What pleasantness of teaching there is in books,--how easy, how
secret! How safely we lay bare the poverty of human ignorance to
books, without feeling any shame! They are masters who instruct
us without rod or ferule, without angry words, without clothes or
money. If you come to them, they are not asleep; if you ask and
inquire of them, they do not withdraw themselves; they do not chide
if you make mistakes; they do not laugh at you if you are ignorant.
O books, who alone are liberal and free, who give to all who ask
of you, and enfranchise all who serve you faithfully.--RICHARD DE
BURY, Bishop of Durham, A. D. 1459.
Enough has been written in praise of books to fill a library. It is not
always so eloquently worded as is the Bishop of Durham’s benediction;
but the same general truths--or fallacies--are repeated with more or
less pride and persuasiveness. At the same time, a lesser library
might be compiled of the warnings uttered by the anxious ones who
hold that the power of books is more potent than benign, and that
if one half of the world’s readers are being led gloriously to high
and noble truths, the other half is being vitiated by an influence
which makes for paltriness and degradation. Under all circumstances,
we are asked to believe that we are dominated by the printed page.
It is this conviction which induces so much of austerity--not to say
of censoriousness--in our counsellors, whose upbraidings are but the
echoes of those sterner protests with which church and state were wont
in earlier days to direct the reading courses of the public. That
books have always been deemed formidable antagonists is proven by
their frequent condemnation. The fires that were kindled for sorcerers
and for heretics flamed just as fiercely for the stubborn volumes
which passed the border-land of orthodoxy. Calvin burned all the
pamphlets and manuscripts of Servetus at the same time that he burned
their author; in consequence of which thoroughness, “Christianismi
Restitutio” is said to be one of the rarest dissertations in the world.
For some books that perished at the stake the antiquarian can never
mourn enough. An act passed in the short reign of King Edward VI
commanded the wholesale destruction of all “antiphones, myssales,
scrayles, processionales, manuelles, legendes, pyes, prymars in Lattyn
or Inglishe, cowchers, journales, ordinales, or other books or writings
whatsoever, heretofore used for the service of the churche, written or
prynted in the Inglishe or Lattyn tongue.” Owners of these precious
volumes were commanded to give them up (heavy fines being exacted for
disobedience), that they might be “openlye brent, or otherways defaced
and destroied.” None were spared, save the “Prymars in the Inglishe or
Lattyn tongue set forthe by the late Kinge of famous memorie, Kinge
Henrie the eight;” and even from such hallowed pages all “invocations
or prayers to saintes” were to be “blotted or clerelye put out.”
Orthodoxy is a costly indulgence. What treasures were lost to the
world, what--
Small rare volumes, dark with tarnished gold,
shrivelled into ashes, that the Book of Common Prayer might rule in
undisputed authority and right!
Queen Elizabeth was strenuously opposed to “schismatical” works,
as well as to those of a political or diplomatic character. With
broad-minded impartiality she burned _all_ books and pamphlets
which presumed to deal--no matter in what spirit--with subjects
she did not wish discussed. Like the old Tory lady who objected to
her Tory butler’s sentiments, seeing no reason why butlers should
have sentiments at all, Elizabeth punished the too effusive piety
and patriotism of her subjects as severely as she punished their
discontent. The hall kitchen of the Stationers’ Company witnessed many
a bonfire of books during her reign; and many an incautious author
discovered with poor Peter Wentworth that “the anger of a Prince is as
the roaring of a Lyon, and even as the messenger of Death.” James I
favoured St. Paul’s churchyard as a spot singularly suitable for the
cremation of books; and Oxford and Cambridge had their own exclusive
_auto-da-fés_ for two centuries and more. Edinburgh, with fine national
feeling, burned Drake’s “Historia Anglo-Scotica,” because its English
tone offended Scottish pride; and England burned the Rev. Arthur Bury’s
“Naked Gospel” in 1690, because she conceived that a rector of Exeter
should veil his truths more decently from the eyes of the feeble and
profane. The last book to achieve such unmerited distinction in Great
Britain was a copy of Mr. Froude’s “Nemesis of Faith,” which, being
discovered in the possession of an Oxford student, was publicly burned
by the Rev. William Sewell, Dean of Exeter, in the college hall, on
the twenty-seventh of February, 1849. “Oxford,” says Mr. James Anson
Farrer, “has always tempered her love for learning with a dislike for
inquiry.” The incident, being at best unusual, gave such a healthy
impetus to the sale of Mr. Froude’s work--which had won no wide
hearing--that it went into a second edition, and became an object of
keen, though temporary, solicitude. Well might the Marquis de Langle
say that burning was as a blue ribbon to any book, inspiring interest,
and insuring sales. There are those who affirm that the “Index
Expurgatorius,” by which the Roman Catholic church still seeks to
restrain the reading of her children, is a similar spur to curiosity.
