Complete. From the original text as it was read before the London Institution and published in the Fortnightly Review, April 1st, 1879.
IT is the fashion for those who have any connection with letters, in the presence of thoughtful men and women, eager for knowledge, and anxious after all that can be gotten from books, to expatiate on the infinite blessings of literature, and the miraculous achievements of the press; to extol, as a gift above price, the taste for study and the love of reading. Far be it from me to gainsay the inestimable value of good books, or to discourage any man from reading the best; but I often think that we forget that other side to this glorious view of literature:—the misuse of books, the debilitating waste of life in aimless promiscuous vapid reading, or even, it may be, in the poisonous inhalation of mere literary garbage and bad men’s worst thoughts.
For what can a book be more than the man who wrote it? The brightest genius, perhaps, never puts the best of his own soul into his printed page; and some of the most famous men have certainly put the worst of theirs. Yet are all men desirable companions, much less teachers, fit to be listened to, able to give us advice, even of those who get reputation and command a hearing? Or, to put out of the question that writing which is positively bad, are we not, amidst the multiplicity of books and of writers, in continual danger of being drawn off by what is stimulating rather than solid, by curiosity after something accidentally notorious, by what has no intelligible thing to recommend it, except that it is new? Now, to stuff our minds with what is simply trivial, simply curious, or that which at best has but a low nutritive power, this is to close our minds to what is solid and enlarging, and spiritually sustaining. Whether our neglect of the great books comes from our not reading at all, or from an incorrigible habit of reading the little books, it ends in just the same thing. And that thing is ignorance of all the greater literature of the world. To neglect all the abiding parts of knowledge for the sake of the evanescent parts is really to know nothing worth nothing. It is in the end the same thing, whether we do not use our minds for serious study at all, or whether we exhaust them by an impotent voracity for idle and desultory “information,” as it is called—a thing as fruitful as whistling. Of the two plans I prefer the former. At least, in that case, the mind is healthy and open. It is not gorged and enfeebled by excess in that which cannot nourish, much less enlarge and beautify our nature.
But there is much more than this. Even to those who resolutely avoid the idleness of reading what is trivial, a difficulty is presented, a difficulty every day increasing by virtue even of our abundance of books. What are the subjects, what are the class of books we are to read, in what order, with what connection, to what ultimate use or object? Even those who are resolved to read the better books are embarrassed by a field of choice practically boundless. The longest life, the greatest industry, the most powerful memory, would not suffice to make us profit from a hundredth part of the world of books before us. If the great Newton said that he seemed to have been all his life gathering a few shells on the shore, whilst a boundless ocean of truth still lay beyond and unknown to him, how much more to each of us must the sea of literature be a pathless immensity beyond our powers of vision or of reach,—an immensity in which industry itself is useless without judgment, method, discipline; where it is of infinite importance what we can learn and remember, and of utterly no importance what we may have once looked at or heard of. Alas! the most of our reading leaves as little mark even in our own education as the foam that gathers round the keel of a passing boat! For myself, I am inclined to think the most useful part of reading is to know what we should not read, what we can keep out from that small cleared spot in the overgrown jungle of “information,” the corner which we can call our ordered patch of fruit-bearing knowledge. Is not the accumulation of fresh books a fresh hindrance to our real knowledge of the old? Does not the multiplicity of volumes become a bar upon our use of any? In literature especially does it hold—that we cannot see the wood for the trees.
A man of power, who has got more from books than most of his contemporaries, has lately said: “Form a habit of reading, do not mind what you read, the reading of better books will come when you have a habit of reading the inferior.” I cannot agree with him. I think a habit of reading idly debilitates and corrupts the mind for all wholesome reading; I think the habit of reading wisely is one of the most difficult habits to acquire, needing strong resolution and infinite pains; and I hold the habit of reading for mere reading’s sake, instead of for the sake of the stuff we gain from reading, to be one of the worst and commonest and most unwholesome habits we have. Why do we still suffer the traditional hypocrisy about the dignity of literature,—literature, I mean, in the gross, which includes about equal parts of what is useful and what is useless? Why are books as books, writers as writers, readers as readers, meritorious and honorable, apart from any good in them, or anything that we can get from them? Why do we pride ourselves on our powers of absorbing print, as our grandfathers did on their gifts in inbibing port, when we know that there is a mode of absorbing print which makes it impossible we can ever learn anything good out of books?
Our stately Milton said in a passage which is one of the watchwords of the English race, “As good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book.” But has he not also said that he would “have a vigilant eye how Bookes demeane themselves as well as men, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors”?… Yes! they do kill the good book who deliver up their few and precious hours of reading to the trivial book; they make it dead for them; they do what lies in them to destroy “the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalm’d and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life”; they “spill that season’d life of man preserv’d and stor’d up in Bookes.” For in the wilderness of books most men, certainly all busy men, must strictly choose. If they saturate their minds with the idler books, the “good book,” which Milton calls “an immortality rather than a life,” is dead to them: it is a book sealed up and buried.
It is most right that in the great republic of letters there should be a freedom of intercourse and a spirit of equality. Every reader who holds a book in his hand is free of the inmost minds of men past and present; their lives both within and without the pale of their uttered thoughts are unveiled to him; he needs no introduction to the greatest; he stands on no ceremony with them; he may, if he be so minded, scribble “doggerel” on his Shelley, or he may kick Lord Byron, if he please, into a corner. He hears Burke perorate, and Johnson dogmatize, and Scott tell his border tales, and Wordsworth muse on the hillside, without the leave of any man, or the payment of any toll. In the republic of letters there are no privileged orders or places reserved. Every man who has written a book, even the diligent Mr. Whitaker, is in one sense an author; “a book’s a book although there’s nothing in’t”; and every man who can decipher a penny journal is, in one sense, a reader. And your “general reader,” like the gravedigger in “Hamlet,” is hail-fellow with all the mighty dead; he pats the skull of the jester; batters the cheek of lord, lady, or courtier; and uses “imperious Cæsar” to teach boys the Latin declensions.
