aside from the unfailing charm of its manner, is the frankly subjective character of the record. Mr. Howells has elsewhere sinned not a little in attempting to pass off his personal likes and dislikes as objective criticism, but in the present case what he writes is just what it pretends to be — a consecutive account of the books that came into his hands during his impressionable early years, and of the feelings with which he read them. There is an occasional touch of Philistinism, as in the plea more than once made for bowdlerizing the English classics in general, or of a lack of appreciation which is simply amazing, as in this opinion: "I do not think I should have lost much if I had never read 'Pericles' and 'Winter's Tale.' " In the present work Mr. Howells is concerned with the books that he read, and not with those that he wrote, but he does have a word to say of his own first volume, and it is to this amusing effect: "The 'Poems of Two Friends' became instantly and lastingly unknown to fame; the West waited, as it always does, to hear what the East should say; the East said nothing, and two-thirds of the small edition of five hundred came back upon the publisher's hands."