Reading

With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all

men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for

certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike. In

accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a

family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in

dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor

accident. The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of

the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe

remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it

was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews

the vision. No dust has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since

that divinity was revealed. That time which we really improve, or which

is improvable, is neither past, present, nor future.

My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to serious

reading, than a university; and though I was beyond the range of the

ordinary circulating library, I had more than ever come within the

influence of those books which circulate round the world, whose

sentences were first written on bark, and are now merely copied from

time to time on to linen paper. Says the poet Mîr Camar Uddîn Mast,

“Being seated to run through the region of the spiritual world; I have

had this advantage in books. To be intoxicated by a single glass of

wine; I have experienced this pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of

the esoteric doctrines.” I kept Homer’s Iliad on my table through the

summer, though I looked at his page only now and then. Incessant labor

with my hands, at first, for I had my house to finish and my beans to

hoe at the same time, made more study impossible. Yet I sustained

myself by the prospect of such reading in future. I read one or two

shallow books of travel in the intervals of my work, till that

employment made me ashamed of myself, and I asked where it was then

that _I_ lived.

The student may read Homer or Æschylus in the Greek without danger of

dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that he in some measure

emulate their heroes, and consecrate morning hours to their pages. The

heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue,

will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must

laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a

larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and

generosity we have. The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its

translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers

of antiquity. They seem as solitary, and the letter in which they are

printed as rare and curious, as ever. It is worth the expense of

youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some words of an

ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the

street, to be perpetual suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain

that the farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has

heard. Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at

length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the

adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language

they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the

classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only

oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most

modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as

well omit to study Nature because she is old. To read well, that is, to

read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that

will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the

day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the

steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be

read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. It is not

enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which

they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken

and the written language, the language heard and the language read. The

one is commonly transitory, a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost

brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our

mothers. The other is the maturity and experience of that; if that is

our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select

expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be

born again in order to speak. The crowds of men who merely _spoke_ the

Greek and Latin tongues in the middle ages were not entitled by the

accident of birth to _read_ the works of genius written in those

languages; for these were not written in that Greek or Latin which they

knew, but in the select language of literature. They had not learned

the nobler dialects of Greece and Rome, but the very materials on which

they were written were waste paper to them, and they prized instead a

cheap contemporary literature. But when the several nations of Europe

had acquired distinct though rude written languages of their own,

sufficient for the purposes of their rising literatures, then first

learning revived, and scholars were enabled to discern from that

remoteness the treasures of antiquity. What the Roman and Grecian

multitude could not _hear_, after the lapse of ages a few scholars

_read_, and a few scholars only are still reading it.

However much we may admire the orator’s occasional bursts of eloquence,

the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or above the

fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind the

clouds. _There_ are the stars, and they who can may read them. The

astronomers forever comment on and observe them. They are not

exhalations like our daily colloquies and vaporous breath. What is

called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the

study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion,

and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can _hear_ him; but the

writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be

distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks

to the intellect and health of mankind, to all in any age who can

_understand_ him.

No wonder that Alexander carried the Iliad with him on his expeditions

in a precious casket. A written word is the choicest of relics. It is

something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any

other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may

be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually

breathed from all human lips;—not be represented on canvas or in marble

only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. The symbol of an

ancient man’s thought becomes a modern man’s speech. Two thousand

summers have imparted to the monuments of Grecian literature, as to her

marbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carried

their own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect

them against the corrosion of time. Books are the treasured wealth of

the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books,

the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves

of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while

they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse

them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every

society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on

mankind. When the illiterate and perhaps scornful trader has earned by

enterprise and industry his coveted leisure and independence, and is

admitted to the circles of wealth and fashion, he turns inevitably at

last to those still higher but yet inaccessible circles of intellect

and genius, and is sensible only of the imperfection of his culture and

the vanity and insufficiency of all his riches, and further proves his

good sense by the pains which he takes to secure for his children that

intellectual culture whose want he so keenly feels; and thus it is that

he becomes the founder of a family.

Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language

in which they were written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the

history of the human race; for it is remarkable that no transcript of

them has ever been made into any modern tongue, unless our civilization

itself may be regarded as such a transcript. Homer has never yet been

printed in English, nor Æschylus, nor Virgil even—works as refined, as

solidly done, and as beautiful almost as the morning itself; for later

writers, say what we will of their genius, have rarely, if ever,

equalled the elaborate beauty and finish and the lifelong and heroic

literary labors of the ancients. They only talk of forgetting them who

never knew them. It will be soon enough to forget them when we have the

learning and the genius which will enable us to attend to and

appreciate them. That age will be rich indeed when those relics which

we call Classics, and the still older and more than classic but even

less known Scriptures of the nations, shall have still further

accumulated, when the Vaticans shall be filled with Vedas and

Zendavestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares, and

all the centuries to come shall have successively deposited their

trophies in the forum of the world. By such a pile we may hope to scale

heaven at last.

The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for

only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the

multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically.

Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they

have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in

trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little

or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which

lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the

while, but what we have to stand on tip-toe to read and devote our most

alert and wakeful hours to.

I think that having learned our letters we should read the best that is

in literature, and not be forever repeating our a b abs, and words of

one syllable, in the fourth or fifth classes, sitting on the lowest and

foremost form all our lives. Most men are satisfied if they read or

hear read, and perchance have been convicted by the wisdom of one good

book, the Bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate

their faculties in what is called easy reading. There is a work in

several volumes in our Circulating Library entitled Little Reading,

which I thought referred to a town of that name which I had not been

to. There are those who, like cormorants and ostriches, can digest all

sorts of this, even after the fullest dinner of meats and vegetables,

for they suffer nothing to be wasted. If others are the machines to

provide this provender, they are the machines to read it. They read the

nine thousandth tale about Zebulon and Sephronia, and how they loved as

none had ever loved before, and neither did the course of their true

love run smooth,—at any rate, how it did run and stumble, and get up

again and go on! how some poor unfortunate got up on to a steeple, who

had better never have gone up as far as the belfry; and then, having

needlessly got him up there, the happy novelist rings the bell for all

the world to come together and hear, O dear! how he did get down again!

For my part, I think that they had better metamorphose all such

aspiring heroes of universal noveldom into man weathercocks, as they

used to put heroes among the constellations, and let them swing round

there till they are rusty, and not come down at all to bother honest

men with their pranks. The next time the novelist rings the bell I will

not stir though the meeting-house burn down. “The Skip of the

Tip-Toe-Hop, a Romance of the Middle Ages, by the celebrated author of

‘Tittle-Tol-Tan,’ to appear in monthly parts; a great rush; don’t all

come together.” All this they read with saucer eyes, and erect and

primitive curiosity, and with unwearied gizzard, whose corrugations

even yet need no sharpening, just as some little four-year-old bencher

his two-cent gilt-covered edition of Cinderella,—without any

improvement, that I can see, in the pronunciation, or accent, or

emphasis, or any more skill in extracting or inserting the moral. The

result is dulness of sight, a stagnation of the vital circulations, and

a general deliquium and sloughing off of all the intellectual

faculties. This sort of gingerbread is baked daily and more sedulously

than pure wheat or rye-and-Indian in almost every oven, and finds a

surer market.

The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers.

What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this town, with a

very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even

in English literature, whose words all can read and spell. Even the

college-bred and so called liberally educated men here and elsewhere

have really little or no acquaintance with the English classics; and as

for the recorded wisdom of mankind, the ancient classics and Bibles,

which are accessible to all who will know of them, there are the

feeblest efforts any where made to become acquainted with them. I know

a woodchopper, of middle age, who takes a French paper, not for news as

he says, for he is above that, but to “keep himself in practice,” he

being a Canadian by birth; and when I ask him what he considers the

best thing he can do in this world, he says, beside this, to keep up

and add to his English. This is about as much as the college bred

generally do or aspire to do, and they take an English paper for the

purpose. One who has just come from reading perhaps one of the best

English books will find how many with whom he can converse about it? Or

suppose he comes from reading a Greek or Latin classic in the original,

whose praises are familiar even to the so called illiterate; he will

find nobody at all to speak to, but must keep silence about it. Indeed,

there is hardly the professor in our colleges, who, if he has mastered

the difficulties of the language, has proportionally mastered the

difficulties of the wit and poetry of a Greek poet, and has any

sympathy to impart to the alert and heroic reader; and as for the

sacred Scriptures, or Bibles of mankind, who in this town can tell me

even their titles? Most men do not know that any nation but the Hebrews

have had a scripture. A man, any man, will go considerably out of his

way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the

wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every

succeeding age have assured us of;—and yet we learn to read only as far

as Easy Reading, the primers and class-books, and when we leave school,

the “Little Reading,” and story books, which are for boys and

beginners; and our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all on a

very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins.

