ON READING IN RELATION
TO LITERATURE
BY
LAFCADIO HEARN
[Illustration]
The Atlantic Monthly Press, Inc.
BOSTON
_Copyright, 1921, by_
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS
As the term approaches its close, I wish to keep my promise regarding
a series of lectures relating to literary life and work, to be given
independently of texts or authorities, and to represent, as far as
possible, the results of practical experience among the makers of
literature in different countries. The subject for this term will be
Reading--apparently, perhaps, a very simple subject, but really not so
simple as it looks, and much more important than you may think it. I
shall begin this lecture by saying that very few persons know how to
read. Considerable experience with literature is needed before taste
and discrimination can possibly be acquired; and without these, it is
almost impossible to learn how to read. I say _almost_ impossible;
since there are some rare men who, through a natural inborn taste,
through a kind of inherited literary instinct, are able to read very
well even before reaching the age of twenty-five years. But these are
great exceptions, and I am speaking of the average.
For, to read the characters or the letters of the text does not mean
reading in the true sense. You will often find yourselves reading words
or characters automatically, even pronouncing them quite correctly,
while your minds are occupied with a totally different subject. This
mere mechanism of reading becomes altogether automatic at an early
period of life, and can be performed irrespective of attention. Neither
can I call it reading, to extract the narrative portion of a text from
the rest simply for one’s personal amusement, or, in other words,
to read a book “for the story.” Yet most of the reading that is done
in the world is done in exactly this way. Thousands and thousands of
books are bought every year, every month, I might even say every day,
by people who do not read at all. They only think that they read.
They buy books just to amuse themselves, “to kill time,” as they call
it; in one hour or two their eyes have passed over all the pages, and
there is left in their minds a vague idea or two about what they have
been looking at; and this they really believe is reading. Nothing is
more common than to be asked, “Have you read such a book?” or to hear
somebody say, “I have read such and such a book.” But these persons do
not speak seriously. Out of a thousand persons who say, “I have read
this,” or “I have read that,” there is not one perhaps who is able to
express any opinion worth hearing about what he has been reading. Many
and many a time I hear students say that they have read certain books;
but if I ask them some questions regarding the book, I find that they
are not able to make any answer, or at best, they will only repeat
something that somebody else has said about what they think that they
have been reading. But this is not peculiar to students; it is in all
countries the way that the great public devours books. And to conclude
this introductory part of the lecture, I would say that the difference
between the great critic and the common person is chiefly that the
great critic knows how to read, and the common person does not. No man
is really able to read a book who is not able to express an original
opinion regarding the contents of a book.
No doubt you will think that this statement of the case confuses
reading with study. You might say, “When we read history or philosophy
or science, then we do read very thoroughly, studying all the meanings
and bearings of the text, slowly, and thinking about it. This is hard
study. But when we read a story or a poem out of class-hour, we read
for amusement. Amusement and study are two different things.” I am not
sure that you all think this; but young men generally do so think. As a
matter of fact, every book worth reading ought to be read in precisely
the same way that a scientific book is read--not simply for amusement;
and every book worth reading should have the same amount of value in
it that a scientific book has, though the value may be of a totally
different kind. For, after all, the good book of fiction or romance or
poetry is a scientific work; it has been composed according to the best
principles of more than one science, but especially according to the
principles of the great science of life, the knowledge of human nature.
In regard to foreign books, this is especially true; but the advice
suggested will be harder to follow when we read in a language which is
not our own. Nevertheless, how many Englishmen do you suppose really
read a good book in English? how many Frenchmen read a great book
in their own tongue? Probably not more than one in two thousand of
those who think that they read. What is more, although there are now
published every year in London upwards of six thousand books, at no
time has there been so little good reading done by the average public
as to-day. Books are written, sold, and read after a fashion--or rather
according to the fashion. There is a fashion in literature as well as
in everything else; and a particular kind of amusement being desired by
the public, a particular kind of reading is given to supply the demand.
So useless have become to this public the arts and graces of real
literature, the great thoughts which should belong to a great book,
that men of letters have almost ceased to produce true literature. When
a man can obtain a great deal of money by writing a book without style
or beauty, a mere narrative to amuse, and knows at the same time that
if he should give three, five, or ten years to the production of a
really good book, he would probably starve to death, he is forced to
be untrue to the higher duties of his profession. Men happily situated
in regard to money matters might possibly attempt something great from
time to time; but they can hardly get a hearing. Taste has so much
deteriorated within the past few years, that, as I told you before,
style has practically disappeared--and style means thinking. And this
state of things in England has been largely brought about by bad habits
of reading, by not knowing how to read.
