John Morley, the English Statesman and
Scholar, Tells the Secret of Making
One's Reading Pay.
When a man knows books as thoroughly as John Morley knows them, his
opinions as to what and how to read are worth having. Mr. Morley has
revised and put together as an article for _The Critic_ several of his
extemporaneous addresses on books and reading. From this article the
following paragraphs have been culled and condensed with care to select
those passages which contain practical advice for people who desire to
make their reading count for something:
The object of reading is not to dip into everything that
even wise men have ever written. In the words of one of the
most winning writers of English that ever existed--Cardinal
Newman--the object of literature in education is to open the
mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to
comprehend and digest its knowledge, to give it power over
its own faculties, application, flexibility, method,
critical exactness, sagacity, address, and expression.
Literature consists of all the books--and they are not so
many--where moral truth and human passion are touched with a
certain largeness, sanity, and attraction of form. Poets,
dramatists, humorists, satirists, masters of fiction, the
great preachers, the character-writers, the maxim-writers,
the great political orators--they are all literature in so
far as they teach us to know man and to know human nature.
What I venture to press upon you is that it requires no
preterhuman force of will in any young man or woman--unless
household circumstances are more than usually vexatious and
unfavorable--to get at least half an hour out of a solid
busy day for good and disinterested reading. Some will say
that this is too much to expect, and the first persons to
say it, I venture to predict, will be those who waste their
time most. At any rate, if I cannot get half an hour, I will
be content with a quarter.
Multiply the half-hour by three hundred and sixty-five, and
consider what treasures you might have laid by at the end of
the year, and what happiness, fortitude, and wisdom they
would have given you during all the days of your life.
You may have often heard from others, or may have found out,
how good it is to have on your shelves, however scantily
furnished they may be, three or four of those books to which
it is well to give ten minutes every morning, before going
down into the battle and choking dust of the day. Perhaps it
matters little what it may be so long as your writer has
cheerful seriousness, elevation, calm, and, above all, a
sense of size and strength, which shall open out the day
before you, and bestow gifts of fortitude and mastery.
If a man is despondent about his work, the best remedy that
I can prescribe to him is to turn to a good biography; there
he will find that other men before him have known the dreary
reaction that follows long-sustained effort, and he will
find that one of the differences between the first-rate man
and the fifth-rate lies in the vigor with which the
first-rate man recovers from this reaction, and crushes it
down, and again flings himself once more upon the breach.
A taste for poetry is not given to everybody, but anybody
who does not enjoy poetry, who is not refreshed,
exhilarated, stirred by it, leads but a mutilated existence.
I would advise that in looking for poets--of course after
Shakespeare--you should follow the rule of allowing
preferences, but no exclusion.
Various mechanical contrivances and aids to successful
study are not to be despised by those who would extract the
most from books. The wise student will do most of his
reading with a pen or pencil in his hand. He will not shrink
from the useful toil of making abstracts and summaries of
what he is reading.
Again, some great men--Gibbon was one, and Daniel Webster
was another, and the great Lord Stafford was a third--always
before reading a book made a short, rough analysis of the
questions which they expected to be answered in it, the
additions to be made to their knowledge, and whither it
would take them.
Another practise is that of keeping a commonplace book, and
transcribing into it what is striking and interesting and
suggestive. And if you keep it wisely, as Locke has taught
us, you will put every entry under a head, division, or
subdivision. This is an excellent practise for concentrating
your thought on the passage, and making you alive to its
real point and significance.