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THE BOOK-LOVER.
A Guide to the Best Reading.
BY
JAMES BALDWIN, Ph.D.,
AUTHOR OF “ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LITERARY CRITICISM”,
ETC., ETC.
Whosoever acknowledges himself to be a zealous follower of truth,
of happiness, of wisdom, of science, or even of the faith, must of
necessity make himself a Lover of Books.
RICHARD DE BURY.
CHICAGO:
JANSEN, McCLURG, AND COMPANY.
1885.
Copyright,
By Jansen, McClurg, & Co.
A. D. 1884.
[Illustration]
A Fore Word.
The titlepage of this book explains its plan and purpose. The Courses
of Reading and the Schemes for Practical Study, herein indicated, are
the outgrowth of the Author’s long experience as a lover of books and
director of reading. They have been tested and found to be all that is
claimed for them. As to the large number of quotations in the first
part of the book, they are given in the belief that “in a multitude
of counsels there is wisdom.” And the Author finds consolation and
encouragement in the following words of Emerson: “We are as much
informed of a writer’s genius by what he selects, as by what he
originates. We read the quotation with his eyes, and find a new and
fervent sense.” As the value of the most useful inventions depends
upon the ingenious placing of their parts, so the originality of this
work may be found to lie chiefly in its arrangement. Yet the writer
confidently believes that his readers will enjoy that which he has
borrowed, and possibly find aid and encouragement in that which he
claims as his own; and therefore this book is sent out with the hope
that book-lovers will find in it a safe Guide to the Best Reading.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
CONTENTS.
Page
PRELUDE: IN PRAISE OF BOOKS 9
CHAPTER
I. ON THE CHOICE OF BOOKS 23
II. HOW TO READ 42
III. ON THE VALUE AND USE OF LIBRARIES 56
IV. BOOKS FOR EVERY SCHOLAR 69
V. WHAT BOOKS SHALL YOUNG FOLKS READ? 84
VI. HINTS ON THE FORMATION OF SCHOOL LIBRARIES 108
VII. COURSES OF READING IN HISTORY 113
VIII. COURSES OF READING IN GEOGRAPHY AND NATURAL HISTORY 138
IX. PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 148
X. POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE SCIENCE OF GOVERNMENT 161
XI. ON THE PRACTICAL STUDY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 168
AN AFTER WORD 196
INDEX 197
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
PRELUDE.
In Praise of Books.
Let us consider how great a commodity of doctrine exists in Books;
how easily, how secretly, how safely they expose the nakedness of
human ignorance without putting it to shame. These are the masters
who instruct us without rods and ferules, without hard words and
anger, without clothes or money. If you approach them, they are not
asleep; if investigating you interrogate them, they conceal nothing;
if you mistake them, they never grumble; if you are ignorant, they
cannot laugh at you.
You only, O Books, are liberal and independent. You give to all who
ask, and enfranchise all who serve you assiduously. Truly, you are
the ears filled with most palatable grains. You are golden urns
in which manna is laid up; rocks flowing with honey, or rather,
indeed, honeycombs; udders most copiously yielding the milk of life;
store-rooms ever full; the four-streamed river of Paradise, where
the human mind is fed, and the arid intellect moistened and watered;
fruitful olives; vines of Engaddi; fig-trees knowing no sterility;
burning lamps to be ever held in the hand.
The library, therefore, of wisdom is more precious than all riches;
and nothing that can be wished for is worthy to be compared with it.
Whosoever acknowledges himself to be a zealous follower of truth,
of happiness, of wisdom, of science, or even of the faith, must of
necessity make himself a Lover of Books.
RICHARD DE BURY, 1344.