But this noble equality of all writers—of all writers and of all readers—has a perilous side to it. It is apt to make us indiscriminate in the books we read, and somewhat contemptuous of the mighty men of the past. Men who are most observant as to the friends they make, or the conversation they join in, are carelessness itself as to the books to whom they intrust themselves and the printed language with which they saturate their minds. Yet can any friendship or society be more important to us than that of the books which form so large a part of our minds and even of our characters? Do we in real life take any pleasant fellow to our homes and chat with some agreeable rascal by our firesides, we who will take up any pleasant fellow’s printed memoirs, we who delight in the agreeable rascal when he is cut up into pages and bound in calf?
I have no intention to moralize or to indulge in a homily against the reading of what is deliberately evil. There is not so much need for this now, and I am not discoursing on the whole duty of man. I take that part of our reading which is by itself no doubt harmless, entertaining, and even gently instructive. But of this enormous mass of literature, how much deserves to be chosen out, to be preferred to all the great books of the world, to be set apart for those precious hours which are all that the most of us can give to solid reading? The vast proportion of books are books that we shall never be able to read. A serious percentage of books are not worth reading at all. The really vital books for us we also know to be a very trifling portion of the whole. And yet we act as if every book were as good as any other, as if it were merely a question of order which we take up first, as if any book were good enough for us, and as if all were alike honorable, precious, and satisfying. Alas! books cannot be more than the men who write them, and as a large proportion of the human race now write books, with motives and objects as various as human activity, books as books are entitled a priori, until their value is proved, to the same attention and respect as houses, steam engines, pictures, fiddles, bonnets, and other thoughtful or ornamental products of human industry. In the shelves of those libraries which are our pride,—libraries public or private, circulating or very stationary,—are to be found those great books of the world rari nantes in gurgite vasto, those books which are truly “the precious lifeblood of a master spirit.” But the very familiarity which their mighty fame has bred in us makes us indifferent; we grow weary of what every one is supposed to have read, and we take down something which looks a little eccentric, or some author on the mere ground that we never heard of him before.
Thus the difficulties of literature are in their way as great as those of the world, the obstacles to finding the right friends are as great, the peril is as great of being lost in a babel of voices and an everchanging mass of beings. Books are not wiser than men, the true books are not easier to find than the true men, the bad books or the vulgar books are not less obtrusive and not less ubiquitous than the bad or vulgar everywhere; the art of right reading is as long and difficult to learn as the art of right living. Those who are on good terms with the first author they meet run as much risk as men who surrender their time to the first passer in the street, for to be open to every book is for the most part to gain as little as possible from any. A man aimlessly wandering about in a crowded city is of all men the most lonely; so he who takes up only the books that he “comes across,” is pretty certain to meet but few that are worth knowing.
Now this danger is one to which we are specially exposed in this age. Our high-pressure life of emergencies, our whirling industrial organization or disorganization, have brought us in this (as in most things) their peculiar difficulties and drawbacks. In almost everything vast opportunities and gigantic means of multiplying our products bring with them new perils and troubles which are often at first neglected. Our huge cities, where wealth is piled up and the requirements and appliances of life extended beyond the dreams of our forefathers, seem to breed in themselves new forms of squalor, disease, blights, or risks to life, such as we are yet unable to cope with. So the enormous multiplicity of modern books is not altogether favorable to the knowing of the best. I listen with mixed satisfaction to the pæans that they chant over the works that issue from the press each day, how the books poured forth from Paternoster Row might in a few years be built into a pyramid that would fill the dome of St. Paul’s. How in this mountain of literature am I to find the really useful book? How, when I have found it, and found its value, am I to get others to read it? How am I to keep my head clear in the torrent and din of works, all of which distract my attention, most of which promise me something, whilst so few fulfill that promise? The Nile is the source of the Egyptian’s bread, and without it he perishes of hunger. But the Nile may be rather too liberal in his flood, and then the Egyptian runs imminent risk of drowning.
And thus there never was a time, at least during the last two hundred years, when the difficulties in the way of making an efficient use of books were greater than they are to-day, when the obstacles were more real between readers and the right books to read, when it was practically so troublesome to find out that which it is of vital importance to know; and that not by the dearth, but by the plethora of printed matter. For it comes to nearly the same thing whether we are actually debarred by physical impossibility from getting the right book into our hand, or whether we are choked off from the right book by the obtrusive crowd of the wrong books; so that it needs a strong character and a resolute system of reading to keep the head cool in the storm of literature around us. We read nowadays in the market place—I would rather say in some large steam factory of letterpress, where damp sheets of new print whirl round us perpetually—if it be not rather some noisy book fair where literary showmen tempt us with performing dolls, and the gongs of rival booths are stunning our ears from morn till night. Contrast with this pandemonium of Leipsic and Paternoster Row the sublime picture of our Milton in his early retirement at Horton, when, musing over his coming flight to the epic heaven, practicing his pinions, as he tells Diodati, he consumed five years of solitude in reading over the whole of the ancient writers:—
| “Et totum rapiunt, me, mea vita, libri.” |
I am not presumptuous enough to assert that the larger part of modern literature is not worth reading in itself, that the prose is not readable, entertaining, one may say highly instructive. Nor do I pretend that the verses which we read so zealously in place of Milton’s are not good verses. On the contrary, I think them sweetly conceived, as musical and as graceful as the verse of any age in our history. I say it emphatically, a great deal of our modern literature is such that it is exceedingly difficult to resist it, and it is undeniable that it gives us real information. It seems perhaps unreasonable to many, to assert that a decent readable book which gives us actual instruction can be otherwise than a useful companion and a solid gain. I dare say many people are ready to cry out upon me as an obscurantist for venturing to doubt a genial confidence in all literature simply as such. But the question which weighs upon me with such really crushing urgency is this: What are the books that in our little remnant of reading time it is most vital for us to know? For the true use of books is of such sacred value to us that to be simply entertained is to cease to be taught, elevated, inspired by books; merely to gather information of a chance kind is to close the mind to knowledge of the urgent kind.
