Even the very greatest of authors are indebted to miscellaneous reading, often in several different languages, for the suggestion of their most original works, and for the light which has kindled many a shining thought of their own.
Hamerton.
He reads a book most wisely who thinks everything into a book that it is capable of holding, and it is the stamp and token of a great book so to incorporate itself with our own being, so to quicken our insight and stimulate our thought, as to make us feel as if we helped to create it while we read. Whatever we can find in a book that aids us in the conduct of life, or to a truer interpretation of it, or to a franker reconcilement with it, we may with a good conscience believe is not there by accident, but that the author meant we should find it there.
Lowell.
Much as a man gains from actual conflict with living minds, he may gain much even of the same kind of knowledge, though different in detail, from the accumulated thinking of the past. No living generation can outweigh all the past. If books without experience in real life cannot develop a man all round, neither can life without books do it. There is a certain dignity of culture which lives only in the atmosphere of libraries. There is a breadth and a genuineness of self-knowledge which one gets from the silent friendship of great authors without which the best work that is in a man cannot come out of him in large professional successes.
Phelps.
The great secret of reading consists in this,—that it does not matter so much what we read or how we read it as what we think and how we think it. Reading is only the fuel; and, the mind once on fire, any and all material will feed the flame, provided only it have any combustible matter in it. And we cannot tell from what quarter the next material will come. The thought we need, the facts we are in search of, may make their appearance in the corner of the newspaper, or in some forgotten volume long ago consigned to dust and oblivion. Hawthorne in the parlor of a country inn on a rainy day could find mental nutriment in an old directory. That accomplished philologist, the late Lord Strangford, could find ample amusement for an hour’s delay at a railway station in tracing out the etymology of the names in Bradshaw. The mind that is not awake and alive will find a library a barren wilderness.
Charles F. Richardson.
IX
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS
A novel.
A clergyman who found the reaction from his pulpit efforts so great that often he could not bring himself to think vigorously and consecutively before the middle of the following week was advised by his physician to try the effect of an Indian tale or an exciting story, and found that a good novel works like a charm in bringing the mind back to normal action. After the interest in the story or novel begins to grow there is danger of reading too long, of reading until another spell of fatigue and reaction comes. The book should be laid aside as soon as the first glow of mental action is felt.
Books.
Most thinkers need the stimulating influence of other minds. These can be found at their best upon the shelves of a well-selected library. They are ready to help us whenever we feel ready to give them our attention. Men put the best part of themselves into their books. The process of writing for print intensifies mental activity, spurs the intellect to the keenest, most vigorous effort, and arouses the highest energy of thought and feeling. Authors that exert a quickening influence upon our thinking should be kept for use whenever we need a stimulus to rouse the mind from its lethargy.
Leibnitz got his best ideas while reading books. He had acquired the habits of a librarian to whom favorite volumes are always accessible.
As stimulus.
A scientist of repute says he gets the necessary stimulus from Jevons’s treatise on the inductive sciences. Professor Phelps has collected an instructive list of authors whose writings have been helpful to other authors of note. He says,—
Examples.
“Voltaire used to read Massillon as a stimulus to production. Bossuet read Homer for the same purpose. Gray read Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’ as the preliminary to the use of his pen. The favorites of Milton were Homer and Euripides. FÉnelon resorted to the ancient classics promiscuously. Pope read Dryden as his habitual aid to composing. Corneille read Tacitus and Livy. Clarendon did the same. Sir William Jones, on his passage to India, planned five different volumes, and assigned to each the author he resolved to read as a guide and awakener to his own mind for its work. Buffon made the same use of the works of Sir Isaac Newton. With great variety of tastes successful authors have generally agreed in availing themselves of this natural and facile method of educating their minds to the work of original creation.”[15]
Great thinkers.
The most valuable function of standard authors lies in their quickening influence upon the intellectual life. The effort to appropriate their ideas and to master their thoughts is the best possible exercise for the understanding. In thinking their thoughts, weighing their arguments, and following their train of reasoning the mind gains vigor, strength, and the capacity for sustained effort. The invigorating atmosphere which a great thinker creates has a most remarkable tonic effect upon all who dwell in it. By unconscious absorption they acquire his spirit of inquiry, his methods of research, his habits of investigation, his way of attacking and mastering difficulties. While trying to walk in his footsteps they learn to take giant strides. His idioms, his choice of words, his favorite phrases and expressions are at their service when they enter new fields of truth. Both in power and aspiration they become like him through the mysterious process of mind acting upon mind, of heart evoking heart, and of will transfusing itself into will. A great thinker gets his place in the galaxy of shining intellects through the truths which he communicates; and as truth is the best food for the soul, so the quest of truth is the best exercise for all its faculties.
