CHARLES F. RICHARDSON.

IX

THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS

A clergyman who found the reaction from his pulpit efforts so great that often he could not bring himself to think vigorously and consecutively before the middle of the following week was advised by his physician to try the effect of an Indian tale or an exciting story, and found that a good novel works like a charm in bringing the mind back to normal action. After the interest in the story or novel begins to grow there is danger of reading too long, of reading until another spell of fatigue and reaction comes. The book should be laid aside as soon as the first glow of mental action is felt.

Most thinkers need the stimulating influence of other minds. These can be found at their best upon the shelves of a well-selected library. They are ready to help us whenever we feel ready to give them our attention. Men put the best part of themselves into their books. The process of writing for print intensifies mental activity, spurs the intellect to the keenest, most vigorous effort, and arouses the highest energy of thought and feeling. Authors that exert a quickening influence upon our thinking should be kept for use whenever we need a stimulus to rouse the mind from its lethargy.

Leibnitz got his best ideas while reading books. He had acquired the habits of a librarian to whom favorite volumes are always accessible.

A scientist of repute says he gets the necessary stimulus from Jevons’s treatise on the inductive sciences. Professor Phelps has collected an instructive list of authors whose writings have been helpful to other authors of note. He says,—

“Voltaire used to read Massillon as a stimulus to production. Bossuet read Homer for the same purpose. Gray read Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’ as the preliminary to the use of his pen. The favorites of Milton were Homer and Euripides. Fénelon resorted to the ancient classics promiscuously. Pope read Dryden as his habitual aid to composing. Corneille read Tacitus and Livy. Clarendon did the same. Sir William Jones, on his passage to India, planned five different volumes, and assigned to each the author he resolved to read as a guide and awakener to his own mind for its work. Buffon made the same use of the works of Sir Isaac Newton. With great variety of tastes successful authors have generally agreed in availing themselves of this natural and facile method of educating their minds to the work of original creation.”[15]

The most valuable function of standard authors lies in their quickening influence upon the intellectual life. The effort to appropriate their ideas and to master their thoughts is the best possible exercise for the understanding. In thinking their thoughts, weighing their arguments, and following their train of reasoning the mind gains vigor, strength, and the capacity for sustained effort. The invigorating atmosphere which a great thinker creates has a most remarkable tonic effect upon all who dwell in it. By unconscious absorption they acquire his spirit of inquiry, his methods of research, his habits of investigation, his way of attacking and mastering difficulties. While trying to walk in his footsteps they learn to take giant strides. His idioms, his choice of words, his favorite phrases and expressions are at their service when they enter new fields of truth. Both in power and aspiration they become like him through the mysterious process of mind acting upon mind, of heart evoking heart, and of will transfusing itself into will. A great thinker gets his place in the galaxy of shining intellects through the truths which he communicates; and as truth is the best food for the soul, so the quest of truth is the best exercise for all its faculties.

De Quincey, in his essay on Alexander Pope, draws an important and oft-quoted distinction between the literature of knowledge and the literature of power. He says the function of the one is to teach, of the other to move. The former he likens to a rudder, the latter to an oar or a sail. To illustrate the difference he asks, “What do you learn from ‘Paradise Lost’? Nothing at all. What do you learn from a cookery-book? Something new, something that you did not know before, in every paragraph. But would you, therefore, put the wretched cookery-book on a higher level of estimation than the divine poem? What you owe to Milton is not any knowledge, of which a million separate items are still but a million of advancing steps on the same earthly level; what you owe is power,—that is, exercise and expansion to your own latent capacity of sympathy with the infinite, where every pulse and each separate influx is a step upward, a step ascending, as upon Jacob’s ladder, from earth to mysterious altitudes above the earth. All the steps of knowledge, from first to last, carry you farther on the same plane, but could never raise you one foot above your ancient level of earth; whereas, the very first step in power is a flight, is an ascending into another element where earth is forgotten.”

The value of the literature of power as a means of imparting power to every soul that lives under its influence is easily seen and generally acknowledged. But the literature of knowledge serves the double purpose of furnishing us material for thought and of acting as a stimulus to thought. On this point we have the testimony of the wisest who have ventured to give advice upon the use of books. Lowell says, “It is certainly true that the material of thought reacts upon the thought itself. Shakespeare himself would have been commonplace had he been padlocked in a thinly shaven vocabulary, and Phidias, had he worked in wax, only a more inspired Mrs. Jarley.”

The advice which Lowell gives concerning a course of reading and the ends of scholarship to be kept in mind by those who read with a purpose is too valuable to be omitted in this connection:

“One is sometimes asked by young people to recommend a course of reading. My advice would be that they should confine themselves to the supreme books in whatever literature, or, still better, to choose some one great author and make themselves thoroughly familiar with him. For, as all roads lead to Rome, so do they likewise lead away from it, and you will find that in order to understand perfectly and to weigh exactly any vital piece of literature you will be gradually and pleasantly persuaded to excursions and explorations of which you little dreamed when you began, and will find yourselves scholars before you are aware. For, remember, there is nothing less profitable than scholarship for the mere sake of scholarship, nor anything more wearisome in the attainment. But the moment you have a definite aim, attention is quickened, the mother of memory, and all that you acquire groups and arranges itself in an order that is lucid, because everywhere and always it is in intelligent relation to a central object of constant and growing interest. This method also forces upon us the necessity of thinking, which is, after all, the highest result of all education. For what we want is not learning, but knowledge; that is, the power to make learning answer its true end as a quickener of intelligence and a widener of our intellectual sympathies. I do not mean to say that every one is fitted by nature or inclination for a definite course of study, or, indeed, for serious study in any sense. I am quite willing that these should ‘browse in a library,’ as Dr. Johnson called it, to their heart’s content. It is perhaps the only way in which time may be profitably wasted. But desultory reading will not make a ‘full man,’ as Bacon understood it, of one who has not Johnson’s memory, his power of assimilation, and, above all, his comprehensive view of the relations of things. ‘Read not,’ says Lord Bacon, in his ‘Essay of Studies,’ ‘to contradict and confute; not to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously (carefully), and some few to be read wholly and with diligence and attention. Some books, also, may be read by deputy.’

“This is weighty and well said, and I would call your attention especially to the wise words with which the passage closes. The best books are not always those which lend themselves to discussions and comment, but those (like Montaigne’s ‘Essays’) which discuss and comment ourselves.”[16]

Professor Phelps, in his lectures to divinity students, gives golden advice to the class of professional men whose life-work compels them to draw upon their productive intellect more than any other class of professional men.

“There is an influence exerted by books upon the mind which resembles that of diet upon the body. A studious mind becomes, by a law of its being, like the object which it studies with enthusiasm. If your favorite authors are superficial, gaudy, short-lived, you become yourself such in your culture and your influence. If your favorite authors are of the grand, profound, enduring order, you become yourself such to the extent of your innate capacity for such growth. Their thoughts become yours not by transfer, but by transfusion. Their methods of combining thoughts become yours; so that on different subjects from theirs you will compose as they would have done if they had handled those subjects. Their choice of words, their idioms, their constructions, their illustrative materials become yours; so that their style and yours will belong to the same class in expression, and yet your style will never be merely imitative of theirs.