THE value of books as a means of culture is at this day recognized by all men. The chief allies and instruments of teachers, they are the best substitutes for teachers, and, next to a good college, a good library may well be chosen as a means of education. Indeed, a book is a voiceless teacher, and a great library is a virtual university. A literary taste is at once the most efficient instrument of self-education and the purest source of enjoyment the world affords. It brings its possessor into ever-renewing communion with all that is noblest and best in the thought of the past. The winnowed and garnered wisdom of the ages is his daily food. Whatever is lofty, profound, or acute in speculation, delicate or refined in feeling, wise, witty, or quaint in suggestion, is accessible to the lover of books. They enlarge space for him and prolong time. More wonderful than the wishing cap of the Arabian tales, they transport him to former days. The orators declaim for him and the poets sing. He becomes an inhabitant of every country, a contemporary of all ages, and converses with the wisest, the noblest, the tenderest, and the purest spirits that have adorned humanity. All the sages have thought and have acted for him; 137 or, rather, he has lived with them; he has hearkened to their teachings; he has been the witness of their great examples; and, before setting his foot abroad in the world, has acquired the experience of more countries than the patriarchs saw.
The most original thinkers have been most ready to acknowledge their obligations to other minds, whose wisdom has been hived in books. Gibbon acquired from his aunt “an early and invincible love of reading, which,” he declared, “he would not exchange for the treasures of India.” Doctor Franklin traced his entire career to Cotton Mather’s “Essays to Do Good,” which fell into his hands when he was a boy. The current of Jeremy Bentham’s thought was directed for life by a single phrase, “The greatest good of the greatest number,” caught at the end of a pamphlet. Cobbett, at eleven, bought Swift’s “Tale of a Tub,” and it proved what he considered a sort of “birth of intellect.” The genius of Faraday was fired by the volumes which he perused while serving as an apprentice to an English bookseller. One of the most distinguished personages in Europe, showing his library to a visitor, observed that not only this collection, but all his social successes in life, he traced back to “the first franc he saved from the cake shop to spend at a bookstall.” Lord Macaulay, having asked an eminent soldier and diplomatist, who enjoyed the confidence of the first generals and statesmen of the age, to what he owed his accomplishments, was informed that he ascribed it to the fact that he was quartered, in his young days, in the neighborhood of an excellent library, to which he had access. The French historian Michelet attributed his mental inspiration to a single book, a Virgil, he lived with for some years; and he tells us that 138 at an odd volume of Racine, picked up at a stall on the quay, made the poet of Toulon. “If the riches of both Indies,” said Fenelon, “if the crowns of all the kings of Europe, were laid at my feet, in exchange for my love of reading, I would spurn them all.” Books not only enrich and enlarge the mind, but they stimulate, inflame, and concentrate its activity; and though without this reception of foreign influence a man may be odd, he cannot be original. The greatest genius is he who consumes the most knowledge and converts it into mind. What, indeed, is a college education but the reading of certain books which the common sense of all scholars agrees will represent the science already accumulated?
A well-known American writer says that books are only for one’s idle hours. This may be true of an Emerson; but how many Emersons are there in the reading public? If the man who gets almost all his information from the printed page, “needs a strong head to bear that diet,” what must be the condition of his head who abstains from this aliment? A Pascal, when his books are taken from him to save his health, injured by excessive study, may supply their place by the depth and force of his personal reflection; but there is hardly one Pascal in a century. Wollaston made many discoveries with a hatful of lenses and some bits of glass and crystal; but common people need a laboratory as rich as Tyndall’s. To assume that the mental habits which will do for a man of genius will do for all men who would make the most of their faculties, is to exaggerate an idiosyncrasy into a universal law. The method of nature, it has been well said, is not ecstasy, but patient attention. “There are two things to be considered in the matter of inspiration; one is, the infinite 139 God from whom it comes, the other the finite capacity which is to receive it. If Newton had never studied, it would have been as easy for God to have revealed the calculus to his dog Diamond as to Newton. We once heard of a man who thought everything was in the soul, and so gave up all reading, all continuous thought. Said another, ‘If all is in the soul, it takes a men to find it.’ ” It is true that, as Ecclesiasticus tells us, “a man’s mind is sometimes wont to tell him more than seven watchmen that sit above in a high tower”; but it is also true that the man will hear most of all who hearkens to his own mind and to the seven watchmen besides.