This I do not believe, having never in my life met a Roman Catholic
who knew what works were or were not upon the “Index,” or who had been
incautious enough to inquire.
The decline of church discipline and the enfeeblement of law permit
books now to die a natural death; but the conviction of their powerful
and perilous authority still lingers in the teacher’s heart. If he
knows, as is often the case, much of letters and little of life, he
magnifies this authority until it seems the dominant influence of the
world. A writer in one of the British quarterlies assures us with
almost incredible seriousness that we are at the mercy of the authors
whom we read.
“We take a silent, innocent-seeming volume into our hands, and, when
we put it down, we shall never again be what we were before.... St.
Augustine opened the book, and one single sentence changed him from
the brilliant, godless, self-satisfied rhetorician into a powerful
religious force. Here, on the other hand, is a youth who opens a mere
magazine article written against his faith. He throws off the early
influence of home like a mantle, and plunges thenceforward into the
‘sunless gulf of doubt,’ with the unspeakable morasses at the bottom.”
This is a little like the man who left the Unitarian church because
“somebody told him it wasn’t true.” How is a soul so sensitive to be
kept in--or out of--any fold? A religion which dissolves before the
persuasions of a magazine article must necessarily be as short-lived as
the love--“the slight, thin sort of inclination”--which is starved, so
Elizabeth Bennett tells us, by a sonnet. “Ten thousand difficulties,”
says Cardinal Newman nobly, “do not make one doubt;” but the thinker
who cannot surmount the first and feeblest of the difficulties should
never have essayed the perilous pathway of the alphabet. Neither
was St. Augustine’s inspiration a flashlight upon darkness. The
“self-satisfied rhetorician” was not converted, like Harlequin, in one
dazzling moment. There had been a long and bitter struggle between the
forces of life and death, of the spirit and the flesh, before the word
of St. Paul penetrated with overwhelming sweetness into a soul cleared
by hard thinking, and cleansed by a passion for perfection.
Man may be an unstable creature,--we have been told so until we believe
it,--but he parts reluctantly from his convictions, and is slow to
break the habits of a lifetime. Hear what Robert Burton has to say
about the obstinate perversity of heretics.
“Single out the most ignorant of them. Convince his understanding. Show
him his errors. Prove to him the grossness and absurdities of his sect.
He will not be persuaded.”
He will not, indeed, whether persuasion take the form of a sermon, a
magazine article, or the stake. Luther said that the more he read the
Fathers of the early Church, the more he found himself offended; which
proves the strength of a mental attitude to resist the most penetrating
of influences. Neither are political heretics any easier to enlighten.
“Who,” asks Lord Coleridge, “ever convinced an antagonist by a speech?”
