I say first we have despised literature. What do we, as a nation, care
about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries,
public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses? If a
man spends lavishly on his library, you call him mad--a bibliomaniac.
But you never call any one a horse-maniac, though men ruin themselves
every day by their horses, and you do not hear of people ruining
themselves by their books. Or, to go lower still, how much do you think
the contents of the book-shelves of the United Kingdom, public and
private, would fetch, as compared with the contents of its wine-cellars?
What position would its expenditure on literature take, as compared with
its expenditure on luxurious eating? We talk of food for the mind, as of
food for the body: now a good book contains such food inexhaustibly; it
is a provision for life, and for the best part of us; yet how long most
people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a
large turbot for it! Though there have been men who have pinched their
stomachs and bared their backs to buy a book, whose libraries were
cheaper to them, I think, in the end, than most men's dinners are. We
are few of us put to such trial, and more the pity; for, indeed, a
precious thing is all the more precious to us if it has been won by work
or economy; and if public libraries were half as costly as public
dinners, or books cost the tenth part of what bracelets do, even foolish
men and women might sometimes suspect there was good in reading, as well
as in munching and sparkling; whereas the very cheapness of literature
is making even wise people forget that if a book is worth reading, it
is worth buying. No book is worth anything which is not worth _much_;
nor is it serviceable until it has been read, and re-read, and loved,
and loved again; and marked, so that you can refer to the passages you
want in it, as a soldier can seize the weapon he needs in an armoury, or
a housewife bring the spice she needs from her store. Bread of flour is
good; but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good
book; and the family must be poor indeed which, once in their lives,
cannot, for such multipliable barley-loaves, pay their baker's bill. We
call ourselves a rich nation, and we are filthy and foolish enough to
thumb each other's books out of circulating libraries!--J. RUSKIN.
_Sesame and Lilies._