No doubt books, like every other blessing, may be abused. “Reading,” as Bacon says, “makes a full man”; and so does eating; but fullness, without digestion, is dyspepsia, and induces sleepiness and flabbiness, both fatal to activity. The best books are useless, if the book-worm is not a living creature. The mulberry leaf must pass through the silkworm’s stomach, before it can become silk, and the leaves which are to clothe our mental nakedness must be chewed and digested by a living intellect. The mind of the wise reader will react upon its acquisitions, and will grow rich, not by hoarding borrowed treasures, but by turning everything into gold. There are readers whose wit is so smothered under the weight of their accumulations as to b absolutely powerless. It was said of Robert Southey that he gave so much time to the minds of other men that he never found time to look into his own. Robert Hall said of Dr. Kippis that he piled so many books upon his head that his brains could not move. It was to such helluones librorum, or literary anacondas, who are possessed by their knowledge, not possessed of it, that 140 Hobbes of Manchester alluded, when he said that had he read as many books as other men, he would have known as little. There is in many minds, as Abernethy complained of his, a point of saturation, which if one passes, by putting in more than his mind can hold, he only drives out something already in. The history of competitive examinations shows that the kind of knowledge gained by cramming is painfully evanescent; it melts away with lack of use, and leaves nothing behind. It was one of the advantages of the intellectual giants of old, that the very scantiness of their libraries, by compelling them to think for themselves, saved them from that habit of intellectual dependence, — of supplying one’s ideas from foreign sources, — which is as sure to enfeeble the thinking faculty as is a habit of dram-drinking to enfeeble the tone of the stomach. But though books may be thus abused, and many fine wits, like Dr. Oldbuck’s, “lie sheathed to the hilt in ponderous tomes,” will any man contend that such abuse is necessary? The merely passive reader, who never wrestles with his author, may seem to be injured by the works he peruses; but in most cases the injury was done before he began to read. A really active mind will not be weighted down by its knowledge any more than an oak by its leaves, or than was Samson by his locks. John Milton walked gracefully enough under the load of his immense learning; and the flame of Bishop Butler’s genius was certainly not stifled by the mass of books he consumed. Great piles of fuel, which put out the little fires, only make the great fires burn. If a man is injured by multifarious knowledge, it is not because his mind does not crave and need the most various food, but because it “goes into a bad skin.” His learning is mechanically, not chemically, 141 united to the mind; incorporated by contact, and not by solution. The author of “Hudibras” tells us that the sword of his hero sometimes
“— ate into itself for lack
Of somebody to hew or hack.”
and there is reason to believe that the mind may be as fatally enfeebled by turning perpetually upon itself, and refusing all help or impulse from abroad, as by burying itself among books, and resting upon the ideas of other men. There are drones in cells as well as in libraries.