Books are friends whose society is extremely agreeable to me; they
are of all ages, and of every country. They have distinguished
themselves both in the cabinet and in the field, and obtained high
honors for their knowledge of the sciences. It is easy to gain access
to them; for they are always at my service, and I admit them to my
company, and dismiss them from it, whenever I please. They are never
troublesome, but immediately answer every question I ask them. Some
relate to me the events of past ages, while others reveal to me
the secrets of Nature. Some teach me how to live, and others how to
die. Some, by their vivacity, drive away my cares and exhilarate my
spirits; while others give fortitude to my mind, and teach me the
important lesson how to restrain my desires, and to depend wholly
on myself. They open to me, in short, the various avenues of all
the arts and sciences, and upon their information I safely rely in
all emergencies. In return for all these services, they only ask me
to accommodate them with a convenient chamber in some corner of my
humble habitation, where they may repose in peace; for these friends
are more delighted by the tranquility of retirement, than with the
tumults of society.
FRANCESCO PETRARCA.
Books are the Glasse of Counsell to dress ourselves by. They are
Life’s best Business: Vocation to them hath more Emolument coming
in, than all the other busie Termes of Life. They are Feelesse
Counsellours, no delaying Patrons, of easie Accesse, and kind
Expedition, never sending away any Client or Petitioner. They are
for Company, the best Friends; in doubts, Counsellours; in Damp,
Comforters; Time’s Perspective; the home Traveller’s Ship, or Horse;
the busie Man’s best Recreation; the Opiate of idle Wearinesse; the
Mind’s best Ordinary; Nature’s Garden and Seed-plot of Immortality.
A WRITER OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
(quoted in “Allibone’s Dictionary”).
But how can I live here without my books? I really seem to myself
crippled and only half myself; for if, as the great Orator used to
say, arms are a soldier’s members, surely books are the limbs of
scholars. Corasius says: “Of a truth, he who would deprive me of
books, my old friends, would take away all the delight of my life;
nay, I will even say, all desire of living.”
BALTHASAR BONIFACIUS RHODIGINUS, 1656.
For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency
of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they
are; nay, they do preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and
extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are
as lively and as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon’s
teeth, and, being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed
men.... Many a man lives, a burden to the earth; but a good book is
the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up
on purpose for a life beyond life.
JOHN MILTON.
Books are a guide in youth, and an entertainment for age. They
support us under solitude, and keep us from being a burden to
ourselves. They help us to forget the crossness of men and things,
compose our cares and our passions, and lay our disappointments
asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the
dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their
conversation.
JEREMY COLLIER.
God be thanked for books! They are the voices of the distant and the
dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are
the true levellers. They give to all who will faithfully use them,
the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our
race. No matter how poor I am; no matter though the prosperous of my
own time will not enter my obscure dwelling; if the sacred writers
will enter and take up their abode under my roof,—if Milton will
cross my threshold to sing to me of Paradise; and Shakspeare to open
to me the worlds of imagination and the workings of the human heart;
and Franklin to enrich me with his practical wisdom,—I shall not pine
for want of intellectual companionship, and I may become a cultivated
man, though excluded from what is called the best society in the
place where I live.
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING.
In a corner of my house I have books,—the miracle of all my
possessions, more wonderful than the wishing-cap of the Arabian
tales; for they transport me instantly, not only to all places, but
to all times. By my books I can conjure up before me to a momentary
existence many of the great and good men of past ages, and for my
individual satisfaction they seem to act again the most renowned
of their achievements; the orators declaim for me, the historians
recite, the poets sing.
DR. ARNOTT.
Wondrous, indeed, is the virtue of a true book! Not like a dead city
of stones, yearly crumbling, yearly needing repair; more like a
tilled field, but then a spiritual field; like a spiritual tree, let
me rather say, it stands from year to year and from age to age (we
have books that already number some hundred and fifty human ages);
and yearly comes its new produce of leaves (commentaries, deductions,
philosophical, political systems; or were it only sermons, pamphlets,
journalistic essays), every one of which is talismanic and
thaumaturgic, for it can persuade man. O thou who art able to write a
book, which once in two centuries or oftener there is a man gifted
to do, envy not him whom they name city-builder, and inexpressibly
pity him whom they name conqueror or city-burner! Thou, too, art a
conqueror and victor; but of the true sort, namely, over the Devil.