The literature of knowledge and the literature of power.
De Quincey, in his essay on Alexander Pope, draws an important and oft-quoted distinction between the literature of knowledge and the literature of power. He says the function of the one is to teach, of the other to move. The former he likens to a rudder, the latter to an oar or a sail. To illustrate the difference he asks, “What do you learn from ‘Paradise Lost’? Nothing at all. What do you learn from a cookery-book? Something new, something that you did not know before, in every paragraph. But would you, therefore, put the wretched cookery-book on a higher level of estimation than the divine poem? What you owe to Milton is not any knowledge, of which a million separate items are still but a million of advancing steps on the same earthly level; what you owe is power,—that is, exercise and expansion to your own latent capacity of sympathy with the infinite, where every pulse and each separate influx is a step upward, a step ascending, as upon Jacob’s ladder, from earth to mysterious altitudes above the earth. All the steps of knowledge, from first to last, carry you farther on the same plane, but could never raise you one foot above your ancient level of earth; whereas, the very first step in power is a flight, is an ascending into another element where earth is forgotten.”
Lowell.
The value of the literature of power as a means of imparting power to every soul that lives under its influence is easily seen and generally acknowledged. But the literature of knowledge serves the double purpose of furnishing us material for thought and of acting as a stimulus to thought. On this point we have the testimony of the wisest who have ventured to give advice upon the use of books. Lowell says, “It is certainly true that the material of thought reacts upon the thought itself. Shakespeare himself would have been commonplace had he been padlocked in a thinly shaven vocabulary, and Phidias, had he worked in wax, only a more inspired Mrs. Jarley.”
The advice which Lowell gives concerning a course of reading and the ends of scholarship to be kept in mind by those who read with a purpose is too valuable to be omitted in this connection:
His advice.
“One is sometimes asked by young people to recommend a course of reading. My advice would be that they should confine themselves to the supreme books in whatever literature, or, still better, to choose some one great author and make themselves thoroughly familiar with him. For, as all roads lead to Rome, so do they likewise lead away from it, and you will find that in order to understand perfectly and to weigh exactly any vital piece of literature you will be gradually and pleasantly persuaded to excursions and explorations of which you little dreamed when you began, and will find yourselves scholars before you are aware. For, remember, there is nothing less profitable than scholarship for the mere sake of scholarship, nor anything more wearisome in the attainment. But the moment you have a definite aim, attention is quickened, the mother of memory, and all that you acquire groups and arranges itself in an order that is lucid, because everywhere and always it is in intelligent relation to a central object of constant and growing interest. This method also forces upon us the necessity of thinking, which is, after all, the highest result of all education. For what we want is not learning, but knowledge; that is, the power to make learning answer its true end as a quickener of intelligence and a widener of our intellectual sympathies. I do not mean to say that every one is fitted by nature or inclination for a definite course of study, or, indeed, for serious study in any sense. I am quite willing that these should ‘browse in a library,’ as Dr. Johnson called it, to their heart’s content. It is perhaps the only way in which time may be profitably wasted. But desultory reading will not make a ‘full man,’ as Bacon understood it, of one who has not Johnson’s memory, his power of assimilation, and, above all, his comprehensive view of the relations of things. ‘Read not,’ says Lord Bacon, in his ‘Essay of Studies,’ ‘to contradict and confute; not to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously (carefully), and some few to be read wholly and with diligence and attention. Some books, also, may be read by deputy.’
“This is weighty and well said, and I would call your attention especially to the wise words with which the passage closes. The best books are not always those which lend themselves to discussions and comment, but those (like Montaigne’s ‘Essays’) which discuss and comment ourselves.”[16]
Professor Phelps, in his lectures to divinity students, gives golden advice to the class of professional men whose life-work compels them to draw upon their productive intellect more than any other class of professional men.
“There is an influence exerted by books upon the mind which resembles that of diet upon the body. A studious mind becomes, by a law of its being, like the object which it studies with enthusiasm. If your favorite authors are superficial, gaudy, short-lived, you become yourself such in your culture and your influence. If your favorite authors are of the grand, profound, enduring order, you become yourself such to the extent of your innate capacity for such growth. Their thoughts become yours not by transfer, but by transfusion. Their methods of combining thoughts become yours; so that on different subjects from theirs you will compose as they would have done if they had handled those subjects. Their choice of words, their idioms, their constructions, their illustrative materials become yours; so that their style and yours will belong to the same class in expression, and yet your style will never be merely imitative of theirs.