On the contrary, there is a natural and healthy sentiment of revolt
when views we do not share are set forth with unbroken continuity and
insistence. In the give and take of conversation, in the advance and
retreat of argument, in the swift intrusion of the spoken word, made
overpowering by the charm of personality, we encounter a force too
subtle and personal to be resisted. Unconsciously we yield at some
point to the insidious attack of thoughts and ideas so presented as to
weaken our individual opposition, and adroitly force an entrance to
our souls. But books, like sermons, fail by reason of the smoothness
of their current; because there is no backwater to stir the eddies,
and whirl us into conflict and submission. We feel that, could we have
spent our “mornings in Florence” with Mr. Ruskin, have looked with
him at frescoes, tombs, and pavements, and have disputed at every
point his magnificent assumption of authority, we might have ended by
accepting his most unreasonable and intolerant verdicts. Could we free
our souls by expressing to Mr. John Morley our sentiments concerning
Mr. Gladstone, we might in return be impelled to share the enthusiasm
of the enlightened biographer. But neither Mr. Buskin nor Mr. Morley
has the same power of persuasiveness in print. The simple process of
leaving out whatever is antagonistic makes demonstration easy, but
inconclusive. Sometimes the robust directness of the method inclines
us peremptorily to resistance. It is hard for a generous heart not to
sympathize with the exiled Stewarts, after reading Lord Macaulay’s
“History of England.” Mr. Froude must be held responsible for much of
the extravagant enthusiasm professed for the Queen of Scots. And I
once knew an intelligent girl who had been driven by Mr. Prescott into
worshipping Philip II as a hero.
People who have contracted the habit of writing books are naturally
prone to exaggerate their importance. It is this sentiment which has
provoked the attitude of fault-finding, of continuous grumbling at
readers, which is so marked a characteristic of modern criticism. The
public is reproached, admonished, warned by Mr. Frederic Harrison that
if it feels contumacious--which is not infrequently the case--it should
pray for a “cleanlier and quieter spirit.” Whenever a handful of books
is presented to a community, addresses are made to show, on the one
hand, that reading and writing are better than meat and drink, and,
on the other, that the people who read and write are on the brink of
abysmal destruction. I have heard a lecturer upon one of these august
occasions gloomily prophesy that many of the volumes waiting to be
perused would “deprave the taste, irritate the vanity, exaggerate the
egotism, and vitiate the curiosity of their readers.” This seemed an
unfortunate result for philanthropy to achieve; but the speaker went
on to excite the godless interest of his audience by warning them that
romance--of which the new library was reasonably full--would exercise
a “bewildering and blinding effect” upon their minds, “filling them
with false hopes and enervating dreams.” He then defined a good novel
as one which should “stimulate a healthy imagination, a sober ambition,
a modest ardour, an eager humility, a love of what is truly great;”
and left us oppressed with the conviction that the usefulness of our
earthly careers and the salvation of our immortal souls depended upon
the fiction that we read.
“There is no harm,” says Mr. Birrell sweetly, “in talking about books,
still less in reading them; but it is folly to pretend to worship
them.” It is folly to exaggerate their controlling influence in our
lives. We are not more modestly ardent after reading “Vanity Fair,” nor
more eagerly humble after spending long and happy hours with “Emma.”
No sober ambition stirs chastely in our souls when we lay down, with a
sigh of content, “Pride and Prejudice,” or “Guy Mannering,” or “Henry
Esmond,” or “The Ordeal of Richard Feverel.” Even “Anna Karénina” fails
to inspire us with “false hopes and enervating dreams;” and while we
are often bewildered by Mr. Henry James’s masterpieces, we have never
been blinded by any. As for the ordinary novels that tumble headlong
from the press, it is impossible to imagine them as inspiring either
ardour or ambition, egotism or humility. They may perhaps be trusted
to weaken our literary instincts, and to induce mental inertia,--“the
surest way of having no thoughts of our own,” says Schopenhauer, “is to
take up a book every time we have nothing to do,”--but they are not, as
their writers and their critics fearfully assert, the arbiters of our
destinies.