For the first thing which a scholar should bear in mind is that a book
ought not to be read for mere amusement. Half-educated persons read
for amusement, and are not to be blamed for it; they are incapable
of appreciating the deeper qualities that belong to a really great
literature. But a young man who has passed through a course of
university training should discipline himself at an early day never to
read for mere amusement. And once the habit of the discipline has been
formed, he will even find it impossible to read for mere amusement.
He will then impatiently throw down any book from which he cannot
obtain intellectual food, any book which does not make an appeal to
the higher emotions and to his intellect. But on the other hand, the
habit of reading for amusement becomes with thousands of people exactly
the same kind of habit as wine-drinking or opium-smoking; it is like a
narcotic, something that helps to pass the time, something that keeps
up a perpetual condition of dreaming, something that eventually results
in destroying all capacity for thought, giving exercise only to the
surface parts of the mind, and leaving the deeper springs of feeling
and the higher faculties of perception unemployed.
Let us simply state what the facts are about this kind of reading. A
young clerk, for example, reads every day on the way to his office
and on the way back, just to pass the time; and what does he read? A
novel, of course; it is very easy work, and it enables him to forget
his troubles for a moment, to dull his mind to all the little worries
of his daily routine. In one day or two days he finishes the novel;
then he gets another. He reads quickly in these days. By the end of the
year he has read between a hundred and fifty and two hundred novels;
no matter how poor he is, this luxury is possible to him, because of
the institution of circulating libraries. At the end of a few years
he has read several thousand novels. Does he like them? No; he will
tell you that they are nearly all the same, but they help him to pass
away his idle time; they have become a necessity for him; he would
be very unhappy if he could not continue this sort of reading. It is
utterly impossible that the result can be anything but a stupefying of
the faculties. He cannot even remember the names of twenty or thirty
books out of thousands; much less does he remember what they contain.
The result of all this reading means nothing but a cloudiness in his
mind. That is the direct result. The indirect result is that the mind
has been kept from developing itself. All development necessarily
means some pain; and such reading as I speak of has been employed
unconsciously as a means to avoid that pain, and the consequence is
atrophy.
Of course this is an extreme case; but it is the ultimate outcome of
reading for amusement whenever such amusement becomes a habit, and
when there are means close at hand to gratify the habit. At present in
Japan there is little danger of this state of things; but I use the
illustration for the sake of its ethical warning.
This does not mean that there is any sort of good literature which
should be shunned. A good novel is just as good reading as even the
greatest philosopher can possibly wish for. The whole matter depends
upon the way of reading, even more than upon the nature of what is
read. Perhaps it is too much to say, as has often been said, that
there is no book which has nothing good in it; it is better simply
to state that the good of a book depends incomparably more for its
influence upon the habits of the reader than upon the art of the
writer, no matter how great that writer may be. In a previous lecture I
tried to call your attention to the superiority of the child’s methods
of observation to those of the man; and the same fact may be noticed
in regard to the child’s method of reading. Certainly the child can
read only very simple things; but he reads most thoroughly; and he
thinks and thinks untiringly about what he reads; one little fairy
tale will give him mental occupation for a month after he has read it.
