A child's guide to reading

THE STUDY OF LITERATURE

In our age of free libraries and cheap editions of good books anyone who has time and disposition may become not merely a reader of literature, but a student of literature. The difference is not great, perhaps not important; it seems to be only a matter of attitude and method. The reader opens any book that falls in his way or to which he is led for any reason, tries a page or two of it, and continues or not, at pleasure. The student opens a book which he has deliberately sought and brings to it not only the tastes and moods of the ordinary reader, but a determination to know the book, however much or little it may please him. He is impelled not only to know the book, with his critical faculties more or less consciously awake, but to know the circumstances under which the book was written, and its relation to other books. One may read “Hamlet” ten times and know much of it by heart and still not be a student of “Hamlet,” much less a student of Shakespeare. The student feels it necessary to know the other plays of Shakespeare, some of the other Elizabethan dramatists, a little of the history and biography of Shakespeare’s time, and something, too, of the best critical literature that “Hamlet” has inspired in the past two centuries. The study of literature implies order and method in the selection of books, and orderly reading in turn implies enough seriousness and willful application to turn the act of reading, in part, from play to work.

Well, then, it is better to be a student of literature than a mere reader. Ideally that is true; if there were years enough in a human life we should like to be students of everything under the sun. But the conditions of life limit the mere reader on one side and the student on the other, and it is a question which one is ultimately richer in mind. A mere reader will read “Hamlet” until he can almost imagine himself standing on the stage able to speak the lines of any part. The student of literature will read “Hamlet” thoroughly, investigate its real or supposed relation to the rest of the Shakespearian plays, toil through a large volume of learned notes and opinions, read fifty other Elizabethan tragedies and a half dozen volumes on the life and works of Shakespeare. He is on the way to becoming a student of Shakespeare. But while he is struggling with the learned notes, the mere reader is reading, say, Henley’s poems; while the student is reading the lesser plays of Shakespeare, the mere reader is enjoying Browning’s tragedies; while the student of “Hamlet” is making the acquaintance of fifty tragedies by Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Jonson, Marlowe, Webster—less than ten of which are masterpieces—the idle reader is wandering through Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy,” ten modern novels, the seventh book of “Paradise Lost” (that noble Chant of Creation), a beautiful new edition of the poems of George Herbert, and some quite unrelated bits of prose and verse that happen to attract his eye. Which of the two has pursued the happier, wiser course? Each has spent his time well, and each, if there were more time, might profitably follow the other’s course in addition to his own. Intensive, orderly reading, like that of the student, tends to make the mind methodical and certainly furnishes it with a coherent body of related ideas on which to meditate. Extensive reading, such as we assume the reader’s will be, seems to engender superficiality, and yet such is the nature of books and human thought that scattered reading may disclose unexpected and vital relations of idea. Greater effort of will is required to keep the student on his narrower course, and effort of will is profitable to the spirit. On the other hand, the mind is likely to have keener appetite for what it meets on a discursive course, and it assimilates and absorbs more exhaustively what it approaches with natural, unforced interest. “It is better,” says Johnson, “when a man reads from immediate inclination.”

It would be educational anarchy to depreciate orderly intensive study of any subject, and we shall presently consider some helpful introductions to the methodical study of literature. But I believe that human nature and human conditions favor the unmethodical reader, and that he, on the whole, discovers the best uses of books in the world as it is. For in the world as it is, we have in adult life thirty, forty, fifty years in which to read books. If we consider everything a book from the little volume which occupies half an hour to the Bible which cannot be read through once intelligently in under six months, we see that three books a week is a liberal number for an assiduous reader. So that in a lifetime one cannot expect to know more than five or six thousand books. Five thousand, or two thousand, or one thousand are plenty for a life of wisdom and enjoyment. The five thousand or the one thousand books of the discursive reader are likely to be at least as good a collection as the five thousand or the one thousand of the student of literature. Reader and student are both restricted to a small picking from the vineyard of books. The ordinary reader will have spent a third of his reading hours on books that have meant little to him. The student will have spent a third of his time in digging through sapless, fiberless volumes. But the free wandering reader is not disturbed by the number of books he has read in vain or by the vast number of interesting books he has not read at all; whereas the student of literature is lured by his ideal of exhaustive knowledge to hurry through books that he “ought to know,” and in desperation is tempted to insincere pretensions.