Every book that we take up without a purpose is an opportunity lost of taking up a book with a purpose—every bit of stray information which we cram into our heads without any sense of its importance is for the most part a bit of the most useful information driven out of our heads and choked off from our minds. It is so certain that information, i.e., the knowledge, the stored thoughts and observations of mankind, is now grown to proportions so utterly incalculable and prodigious, that even the learned whose lives are given to study can but pick up some crumbs that fall from the table of truth. They delve and tend but a plot in that vast and teeming kingdom, whilst those, whom active life leaves with but a few cramped hours of study, can hardly come to know the very vastness of the field before them, or how infinitesimally small is the corner they can traverse at the best. We know all is not of equal value. We know that books differ in value as much as diamonds differ from the sand on the seashore, as much as our living friend differs from a dead rat. We know that much in the myriad-peopled world of books—very much in all kinds—is trivial, enervating, inane, even noxious. And thus, where we have infinite opportunities of wasting our efforts to no end, of fatiguing our minds without enriching them, of clogging the spirit without satisfying it, there, I cannot but think, the very infinity of opportunities is robbing us of the actual power of using them. And thus I come often, in my less hopeful moods, to watch the remorseless cataract of daily literature which thunders over the remnants of the past, as if it were a fresh impediment to the men of our day in the way of systematic knowledge and consistent powers of thought: as if it were destined one day to overwhelm the great inheritance of mankind in prose and verse.
I remember when I was a very young man at college, that a youth, in no spirit of paradox, but out of plenary conviction, undertook to maintain before a body of serious students, the astounding proposition that the invention of printing had been one of the greatest misfortunes that had ever befallen mankind. He argued that exclusive reliance on printed matter had destroyed the higher method of oral teaching, the dissemination of thought by the spoken word to the attentive ear. He insisted that the formation of a vast literary class looking to the making of books as a means of making money, rather than as a social duty, had multiplied books for the sake of the writers rather than for the sake of the readers; that the reliance on books as a cheap and common resource had done much to weaken the powers of memory; that it destroyed the craving for a general culture of taste, and the need of artistic expression in all the surroundings of life. And he argued lastly, that the sudden multiplication of all kinds of printed matter had been fatal to the orderly arrangement of thought, and had hindered a system of knowledge and a scheme of education.
I am far from sharing this immature view. Of course I hold the invention of printing to have been one of the most momentous facts in the whole history of man. Without it universal social progress, true democratic enlightenment, and the education of the people would have been impossible, or very slow, even if the cultured few, as is likely, could have advanced the knowledge of mankind without it. We place Gutenberg amongst the small list of the unique and special benefactors of mankind, in the sacred choir of those whose work transformed the conditions of life, whose work, once done, could never be repeated. And no doubt the things which our ardent friend regarded as so fatal a disturbance of society were all inevitable and necessary, part of the great revolution of mind through which men grew out of the mediæval incompleteness to a richer conception of life and of the world.
Yet there is a sense in which this boyish anathema against printing may be true to us by our own fault. We may create for ourselves these very evils. For this I hold that the art of printing has not been a gift wholly unmixed with evils; that it must be used wisely if it is to be a boon to man at all; that it entails on us heavy responsibilities, resolution to use it with judgment and self-control, and the will to resist its temptations and its perils. Indeed, we may easily so act that we may make it a clog on the progress of the human mind, a real curse and not a boon. The power of flying at will through space would probably extinguish civilization and society, for it would release us from the wholesome bondage of localities. The power of hearing every word that had ever been uttered on this planet would annihilate thought, as the power of knowing all recorded facts by the process of turning a handle would annihilate true science. Our human faculties and our mental forces are not enlarged simply by multiplying our materials of knowledge and our facilities for communication. Telephones, microphones, pantoscopes, steam presses, and ubiquity engines in general may, after all, leave the poor human brain panting and throbbing under the strain of its appliances, and get no bigger and no stronger than the brains of the men who heard Moses speak, and saw Aristotle and Archimedes pondering over a few worn rolls of crabbed manuscript. Until some new Newton or Watt can invent a machine for magnifying the human mind, every fresh apparatus for multiplying its work is a fresh strain on the mind, a new realm for it to order and to rule.
And so, I say it most confidently, the first intellectual task of our age is rightly to order and make serviceable the vast realm of printed material which four centuries have swept across our path. To organize our knowledge, to systematize our reading, to save, out of the relentless cataract of ink, the immortal thoughts of the greatest—this is a necessity unless the productive ingenuity of man is too lead us at last to a measureless and pathless chaos. To know anything that turns up is, in the infinity of knowledge, to know nothing. To read the first book we come across, in the wilderness of books, is to learn nothing. To turn over the pages of ten thousand volumes is to be practically indifferent to all that is good.
But this warns me that I am entering on a subject which is far too big and solemn for us to touch now. I have no pretension to deal with it as it needs. It is plain, I think, that to organize our knowledge, even to systematize our reading, to make a working selection of books for general study, really implies a complete scheme of education. A scheme of education ultimately implies a system of philosophy, a view of man’s duty and powers as a moral and social being—a religion, in fact. Before a problem so great as this, on which a general audience has such different ideas and wants, and differs so profoundly on the very premises from which we start,—before such a problem as a general theory of education, I prefer to retire. I will keep silence even from good words. I have chosen my own part, and adopted my own teacher. But to ask men to adopt the education of Auguste Comte is almost to ask them to adopt Positivism itself.
