library into which pours the annual cataract of literature, these
little ancient libraries have no use left, save as repositories or
store-rooms. They belong to the days when books were few and expensive;
when few persons could acquire a library of their own; when lecturers
accumulated knowledge that was not the property of the world; when
notes were laboriously copied and handed on; when one of the joys of
learning was the consciousness of possessing secrets not known to other
men. An ancient Dean of Christ Church is said to have given three
reasons for the study of Greek: the first was that it enabled you to
read the words of the Saviour in the original tongue; the second, that
it gave you a proper contempt for those who were ignorant of it; and
the third was that it led to situations of emolument. What a rich aroma
hangs about this judgment! The first reason is probably erroneous, the
second is un-Christian, and the third is a gross motive which would
equally apply to any professional training whatsoever.
Well, the knowledge of Greek, except for the schoolmaster and the
clergyman, has not now the same obvious commercial value. Knowledge is
more diffused, more accessible. It is no longer thought to be a secret,
precious, rather terrible possession; the possessor is no longer
venerated and revered; on the contrary, a learned man is rather
considered likely to be tiresome. Old folios have, indeed, become
merely the stock-in-trade of the illustrators of sensational novels.
Who does not know the absurd old man, with white silky hair, velvet
skull-cap, and venerable appearance, who sits reading a folio at an oak
table, and who turns out to be the villain of the piece, a mine of
secret and unsuccessful wickedness? But no one in real life reads a
folio now, because anything that is worth reprinting, as well as a good
deal that is not, is reprinted in convenient form, if not in England,
at least in Germany.
And the result of it is that these College libraries are almost wholly
unvisited. It seems a pity, but it also seems inevitable. I wish that
some use could be devised for them, for these old books make at all
events a very dignified and pleasant background, and the fragrance of
well-warmed old leather is a delicate thing. But they are not even good
places for working in, now that one has one's own books and one's own
reading-chair. Moreover, if they were kept up to date, which would in
itself be an expensive thing, there would come in the eternal
difficulty of where to put the old books, which no one would have the
heart to destroy.
Perhaps the best thing for a library like this would be not to attempt
to buy books, but to subscribe like a club to a circulating library,
and to let a certain number of new volumes flow through the place and
lie upon the tables for a time. But, on the other hand, here in the
University there seems to be little time for general reading; and
indeed it is a great problem, as life goes on, as duties grow more
defined, and as one becomes more and more conscious of the shortness of
life, what the duty of a cultivated and open-minded man is with regard
to general reading. I am inclined to think that as one grows older one
may read less; it is impossible to keep up with the vast output of
literature, and it is hard enough to find time to follow even the one
or two branches in which one is specially interested. Almost the only
books which, I think, it is a duty to read, are the lives of great
contemporaries; one gets thus to have an idea of what is going on in
the world, and to realize it from different points of view. New
fiction, new poetry, new travels are very hard to peruse diligently.
The effort, I confess, of beginning a new novel, of making acquaintance
with an unfamiliar scene, of getting the individualities of a fresh
group of people into one's head, is becoming every year harder for me;
but there are still one or two authors of fiction for whom I have a
predilection, and whose works I look out for. New poetry demands an
even greater effort; and as to travels, they are written so much in the
journalistic style, and, consist so much of the meals our traveller
obtains at wayside stations, of conversations with obviously reticent
and even unintelligent persons; they have so many photogravures of
places that are exactly like other places, and of complacent people in
grotesque costumes, like supers in a play, that one feels the whole
thing to be hopelessly superficial and unreal. Imagine a journalistic
foreigner visiting the University, lunching at the station
refreshment-room, hurrying to half-a-dozen of the best known colleges,
driving in a tram through the main thoroughfares, looking on at a
football match, interviewing a Town Councillor, and being presented to
the Vice-Chancellor--what would be the profit of such a record as he
could give us? What would he have seen of the quiet daily life, the
interests, the home-current of the place? The only books of travel
worth reading are those where a person has settled deliberately in an
unknown place, really lived the life of the people, and penetrated the
secret of the landscape and the buildings.
I wish very much that there was a really good literary paper, with an
editor of catholic tastes, and half-a-dozen stimulating specialists on
the staff, whose duty would be to read the books that came out, each in
his own line, write reviews of appreciation and not of contemptuous
fault-finding, let feeble books alone, and make it their business to
tell ordinary people what to read, not saving them the trouble of
reading the books that are worth reading, but sparing them the task of
glancing at a good many books that are not worth reading. Literary
papers, as a rule, either review a book with hopeless rapidity, or tend
to lag behind too much. It would be of the essence of such a paper as I
have described, that there should be no delay about telling one what to
look out for, and at the same time that the reviews should be
deliberate and careful.
