The Book-lover. Baldwin James
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is not necessary that, in selecting a library or in choosing what you will read, you should have many books at your disposal. A few books, well chosen and carefully read, will be of infinitely more value to you than any miscellaneous collection, however large. It is possible for “the man of one book” to be better equipped in knowledge and literary attainments than he whose shelves are loaded with all the fashionable literature of the day. If your means will not permit you the luxury of a library, buy one book, or a few books, chosen with special reference to the line of reading which you have determined upon. Let no honey-mouthed book-agent persuade you to buy of his wares, unless they bear exactly upon your specialty. You cannot afford to waste money on mere catchpenny or machine publications, whose only recommendation is that they are harmless and that they sell well. That man is to be envied who can say, “I have a library of fifty or of a hundred volumes, all relating to my chosen line of thought, and not a single inferior or worthless volume among them.”
I have before me a list of books, – “books fashioned by the intellect of godlike men,” – books which every person who aspires to the rank of teacher or scholar should regard as his inheritance from the master-minds of the ages. If you know these books – or some of them – you know much of that which is best in the great world of letters. You cannot afford to live in ignorance of them.
Plato’s Dialogues (Jowett’s translation).
The Orations of Demosthenes on the Crown.
Bacon’s Essays.
Burke’s Orations and Political Essays.
Macaulay’s Essays.
Carlyle’s Essays.
Webster’s Select Speeches.
Emerson’s Essays.
The Essays of Elia, by Charles Lamb.
Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott.
David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens.
Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray.
Hypatia, by Charles Kingsley.
The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot.
The Marble Faun, by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
The Sketch Book, by Washington Irving.
Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo.
Wilhelm Meister, by Goethe (Carlyle’s trans.).
Don Quixote, by Cervantes.
Homer’s Iliad (Derby’s or Chapman’s translation).
Homer’s Odyssey (Bryant’s translation).
Dante’s Divina Commedia (Longfellow’s trans.).
Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Shakspeare’s Works.
Mrs. Browning’s Poems.
Longfellow’s Poetical Works.
Goethe’s Faust (Bayard Taylor’s translation).
I have named but twenty-five authors; but each of these, in his own line of thought and endeavor, stands first in the long roll of immortals. When you have the opportunity to make the acquaintance of such as these, will you waste your time with writers whom you would be ashamed to number among your personal friends? “Will you go and gossip with your housemaid or your stable boy, when you may talk with kings and queens, while this eternal court is open to you, with its society wide as the world, multitudinous as its days, the chosen, the mighty, of every place and time? Into that you may enter always; in that you may take fellowship and rank according to your wish; from that, once entered into it, you can never be outcast but by your own fault; by your aristocracy of companionship there, your inherent aristocracy will be assuredly tested, and the motives with which you strive to take high place in the society of the living, measured, as to all the truth and sincerity that are in them, by the place you desire to take in this company of the dead.”9
CHAPTER II
And as for me, though I con but lite,
On bookes for to rede I me delite,
And to hem yeve I faith and credence,
And in my herte have hem in reverence
So hertely, that there is game none,
That from my bookes maketh me to gone,
But it be seldome on the holy daie,
Save certainly, whan that the month of May
Is comen, and that I heare the foules sing,
And that the floures ginnan for to spring,
Farwell my booke, and my devotion.
AVING chosen the books which are to be our friends and counsellors, the next question to be considered is, How shall we use them? Shall we read them through as hastily as possible, believing that the more we read, the more learned we are? Or shall we not derive more profit by reading slowly, and by making the subject-matter of each book thoroughly our own? I do not believe that any general rule can be given with reference to this matter. Some readers will take in a page at a glance, and will more thoroughly master a book in a week than others could possibly master it in six months. It required Frederick W. Robertson half a year to read a small manual of chemistry, and thoroughly to digest its contents. Miss Martineau and Auguste Comte were remarkably slow readers; but then, that which they read “lay fructifying, and came out a living tree with leaves and fruit.” Yet it does not follow that the same rule should apply to readers of every grade of genius.
It is generally better to read by subjects, to learn what different writers have thought and said concerning that matter of which you are making a special study. Not many books are to be read hastily through. “A person who was a very great reader and hard thinker,” says Bishop Thirlwall, “once told me that he never took up a book except with the view of making himself master of some subject which he was studying, and that while he was so engaged he made all his reading converge to that point. In this way he might read parts of many books, but not a single one from ‘end to end.’ This I take to be an excellent method of study, but one which implies the command of many books as well as of much leisure.”
Seneca, the old Roman teacher, says: “Definite reading is profitable; miscellaneous reading is pleasant… The reading of many authors and of all kinds of works has in it something vague and unstable.”
Says Quintilian: “Every good writer is to be read, and diligently; and when the volume is finished, it is to be gone through again from the beginning.”
Martin Luther, in his “Table Talk,” says: “All who would study with advantage in any art whatsoever ought to betake themselves to the reading of some sure and certain books oftentimes over; for to read many books produceth confusion rather than learning, like as those who dwell everywhere are not anywhere at home.”
“Reading,” says Locke the philosopher, “furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what are read over. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment.”
“Much reading,” says Dr. Robert South, “is like much eating, – wholly useless without digestion.”
“Desultory reading,” writes Julius C. Hare, “is indeed very mischievous, by fostering habits of loose, discontinuous thought, by turning the memory into a common sewer for rubbish of all thoughts to flow through, and by relaxing the power of attention, which of all our faculties most needs care, and is most improved by it. But a well-regulated course of study will no more weaken the mind than hard exercise will weaken the body; nor will a strong understanding be weighed down by its knowledge, any more than oak is by its leaves or than Samson was by his locks. He whose sinews are drained by his hair must already be a weakling.”10
Says
John Ruskin: