How To Read. II.
Liston tells a story of a nice old lady--I think the foster-sister of the
godmother of his brother-in-law's aunt--who came to make them a visit in
the country. The first day after she arrived proved to be much such a day
as this is,--much such a day as the first of a visit in the country is
apt to be,--a heavy pelting north-easter, when it is impossible to go
out, and every one is thrown on his own resources in-doors. The different
ladies under Mrs. Liston's hospitable roof gathered themselves to their
various occupations, and some one asked old Mrs. Dubbadoe if she would
not like to read.
She said she should.
"What shall I bring you from the library?" said Miss Ellen. "Do not
trouble yourself to go up stairs."
"My dear Ellen, I should like the same book I had last year when I was
here, it was a very nice book, and I was very much interested in it."
"Certainly," said Miss Ellen; "what was it? I will bring it at once."
"I do not remember its name, my dear; your mother brought it to me; I
think she would know."
But, unfortunately, Mrs. Liston, when applied to, had forgotten.
"Was it a novel, Mrs. Dubbadoe?"
"I can't remember that,--my memory is not as good as it was, my dear,--but
it was a very interesting book."
"Do you remember whether it had plates? Was it one of the books of birds,
or of natural history?"
"No, dear, I can't tell you about that. But, Ellen, you will find it, I
know. The color of the cover was the color of the top of the baluster!"
So Ellen went. She has a good eye for color, and as she ran up stairs she
took the shade of the baluster in her eye, matched it perfectly as she ran
along the books in the library with the Russia half-binding of the
coveted volume, and brought that in triumph to Mrs. Dubbadoe. It proved to
be the right book. Mrs. Dubbadoe found in it the piece of corn-colored
worsted she had left for a mark the year before, so she was able to go on
where she had stopped then.
Liston tells this story to trump one of mine about a schoolmate of ours,
who was explaining to me about his theological studies. I asked him what
he had been reading.
"O, a capital book; King lent it to me; I will ask him to lend it to you."
I said I would ask King for the book, if he would tell me who was
the author.
"I do not remember his name. I had not known his name before. But that
made no difference. It is a capital book. King told me I should find it
so, and I did; I made a real study of it; copied a good deal from it
before I returned it."
I asked whether it was a book of natural theology.
"I don't know as you would call it natural theology. Perhaps it was. You
had better see it yourself. Tell King it was the book he lent me."
I was a little persistent, and asked if it were a book of biography.
"Well, I do not know as I should say it was a book of biography. Perhaps
you would say so. I do not remember that there was much biography in it.
But it was an excellent book. King had read it himself, and I found it all
he said it was."
I asked if it was critical,--if it explained Scripture.
"Perhaps it did. I should not like to say whether it did or not. You can
find that out yourself if you read it. But it is a very interesting book
and a very valuable book. King said so, and I found it was so. You had
better read it, and I know King can tell you what it is."
Now in these two stories is a very good illustration of the way in which a
great many people read. The notion comes into people's lives that the mere
process of reading is itself virtuous. Because young men who read instead
of gamble are known to be "steadier" than the gamblers, and because
children who read on Sunday make less noise and general row than those who
will play tag in the neighbors' front-yards, there has grown up this
notion, that to read is in itself one of the virtuous acts. Some people,
if they told the truth, when counting up the seven virtues, would count
them as Purity, Temperance, Meekness, Frugality, Honesty, Courage, and
Reading. The consequence is that there are unnumbered people who read as
Mrs. Dubbadoe did or as Lysimachus did, without the slightest knowledge of
what the books have contained.
My dear Dollie, Pollie, Sallie, Marthie, or any other of my young friends
whose names end in _ie_ who have favored me by reading thus far, the
chances are three out of four that I could take the last novel but three
that you read, change the scene from England to France, change the time
from now to the seventeenth century, make the men swear by St. Denis,
instead of talking modern slang, name the women Jacqueline and Marguerite,
instead of Maud and Blanche, and, if Harpers would print it, as I dare say
they would if the novel was good, you would read it through without one
suspicion that you had read the same book before.
So you see that it is not certain that you know how to read, even if you
took the highest prize for reading in the Amplian class of Ingham
University at the last exhibition. You may pronounce all the words well,
and have all the rising inflections right, and none of the falling ones
wrong, and yet not know how to read so that your reading shall be of any
permanent use to you.
For what is the use of reading if you forget it all the next day?
"But, my dear Mr. Hale," says as good a girl as Laura, "how am I going to
help myself? What I remember I remember, and what I do not remember I do
not. I should be very glad to remember all the books I have read, and all
that is in them; but if I can't, I can't, and there is the end of it."
