thing wanting to me," said Leonardo da Vinci; and he was an Italian. I
will not presume to speak for the Americans, but I am sure that, in the
Englishman, the want of this admirable symmetry of the Greeks is a
thousand times more great and crying than in any Italian. The results
of the want show themselves most glaringly, perhaps, in our
architecture, but they show themselves, also, in all our art. _Fit
details strictly combined, in view of a large general result nobly
conceived_; that is just the beautiful _symmetria prisca_ of the Greeks,
and it is just where we English fail, where all our art fails. Striking
ideas we have, and well-executed details we have; but that high symmetry
which, with satisfying and delightful effect, combines them, we seldom
or never have. The glorious beauty of the Acropolis at Athens did not
come from single fine things stuck about on that hill, a statue here, a
gateway there;--no, it arose from all things being perfectly combined
for a supreme total effect. What must not an Englishman feel about our
deficiencies in this respect, as the sense for beauty, whereof this
symmetry is an essential element, awakens and strengthens within him!
what will not one day be his respect and desire for Greece and its
_symmetria prisca_, when the scales drop from his eyes as he walks the
London streets, and he sees such a lesson in meanness as the Strand, for
instance, in its true deformity! But here we are coming to our friend
Mr. Ruskin's province, and I will not intrude upon it, for he is its
very sufficient guardian.
And so we at last find, it seems, we find flowing in favor of the
humanities the natural and necessary stream of things, which seemed
against them when we started. The "hairy quadruped furnished with a tail
and pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits," this good fellow
carried hidden in his nature, apparently, something destined to develop
into a necessity for humane letters. Nay, more: we seem finally to be
even led to the further conclusion that our hairy ancestor carried in
his nature, also, a necessity for Greek.
And therefore, to say the truth, I cannot really think that humane
letters are in much actual danger of being thrust out from their leading
place in education, in spite of the array of authorities against them at
this moment. So long as human nature is what it is, their attractions
will remain irresistible. As with Greek, so with letters generally:
they will some day come, we may hope, to be studied more rationally, but
they will not lose their place. What will happen will rather be that
there will be crowded into education other matters besides, far too
many; there will be, perhaps, a period of unsettlement and confusion and
false tendency; but letters will not in the end lose their leading
place. If they lose it for a time, they will get it back again. We shall
be brought back to them by our wants and aspirations. And a poor
humanist may possess his soul in patience, neither strive nor cry, admit
the energy and brilliancy of the partisans of physical science, and
their present favor with the public, to be far greater than his own, and
still have a happy faith that the nature of things works silently on
behalf of the studies which he loves, and that, while we shall all have
to acquaint ourselves with the great results reached by modern science,
and to give ourselves as much training in its disciplines as we can
conveniently carry, yet the majority of men will always require humane
letters; and so much the more, as they have the more and the greater
results of science to relate to the need in man for conduct, and to the
need in him for beauty.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 20: From "Discourses in America," 1885.]
[Footnote 21: From Ecclesiastes, viii. 17.]
[Footnote 22: From the "Iliad," xxiv. 49.]
HOW TO READ[23]
FREDERIC HARRISON
It is the fashion for those who have any connection with letters 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 brain 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 seldom puts the best of his own soul into his printed page; and
some famous men have certainly put the worst of theirs. Yet are all men
desirable companions, much less teachers, able to give us advice, even
of those who get reputation and command a hearing? 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 knowing. It is in the
end the same, whether we do not use our minds for serious study at all,
or whether we exhaust them by an impotent voracity for desultory
"information"--a thing as fruitful as whistling. Of the two evils 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, joined to 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 help to 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. The incessant accumulation of
fresh books must hinder any real knowledge of the old; for the
multiplicity of volumes becomes a bar upon our use of any. In literature
especially does it hold--that we cannot see the wood for the trees.
How shall we choose our books? Which are the best, the eternal,
indispensable books? To all to whom reading is something more than a
refined idleness these questions recur, bringing with them the sense of
bewilderment; and a still, small voice within us is for ever crying out
for some guide across the Slough of Despond of an illimitable and
ever-swelling literature. How many a man stands beside it, as uncertain
of his pathway as the Pilgrim, when he who dreamed the immortal dream
heard him "break out with a lamentable cry; saying, what shall I do?"
And this, which comes home to all of us at times, presses hardest upon
those who have lost the opportunity of systematic education, who have to
educate themselves, or who seek to guide the education of their young
people. Systematic reading is but little in favour even amongst studious
men; in a true sense it is hardly possible for women. A comprehensive
course of home study, and a guide to books, fit for the highest
education of women, is yet a blank page remaining to be filled.
Generations of men of culture have laboured to organise a system of
reading and materials appropriate for the methodical education of men in
academic lines. Teaching equal in mental calibre to any that is open to
men in universities, yet modified for the needs of those who must study
at home, remains in the dim pages of that melancholy volume entitled
_Libri valde desiderati._[24]
I do not aspire to fill one of those blank pages; but I long to speak a
word or two, as the Pilgrim did to Neighbour Pliable, upon the glories
that await those who will pass through the narrow wicket-gate. On this,
if one can find anything useful to say, it may be chiefly from the
memory of the waste labour and pitiful stumbling in the dark which fill
up so much of the travail that one is fain to call one's own education.
