The most common intellectual difficulty is not that of the lack of ideas, but that of vagueness of ideas. Most persons of moderately good education have plenty of thoughts such as they are, but there is a nebulous quality about these which renders them of little use in reasoning. This makes it necessary to define what is meant by the Study of Literature, as in the first place it was necessary to define literature itself. Many have a formless impression that it is something done with books, a sort of mysterious rite known only to the initiated, and probably a good deal like the mysteries of secret societies,—more of a theory than an actuality. Others, who are more confident of their powers of accurate thinking, have decided that the phrase is merely a high-sounding name for any reading which is not agreeable, but which is recommended by text-books. Some take it to be getting over all the books possible, good, bad, and indifferent; while still others suppose it to be reading about books or their authors. There are plenty of ideas as to what the study of literature is, but the very diversity of opinion proves that at least a great many of these must be erroneous.

In the first place the study of literature is not the mere reading of books. Going on a sort of Cook's tour through literature, checking off on lists what one has read, may be amusing to simple souls, but beyond that it means little and effects little. As the question to be asked in regard to a tourist is how intelligently and how observantly he has traveled, so the first consideration in regard to a reader is how he reads.

The rage for swiftness which is so characteristic of this restless time has been extended to fashions of reading. By some sort of a vicious perversion, the old saw that he who runs may read seems to have been transposed to "He who reads must run." In other words there is too often an assumption that the intellectual distinction of an individual is to be estimated by the rapidity with which he is able to hurry through the volumes he handles. Intellectual assimilation takes time. The mind is not to be enriched as a coal barge is loaded. Whatever is precious in a cargo is taken carefully on board and carefully placed. Whatever is delicate and fine must be received delicately, and its place in the mind thoughtfully assigned.

One effect of the modern habit of swift and careless reading is seen in the impatience with which anything is regarded which is not to be taken in at a glance. The modern reader is apt to insist that a book shall be like a theatre-poster. He must be able to take it all in with a look as he goes past it on a wheel, and if he cannot he declares that it is obscure. W. M. Hunt said, with bitter wisdom: "As print grows cheap, thinkers grow scarce." The enormous increase of books has bred a race of readers who seem to feel that the object of reading is not to read but to have read; not to enjoy and assimilate, but to have turned over the greatest possible number of authors. This idea of the study of literature is as if one selected as the highest social ideal the afternoon tea, where the visitor is presented to numberless strangers and has an opportunity of conversing rationally with nobody.

A class of self-styled students of literature far more pernicious than even the record-breaking readers is that of the gossip-mongers. These are they who gratify an innate fondness of gossip and scandal under the pretext of seeking culture, and who feed an impertinent curiosity in the name of a noble pursuit. They read innumerable volumes filled with the more or less spicy details of authors; they perhaps visit the spots where the geniuses of the world lived and worked. They peruse eagerly every scrap of private letters, journals, and other personal matter which is available. For them are dragged to light all the imperfect manuscripts which famous novelists have forgotten to burn. For them was perpetrated the infamy of the publication of the correspondence of Keats with Miss Brawne; to them Mrs. Stowe appealed in her foul book about Byron, which should have been burned by the common hangman. It is they who buy the newspaper descriptions of the back bedroom of the popular novelist and the accounts of the misunderstanding between the poet and his washerwoman. They scent scandal as swine scent truffles, and degrade the noble name of literature by making it an excuse for their petty vulgarity.

The race is by no means a new one. Milton complained of it in the early days of the church, when, he says:—

With less fervency was studied what St. Paul or St. John had written than was listened to one that could say: "Here he taught, here he stood, this was his stature, and thus he went habited," and, "O happy this house that harbored him, and that cold stone whereon he rested, this village where he wrought a miracle."

Schopenhauer, too, has his indignant protest against this class:—

Petrarch's house in Arqua, Tasso's supposed prison in Ferrara, Shakespeare's house in Stratford, Goethe's house in Weimar, with its furniture, Kant's old hat, the autographs of great men,—these things are gaped at with interest and awe by many who have never read their works.

All this is of course a matter of personal vanity. Small souls pride themselves upon having these things, upon knowing intimate details of the lives of prominent persons. They endeavor thus to attach themselves to genius, as burrs cling to the mane of a lion. The imagination has nothing to do with it; there is in it no love of literature. It is vanity pure and simple, a common vulgar vanity which substitutes self-advertisement and gossip-mongering for respect and appreciation. Who can have tolerance for the man whose proudest boast is that he was in a crowd presented to some poet whose books he never read; for the woman who claims attention on the ground that she has from her seamstress heard particulars of the domestic infelicities of a great novelist; or for the gossip of either sex who takes pride in knowing about famous folk trifles which are nobody's business but their own?