Thou, too, hast built what will outlast all marble and metal, and be
a wonder-bringing city of mind, a temple and seminary and prophetic
mount, whereto all kindreds of the earth will pilgrim.
THOMAS CARLYLE.
Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select,
the more enjoyable; and like these are approached with diffidence,
nor sought too familiarly nor too often, having the precedence only
when friends tire. The most mannerly of companions, accessible at all
times, in all moods, they frankly declare the author’s mind, without
giving offence. Like living friends, they too have their voice and
physiognomies, and their company is prized as old acquaintances.
We seek them in our need of counsel or of amusement, without
impertinence or apology, sure of having our claims allowed. A good
book justifies our theory of personal supremacy, keeping this fresh
in the memory and perennial. What were days without such fellowship?
We were alone in the world without it.
A. BRONSON ALCOTT.
Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company
of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all
civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the
results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid
and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by
etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom
friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers
of another age. We owe to books those general benefits which come
from high intellectual action. Thus, I think, we often owe to them
the perception of immortality. They impart sympathetic activity to
the moral power. Go with mean people, and you think life is mean.
Then read Plutarch, and the world is a proud place, peopled with men
of positive quality, with heroes and demi-gods standing around us,
who will not let us sleep. Then they address the imagination: only
poetry inspires poetry. They become the organic culture of the time.
College education is the reading of certain books which the common
sense of all scholars agrees will represent the science already
accumulated.... In the highest civilization the book is still the
highest delight.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
A great book that comes from a great thinker,—it is a ship of
thought, deep-freighted with truth, with beauty too. It sails the
ocean, driven by the winds of heaven, breaking the level sea of life
into beauty where it goes, leaving behind it a train of sparkling
loveliness, widening as the ship goes on. And what a treasure it
brings to every land, scattering the seeds of truth, justice, love,
and piety, to bless the world in ages yet to come!
THEODORE PARKER.
What is a great love of books? It is something like a personal
introduction to the great and good men of all past times. Books, it
is true, are silent as you see them on their shelves; but, silent
as they are, when I enter a library I feel as if almost the dead
were present, and I know if I put questions to these books they will
answer me with all the faithfulness and fulness which has been left
in them by the great men who have left the books with us.
JOHN BRIGHT.
I love my books as drinkers love their wine;
The more I drink, the more they seem divine;
With joy elate my soul in love runs o’er,
And each fresh draught is sweeter than before!
Books bring me friends where’er on earth I be,—
Solace of solitude, bonds of society.
I love my books! they are companions dear,
Sterling in worth, in friendship most sincere;
Here talk I with the wise in ages gone,
And with the nobly gifted in our own:
If love, joy, laughter, sorrow please my mind,
Love, joy, grief, laughter in my books I find.
FRANCIS BENNOCH.
Books are the windows through which the soul looks out.
HENRY WARD BEECHER.
Books are our household gods; and we cannot prize them too highly.
They are the only gods in all the mythologies that are beautiful
and unchangeable; for they betray no man, and love their lovers. I
confess myself an idolater of this literary religion, and am grateful
for the blessed ministry of books. It is a kind of heathenism which
needs no missionary funds, no Bible even, to abolish it; for the
Bible itself caps the peak of this new Olympus, and crowns it with
sublimity and glory. Amongst the many things we have to be thankful
for, as the result of modern discoveries, surely this of printed
books is the highest of all; and I, for one, am so sensible of its
merits that I never think of the name of Gutenberg without feelings
of veneration and homage.
JANUARY SEARLE.
The only true equalizers in the world are books; the only
treasure-house open to all comers is a library; the only wealth
which will not decay is knowledge; the only jewel which you can
carry beyond the grave is wisdom. To live in this equality, to share
in these treasures, to possess this wealth, and to secure this
jewel may be the happy lot of every one. All that is needed for the
acquisition of these inestimable treasures is the love of books.
