A child's guide to reading

OF GUIDES AND RULES FOR READING

If you ever go into the Maine woods to hunt and fish you will have as your companion a veteran of forest and stream, a professional guide. It will be his duty to show you where the game and fish are most plentiful; to see that you do not get into trouble with the authorities by breaking the game laws; to make your camp comfortable; and if you are very green, to keep a watchful eye on you lest you accidentally shoot him or mistake another sportsman for a deer. If you are the right sort—the Maine guide is almost certain to be the right sort—you will get a great deal more from your companion than the simple services for which you pay him. He will be not only guide, but friend and philosopher, and will grudge you nothing of his stores of wisdom, kindliness, and humor.

If, however, you are to receive most profit and pleasure from life in the woods with this good comrade, you must do your part of the work, use what wits you have, and not show a disposition to lean too limply on his strength. There are some things that the best guide cannot do. Not only will he be unable to think for you, but if you are too ready to let him do all the paddling, he will give you only perfunctory help and sulky advice. If, on the contrary, you are handy, he will be doubly handy. The more you learn, the more he can tell you. The more rapidly you approach the time when you are qualified to set up as professional guide yourself, the more you will enjoy the niceties of his theories of hunting, fishing, and wood lore.

Now, a guide to reading—if he be of the right sort—can do for the beginner in literature very much the same degree of service as the Maine woodsman. The literary guide is merely one who has lived longer among books than the unprofessional reader. Since he has elected to pass his life in the literary woods, he may be supposed to have a good nose for interesting clews, and sharp eyes and alert ears for leading signs. He knows what novels are good fishing and what poetic trees are sound and what are hollow. But his services, however willingly tendered and skillfully performed, have limitations. You must do your own thinking and your own reading, and understand that only when you cease to be in floundering need of a guide will you begin to receive the richest benefits of reading. The guide’s idea of his duty is to help you to get along altogether without him.

No guide, no literary adviser can give you ears for poetry or eyes for truth. The wisest companion can only persuade you to live among good books in order that your ear may have opportunity to reveal its fine capacities if it has them, and in order that your eye, dwelling upon beautiful things, may grow practiced in discernment. He cannot read for you. If you do not intend or hope to read any of the books mentioned in this volume, it will be waste of time for you to turn this page. If you passively receive every judgment of your guide about the merits of the scores of books we shall discuss, and never once question or try his judgment for yourself, you may be learning something about this guide, but you will not be learning about literature. It is not the part of a good pupil to surrender right of private judgment, but it is his part to give his judgment solid matter to work upon. On the other hand, too much independence, especially if it is not grounded in experience, is not modest. Even those who have read a good deal and arrived at mature opinions about books, may be content to accompany for a while a new guide whose experience has, necessarily, been different from that of others.

Whatever your hope or intention, your guide is only a guide; he has not power to lead you against your will, he has not the schoolmaster’s right to prescribe a set course of reading. The reading must be voluntary, and to have value it must involve some hard work. Healthful entertainment and recreation we can safely promise. As for wisdom, reverence, the deeper delights of communion with noble minds, whether you meet these great spiritual experiences depends on you. The guide can merely indicate where they may be sought.

Let us at the outset agree not to map out our journey too rigidly. A young friend of mine conceived at the age of sixteen the inordinate ambition to read everything that is good. He procured a public library catalogue, and asked a school-teacher to check off the titles of all the books knowledge of which is essential to a perfect education. The teacher smiled and confessed that she did not know even the titles herself. She might have added that neither does any one else know the titles, much less the insides, of all good books. But she marked some hundred names, and the ambitious youngster entered upon his long feast. He never finished all the books that were checked, for one or two proved discouragingly stiff and dull, and as he ran his eye down the list for the next prescribed masterpiece he saw other alluring titles which were not checked, and he wrote the numbers on library slips. The experience taught him that he must select books for himself, and that the world’s library is too vast for anyone to be acquainted with all its treasures.

A youth so eager to know good books can be trusted sooner or later to find his way to them. For the benefit of less zealous persons, great faith used to be placed in lists of the Hundred Best Books. Such lists, even the very judicious selection made by Sir John Lubbock (Lord Avebury), can never be satisfactory. Lord Avebury is too good a student of nature and human nature to regard his list as final. It was not final for one man, John Ruskin, who has given us a most inspiring essay on books, “Of Kings’ Treasures.” Ruskin thought that Lubbock had included in the chosen hundred some books that were not only unworthy but injurious. No man could make a list which would fare any better at the hands of another critic of solid convictions. Who shall select a social Four Hundred, all of whom we should accept as friends? Who can select a Four Hundred or a One Hundred of books and not leave out some of the noblest and best? It may be that Lubbock and Ruskin were both a little priggish to take that century of masterpieces quite so solemnly.

In books, as in all things, we cherish much that is not the best, but is good in its way. It is not natural nor right to reject all but the superlatively excellent. It is natural to prefer sometimes a book of secondary value, and it is perversely natural to turn away from the book that we are assured too insistently we “ought to read.” A formal list of “oughts” is a severe test for ordinary human patience. Becky Sharp in “Vanity Fair” is a bad-tempered and bad-hearted young woman, but one can have a little sympathy with her when she throws her copy of Johnson’s Dictionary at the head of her teacher as she parts forever from the school gates. It is not altogether her fault if Johnson’s Dictionary seems to her at that moment of all printed things the most detestable.

