literature and reading what somebody else has been pleased to say of it,
no matter how wise and appreciative this may be. Of course the genuine
student has small sympathy with those demoralizing flippancies about
books which are just now so common in the guise of smart essays upon
authors or their works; those papers in which adroit literary hacks
write about books as the things with which they have meddled most. The
man who reads for himself and thinks for himself realizes that these
essayists are the gypsy-moths of literature, living upon it and at the
same time doing their best to destroy it; and that the reading of these
petty imitations of criticism is about as intellectual as sitting down
in the nursery to a game of "Authors."
Even the reading of good and valuable papers is not the study of
literature in the best sense. There is much of profit in such admirable
essays as those, for instance, of Lowell, of John Morley, or of Leslie
Stephen. Excellent and often inspiring as these may be, however, it is
not to be forgotten that as criticisms their worth lies chiefly in the
incitement which they give to go to the fountain-head. The really fine
essay upon a masterpiece is at its best an eloquent presentment of the
delights and benefits which the essayist has received from the work of
genius; it shows the possibilities and the worth within the reach of
all. Criticisms are easily abused. We are misusing the most sympathetic
interpretation when we receive it dogmatically. In so far as they make
us see what is high and fine, they are of value; in so far as we depend
upon the perceptions of the critic instead of our own, they are likely
to be a hindrance. It is easier to think that we perceive than it is
really to see; but it is well to remember that a man may be plastered
from head to feet with the opinions of others, and yet have no more
genuine ideas of his own than has a bill-board because it is covered
with posters. Genuine emotion is born of genuine conviction. A reader is
really touched by a work of art only as he enters into it and
comprehends it sympathetically. Another may point the way, but he must
travel it for himself. Reading an imaginative work is like wooing a
maiden. Another may give the introduction, but for real acquaintance and
all effective love-making the suitor must depend upon himself if he
would be well sped. Critics may tell us what they admire, but the vital
question is what we in all truth and sincerity admire and appreciate
ourselves.
VI
METHODS OF STUDY
We have spoken of what the study of literature is not, but negations do
not define. It is necessary to look at the affirmative side of the
matter. And first it is well to remark that what we are discussing is
the examination of literature,--literature, that is, in the sense to
which we have limited the term by definition: "The adequate expression
of genuine emotion." It is not intended to include trash, whether that
present itself as undisguised rubbish or whether it mask under
high-sounding names of Symbolism, Impressionism, Realism, or any other
affected nomenclature whatever. It has never been found necessary to
excuse the existence of the masterpieces of literature by a labored
literary theory or a catchpenny classification. It is generally safe to
suspect the book which must be defended by a formula and the writers who
insist that they are the founders of a school. There is but one school
of art--the imaginative.
"But," it may be objected, "in an age when the books of the world are
numbered by millions, when it is impossible for any reader to examine
personally more than an insignificant portion even of those thrust upon
his notice, how is the learner to judge what are worthy of his
attention?" To this it is to be answered that there are works enough
universally approved to keep the readiest reader more than busy through
the span of the longest human life. We shall have occasion later to
speak of especial authors and of especial books. Here it is enough to
say that certainly at the start the student must be content to accept
the verdict of those who are capable of judging for him. Herein lies one
of the chief benefits to be derived from critics and essayists. As the
learner advances, he will find that as his taste and appreciation
advance with them will develop an instinct of choice. In the end he
should be able almost at a glance to judge rightly whether a book is
worthy of attention. In the meanwhile he need not go astray if he follow
the lead of trustworthy experts.
In accepting the opinions of others it is of course proper to use some
caution, and above all things it is important to be guided by common
sense. The market is full of quack mental as well as of quack physical
nostrums. There is a large and enterprising body of publishers who seem
persuaded that they have reduced all literature to a practical
industrial basis by furnishing patent outsides for newspapers and patent
insides for aspiring minds. In these days one becomes intellectual by
prescription, and it is impossible to tell how soon will be advertised
the device of inoculation against illiteracy. Common sense and a sense
of humor save one from many dangers, and it is well to let both have
full play.
I have spoken earlier in these talks of the pleasure of literary study.
One fundamental principle in the selection of books is that it is idle
to read what is not enjoyed. For special information one may read that
which is not attractive save as it serves the purpose of the moment; but
in all reading which is of permanent value for itself, enjoyment is a
prime essential. Reading which is not a pleasure is a barren mistake.
The first duty of the student toward literature and toward himself is
the same,--enjoyment. Either take pleasure in a work of art or let it
alone.
It is idle to force the mind to attend to works which it does not find
pleasurable, and yet it is necessary to read books which are approved as
the masterpieces of literature. Here is a seeming contradiction; but it
must be remembered that it is possible to arouse the mind to interest.