No! my dear Laura, that is not the end of it. And that is the reason this
paper is written. A child of God can, before the end comes, do anything
she chooses to, with such help as he is willing to give her; and he has
been kind enough so to make and so to train you that you can train your
memory to remember and to recall the useful or the pleasant things you
meet in your reading. Do you know, Laura, that I have here a note you
wrote when you were eight years old? It is as badly written as any note I
ever saw. There are also twenty words in it spelled wrong. Suppose you had
said then, "If I can't, I can't, and there's an end of it." You never
would have written me in the lady-like, manly handwriting you write in
to-day, spelling rightly as a matter of mere feeling and of course, so
that you are annoyed now that I should say that every word is spelled
correctly. Will you think, dear Laura, what a tremendous strain on memory
is involved in all this? Will you remember that you and Miss Sears and
Miss Winstanley, and your mother, most of all, have trained your memory
till it can work these marvels? All you have to do now in your reading is
to carry such training forward, and you can bring about such a power of
classification and of retention that you shall be mistress of the books
you have read for most substantial purposes. To read with such results is
reading indeed. And when I say I want to give some hints how to read, it
is for reading with that view.
When Harry and Lucy were on their journey to the sea-side, they fell to
discussing whether they had rather have the gift of remembering all they
read, or of once knowing everything, and then taking their chances for
recollecting it when they wanted it. Lucy, who had a quick memory, was
willing to take her chance. But Harry, who was more methodical, hated to
lose anything he had once learned, and he thought he had rather have the
good fairy give him the gift of recollecting all he had once learned. For
my part, I quite agree with Harry. There are a great many things that I
have no desire to know. I do not want to know in what words the King of
Ashantee says, "Cut off the heads of those women." I do not want to know
whether a centipede really has ninety-six legs or one hundred and four. I
never did know. I never shall. I have no occasion to know. And I am glad
not to have my mind lumbered up with the unnecessary information. On the
other hand, that which I have once learned or read does in some way or
other belong to my personal life. I am very glad if I can reproduce that
in any way, and I am much obliged to anybody who will help me.
For reading, then, the first rules, I think, are: Do not read too much at
a time; stop when you are tired; and, in whatever way, make some review of
what you read, even as you go along.
Capel Lofft says, in quite an interesting book, which plays about the
surface of things without going very deep, which he calls
_Self-Formation_, [Footnote: Self-Formation. Crosby and Nichols. Boston.
1845.] that his whole life was changed, and indeed saved, when he learned
that he must turn back at the end of each sentence, ask himself what it
meant, if he believed it or disbelieved it, and, so to speak, that he must
pack it away as part of his mental furniture before he took in another
sentence. That is just as a dentist jams one little bit of gold-foil home,
and then another, and then another. He does not put one large wad on the
hollow tooth, and then crowd it all in at once. Capel Lofft says that
this _reflection_--going forward as a serpent does, by a series of
backward bends over the line--will make a dull book entertaining, and will
make the reader master of every book he reads, through all time. For my
part, I think this is cutting it rather fine, this chopping the book up
into separate bits. I had rather read as one of my wisest counsellors did;
he read, say a page, or a paragraph of a page or two, more or less; then
he would look across at the wall, and consider the author's statement, and
fix it on his mind, and then read on. I do not do this, however. I read
half an hour or an hour, till I am ready, perhaps, to put the book by.
Then I examine myself. What has this amounted to? What does he say? What
does he prove? Does he prove it? What is there new in it? Where did he get
it? If it is necessary in such an examination you can go back over the
passage, correct your first impression, if it is wrong, find out the
meaning that the writer has carelessly concealed, and such a process makes
it certain that you yourself will remember his thought or his statement.
I can remember, I think, everything I saw in Europe, which was worth
seeing, if I saw it twice. But there was many a wonder which I was taken
to see in the whirl of sight-seeing, of which I have no memory, and of
which I cannot force any recollection. I remember that at Malines--what we
call Mechlin--our train stopped nearly an hour. At the station a crowd of
guides were shouting that there was time to go and see Rubens's picture
of----, at the church of----. This seemed to us a droll contrast to the
cry at our stations, "Fifteen minutes for refreshments!" It offered such
aesthetic refreshment in place of carnal oysters, that purely for the
frolic we went to see. We were hurried across some sort of square into
the church, saw the picture, admired it, came away, and forgot it,--clear
and clean forgot it! My dear Laura, I do not know what it was about any
more than you do. But if I had gone to that church the next day, and had
seen it again, I should have fixed it forever on my memory. Moral: Renew
your acquaintance with whatever you want to remember. I think Ingham says
somewhere that it is the slight difference between the two stereoscopic
pictures which gives to them, when one overlies the other, their relief
and distinctness. If he does not say it, I will say it for him now.