Nor will I enlarge on the matter for thought, for foreboding, almost for despair, that is presented to us by the fact of our familiar literary ways and our recognized literary profession. That things infinitely trifling in themselves; men, events, societies, phenomena, in no way otherwise more valuable than the myriad other things which flit around us like the sparrows on the housetop, should be glorified, magnified, and perpetuated, set under a literary microscope and focused in the blaze of a literary magic lantern—not for what they are in themselves, but solely to amuse and excite the world by showing how it can be done—all this is to me so amazing, so heart-breaking, that I forbear now to treat it, as I cannot say all that I would.
I pass from all systems of education—from thought of social duty, from meditation on the profession of letters—to more general and lighter topics. I will deal now only with the easier side of reading, with matter on which there is some common agreement in the world. I am very far from meaning that our whole time spent with books is to be given to study. Far from it. I put the poetic and emotional side of literature as the most needed for daily use. I take the books that seek to rouse the imagination, to stir up feeling, touch the heart; the books of art, of fancy, of ideals, such as reflect the delight and aroma of life. And here how does the trivial, provided it is the new, that which stares at us in the advertising columns of the day, crowd out the immortal poetry and pathos of the human race, vitiating our taste for those exquisite pieces which are a household word, and weakening our mental relish for the eternal works of genius! Old Homer is the very fountain head of pure poetic enjoyment, of all that is spontaneous, simple, native, and dignified in life. He takes us into the ambrosial world of heroes, of human vigor, of purity, of grace. Now Homer is one of the few poets the life of whom can be fairly preserved in a translation. Most men and women can say that they have read Homer, just as most of us can say that we have studied Johnson’s Dictionary. But how few of us take him up, time after time, with fresh delight! How few have even read the entire “Iliad” and “Odyssey” through! Whether in the resounding lines of the old Greek, as fresh and ever-stirring as the waves that tumble on the seashore, filling the soul with satisfying silent wonder at its restless unison; whether in the quaint lines of Chapman, or the clarion couplets of Pope, or the closer versions of Cowper, Lord Derby, of Philip Worsley, or even in the new prose version of the “Odyssey,” Homer is always fresh and rich. And yet how seldom does one find a friend spellbound over the Greek Bible of antiquity, whilst they wade through torrents of magazine quotations from a petty versifier of to-day, and in an idle vacation will graze, as contentedly as cattle in a fresh meadow, through the chopped straw of a circulating library. A generation which will listen to “Pinafore” for three hundred nights, and will read M. Zola’s seventeenth romance, can no more read Homer than it could read a cuneiform inscription. It will read about Homer just as it will read about a cuneiform inscription, and will crowd to see a few pots which probably came from the neighborhood of Troy. But to Homer and the primeval type of heroic man in his beauty, and his simpleness, and joyousness, the cultured generation is really dead, as completely as some spoiled beauty of the ballroom is dead to the bloom of the heather or the waving of the daffodils in a glade.
It is a true psychological problem, this nausea which idle culture seems to produce for all that is manly and pure in heroic poetry. One knows—at least every schoolboy has known—that a passage of Homer, rolling along in the hexameter or trumped out by Pope, will give one a hot glow of pleasure and raise a finer throb in the pulse; one knows that Homer is the easiest, most artless, most diverting of all poets; that the fiftieth reading rouses the spirit even more than the first—and yet we find ourselves (we are all alike) painfully pshaw-ing over some new and uncut barley sugar in rhyme, which a man in the street asked us if we had read, or it may be some learned lucubration about the site of Troy by some one we chanced to meet at dinner. It is an unwritten chapter in the history of the human mind, how this literary prurience after new print unmans us for the enjoyment of the old songs chanted forth in the sunrise of human imagination. To ask a man or woman who spends half a lifetime in sucking magazines and new poems to read a book of Homer would be like asking a butcher’s boy to whistle “Adelaida.” The noises and sights and talk, the whirl and volatility of life around us, are too strong for us. A society which is forever gossiping in a sort of perpetual “drum” loses the very faculty of caring for anything but “early copies” and the last tale out. Thus, like the tares in the noble parable of the Sower, a perpetual chatter about books chokes the seed which is sown in the greatest books in the world.