In no class of readers does the tendency to unwarranted assumptions of knowledge show more comically than in those advanced students of books who are called Professors of English Literature. Properly speaking, no one is a professor of literature except the man who can produce something worth reading. But as the term is used it defines a class of teachers who have spent much time and study, not as writers but as readers of books, and who then set themselves up, or are set up in spite of individual modesty by the artificial university systems, to “teach” literature. The professional teacher of literature can know only a limited number of books. And while he has been reading his kind, his unprofessional neighbors, even his students, are reading their kind. He knows some literature that they do not; they know some literature that he does not. The chances are that the professor and not the lay reader will have departed the farther from the true uses of literature. It is possible to read a number of good books while the professor is studying what another professor says in reply to a third professor’s opinions about what Shakespeare meant in a certain passage. The professor of literature seems to regard Shakespeare and other poets as inspired children who need a grown person to interpret their baby talk; whereas the lay reader takes it for granted that Shakespeare had more or less definite ideas about what he wished to say and succeeded in saying it with admirable clarity.

To be sure, a professor here and there may be found who is a live and virile reader of poetry like the rest of us, and the faults of pedantry and pretentious authority are not inevitable faults of the profession as a whole. There is, however, one universal fault of the professional teacher of literature which is imposed by the conditions of employment in our universities and is subversive of the true purpose of colleges and the true purposes of literature. One fundamental idea of a college is to afford a certain number of scholarly men the means of livelihood from college endowments in order that they may have time to devote to books. The modern professor of literature seems to have so many duties of administration and discipline that he has little time to read for the sake of reading—which is the chief reason for reading at all. The old idea of a university as a place where the few educated members of society could retire for study and intellectual communion has passed away, and the professor of literature is rather at a disadvantage in the modern world where there are more educated persons outside the universities than in them, and where the cultivated person of leisure, reading literature by himself, can easily outstrip the professor.

Professor of literature? As well might there be a professor of Life, or a professor of Love, or a professor of Wisdom. Literature is too vast for anyone to profess it, excepting always him who can contribute to it. Even if our professors of literature were a more capable class of men, they would still be anomalous members of society, for they are trying to do an anomalous thing, maintain themselves in authority on a subject which is open to everybody in a world of books and libraries. And they are working under conditions not only not helpful, but distinctly unfavorable to a true knowledge and enjoyment of literature, as compared with the conditions of the person of equal intelligence outside the college.

My purpose is not so much to dispraise the literary departments of universities as to praise a world which has grown so rich in opportunities that the universities are no longer the unique leaders in literature or the seats of the best knowledge about it. Our masters are on the shelves and not in the colleges. (Carlyle, Emerson, and Ruskin all said that, and it was said before them.) Without going to college we can become students of literature, professors of literature, if we have the talent and the will. I do not say or mean that we should not go to college if we can. I mean that we can stay away from college if we must and still be as wise and happy readers of books as those bachelors of arts who have sat for four years or more under “professors of literature.” If my advice were sought on this point, I should advise every boy and girl to go to college if possible, but to take few courses in English literature and English composition. One great advantage of a college course is that it offers four years of comparative leisure, of freedom from the day’s work of the breadwinner; and in those four years the student, with a good library at hand, can read for himself. I should advise the student to take courses in foreign languages, history, economics, and the sciences, things which can be taught in classrooms and laboratories and are usually taught by experts. There is no need of listening to a professor of English who discourses about Walter Scott and Shakespeare; we can read them without assistance. Literature is a universal possession among people of general intelligence. It is made, fostered, and enjoyed by men who are not professors of literature in the meaningless sense; it is written for and addressed to people who are not professors of literature; and it is understood and appreciated, I dare affirm, by no intelligent, cultivated class in the world less certainly, less directly, less profitably than by professors of literature in the modern American college.