J. A. LANGFORD.
Let us thank God for books. When I consider what some books have done
for the world, and what they are doing; how they keep up our hope,
awaken new courage and faith, soothe pain, give an ideal life to
those whose homes are hard and cold, bind together distant ages and
foreign lands, create new worlds of beauty, bring down truths from
heaven,—I give eternal blessings for this gift, and pray that we may
use it aright, and abuse it not.
JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE.
Books, we know,
Are a substantial world, both pure and good;
Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
Our pastime and our happiness will grow.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.
Precious and priceless are the blessings which books scatter around
our daily paths. We walk, in imagination, with the noblest spirits,
through the most sublime and enchanting regions,—regions which, to
all that is lovely in the forms and colors of earth,
“Add the gleam,
The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration and the poet’s dream.”
A motion of the hand brings all Arcadia to sight. The war of Troy
can, at our bidding, rage in the narrowest chamber. Without stirring
from our firesides, we may roam to the most remote regions of the
earth, or soar into realms where Spenser’s shapes of unearthly beauty
flock to meet us, where Milton’s angels peal in our ears the choral
hymns of Paradise. Science, art, literature, philosophy,—all that
man has thought, all that man has done,—the experience that has
been bought with the sufferings of a hundred generations,—all are
garnered up for us in the world of books. There, among realities, in
a “substantial world,” we move with the crowned kings of thought.
There our minds have a free range, our hearts a free utterance.
Reason is confined within none of the partitions which trammel it in
life. In that world, no divinity hedges a king, no accident of rank
or fashion ennobles a dunce or shields a knave. We can select our
companions from among the most richly gifted of the sons of God; and
they are companions who will not desert us in poverty, or sickness,
or disgrace.
EDWIN P. WHIPPLE.
My latest passion shall be for books.
FRIEDRICH II. OF PRUSSIA.
For what a world of books offers itself, in all subjects, arts,
and sciences, to the sweet content and capacity of the reader? In
arithmetic, geometry, perspective, optics, astronomy, architecture,
_sculptura_, _pictura_, of which so many and such elaborate treatises
are of late written; in mechanics and their mysteries, military
matters, navigation, riding of horses, fencing, swimming, gardening,
planting, etc.... What so sure, what so pleasant? What vast tomes are
extant in law, physic, and divinity, for profit, pleasure, practice,
speculation, in verse or prose! Their names alone are the subject of
whole volumes; we have thousands of authors of all sorts, many great
libraries, full well furnished, like so many dishes of meat, served
out for several palates, and he is a very block that is affected with
none of them.
ROBERT BURTON.
Except a living man, there is nothing more wonderful than a book!—a
message to us from the dead,—from human souls whom we never saw,
who lived perhaps thousands of miles away; and yet these, on those
little sheets of paper, speak to us, amuse us, vivify us, teach
us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers. We ought to
reverence books, to look at them as useful and mighty things. If they
are good and true, ... they are the message of Christ, the maker of
all things, the teacher of all truth.
CHARLES KINGSLEY.
Golden volumes! richest treasures!
Objects of delicious pleasures!
You my eyes rejoicing please,
You my hands in rapture seize.
Brilliant wits and musing sages,
Lights who beamed through many ages,
Left to your conscious leaves their story,
And dared to trust you with their glory;
And now their hope of fame achieved,
Dear volumes!—you have not deceived.
HENRY RANTZAU.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER I.
On the Choice of Books.
The choice of books is not the least part of the duty of a
scholar. If he would become a man, and worthy to deal with
manlike things, he must read only the bravest and noblest
books,—books forged at the heart and fashioned by the
intellect of a godlike man.—JANUARY SEARLE.
The most important question for you to ask yourself, be you teacher or
scholar, is this: What books shall I read? For him who has inclination
to read, there is no dearth of reading matter, and it is obtainable
almost for the asking. Books are in a manner thrust upon you almost
daily. Shall you read without discrimination whatever comes most
readily to hand? As well say that you will accept as a friend and
companion every man whom you meet on the street. Shall you read even
every good book that comes in your way, simply because it is harmless
and interesting? It is not every harmless book, nor indeed every good
book, that will make your mind the richer for the reading of it.