All the energies of his little fancy are exhausted upon the tale; and
if his parents be wise, they do not allow him to read a second tale,
until the pleasure of the first, and its imaginative effect, has begun
to die away. Later habits, habits which I shall venture to call bad,
soon destroy the child’s power of really attentive reading. But let us
now take the case of a professional reader, a scientific reader; and
we shall observe the same power, developed of course to an enormous
degree. In the office of a great publishing house which I used to
visit, there are received every year sixteen thousand manuscripts. All
these must be looked at and judged; and such work in all publishing
houses is performed by what are called professional readers. The
professional reader must be a scholar, and a man of very uncommon
capacity. Out of a thousand manuscripts he will read perhaps not more
than one; out of two thousand he may possibly read three. The others
he simply looks at for a few seconds--one glance is enough for him to
decide whether the manuscript is worth reading or not. The shape of a
single sentence will tell him that, from the literary point of view. As
regards subject, even the title is enough for him to judge, in a large
number of cases. Some manuscripts may receive a minute or even five
minutes of his attention; very few receive a longer consideration. Out
of sixteen thousand, we may suppose that sixteen are finally selected
for judgment. He reads these from beginning to end. Having read them,
he decides that only eight can be further considered. The eight are
read a second time, much more carefully. At the close of the second
examination the number is perhaps reduced to seven. These seven are
destined for a third reading; but the professional reader knows better
than to read them immediately. He leaves them locked up in a drawer,
and passes a whole week without looking at them. At the end of the
week he tries to see whether he can remember distinctly each of these
seven manuscripts and their qualities. Very distinctly he remembers
three; the remaining four he cannot at once recall. With a little
more effort, he is able to remember two more. But two he has utterly
forgotten. This is a fatal defect; the work that leaves no impression
upon the mind after two readings cannot have real value. He then takes
the manuscripts out of the drawer, condemns two (those he could not
remember), and re-reads the five. At the third reading everything
is judged--subject, execution, thought, literary quality. Three are
discovered to be first class; two are accepted by the publishers only
as second class. And so the matter ends.
Something like this goes on in all great publishing houses; but
unfortunately not all literary work is now judged in the same severe
way. It is now judged rather by what the public likes; and the public
does not like the best. But you may be sure that in a house such
as that of the Cambridge or the Oxford University publishers, the
test of a manuscript is very severe indeed; it is there read much
more thoroughly than it is likely ever to be read again. Now this
professional reader whom we speak of, with all his knowledge and
scholarship and experience, reads the book very much in the same
way as the child reads a fairy tale. He has forced his mind to exert
all its powers in the same minute way that the child’s mind does, to
think about everything in the book, in all its bearings, in a hundred
different directions. It is not true that a child is a bad reader; the
habit of bad reading is only formed much later in life, and is always
unnatural. The natural and also the scholarly way of reading is the
child’s way. But it requires what we are apt to lose as we grow up,
the golden gift of patience; and without patience nothing, not even
reading, can be well done.
Important then as careful reading is, you can readily perceive that it
should not be wasted. The powers of a well-trained and highly educated
mind ought not to be expended upon any common book. By common I mean
cheap and useless literature. Nothing is so essential to self-training
as the proper choice of books to read; and nothing is so universally
neglected. It is not even right that a person of ability should
waste his time in “finding out” what to read. He can easily obtain
a very correct idea of the limits of the best in all departments of
literature, and keep to that best. Of course, if he has to become a
specialist, a critic, a professional reader, he will have to read what
is bad as well as what is good, and will be able to save himself from
much torment only by an exceedingly rapid exercise of judgment, formed
by experience. Imagine, for example, the reading that must have been
done, and thoroughly done, by such a critic as Professor Saintsbury.
Leaving out of the question all his university training, and his
mastery of Greek and Latin classics, which is no small reading to
begin with, he must have read some five thousand books in the English
of all centuries--learned thoroughly everything that was in them, the
history of each one, and the history of its author, whenever that
was accessible. He must also have mastered thoroughly the social and
political history relating to all this mass of literature. But this
is still less than half his work. For, being an authority upon two
literatures, his study of French, both old and new French, must have
been even more extensive than his study of English. And all his work
had to be read as a master reads; there was little more amusement in
the whole from beginning to end. The only pleasure could be in results;
but these results are very great. Nothing is more difficult in this
world than to read a book and then to express clearly and truly in a
few lines exactly what the literary value of the book is. There are
not more than twenty people in the world who can do this, for the
experience as well as the capacity required must be enormous. Very few
of us can hope to become even third or fourth class critics after a
lifetime of study. But we can all learn to read; and that is not by any
means a small feat. The great critics can best show us the way to do
this, by their judgment.
Yet after all, the greatest of critics is the public--not the public
of a day or a generation, but the public of centuries, the consensus
of national opinion or of human opinion about a book that has been
subjected to the awful test of time. Reputations are made not by
critics, but by the accumulation of human opinion through hundreds of
years. And human opinion is not sharply defined like the opinion of a
trained critic; it cannot explain; it is vague, like a great emotion of
which we cannot exactly describe the nature; it is based upon feeling
rather than upon thinking; it only says, “we like this.” Yet there is
no judgment so sure as this kind of judgment, for it is the outcome of
an enormous experience. The test of a good book ought always to be the
test which human opinion, working for generations, applies. And this is
very simple.