“It is the prerogative of great authors thus to throw back a charm over subsequent generations which is often more plastic than the influence of a parent over a child. Do we not feel the fascination of it from certain favorite characters in history? Are there not already certain solar minds in the firmament of your scholarly life whose rays you feel shooting down into the depths of your being, and quickening there a vitality which you feel in every original product of your own mind? Such minds are teaching you the true ends of an intellectual life. They are unsealing the springs of intellectual activity. They are attracting your intellectual aspirations. They are like voices calling to you from the sky.
“Respecting this process of assimilation, it deserves to be remarked that it is essential to any broad range of originality. Never, if it is genuine, does it create copyists or mannerists. Imitation is the work of undeveloped mind. Childish mind imitates. Mind unawakened to the consciousness of its own powers copies. Stagnant mind falls into mannerism. On the contrary, a mind enkindled into aspiration by high ideals is never content with imitated excellence. Any mind thus awakened must, above all things else, be itself. It must act itself out, think its own thoughts, speak its own vernacular, grow to its own completeness. You can no more become servile under such a discipline than you can unconsciously copy another man’s gait in your walk or mask your own countenance with his.”[17]
“Give to yourself a hearty, affectionate acquaintance with a group of the ablest minds in Christian literature, and if there is anything in you kindred to such minds, they will bring it up to the surface of your own consciousness. You will have a cheering sense of discovery. Quarries of thought original to you will be opened. Suddenly, it may be in some choice hour of research, veins will glisten with a lustre richer than that of silver. You will feel a new strength for your life’s work, because you will be sensible of new resources.”[18]
Two ways of reading.
There are two ways of reading books,—one a help to thinking, the other destructive of ability to think. If the reader allows the ideas of a book to pass through his mind as a landscape passes before the eye of a traveller, ever seeking the excitement of something new and never stopping to reflect upon the contents of the book so as to weigh its arguments, to notice its beauties, and to appropriate its truths, the book will leave him less able to think than before. Passive reading is permissible when the aim is merely recreation, but he who would read to gain mental strength must read actively, read books that he can understand only as the result of effort. President Porter gives this advice:
President Porter.
“The person, particularly the student, who has never wrestled manfully and perseveringly with a difficult book will be good for little in this world of wrestling and strife. But when you are convinced that a book is above your attainments, capacity, or age, it is of little use for you, and it is wiser to let it alone. It is both vexing and unprofitable to stand upon one’s toes and strain one’s self for hours in efforts to reach the fruit which you are not tall enough to gather. It is better to leave it till it can be reached more easily. When the grapes are both ripe and within easy reach for you, it is safe to conclude that they are not sour.”[19]
Reading as a source of material.
There are many phases of the library problem which do not call for consideration in this connection, but in addition to their value as a stimulus to thinking, the function of books in furnishing proper material for thought and suitable instruments of thought deserves special consideration on the part of those charged with the duty of teaching others to think. There was a time when libraries were managed as if it were the mission of the librarian to keep the books from being used. The modern librarian seeks to make the accumulated wisdom of the past accessible to all. He regards the library as a storehouse of knowledge, from which any one able to read can get what he needs. CyclopÆdias and dictionaries of reference, card catalogues, and helps like Poole’s “Index to Periodical Literature” make the best thought of the best minds in these and other days accessible to the student. He who wishes to gain a hearing on any theme must know what others have said upon it. Disraeli has well said that those who do not read largely will not themselves deserve to be read. The prize debates between different colleges are teaching students how to utilize books in getting material for public discussions. Theses for graduation develop the ability to use books in the right way. And yet, valuable as books are for furnishing fuel to the mind, they may be used to destroy what little ability to think a pupil has otherwise developed. To assign topics for composition which require a culling of facts from books, and to allow the essays to be written outside of school hours, expose the pupil to unnecessary temptations. In the public schools there should be set apart each week several periods of suitable length, during which the pupil, under the eye of the teacher, writes out his thoughts. In such exercises the attention should not be riveted upon capitals, spelling, punctuation, grammatical construction, and rhetorical devices; the mind should be occupied solely and intensely with the expression of the thought. Mistakes should be corrected when the pupil reviews and rewrites his composition. Books can be used to furnish material for thought; the elaboration can be helped by oral discussions; the interest thereby aroused will make each member of the class anxious to express his thoughts; hesitation in composing and distraction from dread of mistakes can be overcome by making the class write against time.