Well, we may leave our little declaration of independence from those who are supposed to be authorities in literature, and turning from them not too disrespectfully, go our own way. Let us be readers of literature. The study of literature will take care of itself. We cannot expect to know as much about the sources of “Hamlet” as Professor Puppendorf thinks he knows. Neither can we hope to bring as much imagination to our reading as Lamb brought to his. But of the two masters we shall follow Lamb, who was not a professor, nor even, it seems, a student of literature, but only a reader. If we happen to be interested in Professor Smith’s ideas of Milton, we can in three or four hours read his handbook on the subject, or, better, the other handbook from which he got his ideas. For the professors do not keep their wisdom for their students in class; they live, in spite of themselves, in a modern world and publish for the general reader all the knowledge they have—and a little more. We can follow the professors, if we choose, in the libraries. But probably there will be more wisdom and happiness in following Lamb or Stevenson, or some other reader who was not a professor; they tread a broader highway and never forget what books are made for. We may well follow Dr. S. M. Crothers, “The Gentle Reader,” who seems to have been enjoying books all his life and still enjoys them, though he lives near a great university. Another genial guide and counselor, whose company the younger generation might well seek often, is Mr. Howells. He is a professor of literature in the real sense, because he makes it. He is also a reader whose enthusiasms are fresh and individual. Many of his recorded impressions of contemporaneous books are buried in an obscure magazine, and his reticence has its disadvantages in an age when too many inept voices chatter about books. But he reads books and writes about them because he likes them, and so his accounts of his reading are rich in suggestion.

Most of the authentic professors of literature, that is, the men who have produced literature, have been readers rather than students of books. Keats, I am quite sure, had neither opportunity nor inclination to make a formal study of books, even of the old poets from whom his genius drew its sustenance. He seems not to have studied Homer or the English translation by the Elizabethan poet, George Chapman. He calls his sonnet “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer.” You see, he only read it, only “looked into” it, just like an ordinary reader. But he was not ordinary, he was a poet, and so he could write this of his experience as a reader:

Something like that experience ambushes the road of any reader, the most commonplace of us. We, too, can travel in the realms of gold. Only three or four men are born in a century who could express the experience so finely as that. But the breathless adventure can be ours, even if we cannot write about it.

The great writers themselves are the best guides to one another, for they have kept the reader’s point of view—they had too much imagination, as a rule, to descend to any other point of view. We conjecture that Shakespeare was an omnivorous reader. And so, certainly, were Milton, Browning, Tennyson, Shelley, Carlyle, George Eliot, Macaulay. Nearly all the great writers have been, of course, life-long, assiduous students of the technical characteristics of certain kinds of literature from which they were learning their art. The poet must study the poets; the novelist must study the novelists. But the creative artist is usually far from being a scientific or methodical student of literature as it is laid out (suggestive words!), in handbooks and courses. The nature of literature and the experience of the makers of it seem to confirm us in the belief that books are to be read, to be understood and enjoyed as they come to one’s hands, and not jammed into text-book diagrams of periods and cycles and schools. The great writers of our race, those obviously who know most about literature, seem to have taken their books as they took life, just as they happened to come. They were wanderers, not tourists. And though we shall never see as much by the way as they did and have not the power to travel so far, we can roam through “many goodly states and kingdoms” and be sure of inspiring encounters, if only a small corner of our nature is capable of being inspired.

But as travelers in lands of beauty and adventure may profitably spend an hour a day in searching the guide books for facts about what they have seen and directions for finding the most interesting places, so the reader, without sacrificing his spirit of freedom, may well equip himself with a few handbooks of literature. Suppose that Keats has interested us in Chapman’s Homer. Let us find out who Chapman was and when he lived. A fairly reliable book in which to seek for him is Professor George Saintsbury’s “History of Elizabethan Literature.” It is one of a series of histories in which the volume on “Early English Literature” is by Mr. Stopford Brooke, and the volume on “English Literature of the Eighteenth Century” is by Mr. Edmund Gosse. We find in Saintsbury’s handbook ten pages of biography and criticism of Chapman and extracts from his poetry. This is enough to give a little notion of Chapman’s place in literature and to suggest to the ordinary reader whether Chapman is a writer he will wish to know more fully. We find among Mr. Saintsbury’s comments on Chapman the following:

“The splendid sonnet of Keats testifies to the influence which his work long had on those Englishmen who were unable to read Homer in the original. A fine essay of Mr. Swinburne’s has done, for the first time, justice to his general literary powers, and a very ingenious and, among such hazardous things, unusually probable conjecture of Mr. Minto’s identifies him with the ‘rival poet’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets. But these are adventitious claims to fame. What is not subject to such deduction is the assertion that Chapman was a great Englishman who, while exemplifying the traditional claim of great Englishmen to originality, independence, and versatility of work, escaped at once the English tendency to lack of scholarship, and to ignorance of contemporary continental achievements, was entirely free from the fatal Philistinism in taste and in politics, and in other matters, which has been the curse of our race, was a Royalist, a lover, a scholar, and has left us at once one of the most voluminous and peculiar collections of work that stand to the credit of any literary man of his country.”

