In De Morgan's winsome story, "Alice for Short," the heroine of the
earlier portion, Miss Peggy Heath, is made to feel what it would mean to
her to be deprived of a certain companion, and thus realizes his
importance to her life.
It is this test of elimination that I shall ask you to apply to reading.
Imagine yourselves deprived of the privilege, as many another has been
by loss of sight or illness or poverty or removal from book centers. I
have in mind such an instance. The late Professor William Mathews was
injured by a fall when he was ninety years old, and until the end of his
life, about a year later, was confined to his bed. You may know him as
the author of various books of essays: "Getting on in the World," "Great
Conversers," "Hours with Men and Books," "Words, their Use and Abuse,"
and other volumes that testify a marvelous range of acquaintance with
literature. He wrote to a friend that he was brightening his hours of
loneliness by repeating to himself passages of poetry and prose that he
had learned by heart in his earlier days. Few of us can ever have such
stores of memory to draw upon as his, but how happy we should be if
under such circumstances we might be able to turn to a like source of
consolation. Yet we have a much more famous instance of a great scholar
cut off from the privilege of reading. Milton has given us in his famous
invocation to Light, with which he opens the third book of "Paradise
Lost," a picture of his own deprivation, presented with a universal
blank in place of Nature's fair book of knowledge. The passage is too
long to quote here, but let the reader turn to it, if only to refresh
his memory.
This shows the privilege that we are now enjoying, and it may perhaps be
sufficient to take our lesson at this point; but since it is always
pleasanter to consider gain rather than loss, suppose we turn the
subject around and imagine how it would seem if, after having been
deprived all our lives of the privilege of reading, we suddenly had it
thrust upon us. We should now find ourselves able to enjoy those
wonderful works of literature which we had always been hearing about
from the lips of others, but had never been able to know directly. How
we should revel in the prospect before us! At last to be able to read
the "Iliad"! To follow the fortunes of wandering Ulysses! To accompany
Dante in his mystical journey through the three worlds! To dare with
Macbeth and to doubt with Hamlet! Our trouble would be that we should
not know which to select first. We should wish we had the eyes of an
insect that we might read them all at once.
We have a familiar expression in taking leave of our friends, "Be good
to yourself!" which, it will be seen, is the modern man's translation of
the old "farewell," with the truly modern implication that the question
of his faring well will depend upon himself. But can we call a man good
to himself who does not avail himself of advantages that are freely open
to him and that others about him are embracing? The great men of the
past have been such because to their natural abilities they added an
acquaintance with the thought of the great men who preceded them. The
same is true of the men whom we are glad to honor among our
contemporaries. We may feel very sure that we are not heaven-descended
geniuses, or even possessed of unusual talent; and yet, if we do not
give ourselves the advantages that all those had who have won
distinction, we have certainly not given ourselves a fair chance to show
what is in us. Therefore, as a duty to ourselves, we must make the
acquaintance of the books that the common judgment of the world has
pronounced to be of the most value. They must become more than names to
us. We may not indeed find in all of them food for our own spirits, but
it is a part of our business in seeking a knowledge of mankind to know
the thoughts and thought-forms that men have found of most worth. It is
not to be supposed that we shall prize all these books equally; some of
them will never be more to us than great monuments which, for some
reason peculiar to our temperaments, do not appeal to us; but among
their number we shall find some that will throw open to our souls the
very gates of heaven--books that will raise our natures forevermore to a
higher power, as if from two-dimensional Flatland creatures we had
suddenly been advanced to three dimensions, or, in our own humdrum world
of length, breadth, and thickness, we had received the liberty of the
mysterious fourth dimension.
Let us now take a brief inventory of our heritage. We can glance at only
the most precious of these treasures, the crown jewels of the world's
literature, which are all ours, whether we choose to wear them or not.
But first let me make it plain that I am not assuming that all the great
monuments of human genius are literary. I am not forgetful of the fact
that literature is only one of the fine arts, that the Strassburg
Cathedral, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Rembrandt's School of Anatomy,
Michelangelo's Moses are all products of man's creative genius, records
of the life of God in the soul of man. But I do insist that literature
is the most inclusive and the most definite of all the arts, and that
therefore books unlock to us a vaster world than obeys the spell of any
other art. One man's soul may attain its transfiguration through
architecture or music or painting or sculpture as another does through
poetry; the great thing is to attain the transfiguration; and let us be
thankful for the many ways in which God fulfills himself to man. I am
not trying to make out a case for literature, but literature is my
subject, and what I say of it must be taken as equally friendly to all
the other great forms of human expression and often as equally
applicable to them.