I speak of Homer, but fifty other great poets and creators of eternal beauty would serve my argument as well. Take the latest perhaps in the series of the world-wide and immortal poets of the whole human race—Walter Scott. We all read Scott’s romances, as we have all read Hume’s “History of England,” but how often do we read them, how zealously, with what sympathy and understanding? I am told that the last discovery of modern culture is that Scott’s prose is commonplace; that the young men at our universities are far too critical to care for his artless sentences and flowing descriptions. They prefer Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Mallock, and the euphuism of young Oxford, just as some people prefer a Dresden shepherdess to the Caryatides of the Erechtheum, pronounce Fielding to be low, and Mozart to be passé. As boys love lollipops, so these juvenile fops love to roll phrases about under the tongue, as if phrases in themselves had a value apart from thoughts, feelings, great conceptions, or human sympathy. For Scott is just one of the poets (we may call poets all the great creators in prose or in verse) of whom one never wearies, just as one can listen to Beethoven or watch the sunrise or the sunset day by day with new delight. I think I can read the “Antiquary,” or the “Bride of Lammermoor,” “Ivanhoe,” “Quentin Durward,” and “Old Mortality,” at least once a year afresh. Now Scott is a perfect library in himself. A constant reader of romances would find that it needed months to go through even the best pieces of the inexhaustible painter of eight full centuries and every type of man, and he might repeat the process of reading him ten times in a lifetime without a sense of fatigue or sameness. The poetic beauty of Scott’s creations is almost the least of his great qualities. It is the universality of his sympathy that is so truly great, the justice of his estimates, the insight into the spirit of each age, his intense absorption of self in the vast epic of human civilization. What are the old almanacs that they so often give us as histories beside these living pictures of the ordered succession of ages? As in Homer himself, we see in this prose “Iliad” of modern history the battle of the old and the new, the heroic defense of ancient strongholds, the long impending and inevitable doom of mediæval life. Strong men and proud women struggle against the destiny of modern society, unconsciously working out its ways, undauntedly defying its power. How just is our island Homer! Neither Greek nor Trojan sways him; Achilles is his hero; Hector is his favorite; he loves the councils of chiefs and the palace of Priam; but the swineherd, the charioteer, the slave girl, the hound, the beggar, and the herdsman, all glow alike in the harmonious coloring of his peopled epic. We see the dawn of our English nation, the defense of Christendom against the Koran, the grace and the terror of feudalism, the rise of monarchy out of baronies, the rise of parliaments out of monarchy, the rise of industry out of serfage, the pathetic ruin of chivalry, the splendid death struggle of Catholicism, the sylvan tribes of the mountain (remnants of our prehistoric forefathers) beating themselves to pieces against the hard advance of modern industry; we see the grim heroism of the Bible martyrs, the catastrophe of feudalism overwhelmed by a practical age which knew little of its graces and almost nothing of its virtues. Such is Scott, who, we may say, has done for the various phases of modern history what Shakespeare has done for the manifold types of human character. And this glorious and most human and most historical of poets, without whom our very conception of human development would have ever been imperfect, this manliest and truest and widest of romancers we neglect for some hothouse hybrid of psychological analysis, for the wretched imitators of Balzac and the jackanapes phrasemongering of some Osric of the day, who assures us that Scott is an absolute Philistine.
In speaking with enthusiasm of Scott, as of Homer, or of Shakespeare, or of Milton, or of any of the accepted masters of the world, I have no wish to insist dogmatically upon any single name, or two or three in particular. Our enjoyment and reverence of the great poets of the world is seriously injured nowadays by the habit we get of singling out some particular quality, some particular school of art for intemperate praise or, still worse, for intemperate abuse. Mr. Ruskin, I suppose, is answerable for the taste for this one-sided and spasmodic criticism; and every young gentleman who has the trick of a few adjectives will languidly vow that Marlowe is supreme, or Murillo foul. It is the mark of rational criticism as well as of healthy thought to maintain an evenness of mind in judging of great works, to recognize great qualities in due proportion, to feel that defects are made up by beauties, and beauties are often balanced by weakness. The true judgment implies a weighing of each work and each workman as a whole, in relation to the sum of human cultivation and the gradual advance of the movement of ages. And in this matter we shall usually find that the world is right, the world of the modern centuries and the nations of Europe together. It is unlikely, to say the least of it, that a young person who has hardly ceased making Latin verses will be able to reverse the decisions of the civilized world; and it is even more unlikely that Milton and Molière, Fielding and Scott, will ever be displaced by a poet who has unaccountably lain hid for one or two centuries. I know that in the style of to-day I ought hardly to venture to address you about poetry unless I am prepared to unfold to you the mysterious beauties of some unknown genius who has recently been unearthed by the Children of Light and Sweetness. I confess I have no such discovery to announce. I prefer to dwell in Gath and to pitch my tents in Ashdod; and I doubt the use of the sling as a weapon in modern war. I decline to go into hyperbolic eccentricities over unknown geniuses, and a single quality or power is not enough to arouse my enthusiasm. It is possible that no master ever painted a buttercup like this one, or the fringe of a robe like that one; that this poet has a unique subtlety, and that an undefinable music. I am still unconvinced, though the man who cannot see it, we are told, should at once retire to the place where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.
I am against all gnashing of teeth, whether for or against a particular idol. I stand by the men, and by all the men, who have moved mankind to the depths of their souls, who have taught generations, and formed our life. If I say of Scott, that to have drunk in the whole of his glorious spirit is a liberal education in itself, I am asking for no exclusive devotion to Scott, to any poet, or any school of poets, or any age, or any country, to any style or any order of poet, one more than another. They are as various, fortunately, and as many-sided as human nature itself. If I delight in Scott, I love Fielding, and Richardson, and Sterne, and Goldsmith, and Defoe. Yes, and I will add Cooper and Marryat, Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen—to confine myself to those who are already classics, to our own country, and to one form of art alone, and not to venture on the ground of contemporary romance in general. What I have said of Homer, I would say in a degree, but somewhat lower, of those great Ancients who are the most accessible to us in English—Æschylus, Aristophanes, Virgil, and Horace. What I have said of Shakespeare I would say of Calderon, of Molière, of Corneille, of Racine, of Voltaire, of Alfieri, of Goethe, of those dramatists, in many forms, and with genius the most diverse, who have so steadily set themselves to idealize the great types of public life and of the phases of human history. Let us all beware lest worship of the idiosyncrasy of our peerless Shakespeare blind us to the value of the great masters who in a different world and with different aims have presented the development of civilization in a series of dramas, where the unity of a few great types of man and of society is made paramount to subtlety of character or brilliancy of language. What I have said of Milton, I would say of Dante, of Ariosto, of Petrarch, and of Tasso; nor less would I say it of Boccaccio and Chaucer, of Camoens and Spenser, of Rabelais and of Cervantes, of Gil Blas and the Vicar of Wakefield, of Byron and of Shelley, of Goethe and of Schiller. Nor let us forget those wonderful idealizations of awakening thought and primitive societies, the pictures of other races and types of life removed from our own: all those primeval legends, ballads, songs, and tales, those proverbs, apologues, and maxims, which have come down to us from distant ages of man’s history—the old idyls and myths of the Hebrew race; the tales of Greece, of the Middle Ages of the East; the fables of the Old and the New World; the songs of the Nibelungs; the romances of early feudalism; the “Morte d’Arthur”; the “Arabian Nights”; the ballads of the early nations of Europe.
