IN DEFENCE OF "SKIPPING"
A few days ago Mr. Chesterton expressed a doubt whether he had ever read Boswell "through." Knowing Mr. Chesterton, and having a life-long acquaintance with Boswell, I share his doubt. G.K.C. has an amazing gift for seizing the spirit and purport of a book by turning over the pages in handfuls and sampling a sentence here and there. He treats books as the expert wine-taster treats wines, not drinking them in great coarse gulps, but moistening his lips and catching the bouquet on his palate. The parallel is no doubt as misleading as most parallels are apt to be. Good wines have to be "tasted" in this way, but the better the book the deeper should be the draught or the more deliberate and patient the mastication. "Chewed and digested" is Bacon's phrase.
But I am far too much addicted to "skipping" myself to treat the practice as a crime in others. When I was young and industrious and enthusiastic I read as solemnly and slavishly as anyone. I was like a dog with a bone. The tougher the theme the more I exercised my intellectual molars on it. Stout fellows like Zimmermann On Solitude, and Burke on The Sublime and Beautiful, and Mill On Liberty were the sort of men for my youthful ardour. I cannot honestly say I enjoyed them, but I can honestly say that I read them, and I can also honestly say that I shall never read them or their like again. I finished my drudgery long ago, and have become a mere idler among books, a person who has served his apprenticeship and can go about enjoying himself, taking a sip here and a longish "pull" there, passing over this vintage, and returning to that and generally behaving like a freeman wandering over the estates of the mind, without a duty to anything but his own fancy.
I, too, doubt whether I have read Boswell through. Why should I read it through? I have read the conversations a hundred times and I hope to read them a hundred times more; but I will make no affidavit about the letters. I suspect that I have been "skipping" the letters unconsciously all my life. And Paradise Regained? My conscience is clear about Paradise Lost, and I can still mouth the speeches of the first author of our misfortunes whom the judgment of time had converted into the hero of that immortal poem. But can I put my hand on my heart and say I have read the Regained right through? I cannot. I am not even sure that I have read Shakespeare through. I have a vague notion that in the lusty youth of which I have spoken I did read Titus Andronicus and Pericles with the rest, but I am quite prepared to believe that I only like to believe I did.
There is high precedent for those of us who "skip." Johnson himself was a famous "skipper," and confessed that he seldom finished a book. It is true that he performed the amazing feat of rising two hours before his usual time to read Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. He was a truthful man, or I should find difficulty in believing him. Of course the achievement was not so great as it seems, for though Johnson believed in early rising on principle and recommended all young men to practise it, he did not himself rise until noon. But the idea of getting up, if only at ten in the morning, with a feverish desire to read Burton tries my faith even in Johnson's veracity. It is pleasant to dip occasionally into that astonishing rag-box of learning, but most of us are as likely to read Bradshaw's Time Table through as Burton's Anatomy through. It is not a book; it is a curiosity.
It is a common experience to find that the habit of "skipping" grows on us as we grow older. It is not merely that we are more tired or more lazy: it is that we are more discreet and more delicate in our intellectual feeding. It is with reading as with eating. When we are young we can eat anything. If we are offered a bun before dinner we express no astonishment, but consume it recklessly. But, grown older and wiser, as Holmes remarks, we receive the offer of a bun before dinner with polite surprise. And so with books. When the magic of Shelley seizes us at seventeen we can devour The Revolt of Islam as we devoured that large boggy bun, but later we learn to discriminate even with Shelley, and to take great spaces of him as read. And even the most fervent Wordsworthian would admit that his reading of Wordsworth is patchy, and that if the poet had not written a line after he left Grasmere for Rydal Water, his indebtedness to him would not have been sensibly diminished. Who, for example, can honestly say that he has traversed the Sahara of the Ecclesiastical Sonnets?
This is not a plea for skimpy reading. It is good for the young to worry their bone even if there is little meat on it. I would have them serve an arduous apprenticeship in the great world of books, cleaving their own way laboriously through the wilderness. The anthology business for the young is a little over-done. The youthful digestion ought not to be weakened by an exclusive diet of "elegant extracts," and spoon-feeding robs us of the joys of discovery and adventure. What delight is there like encountering in the wilderness some great unknown of whom we have never heard? It is like coming into a fortune, or rather it is better than coming into a fortune, for these are "riches fineless" that grow with compound interest and are not subject to the vicissitudes of things. I found a young maiden of my acquaintance the other day in a mood of unusual exaltation. She had fallen in love and was hot with the first rapture of passion. She had encountered Emma and was aflame with ardour for more adventures in the serene world that Jane Austen had opened out before her. That is the way, casual and unsought, that the realms of gold should be invaded. Youth should be encouraged to fashion its own taste and discriminate for itself between the good, the better and the best. When that is done we can "skip" as we like, with an easy mind and a good conscience. We have learned our path through the wilderness. We know where the hyacinths grow and where we can catch the smell of the wild thyme, and the copse where the nightingale sings to the moon. And if with this liberty of knowledge we "skip" some of the high-brows, and are found more often in the company of Borrow than of Bacon—well, we have done our task-work and are out to enjoy the sun and the wind on the heath.