But I think that as one grows older one may take out a licence, so to
speak, to read less. One may go back to the old restful books, where
one knows the characters well, hear the old remarks, survey the same
scenes. One may meditate more upon one's stores, stroll about more,
just looking at life, seeing the quiet things that are happening, and
beaming through one's spectacles. One ought to have amassed, as life
goes on and the shadows lengthen, a good deal of material for
reflection. And, after all, reading is not in itself a virtue; it is
only one way of passing the time; talking is another way, watching
things another. Bacon says that reading makes a full man; well, I
cannot help thinking that many people are full to the brim when they
reach the age of forty, and that much which they afterwards put into
the overcharged vase merely drips and slobbers uncomfortably down the
side and foot.
The thing to determine then, as one's brain hardens or softens, is what
the object of reading is. It is not, I venture to think, what used to
be called the pursuit of knowledge. Of course, if a man is a
professional teacher or a professional writer, he must read for
professional purposes, just as a coral insect must eat to enable it to
secrete the substances out of which it builds its branching house. But
I am not here speaking of professional studies, but of general reading.
I suppose that there are three motives for reading--the first, purely
pleasurable; the second, intellectual; the third, what may be called
ethical. As to the first, a man who reads at all, reads just as he
eats, sleeps, and takes exercise, because he likes it; and that is
probably the best reason that can be given for the practice. It is an
innocent mode of passing the time, it takes one out of oneself, it is
amusing. Of course, it can be carried to an excess; and a man may
become a mere book-eater, as a man may become an opium-eater. I used at
one time to go and stay with an old friend, a clergyman in a remote
part of England. He was a bachelor and fairly well off. He did not care
about exercise or his garden, and he had no taste for general society.
He subscribed to the London Library and to a lending library in the
little town where he lived, and he bought too, a good many books. He
must have spent, I used to calculate, about ten hours of the
twenty-four in reading. He seemed to me to have read everything, old
and new books alike, and he had an astonishing memory; anything that he
put into his mind remained there exactly as fresh and clear as when he
laid it away, so that he never needed to read a book twice. If he had
lived at a University he would have been a useful man; if one wanted to
know what books to read in any line, one had only to pick his brains.
He could give one a list of authorities on almost every subject. But in
his country parish he was entirely thrown away. He had not the least
desire to make anything of his stores, or to write. He had not the art
of expression, and he was a distinctly tiresome talker. His idea of
conversation was to ask you whether you had read a number of modern
novels. If he found one that you had not read, he sketched the plot in
an intolerably prolix manner, so that it was practically impossible to
fix the mind on what he was saying. He seemed to have no preferences in
literature whatever; his one desire was to read everything that came
out, and his only idea of a holiday was to go up to London and get
lists of books from a bookseller. That is, of course, an extreme case;
and I cannot help feeling that he would have been nearly as usefully
employed if he had confined himself to counting the number of words in
the books he read. But, after all, he was interested and amused, and a
perfectly contented man.
As to the intellectual motive for reading, it hardly needs discussing;
the object is to get clear conceptions, to arrive at a critical sense
of what is good in literature, to have a knowledge of events and
tendencies of thought, to take a just view of history and of great
personalities; not to be at the mercy of theorists, but to be able to
correct a faulty bias by having a large and wide view of the progress
of events and the development of thought. One who reads from this point
of view will generally find some particular line which he tends to
follow, some special region of the mind where he is desirous to know
all that can be known; but he will, at the same time, wish to acquaint
himself in a general way with other departments of thought, so that he
may be interested in subjects in which he is not wholly well-informed,
and be able to listen, even to ask intelligent questions, in matters
with which he has no minute acquaintance. Such a man, if he steers
clear of the contempt for indefinite views which is often the curse of
men with clear and definite minds, makes the best kind of talker,
stimulating and suggestive; his talk seems to open doors into gardens
and corridors of the house of thought; and others, whose knowledge is
fragmentary, would like to be at home, too, in that pleasant palace.
But it is of the essence of such talk that it should be natural and
attractive, not professional or didactic. People who are not used to
Universities tend to believe that academical persons are invariably
formidable. They think of them as possessed of vast stores of precise
knowledge, and actuated by a merciless desire to detect and to ridicule
deficiencies of attainment among unprofessional people. Of course,
there are people of this type to be found at a University, just as in
all other professions it is possible to find uncharitable specialists
who despise persons of hazy and leisurely views. But my own impression
is that it is a rare type among University Dons; I think that it is far
commoner at the University to meet men of great attainments combined
with sincere humility and charity, for the simple reason that the most
erudite specialist at a University becomes aware both of the wide
diversity of knowledge and of his own limitations as well.