Never, perhaps, has the right choice of books been more difficult than
at present; and never did it behoove more strongly both teachers and
scholars to look well to the character of that which they read.
First, then, let us consider what books we are to avoid. All will agree
that those which are really and absolutely bad should be shunned as
we shun a pestilence. In these last years of the nineteenth century
there is no more prolific cause of evil than bad books. There are many
books so utterly vile that there is no mistaking their character, and
no question as to whether they should be avoided. There are others
which are a thousand-fold more dangerous because they come to us
disguised,—“wolves in sheep’s clothing,”—affecting a character of
harmlessness, if not of sanctity. I have heard those who ought to know
better, laugh at the silly jokes of a very silly book, and offer by
way of excuse that there was nothing _very_ bad in it. I have heard
teachers recommend to their pupils reading matter which, to say the
least, was of a very doubtful character. Now, the only excuse that can
be offered in such cases is ignorance,—“I didn’t know there was any
harm in the book.” But the teacher who through ignorance poisons the
moral character and checks the mental growth of his pupils is as guilty
of criminal carelessness as the druggist’s clerk who by mistake sells
arsenic for quinine. Step down and out of that responsible position
which you are in no wise qualified to fill! The direction of the
pupils’ habits of reading, the choice of reading matter for them, is by
no means the least of the teacher’s duties.
The elder Pliny, eighteen hundred years ago, was accustomed to say that
no book was so bad but that some part of it might be read with profit.
This may have been true in Pliny’s time; but it is very far from
correct now-a-days. A large number of books, and many which attain an
immense circulation, are but the embodiment of evil from beginning to
end; others, although not absolutely and aggressively bad, contain not
a single line that can be read with profit.
What are the sure criterions of a bad book? There is no better
authority on this subject than the Rev. Robert Collyer. He says: “If
when I read a book about God, I find that it has put Him farther from
me; or about man, that it has put me farther from him; or about this
universe, that it has shaken down upon it a new look of desolation,
turning a green field into a wild moor; or about life, that it has made
it seem a little less worth living, on all accounts, than it was; or
about moral principles, that they are not quite so clear and strong as
they were when this author began to talk;—then I know that on any of
these five cardinal things in the life of man,—his relations to God,
to his fellows, to the world about him, and the world within him, and
the great principles on which all things stable centre,—_that_, for me,
is a bad book. It may chime in with some lurking appetite in my own
nature, and so seem to be as sweet as honey to my taste; but it comes
to bitter, bad results. It may be food for another; I can say nothing
to that. He may be a pine while I am a palm. I only know this, that in
these great first things, if the book I read shall touch them at all,
it shall touch them to my profit or I will not read it. Right and wrong
shall grow more clear; life in and about me more divine; I shall come
nearer to my fellows, and God nearer to me, or the thing is a poison.
Faust, or Calvin, or Carlyle, if any one of these cardinal things is
the grain and the grist of the book, and that is what it comes to when
I read it, I am being drugged and poisoned; and the sooner I know it
the better. I want bread, and meat, and milk, not brandy, or opium, or
hasheesh.”[1]
And Robert Southey, the poet, expresses nearly the same thing: “Young
readers,—you whose hearts are open, whose understandings are not yet
hardened, and whose feelings are not yet exhausted nor encrusted with
the world,—take from me a better rule than any professors of criticism
will teach you! Would you know whether the tendency of a book is good
or evil, examine in what state of mind you lay it down. Has it induced
you to suspect that what you have been accustomed to think unlawful may
after all be innocent, and that may be harmless which you have hitherto
been taught to think dangerous? Has it tended to make you dissatisfied
and impatient under the control of others, and disposed you to relax in
that self-government without which both the laws of God and man tell
us there can be no virtue, and, consequently, no happiness? Has it
attempted to abate your admiration and reverence for what is great
and good, and to diminish in you the love of your country and your
fellow-creatures? Has it addressed itself to your pride, your vanity,
your selfishness, or any other of your evil propensities? Has it
defiled the imagination with what is loathsome, and shocked the heart
with what is monstrous? Has it disturbed the sense of right and wrong
which the Creator has implanted in the human soul? If so, if you are
