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 mediaeval
incompleteness to a richer conception of life and of the world.
Yet there is a sense in which this boyish anathema against printing may
become true to us by our own fault. We may create for ourselves these
very evils. For the art of printing has not been a gift wholly unmixed
with evils; it must be used wisely if it is to be a boon to man at all;
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 civilisation
and society, for it would release us from the wholesome bondage of place
and rest. 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, 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 Gutenberg 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 organise
our knowledge, to systematise 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.
But this warns me that I am entering on a subject which is far too big
and solemn. It is plain that to organise our knowledge, even to
systematise 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. Before a
problem so great as this, on which readers have such different ideas and
wants, and differ so profoundly on the very premises from which we
start, before such a problem as a general theory of education, I prefer
to pause. 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 recognised 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 focussed 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.
The Choice of Books is really the choice of our education, of a moral
and intellectual ideal, of the whole duty of man. But though I shrink
from any so high a theme, a few words are needed to indicate my general
point of view in the matter.
In the first place, when we speak about books, let us avoid the
extravagance of expecting too much from books, the pedant's habit of
extolling books as synonymous with education. Books are no more
education than laws are virtue; and just as profligacy is easy within
the strict limits of law, a boundless knowledge of books may be found
with a narrow education. A man may be, as the poet saith, "deep vers'd
in books, and shallow in himself." We need to know in order that we may
feel rightly and act wisely. The thirst after truth itself may be pushed
to a degree where indulgence enfeebles our sympathies and unnerves us in
action. Of all men perhaps the book-lover needs most to be reminded that
man's business here is to know for the sake of living, not to live for
the sake of knowing.
A healthy mode of reading would follow the lines of a sound education.
And the first canon of a sound education is to make it the instrument to
perfect the whole nature and character. Its aims are comprehensive, not
special; they regard life as a whole, not mental curiosity; they have to
give us, not so much materials, as capacities. So that, however moderate
and limited the opportunity for education, in its way it should be
always more or less symmetrical and balanced, appealing equally in turn
to the three grand intellectual elements--imagination, memory,
reflection: and so having something to give us in poetry, in history, in
science, and in philosophy.
And thus our reading will be sadly one-sided, however voluminous it be,
if it entirely close to us any of the great types and ideals which the
creative instinct of man has produced, if it shut out from us either
the ancient world, or other European poetry, as important almost as our
own. When our reading, however deep, runs wholly into "pockets," and
exhausts itself in the literature of one age, one country, one type,
then we may be sure that it is tending to narrow or deform our minds.
And the more it leads us into curious byways and nurtures us into
indifference for the beaten highways of the world, the sooner we shall
end, if we be not specialists and students by profession, in ceasing to
treat our books as the companions and solace of our lifetime, and in
using them as the instruments of a refined sort of self-indulgence.
A wise education, and so judicious reading, should leave no great type
of thought, no dominant phase of human nature, wholly a blank. Whether
our reading be great or small, so far as it goes, it should be general.
If our lives admit of but a short space for reading, all the more reason
that, so far as may be, it should remind us of the vast expanse of human
thought, and the wonderful variety of human nature. To read, and yet so
to read that we see nothing but a corner of literature, the loose
fringe, or flats and wastes of letters, and by reading only deepen our
natural belief that this island is the hub of the universe, and the
nineteenth century the only age worth notice, all this is really to call
in the aid of books to thicken and harden our untaught prejudices. Be it
imagination, memory, or reflection that we address--that is, in poetry,
history, science, or philosophy, our first duty is to aim at knowing
something at least of the best, at getting some definite idea of the
mighty realm whose outer rim we are permitted to approach.
But how are we to know the best; how are we to gain this definite idea
of the vast world of letters? There are some who appear to suppose that
the "best" are known only to experts in an esoteric way, who may reveal
to inquirers what schoolboys and betting-men describe as "tips." There
are no "tips" in literature; the "best" authors are never dark horses;
we need no "crammers" and "coaches" to thrust us into the presence of
the great writers of all time. "Crammers" will only lead us wrong. It is
a thing far easier and more common than many imagine, to discover the
best. It needs no research, no learning, and is only misguided by
recondite information. The world has long ago closed the great assize of
letters and judged the first places everywhere. In such a matter the
judgment of the world, guided and informed by a long succession of
accomplished critics, is almost unerring. When some Zoilus finds
blemishes in Homer, and prefers, it may be, the work of some Apollonius
of his own discovering, we only laugh. There may be doubts about the
third and fourth rank; but the first and the second are hardly open to
discussion. The gates which lead to the Elysian fields may slowly wheel
back on their adamantine hinges to admit now and then some new and
chosen modern. But the company of the masters of those who know, and in
especial degree of the great poets, is a roll long closed and complete,
and they who are of it hold ever peaceful converse together.