I protest that I am devoted to no school in particular: I condemn no school; I reject none. I am for the school of all the great men; and I am against the school of the smaller men. I care for Wordsworth as well as for Byron, for Burns as well as Shelley, for Boccaccio as well as for Milton, for Bunyan as well as Rabelais, for Cervantes as much as for Dante, for Corneille as well as for Shakespeare, for Goldsmith as well as Goethe. I stand by the sentence of the world; and I hold that in a matter so human and so broad as the highest poetry the judgment of the nations of Europe is pretty well settled, at any rate, after a century or two of continuous reading and discussing. Let those who will assure us that no one can pretend to culture unless he swear by Fra Angelico and Sandro Botticelli, by Arnolpho the son of Lapo, or the Lombardic bricklayers, by Martini and Galuppi (all, by the way, admirable men of the second rank); and so, in literature and poetry, there are some who will hear of nothing but Webster or Marlowe; Blake, Herrick or Keats; William Langland or the Earl of Surrey; Heine or Omar Khayyám. All of these are men of genius, and each with a special and inimitable gift of his own. But the busy world, which does not hunt poets as collectors hunt for curios, may fairly reserve these lesser lights for the time when they know the greatest well.
So, I say, think mainly of the greatest, of the best known, of those who cover the largest area of human history and man’s common nature. Now when we come to count up these names accepted by the unanimous voice of Europe, we have some thirty or forty names, and amongst them are some of the most voluminous of writers. I have been running over but one department of literature alone, the poetic. I have been naming those only, whose names are household words with us, and the poets for the most part of modern Europe. Yet even here we have a list which is usually found in not less than a hundred volumes at least. Now poetry and the highest kind of romance are exactly that order of literature, which not only will bear to be read many times, but that of which the true value can only be gained by frequent, and indeed habitual reading. A man can hardly be said to know the twelfth Mass or the ninth Symphony, by virtue of having once heard them played ten years ago; he can hardly be said to take air and exercise because he took a country walk once last autumn. And so he can hardly be said to know Scott, or Shakespeare, Molière, or Cervantes, when he once read them since the close of his school days, or amidst the daily grind of his professional life. The immortal and universal poets of our race are to be read and re-read till their music and their spirit are a part of our nature; they are to be thought over and digested till we live in the world they created for us; they are to be read devoutly, as devout men read their Bibles and fortify their hearts with psalms. For as the old Hebrew singer heard the heavens declare the glory of their Maker, and the firmament showing his handiwork, so in the long roll of poetry we see transfigured the strength and beauty of humanity, the joys and sorrows, the dignity and struggles, the long life-history of our common kind.
I have said but little of the more difficult poetry, and the religious meditations of the great idealists in prose and verse, whom it needs a concentrated study to master. Some of these are hard to all men, and at all seasons. The “Divine Comedy,” in its way, reaches as deep in its thoughtfulness as Descartes himself. But these books, if they are difficult to all, are impossible to the gluttons of the circulating library. To these munchers of vapid memoirs and monotonous tales, such books are closed indeed. The power of enjoyment and of understanding is withered up within them. To the besotted gambler on the turf the lonely hillside glowing with heather grows to be as dreary as a prison; and so, too, a man may listen nightly to burlesques, till “Fidelio” inflicts on him intolerable fatigue. One may be a devourer of books, and be actually incapable of reading a hundred lines of the wisest and most beautiful. To read one of such books comes only by habit, as prayer is impossible to one who habitually dreads to be alone.
In an age of steam it seems almost idle to speak of Dante, the most profound, the most meditative, the most prophetic of all poets, in whose epic the panorama of mediæval life, of feudalism at its best and Christianity at its best, stands, as in a microcosm, transfigured, judged, and measured. To most men, the “Paradise Lost,” with all its mighty music and its idyllic pictures of human nature, of our first-child parents in their naked purity and their awakening thought, is a serious and ungrateful task—not to be ranked with the simple enjoyments; it is a possession to be acquired only by habit. The great religious poets, the imaginative teachers of the heart, are never easy reading. But the reading of them is a religious habit, rather than an intellectual effort. I pretend not now to be dealing with a matter so deep and high as religion, or indeed with education in the fuller sense. I will say nothing of that side of reading which is really hard study, an effort of duty, matter of meditation and reverential thought. I need speak not now of such reading as that of the Bible; the moral reflections of Socrates, of Aristotle, of Confucius; the “Confessions” of St. Augustine and the “City of God”; the discourses of St. Bernard, of Bossuet, of Bishop Butler, of Jeremy Taylor; the vast philosophical visions that were opened to the eyes of Bacon and Descartes; the thoughts of Pascal and Vauvenargues, of Diderot and Hume, of Condorcet and de Maistre; the problem of man’s nature as it is told in the “Excursion,” or in “Faust,” in “Cain,” or in the “Pilgrim’s Progress”; the unsearchable outpouring of the heart in the great mystics, of many ages and many races; be the mysticism that of David or of John, of Mahomet or of Buddha; of Fénelon or of Shelley.