conscious of any or all of these effects, or if, having escaped from
all, you have felt that such were the effects it was intended to
produce, throw the book in the fire, whatever name it may bear in the
titlepage! Throw it in the fire, young man, though it should have
been the gift of a friend; young lady, away with the whole set, though
it should be the prominent furniture of a rosewood bookcase.”[2]
“It is the case with literature as with life,” says Arthur
Schopenhauer, the German philosopher. “Wherever we turn we come upon
the incorrigible mob of humankind, whose name is Legion, swarming
everywhere, damaging everything, as flies in summer. Hence the
multiplicity of bad books, those exuberant weeds of literature which
choke the true corn. Such books rob the public of time, money, and
attention, which ought properly to belong to good literature and
noble aims; and they are written with a view merely to make money or
occupation. They are therefore not merely useless, but injurious. Nine
tenths of our current literature has no other end but to inveigle a
thaler or two out of the public pocket, for which purpose author,
publisher, and printer are leagued together.... Of bad books we can
never read too little; of the good, never too much. The bad are
intellectual poison, and undermine the understanding.”[3]
From Thomas Carlyle’s inaugural address at Edinburgh on the occasion
of his installation as rector of the University in 1866, I quote
the following potent passage: “I do not know whether it has been
sufficiently brought home to you that there are two kinds of books.
When a man is reading on any kind of subject, in most departments of
books,—in all books, if you take it in a wide sense,—he will find
that there is a division into good books and bad books: everywhere
a good kind of a book and a bad kind of a book. I am not to assume
that you are unacquainted or ill-acquainted with this plain fact; but
I may remind you that it is becoming a very important consideration
in our day.... There is a number, a frightfully increasing number, of
books that are decidedly, to the readers of them, not useful. But an
ingenious reader will learn, also, that a certain number of books were
written by a supremely noble kind of people; not a very great number of
books, but still a number fit to occupy all your reading industry, do
adhere more or less to that side of things. In short, as I have written
it down somewhere else, I conceive that books are like men’s souls,
divided into sheep and goats. Some few are going up, and carrying us
up, heavenward; calculated, I mean, to be of priceless advantage in
teaching,—in forwarding the teaching of all generations. Others, a
frightful multitude, are going down, down; doing ever the more and the
wider and the wilder mischief. Keep a strict eye on that latter class
of books, my young friends!”
Speaking of those books whose inward character and influence it is hard
at first to discern, John Ruskin says: “Avoid especially that class
of literature which has a knowing tone; it is the most poisonous of
all. Every good book, or piece of book, is full of admiration and awe:
it may contain firm assertion or stern satire, but it never sneers
coldly, nor asserts haughtily; and it always leads you to reverence
or love something with your whole heart. It is not always easy to
distinguish the satire of the venomous race of books from the satire
of the noble and pure ones; but, in general, you may notice that the
cold-blooded Crustacean and Batrachian books will sneer at sentiment,
and the warm-blooded, human books at sin.... Much of the literature of
the present day, though good to be read by persons of ripe age, has a
tendency to agitate rather than confirm, and leaves its readers too
frequently in a helpless or hopeless indignation, the worst possible
state into which the mind of youth can be thrown. It may, indeed,
become necessary for you, as you advance in life, to set your hand
to things that need to be altered in the world, or apply your heart
chiefly to what must be pitied in it, or condemned; but for a young
person the safest temper is one of reverence, and the safest place one
of obscurity. Certainly at present, and perhaps through all your life,
your teachers are wisest when they make you content in quiet virtue;
and that literature and art are best for you which point out, in common
life and familiar things, the objects for hopeful labor and for humble
love.”[4]
There would be fewer bad books in the world if readers were properly
informed and warned of their character; and we may believe that the
really vicious books would soon cease to exist if their makers and
publishers were popularly regarded with the same detestation as other
corrupters of the public morals. “He who has published an injurious
book,” says Robert South, “sins, as it were in his very grave; corrupts
others while he is rotting himself.” Addison says much the same thing:
“Writers of great talents, who employ their parts in propagating
immorality, and seasoning vicious sentiments with wit and humor, are
to be looked upon as the pests of society and the enemies of mankind.