Enriching one’s vocabulary.
Books are helpful in enriching one’s vocabulary. Treatises on rhetoric teach what words should be avoided. The student finds more difficulty in getting enough words to express his thoughts. The study of a good series of readers is more valuable as a means of acquiring a good vocabulary than all the rules on purity, propriety, and so forth, which are found in the text-books on rhetoric. A good series of school readers employs from five to six thousand words. With these the average teacher is familiar to the extent of knowing their meaning when he sees them in sentences. He does not have a sufficient command of a third of them to use them in writing or speaking. The selections of a Fifth Reader contain more words than are found in the vocabulary of any living author. The step from knowing a word when used by another to the ability to use that word in expressing our own thoughts has not been taken in the case of the larger proportion of the words with which we are familiar on the printed page. Most persons use more words in writing than in oral speech, more words in public speaking than in ordinary conversation. We unconsciously absorb many words which we hear others use, but we pick up a far larger number from those we see in print simply because the printed page contains a larger variety of words than spoken language. In this respect there is a vast difference between the oral discourse and the written manuscript of the same person. The style is different; the sentences in oral discourse are less involved; the diction is less complicated; the vocabulary is less copious. Hence the advantage of the boy who has access to standard authors over the youth who has access to few books, and these not well selected. Without any effort, the former gains possession of a vocabulary which makes thinking easier and richer.
School readers.
The lack of a library of standard authors can be supplied, to some extent, by a judicious use of the school readers. If the mastery of the words and the getting of the thought precede the oral reading of the lesson, and if the vocal utterance is followed by oral and written reproduction of the thought, correct habits of study will be formed, and the working vocabulary of teacher and pupil will be vastly increased. The habit of eying every stranger on the printed page will be fixed, and the appropriation of new words will rise above the subconscious stage. Only one other exercise is comparable,—namely, the comparison of words in a lexicon for the purpose of selecting the right one in making a translation from some ancient or modern language. Such translations, if honestly made, enrich the vocabulary and furnish exercise in the study of the finer shades of meaning which words have, as well as in the use of the words for the purpose of expressing thought.
Franklin’s plan.
Correcting papers.
Most persons, when they face an audience or feel at all embarrassed, think in phrases, in broken sentences. Hence exercises designed to cultivate the habit of thinking in sentences are very valuable. Franklin’s plan of rewriting the thought of a book like “The Spectator,” and then comparing his own sentences with those of a master-mind, can be followed with great advantage, because it lifts the burden of correction from the teacher’s shoulders and throws it upon the pupil, giving the latter the full benefit of the exercise. Moreover, it cultivates in the pupil the habit of watching how thought is expressed by standard authors. The teacher’s interest in the thought side of language often makes him forget that the correct use of capitals, punctuation marks, sentences, and paragraphs is a matter of thinking quite as much as invention and the arrangement of materials. These externals of the process of composing must at some time be made the object of chief regard. The reason so many pupils do not learn their use is found in the fact that teachers hate the drudgery of correcting papers, and they expect the pupils to acquire this knowledge incidentally. The right use of books obviates the necessity for much of this drudgery, and secures the desired end with a minimum expenditure of time and effort. Skill in the use of capitals and punctuation marks is best acquired when the attention is not absorbed by the elaboration of ideas or by the labor of composing. The externals involved in putting sentences upon paper can claim the chief attention in the dictation of standard selections from a school reader. This exercise enables the pupil to make his own corrections, and is worth a dozen in which the teacher makes the corrections, only to be cast aside after a momentary glance by the pupil. The exercise may be varied by copying a selection from a standard author upon the black-board, covering it with a screen or shade (on rollers) during the dictation, and exposing it to view only while the corrections are made. If each one of the punctuation marks is made an object of special attention in a particular grade, there are enough grades to cover them all before the pupil reaches the high school.
Dictation.
A superintendent revolutionized the language-work of an entire county by dictating to the applicants at the annual examination for provisional certificates a selection from a First Reader for the purpose of testing their knowledge of capitals and punctuation and the other details of written speech. Every one saw the value of the test, and it led to a study of the school reader from a new point of view.
Books for all.
Right use of books.