I pass by all these. For I am speaking now of the use of books in our leisure hours. I will take the books of simple enjoyment, books that one can laugh over and weep over; and learn from, and laugh and weep again; which have in them humor, truth, human nature in all its sides, pictures of the great phases of human history; and withal sound teaching in honesty, manliness, gentleness, patience. Of such books, I say, books accepted by the voice of all mankind as matchless and immortal, there is a complete library at hand for every man, in his every mood, whatever his tastes or his acquirements. To know merely the hundred volumes or so of which I have spoken would involve the study of years. But who can say that these books are read as they might be, that we do not neglect them for something in a new cover, or which catches our eye in a library? It is not merely to the idle and unreading world that this complaint holds good. It is the insatiable readers themselves who so often read to the least profit. Of course they have read all these household books many years ago, read them, and judged them, and put them away forever. They will read infinite dissertations about these authors; they will write you essays on their works; they will talk most learned criticism about them. But it never occurs to them that such books have a daily and perpetual value, such as the devout Christian finds in his morning and evening psalm; that the music of them has to sink into the soul by continual renewal; that we have to live with them and in them, till their ideal world habitually surrounds us in the midst of the real world; that their great thoughts have to stir us daily anew, and their generous passion has to warm us hour by hour; just as we need each day to have our eyes filled by the light of heaven, and our blood warmed by the glow of the sun. I vow that when I see men forgetful of the perennial poetry of the world, muck-raking in a litter of fugitive refuse, I think of that wonderful scene in the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” where the Interpreter shows the wayfarers the old man raking in the straw and dust, whilst he will not see the Angel who offers him a crown of gold and precious stones.
This gold, refined beyond the standard of the goldsmith, these pearls of great price, the united voice of mankind has assured us are found in those immortal works of every age and of every race whose names are household words throughout the world. And we shut our eyes to them for the sake of the straw and litter of the nearest library or bookshop. A lifetime will hardly suffice to know, as they ought to be known, these great masterpieces of man’s genius. How many of us can name ten men who may be said entirely to know (in the sense in which a thoughtful Christian knows the Psalms and the Epistles) even a few of the greatest poets? I take them almost at random, and I name Homer, Æschylus, Aristophanes, Virgil, Dante, Ariosto, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Calderon, Corneille, Molière, Milton, Fielding, Goethe, Scott. Of course every one has read these poets, but who really knows them, the whole of them, the whole meaning of them? They are too often taken “as read,” as they say in the railway meetings.
Take of this immortal choir the liveliest, the easiest, the most familiar, take for the moment the three—Cervantes, Molière, Fielding. Here we have three poets who unite the profoundest insight into human nature with the most inimitable wit: “Penseroso” and “L’Allegro” in one; “sober, steadfast, and demure,” and yet with “Laughter holding both his sides.” And in all three, different as they are, is an unfathomable pathos, a brotherly pity for all human weakness, spontaneous sympathy with all human goodness. To know “Don Quixote,” that is to follow out the whole mystery of its double world, is to know the very tragicomedy of human life, the contrast of the ideal with the real, of chivalry with good sense, of heroic failure with vulgar utility, of the past with the present, of the impossible sublime with the possible commonplace. And yet to how many reading men is “Don Quixote” little more than a book to laugh over in boyhood! So Molière is read or witnessed; we laugh and we praise. But how little do we study with insight that elaborate gallery of human character; those consummate types of almost every social phenomenon; that genial and just judge of imposture, folly, vanity, affectation, and insincerity; that tragic picture of the brave man born out of his time, too proud and too just to be of use in his age! Was ever truer word said than that about Fielding as “the prose Homer of human nature”? And yet how often do we forget in “Tom Jones” the beauty of unselfishness, the wellspring of goodness, the tenderness, the manly healthiness and heartiness underlying its frolic and its satire, because we are absorbed, it may be, in laughing at its humor, or are simply irritated by its grossness! Nay, “Robinson Crusoe” contains (not for boys, but for men) more religion, more philosophy, more psychology, more political economy, more anthropology, than are found in many elaborate treatises on these special subjects. And yet, I imagine, grown men do not often read “Robinson Crusoe” as the article has it, “for instruction of life and ensample of manners.” The great books of the world we have once read; we take them as read; we believe that we read them; at least, we believe that we know them. But to how few of us are they daily mental food! For once that we take down our Milton, and read a book of that “voice,” as Wordsworth says, “whose sound is like the sea,” we take up fifty times a magazine with something about Milton, or about Milton’s grandmother, or a book stuffed with curious facts about the houses in which he lived, and the juvenile ailments of his first wife.
And whilst the roll of the great men yet unread is to all of us so long, whilst years are not enough to master the very least of them, we are incessantly searching the earth for something new or strangely forgotten. Brilliant essays are forever extolling some minor light. It becomes the fashion to grow rapturous about the obscure Elizabethan dramatists; about the note of refinement in the lesser men of Queen Anne; it is pretty to swear by Lyly’s “Euphues” and Sidney’s “Arcadia”; to vaunt Lovelace and Herrick, Marvell and Donne, Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne. All of them are excellent men, who have written delightful things, that may very well be enjoyed when we have utterly exhausted ths best. But when one meets bevies of hyperesthetic young maidens, in lackadaisical gowns, who simper about Greene and John Ford (authors, let us trust, that they never have read), one wonders if they all know “Lear” or ever heard of “Alceste.” Since to nine out of ten of the “general readers” the very best is as yet more than they have managed to assimilate, this fidgeting after something curious is a little premature and perhaps artificial.