Such being the value of books, how can the college student better spend his leisure time, beyond what is required for sleep, meals, bodily exercise, and society, than in reading? But what books shall he read, and how shall he read them? Shall he let his instincts guide him in the choice, or shall he read only the works which have been stamped with the approval of the ages? How may he acquire, if he lacks it, a taste for the highest types, the masterpieces, of literature? Are there any critical tests by which the best books may be known, and is there any art by which “to pluck out the heart of their mystery”? These questions, if he is a thoughtful young man, anxious to make the most of his time and opportunities, will confront him at the very threshold of his college life. Of the incompetency of most students to answer them for themselves, those persons who have watched them when drawing books from college libraries can have little doubt. Not to speak of the undergraduates who read merely for amusement, or of the intellectual epicures who touch nothing but dainties, nibbling at a multitude of pleasant dishes without getting a good meal from any, — how few, even of the laborious and conscientious students who would economize their precious 142 moments, read wisely, with definite purpose or plan! How many, ignorant that there is a natural order of acquirement, — that, for young readers, biography is better than history, history than philosophy, descriptive poetry than metaphysical, — begin with the toughest, the most speculative, or the most deluding books they can find! How many, having been told that the latest works in certain departments of knowledge are the best, plunge at once into Mill, Spencer, Buckle, Darwin, and Taine! — books pre-eminently suggestive to well-trained minds, but too difficult of digestion for minds not thoroughly instructed. There is, perhaps, no more frequent folly of the young than that of reading hard, knotty books, for the sake of great names, — neglecting established facts in science, history, and literature to soar into regions where their vanity is flattered by novel and daring speculations.
Again, how many students read books through by rote, without interest or enjoyment, without comprehending or remembering their contents, simply because they have been told to read them, or because some great man has profited by them! Who has not seen young men plodding wearily through bulky volumes of history or science, utterly unsuited to their actual state of development, under the delusion that they were getting mental strength and illumination, when, in fact, they were only inflaming their eyes and wasting their precious time? An heroic freshman, full of enthusiasm, and burning to distinguish himself by some literary conquest, fancies that it would be “a grand thing” to possess himself of universal history, and so he attacks the history of the world, in seven volumes, by M. Charles Rollin. He plods through Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, and other “works which no gentleman’s 143 library should be without,” journeying over page after page with incredible patience, and with a scrupulous attention to notes, and, in rare cases, to maps, that is morally sublime. No tome is too thick for him, no type too small; whether the author is luminous or voluminous, it is all the same to him. Years pass, perhaps the young man graduates, before the truth flashes upon him that the object of reading is not to know books, but things; that its value depends upon the insight it gives; and that it is no more necessary to remember the books that have made one wise than it is to remember the dinners which have made one strong. He finds that instead of enriching and invigorating his mind he has taken the most effectual course to stultify it. He has crammed his head with facts, but has extracted from them no wisdom. He has mistaken the husks of history for the fruit, and has no more assimilated his heterogeneous acquisitions than a millstone assimilates the corn it grinds. The corn wears out the millstone, giving it a mealy smell; and the books have worn out the student, given him only the faintest odor of intellectual culture and discipline. Almost every college has its literary Calvin Edsons, — living skeletons that consume more mental food than the strong and healthy, yet receive from it little nourishment, — remaining weak and emaciated on much, while the man of sound constitution grows vigorous on little.
The difficulties of deciding what books to read are greatly multiplied in our day by the enormous number of volumes that weigh down the shelves of our libraries. In the National Library at Paris it is said there are 800,000 separate volumes, or, according to a late writer’s estimate, 148,760 acres of printed paper! The library of the British 144 Museum, which contains over 700,000 separate volumes, is said to have forty miles of book shelves. And yet the largest library in the world does not contain over a quarter part of the books that have been printed since the time of Gutenberg and Fust, while new books are flying from the press as thick as snowflakes on a wintry day. Five thousand new publications are issued a year in England, and it has been ascertained that over ten thousand works, including maps, or a million volumes, are poured forth annually from the press of Germany alone. The Leipsic catalogue contains the name of fifty thousand German authors, and it is estimated that the time will speedily come when the number of German writers will exceed that of German readers. What reader is not appalled by such statistics? Who can cope with even the masterpieces of literature, to say nothing of the scientific and theological works, whose numbers are increasing in geometrical ratio? Steel pens and steam-presses have multiplied the power of production, and railways hurry books to one’s door as fast as printed; but what has increased the cerebrum and the cerebellum? The two lobes of the human brain are not a whit larger to-day then when Adam learned his ab’s and eb’s in the great book of nature. The spectacles by which we may read two books at once are yet to be invented. De Quincey calculates that if a student were to spend his entire life from the age of twenty to eighty in reading only, he might compass the mere reading of some twenty thousand volumes; but, as many books should be studied as well as read, and some read many times over, he concludes that five to eight thousand is the largest number which a student in that long life could hope to master. What 145 realms of books, then, must even the Alexanders of letters leave unconquered! The most robust and indefatigable reader who essays to go through an imperial library cannot extract the honey from one-twentieth of this hive; though he read from dawn to dark, he must die in the first alcoves.
