What does a student of five and twenty years ago still remember of his
college? My own first and fondest recollection is of the walks and
talks, _noctes coenaeque deum_, with loved and honored companions, in
the bonds of a friendship that can be realized only in youth, under the
inspiration of a common intellectual purpose, and, one is tempted to
add, in the atmosphere of college halls; next arise golden hours passed
in the library; and lastly there come back other hours, not always
golden, spent in the classroom. This is, of course, only to enumerate
the three influences that are, or should be, strongest in a student's
life: the society of his fellows, his private reading, and his studies.
Of these three factors of culture the first and the last are fairly
constant, but the second is apt to vary in the experience of any small
group of students from the foremost place, as in the case of John Hay,
to no place at all. It is of this varying element in the student's
conduct of life that I have undertaken to write.
Unless student intercourse has an intellectual basis, such as reading
furnishes, it has nothing to distinguish it from any other good
fellowship and can hardly escape triviality. The little groups of
students at Cambridge which included such members as the three
Tennysons, Hallam, Spedding, Fitzgerald, and Thackeray, while they were
no doubt jovial enough, were first of all intellectual associations,
where
Thought leapt out to wed with Thought
Ere Thought could wed itself with Speech.
In such companionship men not only share and correct the culture which
they have acquired in private, but they are stimulated to higher and
wider attainment. The classroom at its best is hardly equal to a good
book; from its very nature it must address an abstract average rather
than the individual, while a good book startles us with the intimacy of
its revelation to ourselves. The student goes to college to study; he
has his name thence. But while the classroom is busied, patiently,
sedulously doling him out silver, he discovers that there is gold lying
all around, which he may take without asking. Twenty-five years after he
finds that the silver has grown black with rust, while the gold shines
on untarnished. Librarians are often besought for a guide in reading, a
set of rules, a list of books. But what is really needed, and what no
mentor can give, is a hunger and thirst after what is in books; and this
the student must acquire for himself or forego the blessing. Culture
cannot be vicarious. This is not to say that a list of books may not be
useful, or that one set of books is as good as another, but only that
reading is the thing, and, given the impulse to read, the how and the
what can be added unto it; but without this energizing motive, no amount
of opportunity or nurture will avail.
But, having not the desire to read, but only a sense that he ought to
have it, what shall a student do? I will suggest three practicable
courses from which a selection may be made according to the needs of the
individual. The first is to sit down and take account of stock, to map
out one's knowledge, one's previous reading, and so find the inner
boundaries of the vast region yet to be explored. This process can
hardly fail to suggest not merely one point of departure, but many. The
second method is, without even so much casting about, to set forth in
any direction, take the first attractive unread book at hand, and let
that lead to others. The third course is intended for the student whose
previous reading has been so scanty and so perfunctory as to afford him
no outlook into literature, a case, which, it is to be feared, is only
too common. We will consider this method first. Obviously such a student
must be furnished with a guide, one who shall set his feet in the right
paths, give him his bearings in literature, and inspire him with a love
for the beauty and grandeur of the scenery disclosed, so that he shall
become not only able to make the rest of his journey alone, but eager to
set out.
Where shall the student find such a guide? There are many and good at
hand, yet perhaps the best are not the professional ones, but rather
those who give us merely a delightful companionship and invite us to
share their own favorite walks in Bookland. Such a choice companion, to
name but one, awaits the student in Hazlitt's "Lectures on the English
Poets." Of the author himself Charles Lamb says: "I never slackened in
my admiration of him; and I think I shall go to my grave without
finding, or expecting to find, such another companion." And of his books
Stevenson confesses: "We are mighty fine fellows, but we cannot write
like William Hazlitt." In this little volume which the most hard-pressed
student can read and ponder in the leisure moments of a single term, the
reader is introduced at once into the wonderland of our English
literature, which he is made to realize at the outset is an indivisible
portion of the greater territory of the literature of the world.