For this reason I stand amazed at the lengths of fantastic curiosity to which persons far from learned have pushed the mania for collecting rare books, or prying into out-of-the-way holes and corners of literature. They conduct themselves as if all the works attainable by ordinary diligence were to them sucked as dry as an orange. Says one, “I came across a very curious book mentioned in a parenthesis in the ‘Religio Medici.’ Only one other copy exists in this country.” I will not mention the work to-night, because I know that, if I did, to-morrow morning at least fifty libraries would be ransacked for it, which would be unpardonable waste of time. “I am bringing out,” says another, quite simply, “‘The Lives of the Washerwomen of the Queens of England.’” And when it comes out we shall have a copious collection of washing books some centuries old, and at length understand the mode of ironing a ruff in the early mediæval period. A very learned friend of mine thinks it perfectly monstrous that a public library should be without an adequate collection of works in Dutch, though I believe he is the only frequenter of it who can read that language. Not long ago I procured for a Russian scholar a manuscript copy of a very rare work by Greene, the contemporary of Shakespeare. Greene’s “Funeralls” is, I think, as dismal and worthless a set of lines as one often sees; and as it has slumbered for nearly three hundred years, I should be willing to let it be its own undertaker. But this unsavory carrion is at last to be dug out of its grave, for it is now translated into Russian and published in Moscow (to the honor and glory of the Russian professor) in order to delight and inform the Muscovite public, where perhaps not ten in a million can as much as read Shakespeare. This or that collector again, with the labor of half a lifetime and by means of half his fortune, has amassed a library of old plays, every one of them worthless in diction, in plot, in sentiment, and in purpose; a collection far more stupid and uninteresting in fact than the burlesques and pantomimes of the last fifty years. And yet this insatiable student of old plays will probably know less of Molière and Alfieri than Molière’s housekeeper or Alfieri’s valet, and possibly he has never looked into such poets as Calderon and Vondel.
Collecting rare books and forgotten authors is perhaps of all the collecting manias the most foolish in our day. There is much to be said for rare china and curious beetles. The china is occasionally beautiful, and the beetles at least are droll. But rare books now are, by the nature of the case, worthless books, and their rarity usually consists in this: that the printer made a blunder in the text, or that they contain something exceptionally nasty or silly. To affect a profound interest in neglected authors and uncommon books is a sign, for the most part, not that a man has exhausted the resources of ordinary literature, but that he has no real respect for the greatest productions of the greatest men in the world. This bibliomania seizes hold of rational beings and so perverts them, that in the sufferer’s mind the human race exists for the sake of the books, and not the books for the sake of the human race. There is one book they might read to good purpose—the doings of a great book collector who once lived in La Mancha. To the collector, and sometimes to the scholar, the book becomes a fetich or idol, and is worthy of the worship of mankind, even if it cannot be the slightest use to anybody. As the book exists, it must have the compliment paid it of being invited to the shelves. The “library is imperfect without it,” although the library will, so to speak, stink when it has got it. The great books are of course the common books, and these are treated by collectors and librarians with sovereign contempt. The more dreadful an abortion of a book the rare volume may be, the more desperate is the struggle of libraries to possess it. Civilization in fact has evolved a complete apparatus, an order of men and a code of ideas for the express purpose, one may say, of degrading the great books. It suffocates them under mountains of little books, and give the place of honor to that which is plainly literary carrion.
Now I suppose, at the bottom of all this lies that rattle and restlessness of life which belongs to the industrial maelstrom wherein we ever revolve. And connected therewith comes also that literary dandyism which results from the pursuit of letters without any social purpose or any systematic faith. To read from the pricking of some cerebral itch rather than from a desire of forming judgments; to get, like an Alpine club stripling, to the top of some unsealed pinnacle of culture; to use books as a sedative, as a means of exciting a mild intellectual titillation, instead of as a means of elevating the nature; to dribble on in a perpetual literary gossip in order to avoid the effort of bracing the mind to think—such is our habit in an age of utterly chaotic education. We read, as the bereaved poet made rhymes—
| “For the unquiet heart and brain, | |
| A use in measured language lies; | |
| The sad mechanic exercise, | |
| Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.” |
A philosopher with whom I hold (but with whose opinion I have no present intention of troubling you) has proposed a method of dealing with this indiscriminate use of books, which I think is worthy of attention. He has framed a short collection of books for constant and general reading. He put it forward “with the view of guiding the more thoughtful minds among the people in their choice for constant use.” He declares that, “both the intellect and the moral character suffer grievously at the present time from irregular reading.” It was not intended to put a bar upon other reading, or to supersede special study. It is designed as a type of a healthy and rational syllabus of essential books, fit for common teaching and daily use. It presents a working epitome of what is best and most enduring in the literature of the world. The entire collection would form, in the shape in which books now exist in modern libraries, something like five hundred volumes. They embrace books both of ancient and modern times, in all the five principal languages of modern Europe. It is divided into four sections: poetry, science, history, religion.
The principles on what it is framed are these: First it collects the best in all the great departments of human thought, so that no part of education shall be wholly wanting. Next it puts together the greatest books, of universal and permanent value, and the greatest and the most enduring only. Next it measures the greatness of books not by their brilliancy, or even their learning, but by their power of presenting some typical chapter in thought, some dominant phase of history; or else it measures them by their power of idealizing man and nature, or of giving harmony to our moral and intellectual activity. Lastly, the test of the general value of books is the permanent relation they bear to the common civilization of Europe.
Some such firm foothold in the vast and increasing torrent of literature it is certainly urgent to find, unless all that is great in literature is to be borne away in the flood of books. With this we may avoid an interminable wandering over a pathless waste of waters. Without it, we may read everything and know nothing; we may be curious about anything that chances, and indifferent to everything that profits. Having such a catalogue before our eyes, with its perpetual warning,—non multa sed multum,—we shall see how with our insatiable consumption of print we wander, like unclassed spirits, round the outskirts only of these Elysian fields where the great dead dwell and hold high converse. As it is we hear but in a faint echo that voice which cries:—
| “Onorate l’altissimo Poeta: | |
| L’ombra sua torna, ch’era dipartita.” |
