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 to 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....
[Footnote 61: From an address on "The Choice of Books," read before
the London Institution in the winter of 1878-79, and afterward made
the basis of Mr. Harrison's book having the same title.]
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 rime, 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
medieval 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, tho the man who can not 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, or 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, apologs, and maxims, which
have come down to us from distant ages of man's history--the old
idylls 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 reread 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
dignity and struggles, the long life-history of our common kind....
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 medieval 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.