We will not talk of a five-foot or a three-foot shelf, or one of any
other exact dimension, though I suspect that no very long range of space
would be required to hold all the supremely great books for whose
contents we should have room in our souls. The limitation will prove to
be in us rather than in the material of literature. The Bible, while
containing supremely great literature, has still higher claims, and for
the present discussion may be left to its special advocates. But
meanwhile our treasures are waiting for their inventory.
Literature for people of our race begins with Homer and is confined to
Europe and English America. This means in a very true sense that all the
literature which concerns us is modern, for the Greeks are the first and
perhaps the greatest of the moderns. They present us as their first
contribution the works that go under the name of Homer, and we need not
disturb ourselves now with the question whether the "Iliad" and the
"Odyssey" were both written by the same man, or even each written by a
single hand. The point is that we have in them an imperishable picture
of the life of a vanished world. Each is an epic of the natural man, the
one national, the other personal. In the "Iliad" we are plunged into
the thickening close of the ten years' war between the Greeks and
Trojans, during which the beautiful cause of all the trouble, Helen,
retains all her youthful bloom and, in fact, nobody seems to grow any
older. We have a crowded stage with many episodes and interests. In the
"Odyssey" we trace the fortunes of one man, Ulysses, during his return
from the war, which occupies him ten years, so that he is away from
home, as Rip Van Winkle was, twenty years; but, instead of finding
everybody grown old or dead, as Irving's hero did, he finds his wife
still young and attractive and beset by numerous suitors. We are very
glad to have this so, because we are all children at heart and want just
such an ending. The telling of these stories, while simple, is on a
lofty plane; the gods themselves take part in the passions of the
contestants and even in the warfare. The poet, no doubt, meant this for
what it professes to be; but I cannot help seeing in the embroiling of
Olympus a perhaps unrealized tribute of the poet to the greatness of the
human soul in the scale of the universe, a suggestion that moral and
spiritual values and powers outweigh the stars in their courses.
Great as are the works of Homer, we are not to suppose them the only
masterpieces in Greek literature. Certainly the three great dramatists
cannot be omitted, all so great, yet so unlike. These three, together
with two pastoral poets, one lyric poet, and the greatest of prose
poets, are vividly pictured by Mrs. Browning in the glowing stanzas of
her "Wine of Cyprus."
Oh, our Æschylus, the thunderous!
How he drove the bolted breath
Through the cloud, to wedge the ponderous
In the gnarlèd oak beneath.
Oh, our Sophocles, the royal,
Who was born to monarch's place,
And who made the whole world loyal,
Less by kingly power than grace.
Our Euripides, the human,
With his droppings of warm tears,
And his touches of things common
Till they rose to touch the spheres!
Our Theocritus, our Bion,
And our Pindar's shining goals!--
These were cup-bearers undying
Of the wine that's meant for souls.
And my Plato, the divine one,
If men know the gods aright
By their motions as they shine on
With a glorious trail of light!--
It would not be surprising if some who read these lines should find more
food for mind and soul in Plato than in any other of the Greek writers.
Certainly those works of Plato and his contemporary, Xenophon, that
relate to the life, teachings, and death of Socrates are contributions
to a yet uncollected Bible of humanity, one more inclusive than that of
Jew or Christian.
It is one of the great misfortunes of Roman literature that the works of
its chief writers are used as textbooks for schools, a misfortune shared
to some extent by the Greek. Yet Homer and Xenophon, Vergil and Cicero,
did not write for children or callow youth. They belong to Longfellow's
grand old masters,
Whose mighty thoughts suggest
Life's endless toil and endeavor,
and their writings have no relation to adolescence. Yet it is to be
feared that most people who have read their works remember them as seen
through the cloudy medium of their own immaturity. Byron speaks of
reading and hating Horace as a schoolboy, but no normal person can hate
Horace any more than he can hate Washington Irving. It is possible,
however, that pupils who have to read Irving's "Sketch Book" with the
fear of a college entrance examination before their minds may have no
affection even for him. So some of us may have something to unlearn in
our reading of Vergil and Horace, for we must approach their works as
strong meat for mature minds. Vergil's theme is nothing less than the
glorification of the Roman state through its divinely ordered and heroic
founding. School children seldom read more than the six books of the
"Aeneid" required for college; but the other six, though of much less
varied interest, are necessary for the appreciation of the poem. The
whole is a work that no one can afford to pass over in his search for
the burning words that keep alive the thought of other ages. Very
different in theme and manner is the poetry of Horace. He is the most
modern of all the men of old, far more modern than our own Puritan
ancestors. His mixture of grace and shrewdness, poetic charm and worldly
wisdom, we find nowhere else. The bulk of his work is not large, and
this fact, as in the case of Gray and Keats and Poe, is rather in his
favor, because the reader can easily become familiar with it all, though
then he will sigh for more. Horace wears well; the older we grow the
better we like him. He has love songs for youth, political poems for
maturity, and satires for old age. After we have lived with him for half
a century he becomes more real to us than most of our acquaintances in
the flesh. Roman literature is not without other great names to attract
the student; but these two must not be overlooked by the most general or
the most selective reader.
With Vergil the world always associates the still greater figure of one
who was proud to call him master--that of Dante. More than is true of
almost any other writer, his work is a compendium of the life of his
time. The "Divine Comedy" is first of all poetry, and poetry of the
loftiest order; but it is also an embodiment of the learning, the
philosophy, and the theology of his age. It mirrors at once the
greatness and the limitations of the medieval mind. Dante is not modern
in the sense that Horace is, though he is thrice as near to us in time.
Leigh Hunt said that his great poem ought to be called an infernal
tragedy; but that is true only of the Inferno; the spiritual atmosphere
clears as we follow his footsteps through the Purgatorio and the
Paradiso. Of all the masterpieces of human genius the "Divine Comedy" is
perhaps the one that asks the most self-surrender of the modern reader
and--shall I add?--that repays it most richly. Longfellow's marvelous
sonnet sequence, written while he was translating Dante, portrays at
once the spirit in which we should approach the reading of the "Divine
Comedy" and the wonders that we shall find there. It is a book that we
never can outgrow. To know it is to be made a citizen of the moral
universe.
In 1616, within ten days of each other, there passed from earth two men,
each the writer first thought of when his country's literature is
mentioned, and one of them the first writer in the world's literature.
Cervantes and Shakespeare very likely died in ignorance of each other's
work. Stoddard has depicted them in Paradise,
Where sweet Cervantes walks,
A smile on his grave face ...
Where, little seen but light,
The only Shakespeare is.
There is no injustice in saying that Shakespeare's nature included that
of Cervantes. Not so inclusive was Dante's; what his nature most lacked
we find in the author of "Don Quixote." Yet personally they are equally
heroic figures, and, one an exile and the other a slave, both drained to
the dregs the cup of human suffering. Cervantes has several great
advantages over most of the world's classic writers: his masterpiece is
a work of humor; it is written in a simple and graceful style, at once
easy and winning; and it is written in prose, which, after all, does not
make so severe a cultural demand on the reader as poetry. For these very
reasons it cannot aspire to the highest rank, but what it loses in fame
it makes up in popularity. Though in a few passages it is not parlor
reading, "Don Quixote" is one of the cleanest of all the world's great
books. It is not merely technically clean, but clean-minded. It has the
form of a satire on chivalry, but its meaning goes much deeper. It is
really a satire on a more persistent weakness of the Spanish character,
visionary unrealism. We have this quality held up to ridicule in the
learned man and the ignorant man, for Sancho Panza is as much of an
unrealist as his master, only he is a groveling visionary while Don
Quixote is a soaring one. This, too, is a book that one does not
outgrow, but finds it a perpetually adequate commentary on his own
widening experience of men and their motives.
In regard to the supreme figure in literature, the least thing that we
can do is to read him, and, having read him, to read him again and to
keep his volumes next to our hands. We shall hardly read Shakespeare
without having the question of commentators come up; and surely
Shakespeare deserves all the attention that we can bestow upon him. But
the general reader should clearly distinguish between the two kinds of
commentary that have appeared regarding Shakespeare, the one having to
do with his text, his historical accuracy, and his use of words, the
other with his meaning. In Hudson's edition these two kinds of notes are
kept separate. Surely it is the thought of Shakespeare that we want, and
not the pedantry of minute scholarship regarding his material, useful as
that is in its place. The reader who has mastered Hudson's
introductions and has read Dowden's "Shakspere: His Mind and Art" or
Brandes's "Critical Study" will have all that he will ordinarily need in
the way of guidance. But remember that reading about Shakespeare is not
reading Shakespeare; _that_ means, for the time at least, self-surrender
to Shakespeare's leading. Shakespeare is perhaps the supreme example of
a man who found the world interesting. He may not be sympathetic with
evil, but he finds it so interesting that he makes us, for the time
being, take a fratricidal usurper like Hamlet's uncle, or a gross,
sponging braggart like Falstaff, at his own estimate. Shakespeare is
never shocked at anything that happens in the world; he knows the world
too well for that. He offends the Puritan in us by his indifference; he
is therefore probably the best kind of reading for Puritans. Shakespeare
is romantic in his literary methods, but in his portrayal of character
he is an unsurpassed realist. If life were all thought and achievement,
Shakespeare would be the last word in literature; but there is another
side, the side which the Puritan represents, with which Shakespeare is
but imperfectly sympathetic. His message accordingly needs to be
supplemented; and it is interesting that his great successor, the man
who still stands next to him in our literature, supplies that missing
strain. If we could take but one book with us into banishment, it would
be Shakespeare--thus proving Shakespeare's supremacy by Miss Peggy
Heath's principle of elimination; but if we could take two, that second,
I am frank to confess, would for me be Milton.