The books which are really worth attention will surely attract and hold
if they are once properly approached and apprehended. If a mind is
indolent, if it is able to enjoy only the marshmallows and chocolate
caramels of literature, it is not to be fed solely on literary
sweetmeats. Whatever is read should be enjoyed, but it by no means
follows that whatever can be enjoyed should be read. It is possible to
cultivate the habit of enjoying what is good, what is vital, as it is
easy to sink into the stupid and slipshod way of caring for nothing
which calls for mental exertion. It requires training and purpose. The
love of the best in art is possessed as a gift of nature by only a few,
and the rest of us must labor for it. The full appreciation of the work
of a master-mind comes to no one without effort. The reward of the
student of literature is great, but his labor also is great. Literature
is not like an empty public square, which even a blind beggar may cross
almost unconsciously. It more resembles an enchanted castle beset with
spell-infested forests and ghoul-haunted mountains; a place into which
only that knight may enter who is willing to fight his way through
dangers and difficulties manifold; yet a place, too, of infinite riches
and joys beyond the imaginings of dull souls.
It is a popular fallacy that art is to be appreciated without especial
education. Common feeling holds that the reader, like the poet, is born
and not made. It is generally assumed that one is endowed by nature with
an appreciation of art as one is born with a pug nose. The only element
of truth in this is the fact that all human powers are modified by the
personal equation. One is endowed at birth with perceptions fine and
keen, while another lacks them; but no matter what one's natural powers,
there must be cultivation. This cultivation costs care, labor, and
patience. It is, it is true, labor which is in itself delightful, and
one might easily do worse than to follow it for itself without thought
of other end; but it is still labor, and labor strenuous and long
enduring.
It is first necessary, then, to make an endeavor to become interested in
whatever it has seemed worth while to read. The student should try
earnestly to discover wherein others have found it good. Every reader
is at liberty to like or to dislike even a masterpiece; but he is not in
a position even to have an opinion of it until he appreciates why it has
been admired. He must set himself to realize not what is bad in a book,
but what is good. The common theory that the critical faculties are best
developed by training the mind to detect shortcomings is as vicious as
it is false. Any carper can find the faults in a great work; it is only
the enlightened who can discover all its merits. It will seldom happen
that a sincere effort to appreciate a good book will leave the reader
uninterested. If it does, it is generally safe to conclude that the mind
is not ready for this particular work. There must be degrees of
development; and the same literature is not adapted to all stages. If
you cannot honestly enjoy a thing you are from one cause or another in
no condition to read it. Either the time is not ripe or it has no
message for your especial temperament. To force yourself to read what
does not please you is like forcing yourself to eat that for which you
have no appetite. There may be some nourishment in one case as in the
other, but there is far more likely to be indigestion.
An essential condition of profitable reading is that it shall be
intelligent. The extent to which some persons can go on reading without
having any clear idea of what they read is stupefyingly amazing! You may
any day talk in society with persons who have gone through exhaustive
courses of reading, yet who from them have no more got real ideas than a
painted bee would get honey from a painted flower. Fortunately ordinary
mortals are not so bad as this; but is there one of us who is not
conscious of having tobogganed down many and many a page without pausing
thoroughly to seize and master a single thought by the way?
It is well to make in the mind a sharp distinction between apprehending
and comprehending. The difference is that between sighting and bagging
your game. To run hastily along through a book, catching sight of the
meaning of the author, getting a general notion of what he would
convey,--casually apprehending his work,--is one thing; it is quite
another to enter fully into the thoughts and emotions embodied, to make
them yours by thorough appreciation,--in a word to comprehend. The
trouble which Gibbon says he took to get the most out of what he read
must strike ordinary readers with amazement:--
After glancing my eye over the design and order of a new book, I
suspended the perusal until I had finished the task of
self-examination; till I had resolved in a solitary walk all that I
knew or believed or had thought on the subject of the whole work or of
some particular chapter; I was then qualified to discern how much the
author added to my original stock; and if I was sometimes satisfied by
the agreement, I was sometimes armed by the opposition, of our ideas.
It often happens that the average person does not read with sufficient
deliberation even to apprehend what is plainly said. If there be a
succession of particulars, for instance, it is only the exceptional
reader who takes the time to comprehend fully each in turn. Suppose the
passage to be the lines in the "Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of
Chamouni:"--
Your strength, your speed, your fury, and your joy,
Unceasing thunder, and eternal foam.