Yet perhaps no better book than a good dictionary could be found whereon to base a library and a knowledge of literature. The wit who said that the dictionary is a good book, but changes the subject too often, told but a partial truth, for the dictionary keeps consistently to the first of all subjects, the language in which all subjects are expressed. If it be true that Americans are of all peoples the most assiduous patrons of the dictionary, the future of our popular education and of our national literature is secure, for although mere words will not make thought, it is only thoughtful people who have a zealous interest in the dictionary. The schoolmaster who first made the present writer conscious that there is a difference between good English and bad used to tell us in the moments when regular school exercises were pending to study our dictionaries. The dictionary would be a reasonable answer to that delightful conundrum: “If you were wrecked on a desert island, and could have only one book, what book would you choose?”

The shrewdest of all answers to that question evaded it: “I should spend so much time trying to choose the book that I should miss the steamer and not be wrecked.” These conundrums—the best book?—the best hundred books?—the greatest novel?—the greatest poem?—are not to be answered. The use of them is that they stir our imaginations and whet our judgments. If we come close and try to settle them in earnest, we bring tumbling about our heads a multitude of conflicting answers. Then we flee from the disorder and realize that conundrums are only stimulating nonsense. Individual choice among the riches of the world’s literature is not to be confined by hard and fast rules and tests.

As a practical matter we are not altogether free to choose. Our book friends, like our human friends, are in part chosen for us by accidental encounters. We do not wander over the world seeking for the dozen souls that are most fit to be grappled to us with hoops of steel. We merely choose the most congenial among our neighbors. So it is with books. Each of us wishes to select the best among such as are available, to have judgment in accepting the right one when it falls in our way. Biography is full of instances of chance encounters in the world’s library that have shaped great careers.

John Stuart Mill records in his Autobiography how Wordsworth’s poetry brought about in him a spiritual regeneration. At the age of twenty-one, precociously far advanced in his study of economics and philosophy, he found himself dejected and with no clear outlook upon life. He had often heard of the uplifting power of poetry, and read the whole of Byron, but Byron did him no good. He took up Wordsworth’s poems “from curiosity, with no expectation of mental relief.” “I found myself,” he says, “at once better and happier as I came under their influence.” The reading of Wordsworth was the immediate occasion, though not the sole cause, of a complete change in his way of thinking, and his new way of thinking led him to life-long associations with other great men.

We cannot tell which poet, which thinker, will do for us what Wordsworth did for Mill. But while we are young we can take trial excursions into literature until we find our own. And when we do find our own, the treasure that is most precious to our souls, we shall know it, and know it the better, perhaps, if we have tried many good books and failed to like them.

If we are to rely so frankly upon our own likings, a word of caution may be necessary to help us distinguish liberty of choice from unreasonable license. We have to ask not only, Does this book interest me?—but, Does this book appeal to the best tastes and emotions in me? Many of us, by no means bad human beings, are so constituted that if our eye meets the morbid, the coarse, the senselessly horrible, we are fascinated, we are indeed interested. But it requires only the most simple self-analysis and a little honesty, to pull ourselves together and realize that it is an unworthy side of us, a side that we do not care to show our friends, which is being held at attention. Not that we need, like the stupidest of the old Puritans, be afraid of a book simply because it does thrill us and make us breathless. For every bad book which holds the depraved mind guiltily alert, a good book can be found, so absorbing, so compelling, that beside it the bad book is tame.

I once had a pupil whose transparent honesty was only one of his many lovable qualities. He believed that “Literature” consisted of dull books written by authors who died long ago. The ill-reasoned conclusion was his own, but I found that the raw materials of his error lay in the prudishness of one of his teachers. When I told him that “Huckleberry Finn,” by a very live author, is literature, and that a short story by Mrs. Mary Wilkins-Freeman in a current magazine seemed to me literature of rare excellence, his delight so aroused his wits that for some time after that my part of the lessons consisted merely in meeting his enthusiasm halfway.

A friend once asked me what he could read to improve his mind. In the pride of a little superior wisdom, I loftily recommended Shakespeare. His reply was, “That is too deep for me.” A wiser counselor than I, knowing his circumstances, would not have tried to cultivate a sprouting ambition with quite so perfect an intellectual instrument. But I stuck to my advice, and shortly after I had opportunity to prove that I was, if not wise, at least on the side of wisdom. We went together to see “Othello”—from gallery seats. After that my friend read the play and another that was bound with it.

Shakespeare is deep, forsooth. Hamlet’s soliloquy in the fourth act:

is so profound that it is darkened by its very depth. But the play “Hamlet” is a stirring melodrama that keeps the “gallery gods” leaning forward in their seats. The larger part of literature is by dead authors, because the “great majority” of the race is dead and includes its proportionate number of poets and prophets. Some great books are dull except to a comparatively few minds in certain moods. But most dull books by old writers have been forgotten; our ancestors saved us the trouble of rejecting them. Most books that have survived are triumphantly alive in all senses. The vitality of a book that is just born may be brief as a candle flame. The old book that is still bright has proved that its brightness is the true luster of the metal; else we should not know its name.