If in the minds of some readers this little book has helped to break
down the futile distinctions and to show the real relation between the
man who reads and the one who enjoys life, between the thinker and the
man of action, it has done all that the author dared hope. Let us look
upon our library not as an end in itself, but as a means to an end. It
is a mistaken ambition to read as many books as possible within a year,
or to attempt religiously to read the complete works of a number of
authors. The man who buries himself in his library and exists only in
the books therein is an unsocial, stagnant creature; but the one who
reads as a means of attaining to a more productive life among his fellow
men is the one who has gained the true riches of literature.
The world is a world for workers, not idlers. We live in America in the
twentieth century, and we are of but little use to the general machinery
if our minds are forever sojourning with the mediaeval knights or
gossiping in the by-ways of London with Charles Lamb and his
contemporaries. Literature for you and me who live, and toil, and hope
to obtain joy in the doing of it, must be vivifying nourishment to apply
to our living and toiling. Great books and all true education provide
this nourishment or else they would not be worth the price of a comic
supplement.
Poetry, fiction, philosophy and history are not alone for old maids and
retired business men who desire comforting, amusing solace to while away
the hours until the race is run, nor alone for college professors and
writers whose business it is to read, abstract, and judge,--they are
truly, have been, and always will be for the minds of men and women who
need and use the spirit of them in their work, their play, their
sorrows, and their joys.
When Francis Bacon wrote "Reading maketh a full man," he did not mean
"full" to imply a great accumulation of facts and dry-as-dust learning.
Bacon was a philosopher, scientist, essayist, of the first order in
each, and yet a leading statesman in his age. His mind was "full" in
that he had probably as had no other man in England absorbed all the
literature and science of all the centuries that had preceded him; his
was the fulness of the reservoir from which could be drawn an endless
stream of resource with which to undertake new political enterprises, of
strength to maintain his position and of philosophy in the face of
losing it. He was a literary man in that he knew the literature of the
world, a man of letters--he wrote masterpieces, a man of action--he
virtually ruled Great Britain. This is the threefold thread of life
that we may all have as our ambition,--the connoisseur, the creative
artist, the productive worker.
After having considered the bearing the reading of books has upon life,
let us consider the bearing that living has upon reading and writing.
Elbert Hubbard carried out this thought in his little book upon William
Morris, the English poet. Morris, as you may know, was a weaver, a
blacksmith, a wood-carver, a painter, a dyer, a printer, a furniture
manufacturer, a musician, and withal a great poet. Hubbard said:
"William Morris thought literature should be the product of the ripened
mind." We have looked at Bacon as one whose literary output must have
been the product of a mind that had manfully grappled with worldly
affairs, and here is a further list that the Roycrofter gives us:
"Shakespeare was a theatre manager, Milton a secretary, Bobbie Burns a
farmer, Lamb a bookkeeper, Wordsworth a Government employee, Emerson a
lecturer, Hawthorne a custom-house inspector, and Whitman a clerk."
The professional man of letters, except in rather rare instances, is by
no means the man who erects the most enduring literary monuments.
Literature must come from elemental life to have the true relationship
to the affairs of men. We could increase Elbert Hubbard's list to an
almost indefinite length--the author of the Gettysburg address had the
weight of a nation upon his shoulders, Thoreau was more interested in
observing the changing seasons than he was in writing books, Tolstoy was
a soldier, an economist and farmer, Balzac an unsuccessful publisher,
Bunyan a preacher, Pepys a high government official, Oliver Wendell
Holmes a doctor, and countless novelists and poets of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries hard-working, hard-driven newspaper men.
Leisure does not make great literature,--all that is effective must come
from interior or exterior experiences, and acute observations. The most
effectual reading is that which is done in the light of personal
experience, with one's eye upon unliterary activity. There is an
endless chain, of which the links are the subject, the artist, the
reader and his life as reflected by the author's treatment. To live in
a world of books and to have as their profession the spinning of other
volumes is the life of too many of our writers. On the other side of
the shield, we of course see readers whose lives are entirely absorbed
in the volumes they read without an outlet to the practical activities
of existence. How tiresome it is to have a bustling man or woman tell us
that they have not the time or that they are not literary enough to read
great books. They of course, being good Americans, have plenty of time
to go through stacks of worthless novels, and absorb a half dozen
continuous serial stories in our monthly magazines. I say it is
tiresome, and it is foolish, as with a moment's thought we can realize
that books are essentially for the man or woman who is most deeply
immersed in life.
Break down the barrier between literature and life?--there is none! I
have a certain friend who has more to do within the twenty-four hours of
the day than has anyone else I know. Politics, municipal corporations,
railroads--these are apparently his life--absorbed in men and affairs.
And yet if I run across a book that especially appeals to me, I go to
him and ask his ideas upon it. He has probably read it and with his
greater experience in the actual turmoil of living than I have had, he
can enlighten me with a dozen new points of view upon the book under
consideration. He interprets it in the light of his experience, as the
author had written in the light of his.
