I
You, Gentlemen, who so far have followed with patience this
course of lectures, advertised, maybe too ambitiously, as 'On the
Art of Reading,' will recall to your memory, when I challenge it
across the intervals of Vacation, that three propositions have
been pretty steadily held before you.
The _first_: (bear me out) that, man's life being of the length
it is, and his activities multifarious as they are, out of the
mass of printed matter already loaded and still being shot upon
this planet, he _must_ make selection. There is no other way.
The _second_: that--the time and opportunity being so brief, the
mass so enormous, and the selection therefore so difficult--he
should select the books that are best for him, and take them
_absolutely,_ not frittering his time upon books written about
and around the best: that--in their order, of course--the primary
masterpieces shall come first, and the secondary second, and so
on; and mere chat about any of them last of all.
My _third_ proposition (perhaps more discutable) has been that,
the human soul's activities being separated, so far as we can
separate them, into _What Does, What Knows, What Is_--to _be_
such-and-such a man ranks higher than either _knowing_ or _doing_
this, that, or the other: that it transcends all man's activity
upon phenomena, even a Napoleon's: all his housed store of
knowledge, though it be a Casaubon's or a Mark Pattison's: that
only by learning to _be_ can we understand or reach, as we have
an instinct to reach, to our right place in the scheme of things:
and that, any way, all the greatest literature commands this
instinct. To be Hamlet--to feel yourself Hamlet--is more
important than killing a king or even knowing all there is to be
known about a text. Now most of us have been Hamlet, more or
less: while few of us, I trust, have ever murdered a monarch: and
still fewer, perhaps, can hope to know all that is to be known of
the text of the play. But for value, Gentlemen, let us not rank
these three achievements by order of their rarity. Shakespeare
means us to feel--to _be_--Hamlet. That is all: and from the play
it is the best we can get.