What we read depends upon our taste and taste determines character and is determined by character. Taste may be cultivated and improved by always preferring the higher to the lower when we have an opportunity to make a choice, by improving the surroundings and associations, by unconscious influence as well as by conscious effort. There is only one way in which a love for good literature may be gained and that is by reading good literature. People talk about the English classics and at last almost convince themselves that they are familiar with them but how many do you know who have really read Shakespeare?
There are constant allusions in literature and in life to books with which everyone is supposed to be acquainted, such as the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare, Pilgrim’s Progress, Scott and Longfellow. One cannot always choose his business in life, sometimes he is forced to do the first thing that comes to hand, but he need not engage in any recreation that he does not choose and it is his own fault if his pleasures are mean ones. We often meet people whose minds seem flat and stale because they derive their highest inspiration from nothing more elevating than the daily papers.
A common knowledge of a good book may be at once the foundation of mutual understanding and friendship. It establishes a bond of sympathy between minds cultivated and informed by contact with noble thoughts. Such sympathy is impossible for those whose minds owing to lack of reading dwell ever in the present amid material things.
Do not content yourself with reading the observations of others; be an observer yourself. Your reading should teach you to observe, but some persons stultify themselves so by constant reading that they lose the power to perceive. Our minds grow by exertion rather than by passive reception. We are put in the world not only to accomplish a certain amount of work, but also to develop our mental and spiritual powers to the fullest extent; to make the most of ourselves.
By taking an interest in what is going on around us we may add a new charm to life. We are surrounded by the wonderful and inspiring but only the great man or woman has the sense to see it; for all the rest life is hopelessly commonplace. The man who finds the most to admire gets the most enjoyment out of life. The study of nature teaches us to appreciate much that is beautiful in literature, and, on the other hand, books help us to enjoy many things about us that otherwise we should not have noticed. Men with finer faculties than ourselves have observed and recorded for us beauties that without their aid we should have been unable to perceive. “Books,” said Dryden, “are spectacles to read nature.”
The power of a book to stimulate the mind is one of its most useful qualities. Some books are more valuable for what they make us think than for what they actually say. It is the reading that we make the most of, whose substance incorporates itself with our mental equipment, that develops and enlarges our faculties. What we read and assimilate becomes part of the character. Rousseau’s Emile, for instance, is one of the most suggestive books ever written; Pestalozzi, Froebel, Herbert Spencer and many other educational thinkers have derived their inspiration from Rousseau. Emerson is especially valuable for the new trains of thought which he suggests. Furthermore a book is far from useless when it arouses thoughtful dissent. Passages in the Emile have furnished the texts for discussions that have marked advances in educational thought.
We form our characters from the men and books that we associate with. We cannot always choose our companions but we can choose our books, and it is our own fault if they are mean books. A man may be known better by the books he reads than by the company he keeps, we should be quite as likely to find a judge making a companion of a pickpocket or gambler as to find a low-minded man reading an essay by Lowell or Emerson. Tell me what you read and I will tell you what you are. It is what we take an interest in that stamps us.
Matthew Arnold gives a concise definition of culture when he says that it is “to know the best that has been thought and said in the world,” and he makes this idea clearer by saying “culture is reading, but reading with a purpose to guide it and with system.” He elsewhere states, “Culture is a study of the perfection which consists in becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.” Self-activity is called by Sir William Hamilton the primary principle of education. By lovingly reading the best books we may go on, year after year, giving ourselves a fuller education than can be gained in any university, because it is life long;—eternity long. Such an education requires time rather than money and any one who has the determination to improve himself, may like Sir William Jones “with the fortune of a peasant give himself the education of a prince.”
To read good books in a proper manner adds to life a charm whose infinite variety age cannot wither nor custom stale. It was Huxley, the man of science who said, “literature is the greatest of all sources of refined pleasure and one of the great uses of a liberal education is to enable us to enjoy that pleasure.” The gain is immense when we have learned to like the things that are improving rather than those that merely entertain. The remark of Samuel Royce that whenever intellectual pleasures are in the ascendant civilization progresses, and whenever sensual pleasures predominate civilization is on the wane, is as true of the individual as of the race. The nations which have made an impression on history have done so by intellectual vigor and not by brute force. It is ideas not arms that determine destinies and books are the vehicle of ideas.