The test of a great book is whether we want to read it only once or
more than once. Any really great book we want to read the second
time even more than we wanted to read it the first time; and every
additional time that we read it we find new meanings and new beauties
in it. A book that a person of education and good taste does not care
to read more than once is very probably not worth much. Some time ago
there was a very clever discussion going on regarding the art of the
great French novelist, Zola; some people claimed that he possessed
absolute genius; others claimed that he had only talent of a very
remarkable kind. The battle of argument brought out some strange
extravagances of opinion. But suddenly a very great critic simply put
this question: “How many of you have read, or would care to read, one
of Zola’s books a second time?” There was no answer; the fact was
settled. Probably no one would read a book by Zola more than once; and
this is proof positive that there is no great genius in them, and no
great mastery of the highest form of feeling. Shallow or false any book
must be, that, although bought by a hundred thousand readers, is never
read more than once. But we cannot consider the judgment of a single
individual infallible. The opinion that makes a book great must be the
opinion of many. For even the greatest critics are apt to have certain
dullnesses, certain inappreciations. Carlyle, for example, could not
endure Browning; Byron could not endure some of the greatest of English
poets. A man must be many-sided to utter a trustworthy estimate of many
books. We may doubt the judgment of the single critic at times. But
there is no doubt possible in regard to the judgment of generations.
Even if we cannot at once perceive anything good in a book which has
been admired and praised for hundreds of years, we may be sure that by
trying, by studying it carefully, we shall at last be able to feel the
reason of this admiration and praise. The best of all libraries for
a poor man would be a library entirely composed of such great works
only, books which have passed the test of time.
This then would be the most important guide for us in the choice of
reading. We should read only the books that we want to read more than
once, nor should we buy any others, unless we have some special reason
for so investing money. The second fact demanding attention is the
general character of the value that lies hidden within all such great
books. A great book is not apt to be comprehended by a young person
at the first reading except in a superficial way. Only the surface,
the narrative, is absorbed and enjoyed. No young man can possibly see
at first reading the qualities of a great book. Remember that it has
taken humanity in many cases hundreds of years to find out all that
there is in such a book. But according to a man’s experience of life,
the text will unfold new meanings to him. The book that delighted
us at eighteen, if it be a good book, will delight us much more at
twenty-five, and it will prove like a new book to us at thirty years
of age. At forty we shall re-read it, wondering why we never saw how
beautiful it was before. At fifty or sixty years of age the same facts
will repeat themselves. A great book grows exactly in proportion to the
growth of the reader’s mind. It was the discovery of this extraordinary
fact by generations of people long dead that made the greatness of such
works as those of Shakespeare, of Dante, or of Goethe. Perhaps Goethe
can give us at this moment the best illustration. He wrote a number of
little stories in prose, which children like, because to children they
have all the charm of fairy tales. But he never intended them for fairy
tales; he wrote them for experienced minds. A young man finds very
serious reading in them; a middle aged man discovers an extraordinary
depth in their least utterance; and an old man will find in them all
the world’s philosophy, all the wisdom of life. If one is very dull,
he may not see much in them, but just in proportion as he is a superior
man, and in proportion as his knowledge of life has been extensive, so
will he discover the greatness of the mind that conceived them.
This does not mean that the authors of such books could have
preconceived the entire range and depth of that which they put into
their work. Great art works unconsciously without ever suspecting that
it is great; and the larger the genius of a writer, the less chance
there is of his ever knowing that he has genius; for his power is less
likely to be discovered by the public until long after he is dead.