A good many text-books encourage this folly, and there are not a few writers who pass their useless days in grubbing in the dust-heaps of the past to discover the unessential and unmeaning incidents in the lives of bygone worthies. They put on airs of vast superiority over mortals who scorn their ways and words; they have only pitying contempt for readers who suppose that the works of an author are what the world should be concerned with instead of his grocery bills and the dust on his library table. Such meddlers have no more to do with literature than the spider on the eaves of kings' houses has to do with affairs of state.

It is not that all curiosity about famous men is unwholesome or impertinent. The desire to know about those whose work has touched us is natural and not necessarily objectionable. It is outside of the study of literature, save in so far as it now and then—less often, I believe, than is usually assumed—may help us to understand what an author has written; yet within proper limits it is to be indulged in, just as we all indulge now and then in harmless gossip concerning our fellows. It is almost sure to be a hindrance rather than a help in the study of literature if it goes much beyond the knowledge of those circumstances in the life of an author which have directly affected what he has written. There are few facts in literary history for which we have so great reason to be devoutly thankful as that so little is known concerning the life of the greatest of poets. We are able to read Shakespeare with little or no interruption in the way of detail about his private affairs, and for this every lover of Shakespeare's poetry should be grateful.

The study of literature, it must be recognized farther, is not the study of the history of literature. The development of what are termed "schools" of literature; the change in fashions of expression; the modifications in verse-forms and the growth and decay of this or that phase of popular taste in books, are all matters of interest in a way. They are not of great value, as a rule, yet they will often help the reader to a somewhat quicker appreciation of the force and intention of literary forms. It is necessary to have at least a general idea of the course of literary and intellectual growth through the centuries in order to appreciate and comprehend literature,—the point to be kept in mind being that this is a means and not in itself an end. It is necessary, for instance, for the student to toil painfully across the wastes of print produced in the eighteenth century, wherein there is little really great save the works of Fielding; and where the reader has to endure a host of tedious books in order properly to appreciate the manly tenderness of Steele, the boyishly spontaneous realism of Defoe, the kindly humanity of Goldsmith, and the frail, exquisite pipe of Collins. The rest of the eighteenth century authors most of us read chiefly as a part of the mechanics of education. We could hardly get on intelligently without a knowledge of the polished primness of Addison, genius of respectability; the vitriolic venom of Swift, genius of malignity; the spiteful perfection of Pope, genius of artificiality; or the interminable attitudinizing of Richardson, genius of sentimentality. These authors we read quite as much as helps in understanding others as for their own sake. We do not always have the courage to acknowledge it, but these men do not often touch our emotions, even though the page be that of Swift, so much the greatest of them. We examine the growth of the romantic spirit through the unpoetic days between the death of Dryden and the coming of Blake and Coleridge and Wordsworth; and from such examination of the history of literature we are better enabled to form standards for the actual estimate of literature itself.

There is a wide and essential difference between really entering into literature and reading what somebody else has been pleased to say of it, no matter how wise and appreciative this may be. Of course the genuine student has small sympathy with those demoralizing flippancies about books which are just now so common in the guise of smart essays upon authors or their works; those papers in which adroit literary hacks write about books as the things with which they have meddled most. The man who reads for himself and thinks for himself realizes that these essayists are the gypsy-moths of literature, living upon it and at the same time doing their best to destroy it; and that the reading of these petty imitations of criticism is about as intellectual as sitting down in the nursery to a game of "Authors."

Even the reading of good and valuable papers is not the study of literature in the best sense. There is much of profit in such admirable essays as those, for instance, of Lowell, of John Morley, or of Leslie Stephen. Excellent and often inspiring as these may be, however, it is not to be forgotten that as criticisms their worth lies chiefly in the incitement which they give to go to the fountain-head. The really fine essay upon a masterpiece is at its best an eloquent presentment of the delights and benefits which the essayist has received from the work of genius; it shows the possibilities and the worth within the reach of all. Criticisms are easily abused. We are misusing the most sympathetic interpretation when we receive it dogmatically. In so far as they make us see what is high and fine, they are of value; in so far as we depend upon the perceptions of the critic instead of our own, they are likely to be a hindrance. It is easier to think that we perceive than it is really to see; but it is well to remember that a man may be plastered from head to feet with the opinions of others, and yet have no more genuine ideas of his own than has a bill-board because it is covered with posters. Genuine emotion is born of genuine conviction. A reader is really touched by a work of art only as he enters into it and comprehends it sympathetically. Another may point the way, but he must travel it for himself. Reading an imaginative work is like wooing a maiden. Another may give the introduction, but for real acquaintance and all effective love-making the suitor must depend upon himself if he would be well sped. Critics may tell us what they admire, but the vital question is what we in all truth and sincerity admire and appreciate ourselves.