Common sense tells the reader when and where he may talk about books. Happy the family that read the same books: happier still the family that can talk about them! Love of reading is the best safeguard against gossip, and against excessive talking. One woman of your acquaintance fills every gap with talk; another fills the pauses of the day with reading.
In this country that boasts no class distinctions, we, nevertheless, have a class at the very top: the privileged caste of readers. What a freemasonry there is among them! They “speak the same language”; they toss about allusions; they dare to quote to one another; they take worlds for granted. But if you belong to this aristocracy, beware of snobbishness. The snobbishness of culture is the most contemptible of all, for culture knows better. The other “snobbishness” is based on pure ignorance of the true values of life, and has so far excuse.
People of moderate means probably make the best readers, because they have the largest share of rational leisure. The very poor and the very rich know not leisure, and its graces and benefactions. “Give me neither poverty nor riches” – such would be the best condition for the intellectual life. Miss Jeannette Gilder once drew a pleasant picture: as she passed along a Boston street of a winter evening, she noted the friendly custom of leaving up the window shades, and letting the light and cheer of the home shine forth upon the wayfarer. But to her New York eyes it was a striking fact that these Boston families sat reading by the evening lamp; that appeared to be their regular nightly occupation. She carried away the feeling that the good old Boston of Emerson and Lowell and Longfellow was not altogether vanished.
A bookless home! Was ever such suggestion of dreariness! The reader, if he own anything, will own some books. They need not be many. Some of the greatest readers have had but a modest number. Those few volumes go far to furnish your home. No wall covering is so rich. When the western light strikes across your bookshelves, – and no library should be without its western window, – the blended colors of those goodly volumes convey the charm of even the outside of literature. I like Montaigne’s way of saying, “As soon as I was able, I hired a spacious house in the city, for myself and books; where I again, with rapture, resumed my literary pursuits.” “A house for myself and books!”
No; your books need not be many. They will be more to you if you have made sacrifices for their sake, – as Charles Lamb did in the days when his purchase was not merely a purchase, but nothing short of a victory. If you own but few books, you will know the pleasures of re-reading. You will find the second reading fixes a book, gives you its essence and its true proportions. Yet it is rather the intimacies and friendships among books re-read that I have in mind, when they become all interwoven with endearing memories and associations. Every ten years you become a wiser reader and turn a new light upon your author. I imagine three tests of a book: do you read it aloud? – do you give it away? – but above all, do you read it a second time?
Your reading should have much variety, ranging from the newspapers to the great poets. Of course we must know what the great world is about and must live in our own age; but the little world of the newspapers let us waste no time upon. Said Matthew Arnold again: “Reading a good book is a discipline such as no reading of even good newspapers can ever give.” Scrappy reading makes scrappy minds, for it destroys power of attention.
I believe that there should be a backbone of History throughout your lifetime of reading. Be sure to choose first-rate historical books; never waste yourself upon second-rate histories. Biography, I am aware, is middle-aged reading; and I can only promise you immense pleasure from it when you are past forty. Those large, heavy volumes in dull bindings, which did not invite your youth, will become alive and significant, and full of good society.
I have never a seen college girl who did not enjoy reading essays, whatever her sentiment about writing them. Essays, too, are good society, the companionship of fine minds giving you their best. This literary form, with its modest, careless name, has yet the widest range in all literature. Nothing human is alien to it. If you read “for the sense of life,” a good essay will give you precisely that.
Books of travel are especially good to read after you have traveled. One glimpse of the Old World, for example, gives you the clue, the key, which makes books and pictures intelligible to the imagination ever after. When once you have this clue, you can read far beyond your own travels. And while you are on the road, do a little reading day by day, – Henry James’s “Little Tour in France” while you are making that very tour; Hawthorne’s “Our Old Home,” while you, too, are in England. In foreign lands read a newspaper of the country, and read a novel by its best writer of fiction.
Said that fine old novel-reader, Professor Jowett, of Baliol, when he was writing to a young lady, “Have you thoroughly made yourself up in Miss Austen and the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’? No person is educated who doesn’t know them.” Good fiction educates not only the intellect but the heart. It enriches the imagination and the sympathies, and “teaches us to walk not by sight but by insight.” This is fiction fair, and with fiction foul, why should we concern ourselves?
“Who reads poetry nowadays?” people are asking miserably. My real reader, I answer with confidence. He must have poetry, and why he must, Richard Crashaw’s friend said once for all in the quaint preface to the poet’s verses: “Maist thou take a poem hence and tune thy soul by it into a heavenly pitch.”
Another old writer once described the four classes of readers: “Sponges which attract all without distinguishing; hour-glasses which receive and pour out as fast; bags which only retain the dregs, and let the wine escape; and sieves which retain the best only.” I am now, of course, addressing the sieves. Real readers need not take high moral ground about trash; they are simply bored by it. A publisher said the other day that he must publish a certain amount of trash in order to be able to publish some good books. He needs a body of better readers. Mediocre readers make mediocre books.
Superior people, however, are often disloyal to their own standards. You are, for example, untrue to yourself, if you sit at a theater assisting – admirable French word! – at a play that your whole soul rejects. It is like a breach of faith to read a book which is moral trash or literary trash. No mind is safe from the suggestion of such plays or such books. Said Fielding, “We are as liable to be corrupted by books as by companions.” Happily it is just as true that we are as liable to be purified by books as by companions.
To be quite fair, we must acknowledge some dangers of reading. You remember Kipling’s bank clerk, who in a previous incarnation had been a Viking, and who might have written tales as good as Kipling’s own had he not been so steeped in English literature. I have known people who had plainly been dulled by over-reading: they were the “sponges” of our old writer. Over every book we should think at least as long a time as we spend in the reading. I notice the real reader frequently looks up and off from his book, to think the better.
Ask from your book not only ideas, but style. Careless readers have permitted slipshod books. The writer says to himself, “This is quite good enough for the people who are likely to read it.” He is fond of the simile of the pearls and the swine, confident that it is the swine who have thwarted his genius. Real readers help to make real writers.
Who are some of the real readers we have known? There is Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxenford. He owned books, poor as he was; he kept them at the head of his bed; and there you have two unfailing marks of the real reader. (I even like that dash of color, – the “black or red” of his bindings; for the real reader loves the outside of his book as well.)
I think of Milton, who made the most beautiful definition of a book I know – “the precious life-blood of a master spirit, treasured up on purpose to a Life beyond Life.” None but a real reader could have so nobly imagined the book and its author.
When Keats read Chapman’s Homer and said that a new planet swam into his ken, he expressed for all readers the sense of surprise, of discovery, and of acquisition when they have found a real book.
Into this noble fellowship you and I are allowed to enter, as we leave our college.