Personally, direct bookish talk is my abomination. A knowledge of books
ought to give a man a delicate allusiveness, an aptitude for pointed
quotation. A book ought to be only incidentally, not anatomically,
discussed; and I am pleased to be able to think that there is a good
deal of this allusive talk at the University, and that the only reason
that there is not more is that professional demands are so insistent,
and work so thorough, that academical persons cannot keep up their
general reading as they would like to do.
And then we come to what I have called, for want of a better word, the
ethical motive for reading; it might sound at first as if I meant that
people ought to read improving books, but that is exactly what I do not
mean. I have very strong opinions on this point, and hold that what I
call the ethical motive for reading is the best of all--indeed the only
true one. And yet I find a great difficulty in putting into words what
is a very elusive and delicate thought. But my belief is this. As I
make my slow pilgrimage through the world, a certain sense of beautiful
mystery seems to gather and grow. I see that many people find the world
dreary--and, indeed, there must be spaces of dreariness in it for us
all--some find it interesting; some surprising; some find it entirely
satisfactory. But those who find it satisfactory seem to me, as a rule,
to be tough, coarse, healthy natures, who find success attractive and
food digestible: who do not trouble their heads very much about other
people, but go cheerfully and optimistically on their way, closing
their eyes as far as possible to things painful and sorrowful, and
getting all the pleasure they can out of material enjoyments.
Well, to speak very sincerely and humbly, such a life seems to me the
worst kind of failure. It is the life that men were living in the days
of Noah, and out of such lives comes nothing that is wise or useful or
good. Such men leave the world as they found it, except for the fact
that they have eaten a little way into it, like a mite into a cheese,
and leave a track of decomposition behind them.
I do not know why so much that is hard and painful and sad is
interwoven with our life here; but I see, or seem to see, that it is
meant to be so interwoven. All the best and most beautiful flowers of
character and thought seem to me to spring up in the track of
suffering; and what is the most sorrowful of all mysteries, the mystery
of death, the ceasing to be, the relinquishing of our hopes and dreams,
the breaking of our dearest ties, becomes more solemn and awe-inspiring
the nearer we advance to it.
I do not mean that we are to go and search for unhappiness; but, on the
other hand, the only happiness worth seeking for is a happiness which
takes all these dark things into account, looks them in the face, reads
the secret of their dim eyes and set lips, dwells with them, and learns
to be tranquil in their presence.
In this mood--and it is a mood which no thoughtful man can hope or
ought to wish to escape--reading becomes less and less a searching for
instructive and impressive facts, and more and more a quest after
wisdom and truth and emotion. More and more I feel the impenetrability
of the mystery that surrounds us; the phenomena of nature, the
discoveries of science, instead of raising the veil, seem only to make
the problem more complex, more bizarre, more insoluble; the
investigation of the laws of light, of electricity, of chemical action,
of the causes of disease, the influence of heredity--all these things
may minister to our convenience and our health, but they make the mind
of God, the nature of the First Cause, an infinitely more mysterious
and inconceivable problem.
But there still remains, inside, so to speak, of these astonishing
facts, a whole range of intimate personal phenomena, of emotion, of
relationship, of mental or spiritual conceptions, such as beauty,
affection, righteousness, which seem to be an even nearer concern, even
more vital to our happiness than the vast laws of which it is possible
for men to be so unconscious, that centuries have rolled past without
their being investigated.
And thus in such a mood reading becomes a patient tracing out of human
emotion, human feeling, when confronted with the sorrows, the hopes,
the motives, the sufferings which beckon us and threaten us on every
side. One desires to know what pure and wise and high-hearted natures
have made of the problem; one desires to let the sense of beauty--that
most spiritual of all pleasures--sink deeper into the heart; one
desires to share the thoughts and hopes, the dreams and visions, in the
strength of which the human spirit has risen superior to suffering and
death.
And thus, as I say, the reading that is done in such a mood has little
of precise acquisition or definite attainment about it; it is a desire
rather to feed and console the spirit--to enter the region in which it
seems better to wonder than to know, to aspire rather than to define,
to hope rather than to be satisfied. A spirit which walks expectantly
along this path grows to learn that the secret of such happiness as we
can attain lies in simplicity and courage, in sincerity and
loving-kindness; it grows more and more averse to material ambitions
and mean aims; it more and more desires silence and recollection and
contemplation. In this mood, the words of the wise fall like the
tolling of sweet, grave bells upon the soul, the dreams of poets come
like music heard at evening from the depth of some enchanted forest,
wafted over a wide water; we know not what instrument it is whence the
music wells, by what fingers swept, by what lips blown; but we know
that there is some presence there that is sorrowful or glad, who has
power to translate his dream into the concord of sweet sounds. Such a
mood need not withdraw us from life, from toil, from kindly
relationships, from deep affections; but it will rather send us back to
life with a renewed and joyful zest, with a desire to discern the true
quality of beautiful things, of fair thoughts, of courageous hopes, of
wise designs. It will make us tolerant and forgiving, patient with
stubbornness and prejudice, simple in conduct, sincere in word, gentle
in deed; with pity for weakness, with affection for the lonely and the
desolate, with admiration for all that is noble and serene and strong.