It was said that during President Wilson's first winter in the White
House, society in Washington was much exercised as to how he passed his
evenings. It later developed that those evenings in which he was not
absorbed in official business were spent in reading poetry, preferably
Wordsworth, to his family. Washington stood amazed! Perhaps there is no
truth in this story, but the ingredients are certainly there, which, if
brought into conjunction, would make a true yarn. The active helmsman
of the ship of state, with innumerable matters weighing upon him,
seeking wisdom and spiritual fibre from a great poet; Washington
society, without much to do, yet frightfully busy, amazed at his wasting
or dreamily passing his hours of possible recreation!
Many another great public man has well appreciated that books are not
for the closet but for life. Theodore Roosevelt is the apostle of
strenuosity, statesman, ranchman, hunter, and yet a writer upon a wide
range of subjects and an omnivorous reader. The plays of Shakespeare
were the school books and college education of our rail splitter,
Abraham Lincoln. A great English liberal, Charles James Fox, would
charm the House of Commons for hours with his oratory, go to Brooks' and
lose a fortune at cards, and then home to his bed to read the Plays of
Euripides,--probably to absorb wisdom and courage for his thinking and
gaming upon the following evening. Of the men and women to whom books
mean life, we could go on with our list indefinitely, not only through
the ranks of kings and queens, soldiers and statesmen, financiers and
merchants, but sea captains, mechanics, farmers, clerks, and coal
miners. In every walk of life we find the true philosophers, the true
adepts in the art of living, seeking sustenance from the printed page.
Go into a public library, and study the faces of those who are reading
there--ambition, inspiration, delight will be expressed by those who
have found _the open door_, the way to riches and plenty. Observe the
homes of your acquaintances! Cicero said that books are the soul of a
room, and we may expand this epigram in saying that the use of books in
a family brings all the members into a communion with each other,
creating an atmosphere far removed from that of the home in which books
are infrequent sojourners.
Oh no, it is not the professed gentleman of literature with the pedantic
knowledge and bookish phraseology, but the men and women who seek
explanation of and relief from sorrow, stimulus to higher attainment,
pleasure that mellows activity, to whom the authors are truly the path
of life. Those whom you see on the elevated trains reading Shakespeare,
the ranchman with his pocket edition of Dickens, the country doctor who
hates to buy an automobile as when driving his old buggy he could read
his Boswell upon his round of visits,--they are the ones to whom the
poet can truly say,
You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean;
But I will be health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
You need never be afraid of becoming intellectual. To be sure it is
somewhat the fashion in America to think that a man who reads Meredith
should be a college professor or the editor of a book review--but this
is only a fashion and held to by the most stupid. It is smart to laugh
at good books and "culture," but it is the same sort of smartness at
which all Europe has been sensibly sneering for a century. Reading
should not be a profession; those that make it such invariably become
world weary, book weary, at sea in an ocean in which life is necessarily
a more vital thing than they are able to swallow. Do not give your life
over to your library, but make of it an electric battery with which to
vivify life. It can be done, and is done by the great and the little,
the sorrowful and the joyful, the leading warriors in the battle for
civilized progress.
Call upon the supreme minds of past ages to support you in the strife of
this and they will prove stalwart, faithful legions. Read as is your
need and inclination; not as a duty, not as a feat, but as an
acknowledgment that you are glad to win the best and most helpful of
friends. Aristotle said that all men desire knowledge. If knowledge
means deeper human sympathy, a more profound enlightenment, a richer,
happier, more productive life, let each one of us admit that the
attainment of knowledge is in truth our endeavor. Let us try the
experiment of finding this knowledge in the volumes of the deepest, the
most intensive livers.
Make the book you read to-day play a part in the world of to-morrow, and
you will rise above the reader in the closet who carps and criticizes,
thus cutting himself off from the work of men. You will disprove all
statements about the lack of practicability of education, the
other-worldiness of books.
* * * * *
There was a boy who wandered out along an unknown highway into a far
country. The way seemed sombre, foreign and meaningless. His questions
were unanswered, his desires unsatisfied; there seemed no by-paths into
which he could turn in the hope of finding a solace or a reason for his
journey.
A never-ending vista without rhyme or reason lay before him of flat,
uninteresting solitudes, only broken by dark pits or rugged obstructions
which he had either to circle about or climb over or under. They always
annoyed and provoked him, as there seemed no set plan for meeting such
difficulties, no apparent purpose in wandering on. He knew, however,
that there was no turning back, he had to stagger, and stumble, and plod
forward, ever forward.
It was the way of life, and it was a meaningless road, a disappointing
journey undertaken with great expectations.
After a deal of suffering, impatience and profound discouragement, he
came upon a great Palace standing in his way. It was the first that he
had ever seen, and he wondered at it.
With hesitancy he determined to walk about it and to follow the beaten
road, uninteresting but familiar, which he felt must stretch beyond. He
spied, however, a small door at the side of the great barred gate and he
determined to enter and to see what could be found within. The panel
yielded to his timorous push, and he found himself in a mighty hall
where there were wondrous things!
Many another wanderer had already arrived, and many others were to
follow,--there was a happiness, a purpose, a vitality in life that had
been sadly lacking upon the road of his journeying. Wisdom, riches, the
answers to his questions, the reasons for his arduous pilgrimage lay
before him. He grasped them and was content.
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