A belief in the overpowering influence of books was part of Carlyle’s
gospel. He had a curious modesty about giving advice, even when it was
sought; and--born dictator though he was--he realized that his own
literary needs were not necessarily the literary needs of other men. He
said as much quite simply and sincerely when people asked him what they
should read, holding always, with Dr. Johnson, that inclination must
prompt the choice. To be sure, like Dr. Johnson, and like Emerson, he
presupposed inclination to be of an austere and seemly order. Emerson
never wearied of saying that people should read what they liked; but
he plainly expected them to like only what was good. Carlyle was
firmly convinced that authorship carried with it responsibilities too
serious for trifling. He reverenced the printed page, and he expressed
this reverence, this confession of faith, in the most explicit and
comprehensive assertion.
“The writer of a book is he not a preacher, preaching, not to this
parish or that, but to all men in all times and places? Not the
wretchedest circulating library novel which foolish girls thumb and con
in remote villages, but will help to regulate the actual practical
weddings and households of those foolish girls.”
More than this it would be impossible to say, and few of us, I hope,
would be willing to say as much. The idea is too oppressive to be
borne. Only authors and critics can afford to take this view of
life. Personally I believe that a foolish girl is more influenced
by another foolish girl, to say nothing of a foolish boy, than by
all the novels on the library shelves. Companionship and propinquity
are forces to be reckoned with. Mind touches mind like an electric
current. The contagion of folly is spread, like other forms of
contagion, by personal contact. Books may, as Carlyle says, preach to
all men, in all times and places; but it is precisely their lack of
reticence, the universality of their message, their chill publicity
of tone which reduces their readers to the level of an audience or of
a congregation. If we recall the disclosures with which we have been
favoured from time to time by distinguished people who consented to
tell the world what books had influenced their lives, we cannot fail
to remember the perfunctory nature of these revelations. It was as
though the speakers had first marshalled in order the most enduring
masterpieces of literature, and had then fitted their own sentiments
and experiences into appropriate grooves. This reversal of a natural
law is much in favour when what are called epoch-making books come
under public discussion. There are enthusiasts who appear to think that
Rousseau evoked the French Revolution, and that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”
was responsible for the Civil War. When the impetus of a profound and
powerful emotion, the mighty will of a great event finds expression in
literature,--or at least in letters,--the writer’s mind speeds like
a greyhound along the track of public sentiment. It does not create
the sentiment, it does not appreciably intensify it; but it enables
people to perceive more clearly the nature of the course to which they
stand committed. These sympathetic triumphs are sometimes mistaken for
literary triumphs. They are often thought to lead the chase they follow.
If, on the other hand, we ask ourselves soberly what books have helped
to mould our characters or to control our energies, we shall not find
the list an imposing one. There will be little or nothing to tell a
listening world. Rather may we incline to the open skepticism of Lord
Byron: “Who was ever altered by a poem?” Even presuming that we are
happy enough to detach ourselves from contemporary criticism, and
to read for human delight; even presuming that, after a lifetime of
effort, we have learned to recognize perfection in literary art, and
to turn of our own free will to those lonely works which “in the best
and noblest sense of a good and noble word, should be, and forever
remain, essentially unpopular;” even then it does not follow that we
are mastered by the books we love. There still remains to us that
painful and unconquerable originality, which is not defiant, but only
helplessly incapable of submission. “Giving a reason for a thing,” says
Dr. Johnson, “does not make it right.” Let us hope that being unable
to give a reason for a thing does not prove us wrong. The Rev. Mark
Pattison, who was the most unflinching reader of his day, who looked
upon money only as a substance convertible by some happy alchemy into
leather-bound volumes, and upon time only as a possession which could
be exchanged for a wider acquaintance with literature, understood
better than any scholar in England the limitations and futilities of
print. He did not say with Hobbes, “If I had read as much as other men,
I should doubtless have shared their ignorance,” because he had read
more than other men, and was very widely informed; but he pointed out
with startling lucidity that a flexible mind fortifies itself rather by
conversation, which is the gift of the few, than by reading, which is
the resource of the many. “Books,” he said, “are written in response
to a demand for recreation by minds roused to intelligence, but not
to intellectual activity.” There is something pathetic in his frankly
envious admiration of the French, who can and do convey their thoughts
to one another in a language wrought up to be “the perfect medium of
wit and wisdom,--the wisdom of the serpent,--the incisive medium of the
practical intelligence.” He quoted with melancholy appreciation Lord
Houghton’s story of the Italian who, after submitting to the heavy
hospitality of an English country-house, drew a newly arrived Frenchman
into a corner with the eager request: “Viens donc causer. Je n’ai pas
causé pour quinze jours.”