The ordinary student gets a general and probably a vague impression of
cataracts, dashing down from the glacier-heaped hills; and that is the
whole of it. A poet does not put in a succession of words like this
merely to fill out his line. Coleridge in writing undoubtedly realized
the torrent so fully in his imagination that it was as if he were
beholding it. "What strength!" was his first thought. "What speed," was
the next. "What fury; yet, too, what joy!" Then the ideas of that fury
and that joy made it seem to him as if the noise of the waters was the
voice in which these emotions were embodied, and as if the unceasing
thunder were a sentient cry; while the eternal foam was the visible sign
of the mighty passions of the "five wild torrents, fiercely glad."
In the dirge in "Cymbeline," Shakespeare writes:--
Fear no more the frown o' the great,
Thou art past the tyrant's stroke;
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak;
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.
As you read, do you comprehend the exquisite propriety of the succession
of the ideas? Death has removed Fidele from the possibility of
misfortune; even the lords of the world can trouble no longer. Nay,
more; it has done away with all need of care for the sordid details of
every-day life, food and raiment. All that earth holds is now alike
indifferent to the dead; the pale, wind-shaken reed is neither more nor
less important than the steadfast and enduring oak. And to this, the
thought runs on, must come even the mighty, the sceptred ones of earth.
Not learning, which is mightier than temporal power, can save from this;
not physic itself, of which the mission is to fight with death, can in
the end escape the universal doom.
All follow this, and come to dust.
Hurried over as a catalogue, to take one example more, how dull is the
following from Marlowe's "Jew of Malta;" but how sumptuous it becomes
when the reader gloats over the name of each jewel as would do the Jew
who is speaking:--
The wealthy Moor, that in the eastern rocks
Without control can pick his riches up,
And in his house heap pearls like pebble-stones,
Receive them free, and sell them by the weight
Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts,
Jacinths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds,
Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds,
And seld-seen costly stones of so great price
As one of them indifferently rated,
And of a carat of this quantity,
May serve, in peril of calamity,
To ransom great kings from captivity.
I have not much sympathy with the trick of reading into an author all
sorts of far-fetched meanings of which he can never have dreamed; but,
as it is only by observing these niceties of language that a writer is
able to convey delicate shades of thought and feeling, so it is only by
appreciation of them that the reader is able to grasp completely the
intention which lies wrapped in the verbal form.
To read intelligibly, it is often necessary to know something of the
conditions under which a thing was written. There are allusions to the
history of the time or to contemporary events which would be meaningless
to one ignorant of the world in which the author lived. To see any point
to the fiery and misplaced passage in "Lycidas" in which Milton
denounces the hireling priesthood and the ecclesiastic evils of his day,
one must understand something of theological politics. We are aided in
the comprehension of certain passages in the plays of Shakespeare by
familiarity with the conditions of the Elizabethan stage and of the
court intrigues. In so far it is sometimes an advantage to know the
personal history of a writer, and the political and social details of
his time. For the most part the portions which require elaborate
explanation are not of permanent interest or at least not of great
importance. The intelligent reader, however, will not wish to be tripped
up by passages which he cannot understand, and will therefore be likely
to inform himself at least sufficiently to clear up these.
Any reader, moreover, must to some extent know the life and customs of
the people among whom a work is produced. To one who failed to
appreciate wherein the daily existence of the ancient Greeks differed
from that of moderns, Homer would hardly be intelligible. It would be
idle to read Dante under the impression that the Italy of his time was
that of to-day; or to undertake Chaucer without knowing, at least in a
general way, how his England was other than that of our own time. The
force of language at a given epoch, the allusions to contemporary
events, the habits of thought and custom must be understood by him who
would read comprehendingly.
When all is said there will still remain much that must depend upon
individual experience. If one reads in Lowell:--
And there the fount rises; ...
No dew-drop is stiller
In its lupin-leaf setting
Than this water moss-bounded;
one cannot have a clear and lively idea of what is meant who has not
actually seen a furry lupin-leaf, held up like a green, hairy hand, with
its dew-drop, round as a pearl. The context, of course, gives a general
impression of what the poet intended, but unless experience has given
the reader this bit of nature-lore, the color and vitality of the
passage are greatly lessened. One of the priceless advantages to be
gained from a habit of careful reading is the consciousness of the
significance of small things, and in consequence the habit of observing
them carefully. When we have read the bit just quoted, for instance, we
are sure to perceive the beauty of the lupin-leaf with its dew-pearl if
it come in our way. The attention becomes acute, and that which would
otherwise pass unregarded becomes a source of pleasure. The most sure
way to enrich life is to learn to appreciate trifles.
