'Fond of Books and Fond of Reading'

A friend has loaned me his copy of Maurice Baring’s Have You Anything to Declare? (1936), subtitled A Note Book with Commentaries. This is the 1950 edition published by William Heinemann of London, and comes with an indecipherable pencil inscription on the front end paper that may be written in German (I decrypt two umlauts) or Latin or Turkish or some unknown Romance language. The volume is a variation on a genre I find irresistible in the proper hands – the commonplace book. 

Baring (1874-1945) is an interesting, largely forgotten and not readily classifiable figure, though remembered by Joseph Epstein. He often wrote about Russian literature, was a Roman Catholic convert and seems to have been a kind, witty, lovable man. When I was reading Baring’s 1924 novel C. several years ago, the late Terry Teachout told me it was a book he prized. The opening of Baring’s preface to Have You Anything to Declare? (surely an allusion to Oscar Wilde’s famous quip) is revealing of the man:

 

“This book is not meant for scholars nor for the learned, but for those who, like myself, although they have only a smattering of letters, are fond of books and fond of reading.”

 

Baring most often quotes lines from Homer and Dante, in the original languages and in English translation. He favors Pope’s version of Homer, written in couplets and often discredited by recent critics and readers. “Pope is an interesting example of how the whirligig of Time affects a very great reputation,” Baring writes. “Critics of his day, Dr Johnson for instance, thought that Pope was a matchless poet, and that hundreds of years would elapse before the world would see such another.” Baring confidently compares a passage from the Iliad to the concluding sentence of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. Here is Baring on Horace:

 

“Horace is untranslatable; but although everyone is aware of this fact, the task is one which tempts everybody; Prime Ministers and statemen such as Canning and Gladstone, novelists such as Bulwer Lytton, bankers such as T.C. Baring, great poets such as Milton and Dryden, and lesser poets such as Whyte Melville. And why not? It is a harmless occupation, and personally I greatly enjoy reading translations of Horace, however inadequate they are.”

 

Naturally, I recall the hundreds of Horace translations collected by Isaac Waisburg at IWP Books.

 

One wants to cheer when Baring lauds George Eliot, quoting a line from Felix Holt -- “There is heroism even in the circles of hell for fellow-sinners, who cling to each other in the fiery whirlwind and never recriminate” – and commenting:

 

“When people say George Eliot’s work is quite dead, and nobody reads her, it would me more accurate to say that her work is despised by a handful of intellectuals, and unread by several thousands of people after a certain age. But in spite of that, cheap editions of her books still have a permanent sale . . .” 

 

Baring doesn’t skimp on the writers closer to his own time --  Kipling, Swinburne, Chekhov, Ronald Knox. Here is an excerpt he quotes from one of Henry James' less frequently read titles, The Tragic Muse (1890):

 

“It was during the present solemnity that, excited by the way she came out and with a hundred stirred ideas about her wheeling through his mind, he was for the first time and most vividly visited by a perception that ended by becoming frequent with him--that of the perfect presence of mind, unconfused, unhurried by emotion, that any artistic performance requires and that all, whatever the instrument, require in exactly the same degree: the application, in other words, clear and calculated, crystal-firm as it were, of the idea conceived in the glow of experience, of suffering, of joy.”

 

Baring comments on this Jamesian passage: “This is borne out by the precept and example of all great artists in every walk of life, whether they be actors, jockeys, singers, poets, conductors, boxers, soldiers or sailors.”

 

Reading Baring is like spending time with a charming, well-read companion blessed with a capacious memory and a first-rate sense of humor. As you read Have You Anything to Declare?  sequentially, you come to recognize the subterranean threads connecting his themes, the order in his seeming thematic disorder. The book is a collage drawn from a serious reader’s reading. Here you’ll find Lermontov and Pushkin in Russian, Goethe in German, La Rochefoucauld and Molière in French, all accompanied by Baring’s translations. Near the conclusion of his commonplace book, Baring quotes a passage from his friend G.K. Chesterton’s 1903 monograph on Robert Browning:

 

“The word amateur has come by the thousand oddities of language to convey an idea of tepidity; whereas the word itself has the meaning of passion. Nor is this peculiarity confined to the mere form of the word; the actual characteristic of these nameless dilettanti is a genuine fire and reality. A man must love a thing very much if he not only practices it without any hope of fame or money, but even practices it without any hope of doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more than any other man can love the rewards of it.”