Hence we may find it a useful maxim that, if our reading be utterly
closed to the great poems of the world, there is something amiss with
our reading. If you find Milton, Dante, Calderon, Goethe, so much
"Hebrew-Greek" to you; if your Homer and Virgil, your Molière and Scott,
rest year after year undisturbed on their shelves beside your school
trigonometry and your old college text-books; if you have never opened
the _Cid, the Nibelungen, Crusoe_, and _Don Quixote_ since you were a
boy, and are wont to leave the Bible and the Imitation for some wet
Sunday afternoon--know, friend, that your reading can do you little real
good. Your mental digestion is ruined or sadly out of order. No doubt,
to thousands of intelligent educated men who call themselves readers,
the reading through a Canto of _The Purgatorio_, or a Book of the
_Paradise Lost_, is a task as irksome as it would be to decipher an
ill-written manuscript in a language that is almost forgotten. But,
although we are not to be always reading epics, and are chiefly in the
mood for slighter things, to be absolutely unable to read Milton or
Dante with enjoyment, is to be in a very bad way. Aristophanes,
Theocritus, Boccaccio, Cervantes, Molière are often as light as the
driven foam; but they are not light enough for the general reader. Their
humour is too bright and lovely for the groundlings. They are, alas!
"classics," somewhat apart from our everyday ways; they are not banal
enough for us; and so for us they slumber "unknown in a long night,"
just _because_ they are immortal poets, and are not scribblers of
to-day.
When will men understand that the reading of great books is a faculty to
be acquired, not a natural gift, at least not to those who are spoiled
by our current education and habits of life? _Ceci tuera cela_,[28] the
last great poet might have said of the first circulating library. An
insatiable appetite for new novels makes it as hard to read a
masterpiece as it seems to a Parisian boulevardier to live in a quiet
country. Until a man can truly enjoy a draft of clear water bubbling
from a mountain side, his taste is in an unwholesome state. And so he
who finds the Heliconian spring insipid should look to the state of his
nerves. Putting aside the iced air of the difficult mountain tops of
epic, tragedy, or psalm, there are some simple pieces which may serve as
an unerring test of a healthy or a vicious taste for imaginative work.
If the _Cid_, the _Vita Nuova_, the _Canterbury Tales_, Shakespeare's
_Sonnets_, and _Lycidas_ pall on a man; if he care not for Malory's
_Morte d'Arthur_ and the _Red Cross Knight_; if he thinks _Crusoe_ and
the _Vicar_ books for the young; if he thrill not with _The Ode to the
West Wind_, and _The Ode to a Grecian Urn_; if he have no stomach for
_Christabel_ or the lines written on _The Wye above Tintern Abbey_, he
should fall on his knees and pray for a cleanlier and quieter spirit.
The intellectual system of most of us in these days needs "to purge and
to live cleanly." Only by a course of treatment shall we bring our minds
to feel at peace with the grand pure works of the world. Something we
ought all to know of the masterpieces of antiquity, and of the other
nations of Europe. To understand a great national poet, such as Dante,
Calderon, Corneille, or Goethe, is to know other types of human
civilisation in ways which a library of histories does not sufficiently
teach. The great masterpieces of the world are thus, quite apart from
the charm and solace they give us, the master instruments of a solid
education.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 23: From "The Choice of Books," 1891. Printed here by
permission of The Macmillan Company.]
[Footnote 24: Books intensely desired.]
[Footnote 25: Thing said in passing.]
[Footnote 26: Floating scattered on the vast abyss.]
[Footnote 27: "And here my books--my life--absorb me whole," Cowper's
translation of Milton's Latin Epistle to Diodati.]
[Footnote 28: This will destroy that.]
ON GOING A JOURNEY[29]
WILLIAM HAZLITT
One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey; but I
like to go by myself. I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors,
nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when
alone.
"The fields his study, nature was his book."
I cannot see the wit of walking and talking at the same time. When I am
in the country, I wish to vegetate like the country. I am not for
criticising hedge-rows and black cattle. I go out of town in order to
forget the town and all that is in it. There are those who for this
purpose go to watering-places, and carry the metropolis with them. I
like more elbow-room, and fewer encumbrances. I like solitude, when I
give myself up to it, for the sake of solitude; nor do I ask for
------"a friend in my retreat,
Whom I may whisper solitude is sweet."