There is a word of warning which should here be spoken to the
over-conscientious student. The desire of doing well may lead to
overdoing. The student, in his anxiety to accomplish his full duty by
separate words, often lets himself become absorbed in them. He drops
unconsciously from the study of literature into the study of philology.
There have been hundreds of painfully learned men who have employed the
whole of their misguided lives in encumbering noble books with
philological excrescences. I do not wish to speak disrespectfully of the
indefatigable clan characterized by Cowper as
Philologists, who chase
A panting syllable through time and space;
Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark,
To Gaul, to Greece and into Noah's ark.
These gentlemen are extremely useful in their way and place; but the
study of philology is not the study of literature. It is at best one of
its humble bond-slaves. A philologist may be minutely acquainted with
every twig in the family-tree of each obsolete word in the entire range
of Elizabethan literature, and yet be as darkly and as completely
ignorant of that glorious world of poetry as the stokers in an ocean
steamer are of the beauty of the sunset seen from the deck. It is often
necessary to know the derivation of a term, and perhaps something of
its history, in order to appreciate its force in a particular usage; but
to go through a book merely to pick out examples for philologic research
is like picking to pieces a mosaic to examine the separate bits of
glass.
While, moreover, attention to the force and value of details is insisted
upon, it must never be forgotten that the whole is of more value than
any or all of its parts. The reader must strive to receive the effect of
a book not only bit by bit, and page by page, and chapter by chapter,
but as a book. There should be in the mind a complete and ample
conception of it as a unit. It is not enough to appreciate the best
passages individually. The work is not ours until it exists in the mind
as a beautiful whole, as single and unbroken as one of those Japanese
crystal globes which look like spheres of living water. He who knows the
worth and beauty of passages is like an explorer. He is neither a
conqueror nor a ruler of the territory he has seen until it is his in
its entirety.
I believe that to comparatively few readers does it occur to make
deliberate and conscious effort to realize works as wholes. The
impression which a book leaves in the thought is of course in some sense
a result of what the book is as a unit; but this is seldom sharply clear
and vivid. The greatest works naturally give the most complete
impression, and the power of producing an effect as a whole is one of
the tests of art. The writer of genius is able so to choose what is
significant, and so to arrange his material that the appreciative
reader cannot fail to receive some one grand and dominating impression.
It is hardly possible, for instance, for any intelligent person to fail
to feel the cumulative passion of "King Lear." The calamities which come
upon the old man connect themselves in the mind of the reader so closely
with one central idea that it is rather difficult to escape from the
dominant idea than difficult to find it. In "Hamlet," on the other hand,
it is by no means easy to gain any complete and adequate grasp of the
play as a unit without careful and intimate study. It is, moreover, not
sure that one has gained a full conception of a work as a whole because
one has an impression even so strong as that which must come to any
receptive reader of "King Lear" or "Othello." To be profoundly touched
by the story is possible without so fully holding the tragedy
comprehendingly in the mind that its poignant meaning kindles the whole
imagination. We have not assimilated that from which we have received
merely fragmentary impressions. The appreciative reading of a really
great book is a profound emotional experience. Individual portions and
notable passages are at best but as incidents of which the real
significance is to be perceived only in the light of the whole.
The power of grasping a work of art as a unit is one which should be
deliberately cultivated. It is hardly likely to come unsought, even to
the most imaginative. It must rest, in the first place, upon a reading
of books as a whole. Whatever in any serious sense is worth reading
once is worth rereading indefinitely. It is idle to hope to grasp a
thing as a whole until one has become familiar with its parts. When once
the details are clear in the mind, it is possible to read with a
distinct and deliberate sense of the share that each passage bears in
the entire purpose. It is necessary, and I may add that it is
enchanting, to reread until the detached points gather themselves
together in the inner consciousness as molecules in a solution gather
themselves into a crystal. The delight of being able to realize what an
author had in mind as a whole is like that of the traveler who at last,
after long days of baffling mists which allowed but broken glimpses here
and there, sees before him the whole of some noble mountain, stripped
clean of clouds, standing sublime between earth and heaven.
Whatever effect a book has must depend largely upon the sympathy between
the reader and the author. To read sympathetically is as fundamental a
condition of good reading as is to read intelligently. It is well known
how impossible it is to talk with a person who is unresponsive, who will
not yield his own mood, and who does not share another's point of view.
On the other hand, we have all tried to listen to speakers with whom it
was not in our power to find ourselves in accord, and the result was
merely unprofitable weariness. For the time being the reader must give
himself up to the mood of the writer; he must follow his guidance, and
receive not only his words but his suggestions with fullest acquiescence
of perception, whatever be the differences of judgment. What Hawthorne
has said of painting is equally applicable to literature:--