It is not easy to overestimate the value of books, not merely for those who aspire to become thinkers, but even for all classes of men in civilized life. Books treasure the wisdom of the ages and transmit it to future generations. They kindle thought, enliven the emotions, and lift the soul into the domain of the true, the beautiful, and the good. They furnish recreation and instruction, comfort and consolation, stimulation and inspiration. They confirm or correct the opinions already formed, and give tone to the entire intellectual life. They enlarge the vocabulary, exemplify the best methods of embodying thought in language, and show how master-minds throw their materials into connected discourse, how they organize facts, truths, inferences, and theories into systems of science or speculation. One can subscribe to all that is said in favor of object-teaching and laboratory methods, and still be consistent in maintaining that it should be one of the chief aims of the school to teach the right use of books, that the college and university fail in their mission if they neglect to put the student into the way of using a library to the best advantage. If the policy of many schools were adopted in other fields of human activity, the folly would be too glaring to escape notice. Suppose, by months of effort, a botanist could create in his son a liking for the plants of the nightshade family, some of which, like the potato and the tomato, are good for food and others are poisonous. Having created the appetite, the father makes no effort to gratify it. The son, failing to distinguish between the good and the bad, the esculent and the poisonous, and finding the latter within easy reach, begins to gratify his appetite by eating without discrimination. The deadly effects are more easily imagined than described.
Good literature.
A parallel folly has been committed in hundreds of communities which have taxed themselves to banish illiteracy and to make ignorance impossible among the young people. Reading is carefully taught; the ability to read is followed by an appetite for reading; a strong desire for the mental food derived from the printed page is created. Yet nothing is done to supply the right kind of books for the purpose of gratifying this appetite. The average youth is allowed to get what he can from the book-stalls, which contain much that is as deleterious to the soul as some plants of the nightshade family are to the body. It is as much a duty to supply proper literature as it is to impart the ability to read. When, in the twentieth century, some historian shall give an account of the educational development of Pennsylvania, he will record it as a fact passing strange and well-nigh incapable of explanation that for more than three decades there stood upon the statute-books of a great commonwealth a law preventing boards of directors from appropriating any school funds to the purchase of books for a school library except such works of a strictly professional character as were necessary for the improvement of the teachers. Within the last decade a new era has dawned in library legislation and in the purchase of books. Directors are now empowered to levy a tax for library purposes, and free libraries are springing into existence not only in the large centres of population, but even in the rural schools. The movement has come not a whit too soon; for habits of reading are sadly needed to supplement life in the factory and on the farm. To make from day to day nothing except the head of a pin, or the sixtieth part of a shoe, may develop marvellous skill and speed in workmanship, but such division of labor leaves little room for intellectual activity or for anything above the merest mechanical routine.
The factory.
It should not occasion surprise that operatives in factories seek the mental excitement which human nature always craves after hours of monotony. Far better that they should find recreation in a good book than in a game of cards, in a free library than in a drinking-saloon. That the workman may taste the joys of the higher life of thought, it is essential that he have access to the best literature in prose and poetry, to books of travel, biography, history, science, and sociology. If he lack these, his mind will lose itself in local gossip, in discontent over his lot, in envy of those who have more to eat and drink, better clothes to wear, and better houses to live in. Of the pleasures of the higher life he can have as many as, if not more than, others have; for at the close of the day his mind is not exhausted by professional thinking, and he can enjoy a good book far more than the men whose daily occupation obliges them to seek recreation in physical exercise.
The farm.
Twentieth century.
The same remarks apply to life on the farm. The incessant drudgery of monotonous toil day after day from early dawn till late at night has sent farmers and their wives to untimely graves, sometimes to the insane asylum. They need the intellectual stimulus which comes from good books, the health-giving recreation which comes with the change from the fatiguing toil of the day to the perusal of good literature in the evening. Under the more rational policy of providing a supply of good books along with the creation of a taste for reading, the working people of the next generation will be as well read, as well informed, and as capable of sustained thought as those who think money all day, or spend their strength in vocations which act upon the mind very much as a grindstone acts upon a knife,—narrowing the blade while sharpening the edge. Let it be hoped that early in the twentieth century the laboring classes will have shorter hours of work, more leisure for reading, and an appreciation of good books equal to that of Charles Lamb, who asserted that there was more reason for saying grace before a new book than before a dinner. Under the beneficent influence of free text-books and free libraries it should be possible to create in the rising generation a spirit like that of Macaulay, who declared that if any one should offer to make him the greatest king that ever lived, with palaces and gardens, and fine dinners and wines, and coaches and beautiful clothes, and hundreds of servants, on condition that he should not read books, he would decline the offer, preferring to be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books rather than a king who did not love reading.