The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do
just as one pleases. We go a journey chiefly to be free of all
impediments and of all inconveniences; to leave ourselves behind, much
more to get rid of others. It is because I want a little breathing-space
to muse on indifferent matters, where Contemplation
"May plume her feathers and let grow her wings,
That in the various bustle of resort
Were all too ruffled, and sometimes impair'd,"
that I absent myself from the town for a while, without feeling at a
loss the moment I am left by myself. Instead of a friend in a postchaise
or in a Tilbury, to exchange good things with, and vary the same stale
topics over again, for once let me have a truce with impertinence. Give
me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet,
a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner--and then
to thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some game on these lone
heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy. From the point of yonder
rolling cloud, I plunge into my past being, and revel there, as the
sunburnt Indian plunges headlong into the wave that wafts him to his
native shore. Then long-forgotten things, like "sunken wrack and sumless
treasuries," burst upon my eager sight, and I begin to feel, think, and
be myself again. Instead of an awkward silence, broken by attempts at
wit or dull commonplaces, mine is that undisturbed silence of the heart
which alone is perfect eloquence. No one likes puns, alliterations,
antitheses, arguments, and analysis better than I do; but I sometimes
had rather be without them. "Leave, oh, leave me to my repose!" I have
just now other business in hand, which would seem idle to you, but is
with me "very stuff of the conscience." Is not this wild rose sweet
without a comment? Does not this daisy leap to my heart set in its coat
of emerald. Yet if I were to explain to you the circumstance that has so
endeared it to me, you would only smile. Had I not better then keep it
to myself, and let it serve me to brood over, from here to yonder craggy
point, and from thence onward to the far-distant horizon? I should be
but bad company all that way, and therefore prefer being alone. I have
heard it said that you may, when the moody fit comes on, walk or ride on
by yourself, and indulge your reveries. But this looks like a breach of
manners, a neglect of others, and you are thinking all the time that you
ought to rejoin your party. "Out upon such half-faced fellowship," say
I. I like to be either entirely to myself, or entirely at the disposal
of others; to talk or be silent, to walk or sit still, to be sociable
or solitary. I was pleased with an observation of Mr. Cobbett's that "he
thought it a bad French custom to drink our wine with our meals, and
that an Englishman ought to do only one thing at a time." So I cannot
talk and think, or indulge in melancholy musing and lively conversation
by fits and starts. "Let me have a companion of my way," says Sterne,
"were it but to remark how the shadows lengthen as the sun declines." It
is beautifully said: but in my opinion, this continual comparing of
notes interferes with the involuntary impression of things upon the
mind, and hurts the sentiment. If you only hint what you feel in a kind
of dumb show, it is insipid: if you have to explain it, it is making a
toil of a pleasure. You cannot read the book of nature, without being
perpetually put to the trouble of translating it for the benefit of
others. I am for the synthetical method on a journey, in preference to
the analytical. I am content to lay in a stock of ideas then, and to
examine and anatomise them afterwards. I want to see my vague notions
float like the down of the thistle before the breeze, and not to have
them entangled in the briars and thorns of controversy. For once, I like
to have it all my own way; and this is impossible unless you are alone,
or in such company as I do not covet. I have no objection to argue a
point with any one for twenty miles of measured road, but not for
pleasure. If you remark the scent of a beanfield crossing the road,
perhaps your fellow-traveller has no smell. If you point to a distant
object, perhaps he is short-sighted, and has to take out his glass to
look at it. There is a feeling in the air, a tone in the colour of a
cloud which hits your fancy, but the effect of which you are unable to
account for. There is then no sympathy, but an uneasy craving after it,
and a dissatisfaction which pursues you on the way, and in the end
probably produces ill humour. Now I never quarrel with myself, and take
all my own conclusions for granted till I find it necessary to defend
them against objections. It is not merely that you may not be of accord
on the objects and circumstances that present themselves before
you--these may recall a number of objects, and lead to associations too
delicate and refined to be possibly communicated to others. Yet these I
love to cherish, and sometimes still fondly clutch them, when I can
escape from the throng to do so. To give way to our feelings before
company, seems extravagance or affectation; and on the other hand, to
have to unravel this mystery of our being at every turn, and to make
others take an equal interest in it (otherwise the end is not answered)
is a task to which few are competent. We must "give it an understanding,
but no tongue." My old friend C----, however, could do both. He could go
on in the most delightful explanatory way over hill and dale, a summer's
day, and convert a landscape into a didactic poem or a Pindaric ode. "He
talked far above singing." If I could so clothe my ideas in sounding and
flowing words, I might perhaps wish to have some one with me to admire
the swelling theme; or I could be more content, were it possible for me
still to hear his echoing voice in the woods of All-Foxden. They had
"that fine madness in them which our first poets had;" and if they could
have been caught by some rare instrument, would have breathed such
strains as the following.
------"Here be woods as green
As any, air likewise as fresh and sweet
As when smooth Zephyrus plays on the fleet
Face of the curled stream, with flow'rs as many
As the young spring gives, and as choice as any;
Here be all new delights, cool streams and wells,
Arbours o'ergrown with woodbine, caves and dells;
Choose where thou wilt, while I sit by and sing,
Or gather rushes to make many a ring
For thy long fingers; tell thee tales of love,
How the pale Phoebe, hunting in a grove,
First saw the boy Endymion, from whose eyes
She took eternal fire that never dies;
How she convey'd him softly in a sleep,
His temples bound with poppy, to the steep
Head of old Latmos, where she stoops each night,
Gilding the mountain with her brother's light,
To kiss her sweetest."------
FAITHFUL SHEPHERDESS.
Had I words and images at command like these, I would attempt to wake
the thoughts that lie slumbering on golden ridges in the evening clouds:
but at the sight of nature my fancy, poor as it is, droops and closes up
its leaves, like flowers at sunset. I can make nothing out on the
spot:--I must have time to collect myself.--