The Art of Reading.
First, how to read. The reason why so many people who read much know so little, is because they read isolated books instead of reading one book in connexion with another. The memory is trained by association, and if you read two books in succession on one subject you know more than twice as much as if you had read one book only. A good memory is a memory which assimilates. Every one has a good memory for something. A good memory rejects and sifts, and does not accept everything offered to it like a pillar-box. Do not join reading societies, because they kill individuality. Choose your subject, and work all round it. There is an extensive literature on the subject of 'The Art of Reading,' 'The Best Hundred Books,' &c. Most of it is useless and bewildering. The best advice I have ever seen in print about reading was by Sir Herbert Maxwell, and it appeared some years ago at the end of a Nineteenth Century article. It is as follows:
'If any young person of leisure were so much at a loss as to ask advice as to what he should read, mine should be exceedingly simple—Read anything bearing on a definite object. Let him take up any imaginable subject to which he feels attracted, be it the precession of the equinoxes or postage stamps, the Athenian drama or London street cries; let him follow it from book to book, and unconsciously his knowledge, not of that subject only, but of many subjects, will be increased, for the departments of the realm of knowledge are divided by no octroi. He may abandon the first object of his pursuit for another; it does not matter, one subject leads to another; he will have acquired the habit of acquisition; he will have gained that conviction of the pricelessness of time which makes it intolerable for a man to lie abed of a morning.'
The art of reading is a thing to learn, and with it comes the equally valuable art of skipping.
Mr. Balfour's advice to readers is to learn the arts of skipping and skimming, and the late Philip Gilbert Hamerton said:—'The art of reading is to skip judiciously. The art is to skip all that does not concern us, whilst missing nothing that we really need. No external guidance can teach this; for nobody but ourselves can guess what the needs of our intellect may be.'
No one knows how to skim and skip who has not first well threshed out some subject for himself. No one can tear the heart out of a book who has not first been through the student period. Advice is poured forth in lengthy magazine articles, and lectures, but as far as I know there is nothing which embodies such good sense on this subject, excepting Sir Herbert Maxwell's advice above, as a tiny pamphlet, about two inches square, written by Miss Lucy Soulsby, and sold for twopence. It is rather absurdly called Things in Books Clothing!
Below are printed only such passages, gathered from many sources, as I think are necessary to be known about the art of reading.
'It is true that the most absolute master of his own hours still needs thrift if he would turn them to account, and that too many never learn this thrift, whilst others learn it late. . . . . Few intellectual men have the art of economising the hours of study. The very necessity which every one acknowledges of giving vast portions of life to attain proficiency in anything, makes us prodigal where we ought to be parsimonious, and careless where we have need of unceasing vigilance. The best time-savers are a love of soundness in all we learn or do, and a cheerful acceptance of inevitable limitations.'[10]
'In exchange for the varied pleasures of the fashionable life, the intellectual life can offer you but one satisfaction, for all its promises are reducible simply to this, that you shall come at last, after infinite labour, into contact with some great reality; that you shall know and do in such sort that you will feel yourself on firm ground, and be recognised—probably not much applauded, but yet recognised—as a fellow-labourer by other knowers and doers. Before you come to this, most of your present accomplishments will be abandoned by yourself as unsatisfactory and insufficient, but one or two of them will be turned to better account, and will give you, after many years, a tranquil self-respect, and, what is still rarer and better, a very deep and earnest reverence for the greatness which is above you. Severed from the vanities of the illusory, you will live with the realities of knowledge as one who has quitted the painted scenery of the theatre to listen by the eternal ocean or gaze at the granite hills.'[11]
'Reading, with me, incites to reflection instantly. I cannot separate the origination of ideas from the reception of ideas. The consequence is, as I read I always begin to think in various directions, and that makes my reading slow.'[12]