It is true that, in another view, the facts are not quite so discouraging. Newton said that if the earth could be compressed into a solid mass, it could be put into a nutshell; and so, if we could deduct from the world of books all the worthless ones and all those that are merely repetitions, commentaries, or dilutions of the thoughts of others, we should find it shrunk into a comparatively small compass. The learned Huet, who read incessantly till he was ninety-one, and knew more of books perhaps than any other man down to his time, thought that if nothing had been said twice, everything that had ever been written since the creation of the world, the details of history excepted, might be put into nine or ten folio volumes. Still, after all deductions have been made, the residuum of printed matte which one would like to read is so great as to be absolutely terrifying. The use of books is to stimulate and replenish the mind, to give it stuff to work with, — ideas, facts, sentiments; but to be deluged with these is as bad as to lack them. A mill will not go if there is too little water, but it will be as effectually stopped if there is too much. The day of encyclopædic scholarship has gone by. Even that ill-defined creature, “a well-informed man,” is becoming every year more and more rare; but the Huets and the Scaligers, — the Bacons, who “take all knowledge to be their province,” and the Leibnitzes, who presume “to drive all the sciences abreast,” — must soon become as 146 extinct as the megatherium or the ichthyosaurus. The most ambitious reader who now indulges in what Sydney Smith calls the foppery of universality, speedily learns that no individual can grasp in the limits of a lifetime even an elementary knowledge of the many provinces of old learning, enlarged as they are by the vast annexations of modern discovery; and, like Voltaire’s little man of Saturn, who lived only during five hundred revolutions or fifteen thousand of our years, he complains, as he closes his career, that scarcely has he begun to pick up a little knowledge before he is called on to depart.
For all these reasons we cannot but think that our colleges, while they provide the student with libraries, should also provide him with a professor of books and reading. It is not enough to introduce him to these quarries of knowledge; he should also be taught where to sink his shafts and how to work them. Mr. Emerson, speaking of such a professorship in one of his later essays, says: “I think no chair is so much wanted.” Even the ripest scholar is puzzled to decide what books he shall read among the myriads that clamor for his attention. What, then, must be the perplexity of one who has just entered the fields of literature! If in Bacon’s time some books were “to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested,” how much greater must seem the necessity of discrimination at this day, when the amount of literary pabulum has quadrupled and even quintupled! Is there not then an absolute necessity that the student who would economize his time and make the best use of his opportunities, should be guided in his reading by a competent adviser? Will it be said that, according to the theory of a collegiate education, the 147 studies of the curriculum will demand all his time; that he will have no spare hours for general culture? We reply that, as a matter of fact, whatever the theory, in no college does the student, as a rule, give his whole time to the regular lessons, however long or difficult. Unless very dull or poorly prepared, the student does find time to read, — often several hours a day, — and he is generally encouraged to do so by the professors. The question, therefore, is not whether he shall concentrate all his time and attention upon his text-books, but whether he shall read instructive books, for a definite purpose and under competent direction, or shall acquire without direction, the merest odds and ends of knowledge.