It is Milton's literary glory that he appeared in the second generation
following Spenser and Shakespeare--he was born in Shakespeare's
lifetime--and carried off the palm, which he still keeps, for the
greatest English poem. In spiritual kinship he is much nearer to Spenser
than to Shakespeare. Shakespeare hides behind his pages; his
personality makes no clear or at least ready impression upon us; but the
colossal personality of Milton towers above all his works. He is Milton,
the superman, and communion with him for the moment lifts us to
something like his own level. In this personal inspiration lies Milton's
greatest service to his readers. Over and above the poetic delights, of
which he is a master unsurpassed, is the inspiration that comes from the
man behind the poetry; or, to express the same thought in other words,
above the organ music of his verse sounds clear and far the trumpet call
of personality. Therefore Milton is destined to inspire generations by
which his theology and his justification of the ways of God to man are
swept into his own limbo of myth and delusion. Fortunately Milton's
verse is not appallingly great in amount. If we cannot hope to know it
all by heart, as Macaulay did, we can at least know it well enough to
recognize any quotation from it, and rich will be the furnishing of our
minds when we have made this true.
In our beadroll of the world's greatest writers I shall mention only one
more, Goethe. He is the modern man who touched life most widely,
penetratingly, and sanely. His long life came down so near to ours that
many of us have had friends who were in childhood or infancy his
contemporaries. It is fair to say that since his death the world has
moved much nearer to his mental attitude than it stood in his lifetime,
and one of the agencies that have wrought the change is the living force
of his own works, which led and still lead the thought of men. Goethe
may be called the ideal creative critic of life. He held up a mirror,
not to Nature, as Shakespeare did, but to society; and society can get
away from the image which it sees reflected there only by growing away
from it.
Here let us close our list, not because there are no other great writers
to choose from, but because it is long enough for our present purposes,
and because, from this point on, every addition is open to challenge. I
have intentionally pitched my counsel high; some of my readers may feel
like calling it a counsel of perfection; but according to my way of
thinking, no writer is too good for any of us to read. Moreover, I
honestly think the list interesting. It is not chiefly reading for
recreation, but for soul expansion, and it means intellectual effort.
Unless we wrestle with an author as Jacob did with the angel, we shall
not receive the highest blessing. But some one may plead that, while he
does not wish to read wholly for amusement, he is not in a condition,
either from training or circumstances, to engage in mental athletics. He
cannot apply himself to an author as he recognizes that the greatest
writers deserve; but he is willing to read with attention, and he should
like to feel that what he is reading is good literature. This is a
reasonable request, and, out of countless possible responses, I will
make one that I hope may prove both profitable and attractive.