Mr. Lang is responsible for the statement--spoken, let us hope, in
the enjoyment of a sardonic mood rather than after dispassionate
observation--that the average Englishman or Englishwoman would as soon
think of buying a boa-constrictor as buying a book. He or she depends
for intellectual sustenance upon that happy lottery system which has
been devised by circulating libraries, and with which Americans are
so well acquainted,--a system which enables us to put in a request
for Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” and draw out the Rev. W. Profeit’s
“Creation of Matter;” to put in a request for “Lady Rose’s Daughter,”
and draw out “The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come.” It is evident that
reading conducted on this basis is as sure a path to cultivation as
a roulette table is to wealth. It has all the charm of uncertainty,
and all the value of speculation. It eliminates selection, detaches
quantity from quality, and replaces the elusive balancing of results by
the unchallenged roll-call of statistics. It expresses that unshaken
belief which is the gospel of the librarian,--namely, that the number
of books taken from his shelves within a given time has something to do
with the educational efficiency of his library.
Our power of self-deception--without which we should shrivel into
humility--is never so comfortable nor so resourceful as in the matter
of reading. We are capable of believing, not only that we love books
which we do not love, but that we have read books which we have not
read. A lifelong intimacy with their titles, a partial acquaintance
with modern criticism, a lively recollection of many familiar
quotations,--these things come in time to be mistaken for a knowledge
of the books themselves. Perhaps in youth it was our ambitious purpose
to storm certain bulwarks of literature, but we were deterred by
their unpardonable length. It is a melancholy truth, which may as
well be acknowledged in the start, that many of the books best worth
reading are very, very long, and that they cannot, without mortal
hurt, be shortened. Nothing less than shipwreck on a desert island in
company with Froissart’s “Chronicles” would give us leisure to peruse
this glorious narrative, and it is useless to hope for such a happy
combination of chances. We might indeed be wrecked,--that is always
a possibility,--but the volume saved dripping from the deep would be
“Soldiers of Fortune,” or “Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch.”
It is at least curious that if people love books--as we are perpetually
assured they do--they should need so much persuasion to read them.
Societies are formed for mutual encouragement and support in this
engaging but arduous pursuit. Optimistic counsellors cheer a shrinking
public to its task by recommending minute quantities of intellectual
nourishment to be taken twenty-four hours apart. They urge us to read
something “solid” for fifteen minutes a day, until we get used to
it, and they promise us that--mental invalids though we be--we can
assimilate great masterpieces in doses so homœopathic that we need
hardly know we are taking them. But this is not the spirit in which
we pursue other pleasures. We do not make an earnest effort to enjoy
our friends by admitting one for fifteen minutes’ conversation every
morning. If we like a thing at all, we are apt to like a good deal of
it; and if we are working _con amore_, we are wont to work very hard.
To turn to books, as Jeremy Collier counsels us, when we are weary
alike of solitude and companionship, to value them, as he did, because
they help us to forget “the crossness of men and things,” is to pay a
sincere, but not an ardent, tribute to their worth. Even the Bishop of
Durham praised his library, which he truly loved, because it soothed
his unquiet soul. The friendly volumes forbore, as he gratefully noted,
either to chide his errors or to mock at his ignorance; and there were
contemporaries--like Petrarch--who affirmed that, for so ardent a
bibliophile, the good Bishop had no great store of learning. His words
echo pleasantly through the centuries, breathing the secret of quiet
hours stolen from stormy times; and we repeat them, wondering less at
their eloquence than at their moderation. “O books, who alone are
liberal and free, who give to all who ask of you, and enfranchise all
who serve you faithfully.”