We who have wandered in the wastes so long, and lost so much of our
lives in our wandering, may at least offer warnings to younger
wayfarers, as men who in thorny paths have borne the heat and burden of
the day might give a clue to their journey to those who have yet a
morning and a noon. As I look back and think of those cataracts of
printed stuff which honest compositors set up, meaning, let us trust, no
harm, and which at least found them in daily bread,--printed stuff which
I and the rest of us, to our infinitely small profit, have consumed with
our eyes, not even making an honest living of it, but much impairing our
substance,--I could almost reckon the printing press as amongst the
scourges of mankind. I am grown a wiser and a sadder man, importunate,
like that Ancient Mariner, to tell each blithe wedding guest the tale of
his shipwreck on the infinite sea of printers' ink, as one escaped by
mercy and grace from the region where there is water, water, everywhere,
and not a drop to drink.
A man of power, who has got more from books than most of his
contemporaries, once 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." We need not accept this _obiter dictum_[25] of
Lord Sherbrooke. A habit of reading idly debilitates and corrupts the
mind for all wholesome reading; the habit of reading wisely is one of
the most difficult habits to acquire, needing strong resolution and
infinite pains; and reading for mere reading's sake, instead of for the
sake of the good we gain from reading, is one of the worst and commonest
and most unwholesome habits we have. And so our inimitable humorist has
made delightful fun of the solid books,--which no gentleman's library
should be without,--the Humes, Gibbons, Adam Smiths, which, he says, are
not books at all, and prefers some "kindhearted play-book," or at times
the _Town and County Magazine_. Poor Lamb has not a little to answer
for, in the revived relish for garbage unearthed from old theatrical
dungheaps. Be it jest or earnest, I have little patience with the
Elia-tic philosophy of the frivolous. 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, 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 imbibing
port, when we know that there is a mode of absorbing print which makes
it impossible that 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 life-blood
of a master-spirit, imbalm'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
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
"doggrel" on his Shelley, or he may kick Lord Byron, if he please, into
a corner. He hears Burke perorate, and Johnson dogmatise, 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 grave-digger 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 Caesar" 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 share, are carelessness itself as to the books to whom
they entrust 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?
If any person given to reading were honestly to keep a register of all
the printed stuff that he or she consumes in a year--all the idle tales
of which the very names and the story are forgotten in a week, the
bookmaker's prattle about nothing at so much a sheet, the fugitive
trifling about silly things and empty people, the memoirs of the
unmemorable, and lives of those who never really lived at all--of what
a mountain of rubbish would it be the catalogue: Exercises for the eye
and the memory, as mechanical as if we set ourselves to learn the names,
ages, and family histories of every one who lives in our own street, the
flirtations of their maiden aunts, and the circumstances surrounding the
birth of their grandmother's first baby.
It is impossible to give any method to our reading till we get nerve
enough to reject. The most exclusive and careful amongst us will (in
literature) take boon companions out of the street, as easily as an
idler in a tavern. "I came across such and such a book that I never
heard mentioned," says one, "and found it curious, though entirely
worthless." "I strayed on a volume by I know not whom, on a subject for
which I never cared." And so on. There are curious and worthless
creatures enough in any pot-house all day long; and there is incessant
talk in omnibus, train, or street by we know not whom, about we care not
what. Yet if a printer and a bookseller can be induced to make this
gabble as immortal as print and publication can make it, then it
straightway is literature, and in due time it becomes "curious."
I have no intention to moralise 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 by itself is 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 honourable, precious, and
satisfying. Alas! books cannot be more than the men who write them; and
as a fair proportion of the human race now write books, with motives and
objects as various as human activity, books, as books, are entitled _à
priori_, until their value is proved, to the same attention and respect
as houses, steam-engines, pictures, fiddles, bonnets, and other 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_,[26] those books which are truly "the precious life-blood 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, some worthless book, on the mere ground that we never heard
of it 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
ever-changing 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 men are 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
organisation or disorganisation 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 master. So the enormous
multiplicity of modern books is not altogether favourable to the knowing
of the best. I listen with mixed satisfaction to the paeans that they
chant over the works which 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 fulfil 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 letter-press, 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, practising his
pinions, as he tells Diodati, he consumed five years of solitude in
reading the ancient writers--"_Et totum rapiunt me, mea vita,
libri_."[27]
Who now reads the ancient writers? Who systematically reads the great
writers, be they ancient or modern, whom the consent of ages has marked
out as classics: typical, immortal, peculiar teachers of our race? Alas!
the _Paradise Lost_ is lost again to us beneath an inundation of
graceful academic verse, sugary stanzas of ladylike prettiness, and
ceaseless explanations in more or less readable prose of what John
Milton meant or did not mean, or what he saw or did not see, who married
his great-aunt, and why Adam or Satan is like that, or unlike the other.
We read a perfect library about the _Paradise Lost_, but the _Paradise
Lost_ itself we do not read.
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. 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. Possibly 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.