Many people live in first-class houses, stay at first-class hotels, travel in first-class steamships and railway trains and then read third or fourth-class books. For them one book is about as good as another.
If one does not care for the world’s great books the fault is in him, not in them, but he must realize the vastness of human knowledge and understand that some of the wisest voices of all time have no message for him.
There are nomadic readers who read as the gypsies live, camping everywhere but for a night without purpose and without profit. Such reading is mental dissipation. Desultory reading jumps from one book to another. You might as well try to drink the sea as to read all books. You must divide in order to conquer. Do not read blindly, know what you are about. Have a definite aim and purpose. Do not read the first book that comes to hand but when you hear of a book that you ought to read make a note of it. By keeping a list of books you may shape your course and make your reading a selection from a selection.
Do not prefer the new to the meritorious; by following Emerson’s advice “read no book until it has been out a year,” you will avoid many loud-trumpeted books. There is uncertainty in reading a new book, but the value of the old books is well known. We need make no mistake.
Many of the oldest books are always new but there are books which were once standards on historical and technical subjects that are now as out of date as last year’s almanac. Be sure that what you read is reliable and the best of its kind. Prefer quality to quantity. Read the great books for yourself and do not be content with reading other people’s impressions of them. Books about books are seldom useful unless one has also read the works of which they treat.
Let the books that you select be those that have the approval of men competent to judge, but bear in mind that the wisest man cannot select the books that will best suit others; each must choose for himself. People are always glad to recommend the books that have helped them but they cannot tell whether such books will help you. You must find out for yourself, no one else can do it for you. Do not be afraid to ask anyone who knows more than you do. There is no information which people are so ready to give as about books, indeed when you ask them they feel flattered. When Franklin wished to make friends with a man that he suspected of hostile sentiments he borrowed a book of him and returned it promptly.
To find out what the best books are is no difficult matter, but to find out what are the best books for us requires a self-knowledge that takes life-long study. In reading we must feel our way, we cannot tell what is best for us all at once. We need to get acquainted with our own minds, to learn what our powers and tastes are. This takes time and thought and, more than all, fair-mindedness in order that we may not form too high or too low an estimate of our abilities. “If thou wouldst profit by thy reading, read humbly, simply, honestly, and not desiring to win a character for learning,” said Thomas a Kempis.
Have a clear view of literature, know what you like and why you like it. Be honest with yourself, do not pretend to like what you do not because other people do. Do not be afraid to be ignorant of many things, it is the price you must pay for knowing a few things well. It is only the stupid who pretend to know what they do not. An educated man is not ashamed to say that he does not know. “The acknowledgment of ignorance,” said Montaigne, “is one of the best and surest testimonies of judgment that I can finde.” To know when you do know a thing and when you do not, is the first step towards the attainment of sound scholarship, and the next is to know where to go for information. “Nothing is so prolific as a little known well.”
To have a general idea of what is worth reading and to know where to turn for the books which are of vital importance to one’s development must be the foundation of any plan for culture. It is one of the most useful results of a liberal education that it gives a broad view of the whole range of human thought, and shows what to consider and what to reject; it teaches to distinguish as Lowell says between literature and printed matter.
Follow the bent of your inclination but make a clear distinction between the reading that you do with a purpose and that which you do for pleasure, “what we read with inclination makes a strong impression. What we read as a task is of little use,” said Doctor Johnson, and he added “if we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention, so there is but one half to be employed on what we read.”
Much energy is wasted by conscientious readers over classic books that are beyond their capacity. Plato and Aristotle are among the greatest thinkers that the world has produced but their works are not within the comprehension of every mind. Indeed Emerson says that, “There are not in the world at any one time more than a dozen persons who read and understand Plato.”
Do not think that because a statement is in print it is necessarily true. You will often find conflicting statements in different books on the same subject. “Some books are lies frae end to end,” said Burns. Fortunately this can be said of few books but many contain inaccuracies, mis-statements and exaggerations. Weigh and consider all you read in the light of your own experience. Books like life of which they are expressions and authors who produce them are of all kinds, good and bad, uplifting and degrading, true and false. We must value them for what they are, not for what they pretend to be, and, setting aside our own preconceptions and prejudices, lay our minds open to those who seriously and sincerely hold other views than ours.
The author tries to make us feel what he feels and see what he sees. Some can do this without effort on our part and others like cuttle fish cover themselves with clouds of their own obscurity. We soon learn from the way a writer expresses himself whether he is accurate or not and we depend upon those whom we find careful in making their statements.
We get to love and trust authors as we get to know our friends by long and familiar converse. The writers we should know best, with whose lives and complete works we should make ourselves familiar are those who have beauty of character added to grace of expression. Some men like Burns and Goldsmith endear themselves to us in spite of pronounced weaknesses.
Books give pleasure not only by what they contain but also by the manner in which it is expressed. Beauty of language as well as of thought make the works of Cardinal Newman and Matthew Arnold attractive whether we agree with their conclusions or not and whether the subjects of which they treat are of interest to us or not.
Milton tells us that we should have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves. There is in some ways more danger from evil books than from evil companions. Bad companions cannot be with us always and bad books may be. Schopenhauer calls “bad books, those exuberant weeds of literature that choke the true corn,” and even the gentle Charles Lamb speaks with contempt of “things in books’ clothing.” The only use of poor books is to teach us by comparison the value of good ones. Rousseau thought that “the abuse of reading is destructive to knowledge. Imagining ourselves to know everything we read, we conceive it unnecessary to learn it by other means.”
“Literature is not shut up in books nor art in galleries: both are taken in by unconscious absorption through the finer pores of mind and character in the atmosphere of society,” said Lowell; and Emerson wrote, “books are for the scholar’s idle times: when he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings. But when the intervals of darkness come, as come they must,—when the sun is hid and the stars withdraw their shining,—we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is.”
“No man should consider so highly of himself as to think he can receive but little light from books, nor so meanly as to believe he can discover nothing but what is to be learned from them.” wrote Doctor Johnson, and Professor Blackie says, “all knowledge which comes from books comes indirectly, by reflection, and by echo; true knowledge grows from a living root in the thinking soul; and whatever it may appropriate from without, it takes by living assimilation into a living organism, not by mere borrowing.”