We live in a day when it is the practice in every calling to utilize things which were once deemed valueless. In some of the great cities of Europe even the sweepings of the streets are turned to account, being sold to contractors who use them as dressing for farms. In the Untied States Mint at Philadelphia the visitor to the gold room notices a rack placed over the floor for him to walk on; on inquiring its purpose, he is told that it is to prevent the visitor from carrying away with the dust of his feet the minute particles of precious metal which, in spite of the utmost care, will fall upon the floor when the rougher edges of the bar are filed, and that the sweepings of the building save yearly thousands of dollars. How much more precious are the minute fragments of time which are wasted by the young, especially by those who are toiling in the mints of knowledge? Who can estimate the value to a college student of this golden dust, these rasping and parings of life, these leavings of days and remnants of hours, so valueless 148 singly, so inestimable in the aggregate, could they be gleaned up and turned to mental improvement! Let us suppose that a young man, on entering college, economizes the odds and ends of his time so far as to read thoughtfully twelve pages of history a day. This would amount, omitting Sundays, to about three thousand seven hundred pages, or twelve volumes of over three hundred pages each, in a year. At the end of his college course he would have read forty-eight volumes, — enough to have made him master of all the leading facts, with much of the philosophy of history; with the great, paramount works of English literature; with the masterpieces (in translations) of French, German, Spanish, and Italian literature, and with not a little of the choicest periodical literature of the day. What a fund of knowledge, of wisdom, and of inspiration would these forty-eight volumes, well chosen, well understood, and well digested, be to him! What a quickening, bracing, and informing study would even one great book prove! The histories of Hallam, Grote, Merivale, Mommsen, Milman, Macaulay, Motley; Clarendon’s gallery of portraits, Gibbon’s great historic painting; any one of these might date an epoch in the student’s intellectual life. The thorough, conscientious study of any masterpiece of literature, Dr. Johnson thought, would make a man a dangerous intellectual antagonist. Over and above all this, the student would have formed habits of self-improvement and of economy in the use of his time which would be of more value than his acquisitions, and would influence his whole life.
In saying this we do not forget that it is not well for the intellectual worker to be always in the harness, or to be a slave to the clock. We have no sympathy with 149 those persons who, with a pair of compasses, divide the day into portions, allotting one portion and no more to one thing, and another portion to another, and who think it is a sin to lose a minute. On the contrary, we believe there is a profound truth in the saying of Tillier that “le temps me mieux employé est celui que l’on perd.” Much of our education, even of our best education, is acquired, not only out of school, but out of the study, in the hours which morbid or mechanical workers consider lost. Deduct from our acquisitions all that is learned in seemingly idle hours, in times of recreation and social intercourse, and the residuum would be a heap of bones without flesh to cover them. Making, however, all deductions for necessary rest and relaxation, we still believe there are few students who cannot find time to read twelve pages a day. Are there not many who through ignorance of what to read, and how to read, and even of the chief advantages of reading, waste double this time?
Will it be said that it is enough for the student to read a few choice authors, — to absorb thoroughly a half-dozen or more representative books, — and that these he can select for himself? No doubt there are advantage in thus limiting one’s reading. So far as reading is not a pastime, but a part of the systematic cultivation of the faculties, it is useful only so far as it implies close and intimate knowledge. The mind should be not a vessel only, but a vat. A man may say that he has read Milton’s minor poems, if he has skimmed over them lightly as he would skim over the columns of a newspaper, or if he dispatches them as a person boasted that he had gone through a geometry in one afternoon, only skipping the A’s and B’s, and crooked lines that seemed to have 150 been thrown in to intercept his progress; but he has not read them to any good purpose until they have fascinated his imagination and sunk into his memory. Really great books must be read and re-read with ceaseless iteration, must be chewed and digested till they are thoroughly assimilated, till their ideas pass like the iron atoms of the blood into the mental constitution; and they hardly begin to give weight and power to the intellect, till we have them so by heart that we scarcely need to look into them. It is not in the number of facts one has read that his intellectual power lies, but in the number he can bring to bear on a given subject, and in his ability to treat them as data, or factors of a new product, in an endless series.