Here, in this paragraph, we stand neck-deep in the study of literature, its exhilarating eddies of opinion, its mind-strengthening difficulties, and also, we must confess, its harmless dangers and absurdities. Let us run over Mr. Saintsbury’s sentences again and see whither they take us.

Keats’s sonnet—we have just read that—which Mr. Saintsbury says, testifies to the influence of Chapman for a long time on Englishmen who could not read Greek, really does nothing of the sort. It testifies only that Keats met Chapman, and the momentous meeting took place, in point of fact, at a time when the interest in Elizabethan poetry was reviving after a century that preferred Pope’s “Iliad” to Chapman’s. Handbook makers sometimes go to sleep and make statements like that, and it is just as well that they do, for their noddings tumble them from their Olympian elevations to our level and help to make them intelligible to the common run of mortals. The mention of Swinburne’s essay is an interesting clue to follow. His recent death (1909) has occasioned much talk about him, and at least his name is familiar, and the fact that he was a great poet. It is interesting to discover that he was also a critic of Elizabethan poetry. We are thus led to an important modern critic and poet as a result of having struck from a side path into a history of Elizabethan literature. Mr. Minto’s conjecture that Chapman was the “rival poet” of Shakespeare’s sonnets is valuable because it will take us to those sonnets, and will give us our first taste of the great hodge-podge of conjectures and ingenious guesses which constitute a large part of the “study of literature” and are so delightful and stimulating to lose oneself in. After you have read Shakespeare’s sonnets and a biography of Shakespeare and the whole of Mr. Saintsbury’s book, you can pick out some other Elizabethan poet and conjecture that he is the rival to whom Shakespeare enigmatically alludes. Neither you nor anyone else will ever be sure who has guessed right. But that matters little. The value of the game, whatever its foolish aspects, is that interest in a problem of literature or literary biography cultivates your mind, keeps you reading, so entangles you in books and the things relating to books that, like Mr. Kipling’s hero, you can’t drop it if you tried. The rewards of such an interest are lifelong and satisfying, even if the solution is unattainable or not really worth attaining. The literary problem is a changeful wind that keeps one forever sailing the sea of books.

The rest of Mr. Saintsbury’s remarks, those about English character, have this significance for us: One cannot read books, or study literary problems, without studying the people who produced them. The study of literature is the study of national characteristics. The reason we Americans know so much more about the English than the English know about us, is that we have been brought up on English literature, while the Englishman has only begun to read our literature. Mr. Saintsbury’s reflections on the Philistinism of the English open at once to the reader large questions, philosophic in their nature, but not too philosophic for any ordinary person to think about, the question of the relation of English literature to Continental literature, and the question whether the English, who have produced the greatest of all modern poetry, are in comparison with their neighbors a notably poetic race. One of the best works on English literature for the student to read and possess, that by the Frenchman Taine (the English translation is excellent), is based on a philosophic inquiry into the nature of the English people. There is, so far as I know, no analogous study of American literature, though Professor Barrett Wendell’s “Literary History of America” might have developed into such a book if the author had taken pains to think out some of his clever, fugitive suggestions. The best books on the literature of our country which I have seen are Professor Charles F. Richardson’s “American Literature” and the “Manual,” edited by Mr. Theodore Stanton for the German Tauchnitz edition of British and American authors, and published in this country by the Putnams.

