It is something of a commonplace—a rather modest volume with most of us, summed up on a tombstone generally, easily enough, but we are bound to believe after all is said and done that the great masterpiece among reference books, for every man,—the one originally intended by the Creator for every man to use,—is the reference book of his own life. We believe that the one direct and necessary thing for a man to do, if he is going to be a good reader, is to make, this reference book—his own private edition of it—as large and complete as possible. Everything refers to it, whatever his reading is. Shakespeare and the New York World, Homer and Harper’s Bazar, Victor Hugo and The Forum, Babyhood and the Bible all refer to it,—are all alike in making their references (when they are really looked up) to private editions. Other editions do not work. In proportion as they are powerful in modern life, all the books and papers that we have are engaged in the business of going about the world discovering people to themselves, unroofing first person singulars in it, getting people to use their own reference books on all life. Literature is a kind of vast international industry of comparing life. We read to look up references in our own souls. The immortality of Homer and the circulation of the Ladies’ Home Journal both conform to this fact, and it is equally the secret of the last page of Harper’s Bazar and of Hamlet and of the grave and monthly lunge of The Forum at passing events. The difference of appeal may be as wide as the east and the west, but the east and the west are in human nature and not in the nature of the appeal. The larger selves look themselves up in the greater writers and the smaller selves spell themselves out in the smaller ones. It is here we all behold as in some vast reflection or mirage of the reading world our own souls crowding and jostling, little and great, against the walls of their years, seeking to be let out, to look out, to look over, to look up—that they may find their possible selves.
When men are allowed to follow what might be called the forces of nature in the reading world they are seen to read:
1st. About themselves.
2nd. About people they know.
3rd. About people they want to know.
4th. God.
Next to their interest in persons is their interest in things:
1st. Things that they have themselves.
2nd. Things that people they know, have.
3rd. Things they want to have.