I think it makes no difference how you make this mental review of the
author, but I do think it essential that, as you pass from one division of
his work to another, you should make it somehow.
Another good rule for memory is indispensable, I think,--namely, to read
with a pencil in hand. If the book is your own, you had better make what I
may call your own index to it on the hard white page which lines the cover
at the end. That is, you can write down there just a hint of the things
you will be apt to like to see again, noting the page on which they are.
If the book is not your own, do this on a little slip of paper, which you
may keep separately. These memoranda will be, of course, of all sorts of
things. Thus they will be facts which you want to know, or funny stories
which you think will amuse some one, or opinions which you may have a
doubt about. Suppose you had got hold of that very rare book, "Veragas's
History of the Pacific Ocean and its Shores"; here might be your private
index at the end of the first volume:--
Percentage of salt in water, 11: Gov. Revillagigedo, 19: Caciques and
potatoes, 23: Lime water for scurvy, 29. Enata, Kanaka, ἀνήρ ἀνά? 42:
Magelhaens _vs_. Wilkes, 57: Coral insects, 20: Gigantic ferns, 84,
&c., &c., &c.
Very likely you may never need one of these references; but if you do, it
is certain that you will have no time to waste in hunting for them. Make
your memorandum, and you are sure.
Bear in mind all along that each book will suggest other books which you
are to read sooner or later. In your memoranda note with care the authors
who are referred to of whom you know little or nothing, if you think you
should like to know more, or ought to know more. Do not neglect this last
condition, however. You do not make the memorandum to show it at the
Philogabblian; you make it for yourself; and it means that you yourself
need this additional information.
Whether to copy much from books or not? That is a question,--and the
answer is,--"That depends." If you have but few books, and much time and
paper and ink; and if you are likely to have fewer books, why, nothing is
nicer and better than to make for use in later life good extract-books to
your own taste, and for your own purposes. But if you own your books, or
are likely to have them at command, time is short, and the time spent in
copying would probably be better spent in reading. There are some very
diffusive books, difficult because diffusive, of which it is well to write
close digests, if you are really studying them. When we read John Locke,
for instance, in college, we had to make abstracts, and we used to stint
ourselves to a line for one of his chatty sections. That was good practice
for writing, and we remember what was in the sections to this hour. If you
copy, make a first-rate index to your extracts. They sell books prepared
for the purpose, but you may just as well make your own.
You see I am not contemplating any very rapid or slap-dash work. You may
put that on your novels, or books of amusement, if you choose, and I will
not be very cross about it; but for the books of improvement, I want you
to improve by reading them. Do not "gobble" them up so that five years
hence you shall not know whether you have read them or not. What I advise
seems slow to you, but if you will, any of you, make or find two hours a
day to read in this fashion, you will be one day accomplished men and
women. Very few professional men, known to me, get so much time as that
for careful and systematic reading. If any boy or girl wants really to
know what comes of such reading, I wish he would read the life of my
friend George Livermore, which our friend Charles Deane has just now
written for the Historical Society of Massachusetts. There was a young
man, who when he was a boy in a store began his systematic reading. He
never left active and laborious business; but when he died, he was one of
the accomplished historical scholars of America. He had no superior in his
special lines of study; he was a recognized authority and leader among
men who had given their lives to scholarship.
I have not room to copy it here, but I wish any of you would turn to a
letter of Frederick Robertson's, near the end of the second volume of his
letters, where he speaks of this very matter. He says he read, when he was
at Oxford, but sixteen books with his tutors. But he read them so that
they became a part of himself, "as the iron enters a man's blood." And
they were books by sixteen of the men who have been leaders of the world.
No bad thing, dear Stephen, to have in your blood and brain and bone the
vitalizing element that was in the lives of such men.
I need not ask you to look forward so far as to the end of a life as long
as Mr. George Livermore's, and as successful. Without asking that, I will
say again, what I have implied already, that any person who will take any
special subject of detail, and in a well-provided library will work
steadily on that little subject for a fortnight, will at the end of the
fortnight probably know more of that detail than anybody in the country
knows. If you will study by subjects for the truth, you have the
satisfaction of knowing that the ground is soon very nearly all your own.
I do not pretend that books are everything. I may have occasion some day
to teach some of you "How to Observe," and then I shall say some very-hard
things about people who keep their books so close before their eyes that
they cannot see God's world, nor their fellow-men and women. But books
rightly used are society. Good books are the best society; better than is
possible without them, in any one place, or in any one time. To know how
to use them wisely and well is to know how to make Shakespeare and Milton
and Theodore Hook and Thomas Hood step out from the side of your room, at
your will, sit down at your fire, and talk with you for an hour. I have no
such society at hand, as I write these words, except by such magic. Have
you in your log-cabin in No. 7?