The great things done in literature have not usually been done by men
who thought themselves great. Many thousand years ago some wanderer
in Arabia, looking at the stars of the night, and thinking about the
relation of man to the unseen powers that shaped the world, uttered all
his heart in certain verses that have been preserved to us in the Book
of Job. To him the sky was a solid vault; of that which might exist
beyond it, he never even dreamed. Since his time how vast has been the
expansion of our astronomical knowledge! We now know thirty millions of
suns, all of which are probably attended by planets, giving a probable
total of three hundred millions of other worlds within sight of our
astronomical instruments. Probably multitudes of these are inhabited by
intelligent life; it is even possible that within a few years more we
shall obtain proof positive of the existence of an older civilization
than our own upon the planet Mars. How vast a difference between our
conception of the universe and Job’s conception of it. Yet the poem of
that simple-minded Arab or Jew has not lost one particle of its beauty
and value because of this difference. Quite the contrary! With every
new astronomical discovery the words of Job take grander meanings to
us, simply because he was truly a great poet and spoke only the truth
that was in his heart thousands of years ago. Very anciently also
there was a Greek story-teller who wrote a little story about a boy
and girl in the country, called _Daphnis and Chloe_. It was a little
story, telling in the simplest language possible how that boy and
girl fell in love with each other, and did not know why, and all the
innocent things they said to each other, and how grown-up people kindly
laughed at them and taught them some of the simplest laws of life. What
a trifling subject, some might think. But that story, translated into
every language in the world, still reads like a new story to us; and
every time we re-read it, it appears still more beautiful, because it
teaches a few true and tender things about innocence and the feeling
of youth. It never can grow old, any more than the girl and boy whom
it describes. Or, to descend to later times, about three hundred years
ago a French priest conceived the idea of writing down the history
of a student who had been charmed by a wanton woman, and led by her
into many scenes of disgrace and pain. This little book, called _Manon
Lescaut_, describes for us the society of a vanished time, a time when
people wore swords and powdered their hair, a time when everything
was as different as possible from the life of to-day. But the story
is just as true of our own time as of any time in civilization; the
pain and the sorrow affect us just as if they were our own; and the
woman, who is not really bad, but only weak and selfish, charms the
reader almost as much as she charmed her victim, until the tragedy
ends. Here again is one of the world’s great books that cannot die.
Or, to take one more example out of a possible hundred, consider the
stories of Hans Andersen. He conceived the notion that moral truths and
social philosophy could be better taught through little fairy tales
and child stories than in almost any other way; and with the help of
hundreds of old-fashioned tales, he made a new series of wonderful
stories that have become a part of every library and are read in all
countries by grown-up people much more than by children. There is in
this astonishing collection of stories, a story about a mermaid, which
I suppose you have all read. Of course there can be no such thing
as a mermaid; from one point of view the story is quite absurd. But
the emotions of unselfishness and love and loyalty which the story
expresses are immortal, and so beautiful that we forget about all the
unreality of the framework; we see only the eternal truth behind the
fable.
You will understand now exactly what I mean by a great book. What
about the choice of books? Some years ago you will remember that an
Englishman of science, Sir John Lubbock, wrote a list of what he called
the best books in the world--or at least the best hundred books. Then
some publishers published the hundred books in cheap form. Following
the example of Sir John, other literary men made different lists of
what they thought the best hundred books in existence; and now quite
enough time has passed to show us the value of these experiments. They
have proved utterly worthless, except to the publishers. Many persons
may buy the hundred books; but very few read them. And this is not
because Sir John Lubbock’s idea was bad; it is because no one man can
lay down a definite course of reading for the great mass of differently
constituted minds. Sir John expressed only his opinion of what most
appealed to him; another man of letters would have made a different
list; probably no two men of letters would have made exactly the same
one. The choice of great books must, under all circumstances, be an
individual one. In short, you must choose for yourselves according to
the light that is in you. Very few persons are so many-sided as to
feel inclined to give their best attention to many different kinds of
literature. In the average of cases it is better for a man to confine
himself to a small class of subjects--the subjects best according with
his natural powers and inclinations, the subjects that please him. And
no man can decide for us, without knowing our personal character and
disposition perfectly well and being in sympathy with it, where our
powers lie. But one thing is easy to do--that is, to decide, first,
what subject in literature has already given you pleasure; to decide,
secondly, what is the best that has been written upon that subject,
and then to study that best to the exclusion of ephemeral and trifling
books which profess to deal with the same theme, but which have not yet
obtained the approbation of great critics or of a great public opinion.
Those books which have obtained both are not so many in number as
you might suppose. Each great civilization has produced only two or
three of the first rank, if we except the single civilization of the
Greeks. The sacred books embodying the teaching of all great religions
necessarily take place in the first rank, even as literary productions;
for they have been polished and repolished, and have been given the
highest possible literary perfection of which the language in which
they are written is capable. The great epic poems which express the
ideals of races, these also deserve a first place. Thirdly, the
masterpieces of drama, as reflecting life, must be considered to belong
to the highest literature. But how many books are thus represented?
