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THE DELICIOUS VICE

Pipe Dreams and Fond Adventures of an Habitual Novel-Reader Among Some
Great Books and Their People

By Young E. Allison

_Second Edition_

(Revised and containing new material)

CHICAGO THE PRAIRIELAND PUBLISHING CO. 1918 Printed originally in the
Louisville Courier-Journal. Reprinted by courtesy.

First edition, Cleveland, Burrows Bros., 1907.

Copyright 1907-1918





I. A RHAPSODY ON THE NOBLE PROFESSION OF NOVEL READING

It must have been at about the good-bye age of forty that Thomas Moore,
that choleric and pompous yet genial little Irish gentleman, turned a
sigh into good marketable "copy" for Grub Street and with shrewd economy
got two full pecuniary bites out of one melancholy apple of reflection:

  "Kind friends around me fall
  Like leaves in wintry weather,"

  --he sang of his own dead heart in the stilly night.

  "Thus kindly I scatter thy leaves on the bed
  Where thy mates of the garden lie scentless and dead."
--he sang to the dying rose. In the red month of October the rose is
forty years old, as roses go. How small the world has grown to a man of
forty, if he has put his eyes, his ears and his brain to the uses for
which they are adapted. And as for time--why, it is no longer than a
kite string. At about the age of forty everything that can happen to a
man, death excepted, has happened; happiness has gone to the devil or
is a mere habit; the blessing of poverty has been permanently secured
or you are exhausted with the cares of wealth; you can see around
the corner or you do not care to see around it; in a word--that is,
considering mental existence--the bell has rung on you and you are up
against a steady grind for the remainder of your life. It is then there
comes to the habitual novel reader the inevitable day when, in anguish
of heart, looking back over his life, he--wishes he hadn't; then he asks
himself the bitter question if there are not things he has done that he
wishes he hadn't. Melancholy marks him for its own. He sits in his room
some winter evening, the lamp swarming shadowy seductions, the grate
glowing with siren invitation, the cigar box within easy reach for that
moment when the pending sacrifice between his teeth shall be burned out;
his feet upon the familiar corner of the mantel at that automatically
calculated altitude which permits the weight of the upper part of the
body to fall exactly upon the second joint from the lower end of the
vertebral column as it rests in the comfortable depression created by
continuous wear in the cushion of that particular chair to which every
honest man who has acquired the library vice sooner or later gets
attached with a love no misfortune can destroy. As he sits thus,
having closed the lids of, say, some old favorite of his youth, he will
inevitably ask himself if it would not have been better for him if he
hadn't. And the question once asked must be answered; and it will be an
honest answer, too. For no scoundrel was ever addicted to the delicious
vice of novel-reading. It is too tame for him. "There is no money in
it."

       *       *       *       *       *

And every habitual novel-reader will answer that question he has asked
himself, after a sigh. A sigh that will echo from the tropic deserted
island of Juan Fernandez to that utmost ice-bound point of Siberia where
by chance or destiny the seven nails in the sole of a certain mysterious
person's shoe, in the month of October, 1831, formed a cross--thus:

                       *
                     * * *
                       *
                       *
                       *

while on the American promontory opposite, "a young and handsome woman
replied to the man's despairing gesture by silently pointing to heaven."
The Wandering Jew may be gone, but the theater of that appalling
prologue still exists unchanged. That sigh will penetrate the gloomy
cell of the Abbe Faria, the frightful dungeons of the Inquisition, the
gilded halls of Vanity Fair, the deep forests of Brahmin and fakir, the
jousting list, the audience halls and the petits cabinets of kings of
France, sound over the trackless and storm-beaten ocean--will echo, in
short, wherever warm blood has jumped in the veins of honest men and
wherever vice has sooner or later been stretched groveling in the dust
at the feet of triumphant virtue.

And so, sighing to the uttermost ends of the earth, the old novel-reader
will confess that he wishes he hadn't. Had not read all those novels
that troop through his memory. Because, if