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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 he hadn't--and it is the
impossibility of the alternative that chills his soul with the despair
of cruel realization--if he hadn't, you see, he could begin at the very
first, right then and there, and read the whole blessed business through
for the first time. For the FIRST TIME, mark you! Is there anywhere in
this great round world a novel reader of true genius who would not do
that with the joy of a child and the thankfulness of a sage?

Such a dream would be the foundation of the story of a really noble Dr.
Faustus. How contemptible is the man who, having staked his life freely
upon a career, whines at the close and begs for another chance; just
one more--and a different career! It is no more than Mr. Jack Hamlin, a
friend from Calaveras County, California, would call "the baby act,"
or his compeer, Mr. John Oakhurst, would denominate "a squeal." How
glorious, on the other hand, is the man who has spent his life in his
own way, and, at its eventide, waves his hand to the sinking sun and
cries out: "Goodbye; but if I could do so, I should be glad to go over
it all again with you--just as it was!" If honesty is rated in heaven
as we have been taught to believe, depend upon it the novel-reader
who sighs to eat the apple he has just devoured, will have no trouble
hereafter.

What a great flutter was created a few years ago when a blind
multi-millionaire of New York offered to pay a million dollars in cash
to any scientist, savant or surgeon in the world who would restore
his sight. Of course he would! It was no price at all to offer for the
service--considering the millions remaining. It was no more to him than
it would be to me to offer ten dollars for a peep at Paradise. Poor as I
am I will give any man in the world one hundred dollars in cash who will
enable me to remove every trace of memory of M. Alexandre Dumas' "Three
Guardsmen," so that I may open that glorious book with the virgin
capacity of youth to enjoy its full delight. More; I will duplicate the
same offer for any one or all of the following:

"Les Miserables," of M. Hugo.

"Don Quixote," of Senor Cervantes.

"Vanity Fair," of Mr. Thackeray.

"David Copperfield," of Mr. Dickens.

"The Cloister and the Hearth," of Mr. Reade.

And if my good friend, Isaac of York, is lending money at the old
stand and will take pianos, pictures, furniture, dress suits and plain
household plate as collateral, upon even moderate valuation, I will go
fifty dollars each upon the following:

"The Count of Monte Cristo," of M. Dumas.

"The Wandering Jew," of M. Sue.

"The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq.," of Mr. Thackeray.

"Treasure Island," of Mr. Robbie Stevenson.

"The Vicar of Wakefield," of Mr. Goldsmith.

"Pere Goriot," of M. de Balzac.

"Ivanhoe," of Baronet Scott.

(Any one previously unnamed of the whole layout of M. Dumas, excepting
only a paretic volume entitled "The Conspirators.")

Now, the man who can do the trick for one novel can do it for all--and
there's a thousand dollars waiting to be earned, and a blessing also.
It's a bald "bluff," of course, because it can't be done as we all know.
I might offer a million with safety. If it ever could have been done the
noble intellectual aristocracy of novel-readers would have been reduced
to a condition of penury and distress centuries ago.

For, who can put fetters upon even the smallest second of eternity? Who
can repeat a joy or duplicate a sweet sorrow? Who has ever had more than
one first sweetheart, or more than one first kiss under the honeysuckle?
Or has ever seen his name in print for the first time, ever again? Is it
any wonder that all these inexplicable longings, these hopeless hopes,
were summed up in the heart-cry of Faust--

"Stay, yet awhile, O moment of beauty."

       *       *       *       *       *

Yet, I maintain, Dr. Faustus was a weak creature. He begged to be given
another and wholly different chance to linger with beauty. How much
nobler the magnificent courage of the veteran novel-reader, who in the
old age of his service, asks only that he may be permitted to do again
all that he has done, blindly, humbly, loyally, as before.

Don't I know? Have I not been there? It is no child's play, the life of
a man who--paraphrasing the language of Spartacus, the much neglected
hero of the ages--has met upon the printed page every shape of perilous
adventure and dangerous character that the broad empire of fiction could
furnish, and never yet lowered his arm. Believe me it is no carpet duty
to have served on the British privateers in Guiana, under Commodore
Kingsley, alongside of Salvation Yeo; to have been a loyal member of
Thuggee and cast the scarf for Bowanee; to have watched the tortures of
Beatrice Cenci (pronounced as written in honest English, and I spit upon
the weaklings of the service who imagine that any freak of woman called
Bee-ah-treech-y Chon-chy could have endured the agonies related of that
sainted lady)--to have watched those tortures, I say, without breaking
down; to have fought under the walls of Acre with Richard Coeur de Lion;
to have crawled, amid rats and noxious vapors, with Jean Valjean through
the sewers of Paris; to have dragged weary miles through the snow with
Uncas, Chief of the Mohicans; to have lived among wild beasts with Morok
the lion tamer; to have charged with the impis of Umslopogaas; to have
sailed before the mast with Vanderdecken, spent fourteen gloomy years
in the next cell to Edmund Dantes, ferreted out the murders in the Rue
Morgue, advised Monsieur Le Cocq and given years of life's prime in
tedious professional assistance to that anointed idiot and pestiferous
scoundrel, Tittlebat Titmouse! Equally, of course, it has not been all
horror and despair. Life averages up fairly, as any novel-reader
will admit, and there has been much of delight--even luxury and
idleness--between the carnage hours of battle. Is it not so? Ask that
boyish-hearted old scamp whom you have seen scuttling away from the
circulating library with M. St. Pierre's memoirs of young Paul and his
beloved Virginia under his arm; or stepping briskly out of the book
store hugging to his left side a carefully wrapped biography of Lady
Diana Vernon, Mlle. de la Valliere, or Madame Margaret Woffington; or
in fact any of a thousand charming ladies whom it is certain he had met