Not very many. The best, like diamonds, will never be found in great
quantities.
Besides such general indications as I have thus ventured, something may
be said regarding a few choice books--those which a student should wish
to possess good copies of and read all his life. There are not many of
these. For European students it would be necessary to name a number of
Greek authors. But without a study of the classic tongues such authors
could be of much less use to the students of this country; moreover,
a considerable knowledge of Greek life and Greek civilization is
necessary to quicken appreciation of them. Such knowledge is best
gained through engravings, pictures, coins, statues--through those
artistic objects which enable the imagination to see what has existed;
and as yet the artistic side of classical study is scarcely possible
in Japan, for want of pictorial and other material. I shall therefore
say very little regarding the great books that belong to this category.
But as the whole foundation of European literature rests upon classical
study, the student should certainly attempt to master the outlines of
Greek mythology, and the character of the traditions which inspired the
best of Greek literature and drama. You can scarcely open an English
book belonging to any high class of literature, in which you will
not find allusions to Greek beliefs, Greek stories, or Greek plays.
The mythology is almost necessary for you; but the vast range of the
subject might well deter most of you from attempting a thorough study
of it. A thorough study of it, however, is not necessary. What is
necessary is an outline only; and a good book, capable of giving you
that outline in a vivid and attractive manner would be of inestimable
service. In French and German there are many such books; in English, I
know of only one, a volume in Bohn’s Library, Keightley’s _Mythology
of Ancient Greece and Italy_. It is not an expensive work; and it has
the exceptional quality of teaching in a philosophical spirit. As for
the famous Greek books, the value of most of them for you must be
small, because the number of adequate translations is small. I should
begin by saying that all verse translations are useless. No verse
translation from the Greek can reproduce the Greek verse--we have only
twenty or thirty lines of Homer translated by Tennyson, and a few
lines of other Greek poets translated by equally able men, which are
at all satisfactory. Under all circumstances take a prose translation
when you wish to study a Greek or Latin author. We should of course
consider Homer first. I do not think that you can afford not to read
something of Homer. There are two excellent prose translations in
English, one of the Iliad and one of the Odyssey. The latter is for
you the more important of the two great poems. The references to it
are innumerable in all branches of literature; and these references
refer usually to the poetry of its theme, for the Odyssey is much more
a romance than is the Iliad. The advantage of the prose translation
by Lang and Butcher is that it preserves something of the rolling
sound and music of the Greek verse, though it is only prose. That
book I should certainly consider worth keeping constantly by you; its
utility will appear to you at a later day. The great Greek tragedies
have all been translated; but I should not so strongly recommend these
translations to you. It would be just as well, in most cases, to
familiarize yourselves with the stories of the dramas through other
sources; and there are hundreds of these. You should at least know
the subject of the great dramas of Sophocles, Æschylus, and above all
Euripides. Greek drama was constructed upon a plan that requires much
study to understand correctly; it is not necessary that you should
understand these matters as an antiquarian does, but it is necessary
to know something of the stories of the great plays. As for comedy,
the works of Aristophanes are quite exceptional in their value and
interest. They require very little explanation; they make us laugh
to-day just as heartily as they made the Athenians laugh thousands
of years ago; and they belong to immortal literature. There is the
Bohn translation in two volumes, which I would strongly recommend.
Aristophanes is one of the great Greek dramatists whom we can read over
and over again, gaining at every reading. Of the lyrical poets there
is also one translation likely to become an English classic, although
a modern one; that is Lang’s translation of Theocritus, a tiny little
book, but very precious of its kind. You see I am mentioning very
few; but these few would mean a great deal for you, should you use
them properly. Among later Greek work, work done in the decline of
the old civilization, there is one masterpiece that the world will
never become tired of--I mentioned it before, the story of _Daphnis
and Chloe_. This has been translated into every language, and I am
sorry to say that the best translation is not English, but French--the
version of Amyot. But there are many English translations. That book
you certainly ought to read. About the Latin authors, it is not here
necessary to say much. There are very good prose translations of Virgil
and Horace, but the value of these to you cannot be very great without
a knowledge of Latin. However, the story of the Æneid is necessary to
know, and it were best read in the version of Conington. In the course
of your general education it is impossible to avoid learning something
regarding the chief Latin writers and thinkers; but there is one
immortal book that you may not have often seen the name of; and it is
a book everybody should read--I mean the _Golden Ass_ of Apuleius. You
have this in a good English translation. It is only a story of sorcery,
but one of the most wonderful stories ever written, and it belongs to
world literature rather than to the literature of a time.