Let us set out with the recognition of the fact that systematic reading
is far more profitable than desultory reading, even on the same literary
level. One excellent way to achieve system is to read by authors--to
make the author a study, in his writings and his life. To read
Hawthorne's "House of the Seven Gables," for instance, is to drink from
a fountain of the purest spiritual delight; but we gain an additional
delight, even if of a lower kind, when we know something of Hawthorne's
life and his relations to the old town of Salem. In many cases it is
necessary to know the author's life in order really to understand his
book. Now I will suggest the reading, not merely of separate authors,
but of a group. There are many such, of varying degrees of greatness:
the Elizabethan group, the Lake poets, the Byron-Shelley-Keats group,
the mid-nineteenth-century British novelists, to go no further than
writers in English. But I am going to ask your interest in the New
England group of authors who were writing fifty years ago. They comprise
the well-known names of Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Whittier,
Holmes, Thoreau, and Lowell. Each of these delightful writers deserves
to be studied for his own sake, but, if we take them as a group, we
shall gain still more in understanding and profit. How shall we approach
the reading of them? They obviously cannot all be read at once; so let
us begin with any one, say Hawthorne, read his life in Mrs. Field's
brief Beacon Biography, dipping at the same time into his "Note-Books,"
and then read some of his short stories and the "Scarlet Letter." His
biography will already have brought us into contact with most of the
other names, of Longfellow, his college classmate, and of Emerson and
Thoreau, his neighbors at Concord. We may read the Beacon Biography of
Longfellow, but Higginson's would be better, as fuller and more
adequate. We may first read Longfellow's prose works, "Outre-Mer" and
"Hyperion," and then his "Voices of the Night," besides following him in
his "Life, with Extracts from his Journal and Correspondence," edited by
his brother, which is one of the most delightful of books. We shall do
well to read each author's writings in chronological succession; so they
will stand in orderly relation with his life. Similarly we may take up
Emerson first in Mr. Sanborn's Beacon Biography, or in Dr. Holmes's
larger but still handy volume, and then we can apply ourselves with
better understanding to Emerson's essays and poems. I particularly
mention his poems, for I believe that Emerson will come to be rated
higher as a poet than he has yet been. His poetry at its best is hardly
below anyone's best; the only trouble is that there is so little of it;
but ultimately all writers are judged by their best. In the same way we
may take up all the writers of the group, learning something of the life
of each and reading some of his works before passing on to another. Let
me especially call your attention to the writings of Thoreau, who is
less known to his countrymen than any of the others. He is a writer of
great originality and freshness of view. He, too, wrote some exquisite
poetry, worthy of any name in literature; but you will have to look for
it among other verse that has more originality than charm. Obviously
what I have recommended is not the work of one year's leisure, but the
protracted delight of many years: for these books are not to be hurried
over to get to the end of the chapter or to see how they are coming out;
neither are they material for skipping. They are to be read attentively
and reread; and if one or another fails to make a strong appeal to some
reader, surely he cannot fail to find in most of them a source of lofty
pleasure and spiritual enrichment. One fruit that we may expect from
such reading is that we shall find ourselves drawn nearer to the supreme
masters and shall end by surrendering ourselves to them. To know our New
England group is not indeed to climb the Alps of literature, but it is
at least to climb its White Mountains. Every gain will be a fresh
incitement, and those who at the start join the literary Appalachian
Club may be looked for some day in the ranks of the Alpinists.
A word on the reading of contemporary writers; for even our second list
did not bring us down to our own time. We shall, of course, read our
contemporaries, and we have a right to, so long as we do not give them
the time and attention that clearly belong to their betters. The truth
is that contemporaries--unless they are contemporary poets--have a quite
unfair advantage over their elders, our own in time and place being so
much more attractive to us than anything more remote. Still, our
contemporaries have a claim upon us--even, I am rash enough to assert,
our contemporary poets--for they have a message that their predecessors
cannot give us; it may not be the most important message for us, but it
is a message of value, as we shall see if we return to De Morgan and his
novels. These remarkable books we cannot miss without losing something
that makes our own day fine and precious among earth's generations. But
in this respect they are literally chosen from ten thousand, for we need
constantly the caution that the near carries with it an appearance of
importance that is an illusion; of this truth our periodical literature,
from the newspaper up, is the illustrious example, and the lesson is all
summed up in the one phrase, "back number." Let us be careful that in
heeding contemporary voices we are not storing our minds with the
contents of "back numbers." True literature as we have seen, never
becomes out of date; Homer keeps up with the telegraph.
I have but one final word, which has been provided for me by Charles
Lamb, who says in his inimitable fashion: "I own that I am disposed to
say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of the day besides
my dinner. I want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a
moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have
we none for books, those spiritual repasts--a grace before Milton--a
grace before Shakespeare--a devotional exercise proper to be said before
reading the Fairy Queen?" This is the spirit of a joyous but devoutly
grateful expectance, in which I would have myself approach the reading
of a great book. The gratitude I surely owe the author, for there is no
great book but has come like refined gold out of the furnace fire. I owe
it also to the Providence which has granted me this lofty privilege.
Moreover, it is only in the humility born of such an attitude that I can
make a complete approach to my author and gain that uplift and
enrichment of the soul, which--and not pastime nor pleasure--is the true
end, as it should be the aim of reading.