Well, we have entered the classroom in which Mr. Saintsbury is discoursing of Elizabethan literature, we have entered, so to speak, by the side door. If our nature is at all shaped to receive profit and enjoyment from the study of books, we shall be curious to see from reading the whole of Mr. Saintsbury’s book what has led up to Chapman and what writers succeed him. Of the various ways in which authors may be grouped for analysis the historical is the best for the young student; and it is on the historical scheme of division that most studies of literature are based. A very useful series of books has been begun under the editorship of Professor William A. Neilson in which each volume deals with a class of literature, one with the essay, one with the drama, one with ballads, and so on. This series, intended for advanced students, will probably not be the best for the beginner, though it is often true that works intended for advanced readers are the very best for the young, and that books for young readers entirely fail as introductions to more thorough studies. The reader who is really interested in tracing out the relations between writers will in good time wish to read studies of literature made on the historic plan and also some which survey generic divisions of literature. The two methods intersect at right angles. The main thoroughfare of literary study which runs from the early story-tellers through Fielding and Thackeray to Hardy and George Meredith, crosses the other great thoroughfares: the one which follows the relations between Fielding, Gray, Johnson, and Burke and other great men of that age; the one which makes its way through the age of Wordsworth and passes from Burns’s cottage to Scott’s Abbottsford; and the one through the age of Victoria. This has been surveyed as far as George Meredith, and the critics are busily putting up the fences and the sign posts.

In view of the limitations which mere time imposes on the number of books which any individual may study, we shall resolve early not to attempt the impossible, not to try to study with great intimacy the entire range of literature. The thing to do is to select, or to allow our natural drift of mind to select for us, one period of literature, or one group, or one writer in a period. In ten years of leisurely but thoughtful reading, after the day’s work is done, one can know, so far as one’s given capacity will admit, as much about Shakespeare as any Shakespeare scholar, that is, as much that is essential and worth knowing. Not that ten years will exhaust Shakespeare or any other great poet, but they will suffice for the laying of a foundation of knowledge complete and adequate for the individual reader, and on that foundation the individual can build his personal knowledge of the poet, a structure in which the materials furnished by other students become of decreasing importance.

There is a story of a French scholar who made up his mind to write a great book on Shakespeare. In preparation he resolved to read all that had been written about the poet. He found that the accumulation of books on Shakespeare in the Paris libraries was a quarry which he could not excavate in a lifetime, and more appalling still, contemporary scholars and critics were producing books faster than he could read them. This story should console and instruct us. We cannot read all that has been written about Shakespeare; neither can the professional Shakespearians. But we can all read enough. Two or three books a year for ten years will, I am sure, put any student in possession of the best thought of the world on Shakespeare or any other writer. The multitude of works are repetitious, one volume repeats the best of a hundred others, and most of them are waste matter, even for the specialist who vainly strives to digest them.

The thing for us to learn early is not to be appalled by the miles of shelves full of books, but to regard them in a cheerful spirit, to look at them as an interminable supply of spiritual food and drink, a comforting abundance that shall not tempt us to be gourmands. I am convinced that young people are often deterred from the study of books by professional students who preside over the long shelves in the twilight of libraries—blinking high priests of literature who seem to say: “Ah! young seeker of knowledge, here is the mystery of mysteries, where only a few of us after long and blinding study are qualified to dwell. For five and forty years I have been studying Shakespeare—whisper the name in reverence, not for him, but for me—and I have found that in the ‘Winter’s Tale’ a certain comma has been misplaced by preceding high priests, and the line should read thus and so.” Well, if you go inside and open a few windows to let the light and air in, you are likely to find, sitting in one of the airiest recesses, an acquaintance of yours, quite an ordinary person, who has read the “Winter’s Tale” for only five years, has not bothered his head about that blessed comma, can tell you things about the play that the high priest would not find out in a million years, and is using the high priest’s latest disquisition for a paper weight.

So approach your Shakespeare, if he be the poet you select for special study in the next ten years, in a light-hearted and confident spirit. He is a mystery, but he is not past finding out, and the elements of mystery that baffle, that deserve respect, are those which he chose to wrap about himself and his work. The mysteries which others have hung about him are moth-eaten hangings or modern slazy draperies that tear at a vigorous touch. If you hear learned literary muttering behind the arras and plunge your sword through, you will kill, not the king, but a commentator Polonius.

