One of these is to “distribute the attention;” by which they mean to learn to pass easily from one subject to another. Do not become so absorbed in one line that others have no charm for you. This is a common error with students of specialties. The great Darwin regretted that toward the close of his life his unremitted attention to science had destroyed his power of appreciating poetry and the drama. Yet neither should one hurry from book to book, or from topic to topic. Each should be pursued up to the point of commencing fatigue; then the volume should be laid down, and an effort made to recall the main facts we have read, and arrange them in order in the mind. What looks like desultory reading will not remain desultory long if pursued in accordance with these suggestions.
As to what kind of books to read, the brief answer is, all kinds. Variety is the guiding principle. Do not read in ruts. Some say we should always have some main theme to which others should be subordinate. The advice is good for those who have by nature some such leading interest; only for them it is unnecessary; and for those who have not, I believe it is useless, for such an interest can
rarely be created by the will. I doubt if one can say off-hand,—“From this out, my chief interest shall be in the history of Ancient Egypt,” or something of that kind. Disraeli once remarked that biography has a greater interest than history, because it is life without theory; and French writers are better than English, because they have fewer ridiculous ideas of life. Some such plea could be entered for every department of literature, and each would be just. Unquestionably, the tendency at present is to read too exclusively works of the imagination, novels, romances, dramas, and the like; the pleasure they yield is ephemeral and is apt to disqualify for that which is more persistent though less intense, derived from works based on objective realities.
For one branch of literature I must, however, put in a special claim, as it has been such a pleasure to me ever since I learned to read, and that is Poetry. I have heard it sometimes said that this is a taste of youth, and dies a natural death with advancing years. My own experience is quite the contrary. The delight we derive from accurate rhythm, melodious words, fine thoughts, and the depicting of deep emotions, ought to increase as our experience of the world and wider learning make us more familiar with them. This has been the result in my own case and in that of others whom I know or have heard of; for instance, Sir Henry Holland, writing his biography when about eighty years of age, lays stress on the enjoyment the study of the poets continued to afford him; and my mother, at eighty,
derived much pleasure in committing to memory and repeating new poems. There is a sense of completeness, of perfection, which is given a fine thought by appropriate expression in rhythmical language, which prose can never equal, and which, through the potent magic of Form, lifts the mind out of the material into the ideal world, and grants us a momentary glimpse of the Infinite.
If we do not recall to mind and think over what we read we lose most of the pleasure and all the profit of the action. This was what the English philosopher Hobbes meant when he said,—“If I had read as many books as some men, I should be as ignorant as they.” To read without reflecting is like buying grain for food and never grinding it. Through reflection on the images, incidents, and forms of expression with which reading has stored the memory, the highest enjoyment from the process is secured. The mind, like the body, is maintained in a state of pleasurable activity, not by what it swallows, but by what it digests and assimilates. Many people, however, are like dear Charles Lamb, who artlessly confessed,—“I cannot sit and think—books think for me;” and if they think for all to such good purpose as they did for him, no one could complain.
In fact, reflection, meditation, though its pleasures have been chanted by poets and sages for thousands of years, is probably that form of intellectual activity which is least admired and least desired of any. It is not the same as “studying out a subject,” or exerting the creative faculty,
as an inventor when he is devising a machine; but the leisurely calling up from our memory of its various contents. They may be from reading or from conversation or from our experience of life. We may present these to ourselves as the pictures of a gallery or as the scenes of a drama or as a series of connected events; and we may endeavor to discern what relations they bore to each other, or speculate on what would have been the results had they occurred differently, or not at all. We may renew half-forgotten pleasures, or smile at useless pains, or recall long since vanished woes. Lessons for our guidance or knowledge of ourselves may unexpectedly come to us as the results of such self-communing; or we may cast our eyes to the future, and enjoy in prolonged anticipation those pleasures which may never come, or, if they come, can last but a moment. This is the nature of that reflection which, if we learn it and cultivate it, will enable us to pass many a pleasant hour, when otherwise we should be cut off from all sources of amusement, as in some dreary waiting for a train or enforced and lonely vigil.
As solitude is thus relieved by exercise of our minds, society by the same may have many an added charm. What a fund of rational enjoyment is offered by reading circles, debating societies, literary coteries, and associations for the purpose of studying Shakespeare or Browning or Ibsen, or whatever other literary star may be in the ascendant! There are some pretentious persons who profess to be above such gatherings. They can well be dispensed
with in them. The tendency to be guarded against in order to make such schemes prosperous is that of improving the mind. This should be entirely incidental and secondary. When one joins a dining club, he expects a dinner which he likes, not a special diet prescribed by his medical adviser; and so it should be with literary clubs. Let the improvement take care of itself. It will do so.