Those who read in such a spirit will tend to resort more and more to
large and wise and beautiful books, to press the sweetness out of old
familiar thoughts, to look more for warmth and loftiness of feeling
than for elaborate and artful expression. They will value more and more
books that speak to the soul, rather than books that appeal to the ear
and to the mind. They will realize that it is through wisdom and force
and nobility that books retain their hold upon the hearts of men, and
not by briskness and colour and epigram. A mind thus stored may have
little grasp of facts, little garniture of paradox and jest; but it
will be full of compassion and hope, of gentleness and joy. . . .
Well, this thought has taken me a long way from the College library,
where the old books look somewhat pathetically from the shelves, like
aged dogs wondering why no one takes them for a walk. Monuments of
pathetic labour, tasks patiently fulfilled through slow hours! But yet
I am sure that a great deal of joy went to the making of them, the joy
of the old scholar who settled down soberly among his papers, and heard
the silvery bell above him tell out the dear hours that, perhaps, he
would have delayed if he could. Yes, the old books are a tender-hearted
and a joyful company; the days slip past, the sunlight moves round the
court, and steals warmly for an hour or two into the deserted room.
Life--delightful life--spins merrily past; the perennial stream of
youth flows on; and perhaps the best that the old books can do for us
is to bid us cast back a wistful and loving thought into the past--a
little gift of love for the old labourers who wrote so diligently in
the forgotten hours, till the weary, failing hand laid down the
familiar pen, and soon lay silent in the dust.
IV
SOCIABILITIES
I have a friend here, an old friend, who, in refreshing contrast with
the majority of the human race, possesses strongly marked
characteristics. He knows exactly the sort of life that suits him, and
exactly what he likes. He is not, as Mr. Enfield said, one of the
fellows who go about doing what is called "good." But he contrives to
give a great deal of happiness without having any programme. He is, in
the first place, a savant with a great reputation; but he makes no
parade of his work, and sits down to it because he likes it, as a
hungry man may sit down to a pleasant meal. He is thus the most
leisurely man that I know, while, at the same time, his output is
amazing. His table is covered deep with books and papers; but he will
work at a corner, if he is fortunate enough to find one; and, if not,
he will make a kind of cutting in the mass, and work in the shade, with
steep banks of stratified papers on either hand. He is always
accessible, always ready to help any one. The undergraduate, that shy
bird in whose sight the net is so often spread in vain, even though it
be baited with the priceless privilege of tea, tobacco, and the talk of
a well-informed man, comes, in troops and companies, to see him. He is
a man too with a deep vein of humour, and, what is far more rare, a
keen vein of appreciation of the humour of others. He laughs as if he
were amused, not like a man discharging a painful duty. It is true that
he will not answer letters; but then his writing-paper is generally
drowned deeper than plummet can sound; his pens are rusty, and his ink
is of the consistency of tar; but he will always answer questions, with
an incredible patience and sympathy, correcting one's mistakes in a
genial and tentative way, as if a matter admitted of many opinions. If
a man, for instance, maintains that the Norman Conquest took place in
1066 B.C., he will say that some historians put it more than two
thousand years later, but that of course it is difficult to arrive at
exact accuracy in these matters. Thus one never feels snubbed or
snuffed out by him.
Well, for the purposes of my argument, I will call my friend Perry,
though it is not his name; and having finished my introduction I will
go on to my main story.
I took in to dinner the other night a beautiful and accomplished lady,
with whom it is always a pleasure to talk. The conversation turned upon
Mr. Perry. She said with a graceful air of judgment that she had but
one fault to find with him, and that was that he hated women. I
hazarded a belief that he was shy, to which she replied with a
dignified assurance that he was not shy; he was lazy.
Prudence and discretion forbade me to appeal against this decision; but
I endeavoured to arrive at the principles that supported such a
verdict. I gathered that Egeria considered that every one owed a
certain duty to society; that people had no business to pick and
choose, to cultivate the society of those who happened to please and
interest them, and to eschew the society of those who bored and wearied
them; that such a course was not fair to the uninteresting people, and
so forth. But the point was that there was a duty involved, and that
some sacrifice was required of virtuous people in the matter.
Egeria herself is certainly blameless in the matter: she diffuses
sweetness and light in many tedious assemblies; she is true to her
principles; but for all that I cannot agree with her on this point.