I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord soil has

produced, whose names are hardly known here. Or shall I hear the name

of Plato and never read his book? As if Plato were my townsman and I

never saw him,—my next neighbor and I never heard him speak or attended

to the wisdom of his words. But how actually is it? His Dialogues,

which contain what was immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and yet

I never read them. We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and

in this respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction

between the illiterateness of my townsman who cannot read at all, and

the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for

children and feeble intellects. We should be as good as the worthies of

antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were. We are a

race of tit-men, and soar but little higher in our intellectual flights

than the columns of the daily paper.

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are

probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could

really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or

the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of

things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the

reading of a book. The book exists for us perchance which will explain

our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we

may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and

puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men;

not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his

ability, by his words and his life. Moreover, with wisdom we shall

learn liberality. The solitary hired man on a farm in the outskirts of

Concord, who has had his second birth and peculiar religious

experience, and is driven as he believes into the silent gravity and

exclusiveness by his faith, may think it is not true; but Zoroaster,

thousands of years ago, travelled the same road and had the same

experience; but he, being wise, knew it to be universal, and treated

his neighbors accordingly, and is even said to have invented and

established worship among men. Let him humbly commune with Zoroaster

then, and through the liberalizing influence of all the worthies, with

Jesus Christ himself, and let “our church” go by the board.

We boast that we belong to the nineteenth century and are making the

most rapid strides of any nation. But consider how little this village

does for its own culture. I do not wish to flatter my townsmen, nor to

be flattered by them, for that will not advance either of us. We need

to be provoked,—goaded like oxen, as we are, into a trot. We have a

comparatively decent system of common schools, schools for infants

only; but excepting the half-starved Lyceum in the winter, and latterly

the puny beginning of a library suggested by the state, no school for

ourselves. We spend more on almost any article of bodily aliment or

ailment than on our mental aliment. It is time that we had uncommon

schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be

men and women. It is time that villages were universities, and their

elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure—if they are

indeed so well off—to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives.

Shall the world be confined to one Paris or one Oxford forever? Cannot

students be boarded here and get a liberal education under the skies of

Concord? Can we not hire some Abelard to lecture to us? Alas! what with

foddering the cattle and tending the store, we are kept from school too

long, and our education is sadly neglected. In this country, the

village should in some respects take the place of the nobleman of

Europe. It should be the patron of the fine arts. It is rich enough. It

wants only the magnanimity and refinement. It can spend money enough on

such things as farmers and traders value, but it is thought Utopian to

propose spending money for things which more intelligent men know to be

of far more worth. This town has spent seventeen thousand dollars on a

town-house, thank fortune or politics, but probably it will not spend

so much on living wit, the true meat to put into that shell, in a

hundred years. The one hundred and twenty-five dollars annually

subscribed for a Lyceum in the winter is better spent than any other

equal sum raised in the town. If we live in the nineteenth century, why

should we not enjoy the advantages which the nineteenth century offers?

Why should our life be in any respect provincial? If we will read

newspapers, why not skip the gossip of Boston and take the best

newspaper in the world at once?—not be sucking the pap of “neutral

family” papers, or browsing “Olive-Branches” here in New England. Let

the reports of all the learned societies come to us, and we will see if

they know any thing. Why should we leave it to Harper & Brothers and

Redding & Co. to select our reading? As the nobleman of cultivated

taste surrounds himself with whatever conduces to his

culture,—genius—learning—wit—books—paintings—statuary—music—

philosophical instruments, and the like; so let the village do,—not

stop short at a pedagogue, a parson, a sexton, a parish library, and

three selectmen, because our pilgrim forefathers got through a cold

winter once on a bleak rock with these. To act collectively is

according to the spirit of our institutions; and I am confident that,

as our circumstances are more flourishing, our means are greater than

the nobleman’s. New England can hire all the wise men in the world to

come and teach her, and board them round the while, and not be

provincial at all. That is the _uncommon_ school we want. Instead of

noblemen, let us have noble villages of men. If it is necessary, omit

one bridge over the river, go round a little there, and throw one arch

at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.