Anyone in the leisure of his evenings, or of his days, if he is fortunate enough to have unoccupied sunlit hours, may master any poet in the language to which we have been born. Nothing is necessary to this study but a literate, intelligent mind, the text of the poet and such books as one can get in the libraries or with one’s pin money. And in selecting the books one has only to begin at random and follow the lead of the books themselves. Any text of “Macbeth” will give references to all the critical works that anyone needs and they in turn will point to all the rest. You do not need a laboratory course in philology in order to read your poet and to know him, to know him at least as well as the philologist knows him, to know him better, if you have a spark of poetic imagination. There is no democracy so natural, so real, and so increasingly populous as the democracy of studious readers. We acknowledge divinity in man, in our poet above all, and we see flickerings of divinity in the rare reader who is a critic. But we do not acknowledge the divine right of Shakespearian scholars or of any other self-constituted authorities in books. In our literary state the scholars are not our masters but our servants. We rejoice that they are at work and now and again turn up for us a useful piece of knowledge. But they cannot monopolize knowledge of the poets. That is open to any of us, and it is attainable with far less labor than the scholars have led us to believe.

The selection of a single writer for special study, a selection open to us all, should not be made in haste. It should be a “natural selection” determined gradually and unawares. It will not do to say: “I will now begin to study Shakespeare for ten years.” That New Year’s resolution will not survive the first of February. But as you browse among books you may find yourself especially drawn to some one of the poets or prose writers. Follow your master when you find him.

In the meantime you can get a general idea of the development of English literature and the place of the chief writers. A good method is to read selections from English prose and poetry grouped in historical sequence. The volumes of prose edited by Henry Craik and Ward’s “English Poets” afford an adequate survey of British literature. Carpenter’s “American Prose” and Stedman’s “American Anthology” constitute an excellent introduction to the branch of English literature produced on this side of the water. The volumes of selections may be accompanied by the historical handbooks already mentioned, which deal with literary periods, or by one of the histories which cover all the centuries of English authors, such as Saintsbury’s “Short History,” or Stopford Brooke’s “English Literature.” The student should guard against spending too large a portion of his time reading about literature instead of reading the literature itself. But a systematic review of the history of a national literature has great value, apart from the enjoyment of literature; it is, if nothing more, a course in history and biography. I have found that the study of a handbook of a foreign literature in which I could not hope to read extensively was in effect a study of the development of the foreign nation. I never read a better history of Rome than J. W. Mackail’s “Latin Literature.” The student who can read French will receive pleasure and profit from Petit de Julleville’s “Littérature Française” or from the shorter “Petit Histoire” of M. Delphine Duval.

Everyone will study literature in his own way, keep the attitude which his own nature determines, and for that matter the nature of the individual will determine whether he shall study literature at all. I would make one last suggestion to the eager student: Let your study be diligent and as serious as may be, but do not let it be solemn. I once attended a lecture on literature given to a mixed audience, that is, an audience composed mainly of ladies. The lecture was not bad in its way; it contained a good deal of useful information, but at times it reminded me of the discourses on “terewth” by Mr. Chadband in “Bleak House.” It was the audience that was oppressive. The ladies were not, so far as I could see, entertained, but they had paid their money for a dose of light, literature and culture and they meant to have it. So they sat with looks of solemn determination devotedly taking in every word. Two ladies near me were not solemn; they concealed their restiveness and maintained a respectful but not quite attentive demeanor. As I followed them out, I heard one of them say, “Would not Falstaff have roared to hear himself talked about that way”? I once heard a class rebuked for laughing aloud at something funny in Chaucer. The classroom was a serious place and the professor was working. But Chaucer did not intend to be serious at that moment. On another occasion the professor remarked that it was well that Chaucer had not subjected his genius to the deadening effect of the universities of his time, and it occurred to me then that he would have fared about as well in a medieval university as his poems were faring in a modern one. Of course we take literature seriously; by a kind of paradox we take humorous literature seriously. But solemnity is seldom in place when one is reading or studying books. The hours of hard work and deliberate application which are necessary to a study of literature should be joyous hours, and the only appropriate solemnity is that directly inspired by the poets and prose writers when they are solemn.

LIST OF WORKS ON LITERATURE

Supplementary to Chapter XII

Below are given the titles of a few books helpful to the student of literature and literary history.

Remarkable among books for schools on account of its excellent literary style.

Philosophical criticism for advanced readers.

This work gives a trustworthy appraisal of many modern works on Shakespeare. (See page 166 of this Guide.)

In one volume, in the popular edition.

In the English translation.

In Heath’s Modern Language Series.

Both the foregoing works are in easy French.

In the English translation.