But the Greek myths, although eternally imperishable in their beauty,
are not more intimately related to English literature than are the
myths of the ancient English religion, the religion of the Northern
races, which has left its echoes all through our forms of speech, even
in the names of the days of the week. A student of English literature
ought to know something about Northern mythology. It is full of beauty
also, beauty of another and stranger kind; and it embodies one of the
noblest warrior-faiths that ever existed, the religion of force and
courage. You have now in the library a complete collection of Northern
poetry, I mean the two volumes of the _Corpus Poeticum Boreali_.
Unfortunately you have not as yet a good collection of the Sagas and
Eddas. But, as in the case of the vaster subject of Greek mythology,
there is an excellent small book in English, giving an outline of all
that is important--I mean necessary for you--in regard to both the
religion and the literature of the Northern races, Mallet’s _Northern
Antiquities_. Sir Walter Scott contributed the most valuable portion of
the translations in this little book; and these translations have stood
the test of time remarkably well. The introductory chapters by Bishop
Percy are old-fashioned, but this fact does not in the least diminish
the stirring value of the volume. I think it is one of the books that
every student should try to possess.
With regard to the great modern masterpieces translated into English
from other tongues, I can only say that it is better to read them in
the originals, if you can. If you can read Goethe’s _Faust_ in German,
do not read it in English; and if you can read Heine in German, the
French translation in prose, which he superintended, and the English
translations (there are many of them) in verse can be of no use to you.
But if German be too difficult, then read _Faust_ in the prose version
of Hayward, as revised by Dr. Buchheim. You have that in the library;
and it is the best of the kind in existence. _Faust_ is a book that a
man should buy and keep, and read many times during his life. As for
Heine, he is a world poet, but he loses a great deal in translation;
and I can only recommend the French prose version of him; the English
versions of Browning and Lazarus and others are often weak. Some
years ago a series of extraordinary translations of Heine appeared in
_Blackwood’s Magazine_; but these have not appeared, I believe, in book
form.
As for Dante, I do not know whether he can make a strong appeal to you
in any language except his own; and you must understand the Middle Ages
very well to feel how wonderful he was. I might say something similar
about other great Italian poets. Of the French dramatists, you must
study Molière; he is next in importance only to Shakespeare. But do not
read him in any translation. Here I should say positively, that one
who cannot read French might as well leave Molière alone; the English
language cannot reproduce his delicacies of wit and allusion.
As for modern English literature, I have tried in the course of
my lectures to indicate the few books deserving of a place in
world-literature; and I need scarcely repeat them here. Going back
a little further, however, I should like to remind you again of the
extraordinary merit of Malory’s book the _Morte d’Arthur_, and to
say that it is one of the very few that you should buy and keep and
read often. The whole spirit of chivalry is in that book; and I need
scarcely tell you how deep is the relation of the spirit of chivalry to
all modern English literature. I do not recommend you to read Milton,
unless you intend to make certain special studies of language; the
linguistic value of Milton is based upon Greek and Latin literature.
As for his lyrics--that is another matter. Those ought to be studied.
As there is little more to say, except by way of suggestion, I think
that you ought, every one of you, to have a good copy of Shakespeare,
and to read Shakespeare through once every year, not caring at first
whether you can understand all the sentences or not; that knowledge can
be acquired at a later day. I am sure that if you follow this advice
you will find Shakespeare become larger every time that you read him,
and that at last he will begin to exercise a very strong and very
healthy influence upon your methods of thinking and feeling. A man does
not require to be a great scholar in order to read Shakespeare. And
what is true of reading Shakespeare, you will find to be true also in
lesser degree of all the world’s great books. You will find it true of
Goethe’s _Faust_. You will find it true of the best chapters in the
poems of Homer. You will find it true of the best plays of Molière. You
will find it true of Dante, and of those books in the English Bible
about which I gave a short lecture last year. And therefore I do not
think that I can better conclude these remarks than by repeating an
old but very excellent piece of advice which has been given to young
readers: “Whenever you hear of a new book being published, read an old
one.”