It is hardly possible to censure too sharply what Sir William Hamilton calls “the prevailing pestilence of slovenly, desultory, effeminate reading.” A great deal of the time thus spent is but the indulgence of intellectual dram-drinking, affording a temporary exhilaration, but ultimately emasculating both mind and character. The Turk eats opium, the Hindoo chews tobacco and betel nut, the civilized Christian reads; and opium, tobacco, and books, all alike tend to produce that dizzy, dream, drowsy state of mind which unfits a man for all the active duties of life. But true as all this is, “the man of one book,” or of a few books, is, we fear, a Utopian dream rather than a reality, in this nineteenth century. The young man who has a keen, vigorous appetite for knowledge, and who would be abreast with his age, will never be content to feed on a few choice authors, even though each be a library. He knows that as the Amazon and the Mississippi have hundreds of tributaries, so 151 it is with every great stream of knowledge. He sees that such are the interrelations and overlappings of science that, to know one subject well, it is necessary to know something of a thousand others. He recognizes, sooner or later, the fact that, as Maclaurin says, “our knowledge is vastly greater than the sum of what all its objects separately could afford; and when a new object comes within our reach, the addition to our knowledge is the greater the more we already know; so that it increases, not as the new objects increase, but in a much higher proportion.” Above all, he knows that, as in our animal economy it is a disastrous policy to eat exclusively the nitrates which contribute to the muscles, the phosphates, which feed the brains and nerves, or the carbonates which develop fat, so we starve a part of our mental faculties if we limit our mental diet to a few dishes. The intellectual epicure who would feed on a few choice authors is usually the laudator temporis acti, the indiscriminate eulogist of the past; and this, of itself, renders worthless all his recipes for mental culture, and cuts him off from the sympathy of the young. He is forever advising them to read only classic authors, which would be to live in an intellectual monastery. It is quite possible to feed a young man with too concentrated a diet. It has been truly said by a wise teacher that if there is one law more sure than another in intellectual development, it is that the young must take their start in thought and in taste from the models of their own time; from the men whose fame has not become a tradition, but is ringing in clear and loud notes in the social atmosphere around us.
There are some persons, no doubt, who are opposed to all guidance of the young in their reading. They would 152 turn the student loose into a vast library and let him browse freely in whatever literary pastures may please him. With Johnson they say, “Whilst you stand deliberating which book your son shall read first, another boy has read both; read anything five hours a day, and you will soon be learned.” Counsel, advice in the choice of books, they condemn as interfering with the freedom of individual taste and the spontaneity which is the condition of intellectual progress. “Read,” they say to the young man, “what you can read with a keen and lively relish; what charms, thrills, or fascinates you; what stimulates and inspires your mind, or satisfies your intellectual hunger; ‘in brief, sir, study what you most affect.’ ” No doubt there is a vein of wisdom in this advice. It is quite possible to order one’s reading by too strict and formal a rule. A youth will continue to study only that in which he feels a real interest and pleasure, constantly provoking him to activity. It is not the books which others like, or which they deem best fitted for him, that he will read and read with profit, but the books that hit his tastes most exactly and that satisfy his intellectual cravings. No sensible educator will prescribe the same courses of reading for two persons, or lay down any formal, cast-iron rules for the direction of the mental processes. That which is the most nutritious aliment of one mind may prove deleterious and even poisonous to another.
