HOW TO ASSIMILATE THE BEST IN BOOKS.
John Morley, the English Statesman and
Scholar, Tells the Secret of Making
One's Reading Pay.
When a man knows books as thoroughly as John Morley knows them, his opinions as to what and how to read are worth having. Mr. Morley has revised and put together as an article for The Critic several of his extemporaneous addresses on books and reading. From this article the following paragraphs have been culled and condensed with care to select those passages which contain practical advice for people who desire to make their reading count for something:
The object of reading is not to dip into everything that even wise men have ever written. In the words of one of the most winning writers of English that ever existed—Cardinal Newman—the object of literature in education is to open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to comprehend and digest its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, address, and expression.
Literature consists of all the books—and they are not so many—where moral truth and human passion are touched with a certain largeness, sanity, and attraction of form. Poets, dramatists, humorists, satirists, masters of fiction, the great preachers, the character-writers, the maxim-writers, the great political orators—they are all literature in so far as they teach us to know man and to know human nature.
What I venture to press upon you is that it requires no preterhuman force of will in any young man or woman—unless household circumstances are more than usually vexatious and unfavorable—to get at least half an hour out of a solid busy day for good and disinterested reading. Some will say that this is too much to expect, and the first persons to say it, I venture to predict, will be those who waste their time most. At any rate, if I cannot get half an hour, I will be content with a quarter.
Multiply the half-hour by three hundred and sixty-five, and consider what treasures you might have laid by at the end of the year, and what happiness, fortitude, and wisdom they would have given you during all the days of your life.
You may have often heard from others, or may have found out, how good it is to have on your shelves, however scantily furnished they may be, three or four of those books to which it is well to give ten minutes every morning, before going down into the battle and choking dust of the day. Perhaps it matters little what it may be so long as your writer has cheerful seriousness, elevation, calm, and, above all, a sense of size and strength, which shall open out the day before you, and bestow gifts of fortitude and mastery.
If a man is despondent about his work, the best remedy that I can prescribe to him is to turn to a good biography; there he will find that other men before him have known the dreary reaction that follows long-sustained effort, and he will find that one of the differences between the first-rate man and the fifth-rate lies in the vigor with which the first-rate man recovers from this reaction, and crushes it down, and again flings himself once more upon the breach.
A taste for poetry is not given to everybody, but anybody who does not enjoy poetry, who is not refreshed, exhilarated, stirred by it, leads but a mutilated existence. I would advise that in looking for poets—of course after Shakespeare—you should follow the rule of allowing preferences, but no exclusion.
Various mechanical contrivances and aids to successful study are not to be despised by those who would extract the most from books. The wise student will do most of his reading with a pen or pencil in his hand. He will not shrink from the useful toil of making abstracts and summaries of what he is reading.
Again, some great men—Gibbon was one, and Daniel Webster was another, and the great Lord Stafford was a third—always before reading a book made a short, rough analysis of the questions which they expected to be answered in it, the additions to be made to their knowledge, and whither it would take them.
Another practise is that of keeping a commonplace book, and transcribing into it what is striking and interesting and suggestive. And if you keep it wisely, as Locke has taught us, you will put every entry under a head, division, or subdivision. This is an excellent practise for concentrating your thought on the passage, and making you alive to its real point and significance.