They leave books behind them to scatter infection and destroy their
posterity. They act the counterparts of a Confucius or a Socrates, and
seem to have been sent into the world to deprave human nature, and sink
it into the condition of brutality.”[5]
And William Cobbett is still more severe in his denunciation. In his
“Advice to Young Men,” he says: “I hope that your taste will keep you
aloof from the writings of those detestable villains who employ the
powers of their mind in debauching the minds of others, or in endeavors
to do it. They present their poison in such captivating forms that it
requires great virtue and resolution to withstand their temptations;
and they have, perhaps, done a thousand times as much mischief in the
world as all the infidels and atheists put together. These men ought
to be held in universal abhorrence, and never spoken of but with
execration.”
But the shunning of bad books is only one of the problems presented
to us in the choice of our reading. In the great multitude of really
good and valuable books, how shall we choose those which are of the
most vital importance to us to know? The universal habit of desultory
reading—reading simply to be entertained—is a habit not to be indulged
in, nor encouraged, by scholars or by those who aspire to the station
of teachers. There are perhaps a score of books which should be read
and studied by every one who claims the title of reader; but, aside
from these, each person should determine, through a process of rigid
self-examination, what course of reading and what books are likely to
produce the most profitable results to him. Find out, if possible, what
is your special bent of mind. What line of inquiry or investigation is
the most congenial to your taste or mental capacity? Having determined
this question, let your reading all centre upon that topic of study
which you have made your own,—let it be Literature, Science, History,
Art, or any of the innumerable subdivisions of these subjects. In other
words, choose a specialty, and follow it with an eye single to it alone.
Says Frederic Harrison: “Every book that we take up without a purpose
is an opportunity lost of 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.... We know that
books differ in value as much as diamonds differ from the sand on the
sea-shore, 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 effort 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....
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.”[6]
“It is of paramount importance,” says Schopenhauer, “to acquire the art
_not_ to read; in other words, of not reading such books as occupy the
public mind, or even those which make a noise in the world, and reach
several editions in their first and last year of existence. We should
recollect that he who writes for fools finds an enormous audience, and
we should devote the ever scant leisure of our circumscribed existence
to the master-spirits of all ages and nations, those who tower over
humanity, and whom the voice of Fame proclaims: only such writers
cultivate and instruct us.”[7]
And John Ruskin offers the following pertinent advice to beginners:
“It is of the greatest importance to you, not only for art’s sake, but
for all kinds of sake, in these days of book deluge, to keep out of
the salt swamps of literature, and live on a little rocky island of
your own, with a spring and a lake in it, pure and good. I cannot, of
course, suggest the choice of your library to you, for every several
mind needs different books; but there are some books which we all
need, and assuredly, if you read Homer, Plato, Æschylus, Herodotus,
Dante, Shakspeare, and Spenser as much as you ought, you will not
require wide enlargement of your shelves to right and left of them
for purposes of perpetual study. Among modern books, avoid generally
magazine and review literature. Sometimes it may contain a useful
abridgment or a wholesome piece of criticism; but the chances are ten
to one it will either waste your time or mislead you. If you want to
understand any subject whatever, read the best book upon it you can
hear of; not a review of the book.... A common book will often give you
much amusement, but it is only a noble book which will give you dear
friends.”