To some extent, too, the choice of books may be left to individual taste and judgment. There will be times when, under the attraction of a particular subject, or the magnetism of a particular author, it may be advisable to break away from the prescribed list, and follow the thoughtful promptings of nature. That must be a sorry 153 tameness of intellect that feels no impulse to get out of the groove of even the most judicious course of reading. Again, there are some minds that have an eclectic quality which inclines them to the reading they require, and in a library they not only instinctively pounce upon the books they need, but draw at once from them the most valuable ideas as the magnet draws the iron filings scattered through a heap of sand. But these are rare cases, and can furnish no rule for general guidance. To assert that a learned and judicious adviser cannot help the ordinary student in the choice of books, is to assert that all teaching is valueless. If inspiration, genius, taste, elective affinities are sufficient in the selection and reading of books, why not also in the choice of college studies? Why adopt a curriculum? The truth is, the literary appetite of the young is often feeble, and oftener capricious or perverted. While their stomachs generally reject unwholesome food, their minds often feed on garbage and even poison. The majority of young persons are fond of labor-saving processes and short cuts to knowledge, and have little taste for books which put to much strain upon the mind. The knowledge too easily acquired may impart a temporary stimulus and a kind of intellectual keenness and cleverness, but it brings no solid advantage. It is, in fact, “the merest epicurism of intelligence, — sensuous, but certainly not intellectual.” Magnify as we may the necessity of regarding individual peculiarities in education, it is certain that genius, inspiration, or an affinity for any kind of knowledge, does not necessarily exclude self-knowledge, self-criticism, or self-control. As another has said; “If the genius of a man lies in the development of the individual person that he is, his manhood 154 lies in finding out by study what he is, and what he may become, and in wisely using the means that are fitted to form and perfect his individuality.”
Will it be said that there are manuals or “courses of reading,” such as Pycroft’s, or President Porter’s excellent work, by the aid of which an undergraduate may select his books without the aid of a professor/ We answer that such manuals, while they are often serviceable, can never do the work of a living guide and adviser. Books can never teach the use of books. No course of reading, however ideally good, can be exactly adapted to all minds. Every student has his idiosyncrasies, his foibles, his “stond or impediment in the wit,” as Bacon terms it, which must be considered in choosing his reading-matter, so that not only his tastes may be in some degree consulted, but “every defect in the mind may have a special receipt.”
Will it be objected to our plan, that a vast majority of American colleges are ill endowed, and cannot afford to have a Professorship of Books and Reading, however desirable? We reply that such a chair, specially endowed, is not indispensable; but that its duties, in the smaller colleges, might be discharged by the professor of English Literature, or by an accomplished librarian.
But, it may be asked, what are the qualifications, and what will be the duties, of such a literary gustator and guide? We reply that a professor of books and reading should be a man of broad and varied culture, with catholic tastes, a thorough knowledge of bibliography, especially of critical literature, and much knowledge of men; one who can readily detect the peculiarities of his pupils, and who, in directing their reading, will have constant reference to these as well as to the order of nature and 155 intellectual development. While he may prepare, from time to time, courses of reading on special topics, and especially on those related to the college studies, he will be still more useful in advising the student how to read most advantageously; in what ways to improve the memory; how to keep and use commonplace books; when to make abstracts; and in giving many other hints which books on reading never communicate, and which suggest themselves only to one who has learned after many years of experience and by many painful mistakes the secret of successful study. He will see that the young men who look to him as their guide read broadly and liberally, yet care “multum legere potiùs quam multa.” He will see that they cultivate “the pleasure grounds as well as the corn fields of the mind”; that they read not only the most famous books, but the best reputed current works on each subject; that they read by subjects, and not by authors; perusing a book not because it is the newest or the oldest, but because it is the very one they need to help them on to the next stage of their inquiries; and that they practice subsoil plowing by re-reading the masterpieces of genius again and again. Encouraging them to read the books they “do honestly feel a wish and curiosity to read,” he will teach them to discriminate, nevertheless, between true desire, the monition of nature, and that superficial, false desire after spiceries and confectioneries, which, as Carlyle says, is “so often mistaken for the real appetite, lying far deeper, far quieter, after solid nutritive food”; and, discouraging short cuts in general, he will yet often save the student days of labor by pointing out some masterly review article in which is condensed into a few pages the quintessence of many volumes.