Hazlitt begins with a discussion of poetry in general, shows what poetry
is, how its various forms move us, and how it differs from its next of
kin, such as eloquence and romance. He then takes up the poetry of
Homer, the Bible, Dante, and Ossian, and sets forth the characteristics
of each. In his chapter on our first two great poets, Chaucer and
Spenser, he points out the great and contrasted merits of these two
writers who have so little in common except a superficial resemblance in
language. Hazlitt is fond of presenting his authors to us in pairs or
groups. His next chapter is devoted to Shakespeare and Milton; and we
may remark that, while the student is in no danger of forgetting the
existence of Shakespeare, he is likely to need just such a tribute to
the greatness of Milton as the critic here presents. The volume contains
later chapters of great interest on Milton's "Lycidas" and "Eve." It is
not necessary for us to mention here all the subjects treated; Dryden
and Pope, Thomson and Cowper, Burns and the Old English Ballads are
among them. In every case we are not tantalized with mere estimates and
characterizations, but are furnished with illustrative specimens of the
poems discussed. But the initiation into English literature which we
receive from Hazlitt does not end with the authors of whom he treats
directly. Resuming our figure of a landscape, we may say that he takes
us through a thousand bypaths into charming nooks and upon delightful
prospects of which he has made no announcement beforehand.
I spoke of reading and pondering his book in a single college term. But,
while this may easily be done, it will be far more profitable for the
student, as soon as he feels drawn away from the volume to some author
whom it presents, to lay it aside and make an excursion of his own into
literature. Then let him take up the volume again and go on with it
until the critic's praise of the "Faerie Queene," or the "Rape of the
Lock," or the "Castle of Indolence" again draws his attention off the
essay to the poem itself. And as one poem and one author will lead to
another, the volume with which the student set out will thus gradually
fulfill its highest mission by inspiring and training its reader to do
without it. If the student has access to the shelves of a large library,
the very handling of the books in their groups will bring him into
contact with other books which he will be attracted to and will dip into
and read. In fact it should not be long before he finds his problem to
be, not what to read, but what to resist reading.
Suppose, however, that the student finds himself already possessed of a
vague, general knowledge of literature, but nothing definite or
satisfying, nothing that inspires interest. He it is who may profitably
take up the first attractive unread book at hand; but he should endeavor
to read it, not as an isolated fragment of literature, but in its
relations. Suppose the book happens to be "Don Quixote." This is a work
written primarily to amuse. But if the reader throws himself into the
spirit of the book, he will not be content, for instance, with the mere
mention of the romances of chivalry which turned the poor knight's
brain. He will want to read about them and to read some of them
actually. He will be curious as to Charlemagne and his peers, Arthur and
his knights, and will seek to know their true as well as their fabulous
history. Then he will wonder who the Moors were, why they were banished,
and what was the result to Spain of this act in which even his liberal
and kindly author acquiesced. He will ask if antiquity had its romances
and if any later novelists were indebted to Cervantes. The answer to the
last query will bring him to Gil Blas in French literature and to the
works of the great English romancers of the eighteenth century. Fielding
will lead him to Thackeray, Smollett to Dickens, Dickens to Bret Harte,
and Bret Harte to Kipling. If he reads Cervantes in English, he will
have a choice of translations, and he will not fail to mark the
enormous difference in language, literary style, and ideals of rendering
between the three versions of Shelton in the seventeenth century,
Motteux in the eighteenth, and Ormsby in the nineteenth. If, like many
another, he becomes so interested in the great romance as to learn
Spanish for the sake of coming into direct communication with his
author, a whole new literature will be opened to him. Furthermore, in
the cognate languages which a mastery of Spanish will make easy for him,
a group of literatures will be placed at his command; and, while he
began with Cervantes, who threw open for him the portals of the middle
ages, we may leave him with Dante, looking before and after over all
human achievement and destiny.
All this the student will not do in one term nor in one year, but he
will have _found himself_ in the library, he will have acquired a bond
to culture that will not break as he steps out of his last recitation,
that will not yield when time and distance have relegated his college
friendships, with his lost youth, to the Eden or the Avilion of memory.
And if afterwards he comes, with Emerson, to find the chief value of his
college training in the ability it has given him to recognize its little
avail, he will thus disparage it only in the spirit in which a more
advanced student of an earlier day, looking back upon the stupendous
revelations of his "Principia," likened them to so many pebbles or
shells picked up on the shore of the illimitable ocean of knowledge.