If any of us could recall the time which we have spent in desultory and
profitless reading, and devote it now faithfully to the prosecution
of that special line of study which ought, long ago, to have been
chosen, how largely we might add to our fund of useful knowledge, and
how grandly we might increase our intellectual stature! “And again,”
remarks James Herbert Morse, “if I could recover the hours idly given
to the newspaper, not for my own gratification, but solely for my
neighbor at the breakfast-table, I could compass a solid course of
English and American history, get at the antecedents of political
parties in the two countries, and give the reasons for the existence of
Gladstone and Parnell, of Blaine and Edmunds, in modern politics—and
there is undoubtedly a reason for them all. Two columns a day in the
newspapers—which I could easily have spared, for they were given mainly
to murder-trials and the search for corpses, or to the romance of the
reporter concerning the same—have during the last ten years absorbed
just about the time I might have spent in reading a very respectable
course in history,—one embracing, say, Curtius and Grote for Greece,
Mommsen, Merivale, and Gibbon for Rome, Macaulay and Green for my
roots in Saxondom, Bancroft, Hildreth, and Palfrey for the ancestral
tree in America, together with a very notable excursion into Spain
and Holland with Motley and Prescott,—a course which I consider very
desirable, and one which should set up a man of middle age very fairly
in historical knowledge. I am sure I could have saved this amount out
of any ten years of my newspaper reading alone, without cutting off any
portion of that really valuable contribution for which the daily paper
is to be honored, and which would be needed to make me an intelligent
man in the history of my own times.”[8]
It is not necessary that, in selecting a library or in choosing what
you will read, you should have many books at your disposal. A few
books, well chosen and carefully read, will be of infinitely more
value to you than any miscellaneous collection, however large. It is
possible for “the man of one book” to be better equipped in knowledge
and literary attainments than he whose shelves are loaded with all the
fashionable literature of the day. If your means will not permit you
the luxury of a library, buy one book, or a few books, chosen with
special reference to the line of reading which you have determined
upon. Let no honey-mouthed book-agent persuade you to buy of his wares,
unless they bear exactly upon your specialty. You cannot afford to
waste money on mere catchpenny or machine publications, whose only
recommendation is that they are harmless and that they sell well. That
man is to be envied who can say, “I have a library of fifty or of a
hundred volumes, all relating to my chosen line of thought, and not a
single inferior or worthless volume among them.”
I have before me a list of books,—“books fashioned by the intellect
of godlike men,”—books which every person who aspires to the rank
of teacher or scholar should regard as his inheritance from the
master-minds of the ages. If you know these books—or some of them—you
know much of that which is best in the great world of letters. You
cannot afford to live in ignorance of them.
Plato’s Dialogues (Jowett’s translation).
The Orations of Demosthenes on the Crown.
Bacon’s Essays.
Burke’s Orations and Political Essays.
Macaulay’s Essays.
Carlyle’s Essays.
Webster’s Select Speeches.
Emerson’s Essays.
The Essays of Elia, by Charles Lamb.
Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott.
David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens.
Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray.
Hypatia, by Charles Kingsley.
The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot.
The Marble Faun, by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
The Sketch Book, by Washington Irving.
Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo.
Wilhelm Meister, by Goethe (Carlyle’s trans.).
Don Quixote, by Cervantes.
Homer’s Iliad (Derby’s or Chapman’s translation).
Homer’s Odyssey (Bryant’s translation).
Dante’s Divina Commedia (Longfellow’s trans.).
Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Shakspeare’s Works.
Mrs. Browning’s Poems.
Longfellow’s Poetical Works.
Goethe’s Faust (Bayard Taylor’s translation).
I have named but twenty-five authors; but each of these, in his
own line of thought and endeavor, stands first in the long roll of
immortals. When you have the opportunity to make the acquaintance of
such as these, will you waste your time with writers whom you would be
ashamed to number among your personal friends? “Will you go and gossip
with your housemaid or your stable boy, when you may talk with kings
and queens, while this eternal court is open to you, with its society
wide as the world, multitudinous as its days, the chosen, the mighty,
of every place and time? Into that you may enter always; in that you
may take fellowship and rank according to your wish; from that, once
entered into it, you can never be outcast but by your own fault; by
your aristocracy of companionship there, your inherent aristocracy will
be assuredly tested, and the motives with which you strive to take high
place in the society of the living, measured, as to all the truth and
sincerity that are in them, by the place you desire to take in this
company of the dead.”[9]
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