156Perhaps one of the greatest services which such a teacher might perform for the undergraduate would be in showing him how to economize his reading, — how to transfer or inspirit into his brain the contents of a good book in the briefest time. At this day, the art of reading, or at least one of the arts, is to skip judiciously, — to omit all that does not concern us, while missing nothing that we really need. Some of the best thinkers rarely read a book at the beginning, but dive right into the middle, read enough to seize the leading idea, dig out the heart of it, and then throw it by. In this way a volume which cost the author five years of toil, they will devour at a night’s sitting, with as much ease as a spider would suck the juices of a fly, leaving the wings and legs in the shape of a preface, appendix, notes, and conclusion for a boiled joint the next day. It is said that Patrick Henry read with such rapidity that he seemed only to run his eye down the pages of a book, often to leap over the leaves, seldom to go regularly through any passage; and yet, when he had dashed through a volume in this race-horse way, he knew its contents better than anybody else. Stories similar to this of “the forest-born Demosthenes” are told of some of his contemporaries. Wonders are recounted of their powers of perusal; how Johnson would swoop down upon his prey like the eagle, and tear out the heart of a book at once; how Burke, reading a book as if he were never to see it again, devoured two octavo volumes in a stage-coach; and how package after package of these sweet medicines of the mind were thrown in to Napoleon on the island of St. Helena, like food to a lion, and with hoc presto dispatched. It is said that Coleridge rarely read a book 157 through, but would plunge into the marrow of a new volume, and feed on all the nutritious matter with surprising rapidity, grasping the thought of the author, and following out his reasonings to consequences of which he had never dreamed.—
Chief-Justice Parsons, of Massachusetts, who, according to Chief-Justice Parker, “knew more law than anybody else, and knew more of other things than he did of law,” read books with a similar rapidity, taking in the meaning not by single words but by whole sentences, which enabled him to finish several books in a single evening. Thierry, the historian, tells us of himself that from the habit of devouring long pages in folio, in order to extract a phrase and sometimes one word among a thousand, he acquired a faculty which astonished him, — that of reading in some way by intuition, and of encountering almost immediately the passage that would be useful to him, — all the vital power seeming to tend toward a single vital point. Carlyle devours books in the same wholesale way, plucking out from an ordinary volume “the heart of its mystery” in two hours. It is absurd, of course, to suppose that every man, — above all that young men, — will be able with profit to dash through books as did these great men; but all students can be taught how, by practice, to come nearer and nearer to such a habit. It is a miserable bondage to be compelled to read all the word in a book to learn what is in it. A vigorous, live mind will fly ahead of the words of an author and anticipate his thought. Instead of painfully traversing the vales of commonplace, it will leap from peak to peak on the summit of his ideas. Great quickness, acuteness, and power of concentration are required to do this; but it is 158 a faculty susceptible of cultivation and measurably attainable by all. The first thing to be learned by every student is how to read. Few know how, because few have made it a study. Many read a books as if they had taken a sacrementum militare to follow the author through all his platitudes and twaddle. Like the American sloth, they begin at the top of the tree, and never leave it till they have devoured all of which they can strip it, whether leaves or fruit. Others read languidly, without re-acting on the author or challenging his statements, when the pulse should beat high, as if they were in battle and the sound of the trumpet were in their ears. We are told by Dr. O. W. Holmes, who was a classmate of the late Dr. H. B. Hackett, that when the latter was at Phillips Academy, Andover, he “fastened his eyes upon a book as if it were a will making him heir to a million.” A reader who is thus enthusiastic, and knows the secret of his art, will get through a book in far less time, and master it more thoroughly than another, who, ignorant of the art, has plodded through every page.
* This essay is reprinted, by permission, with some changes, from a paper contributed by the author to the Special Report on “The Public Libraries of the United States of America, their History, Condition and Management,” lately made by Hon. John Eaton, LL.D., Commissioner of the U. S. Bureau of Education, and published at Washington.