Books and how to make the most of them

by James Hosmer Penniman

Lowell thought that the real literary genius stored up the apt or pleasing word, and Ruskin said, “he is the best poet who can by the fewest words touch the greatest number of secret chords of thought in his reader’s own mind, and set them to work in their own way.”

The inspiration and delight derived from familiarity with the best poetry is one of the most precious results of culture. More than any other work of man poetry helps us to cherish the ideal and we look to our ideals to counteract the hardness of our daily life, to strengthen and uplift us. To read a great poet for a few minutes every day raises one out of the commonplace. Matthew Arnold, who was one of the hardest worked men of his time, used to read a hundred lines or more of the Odyssey before he went to bed. He said that “Good poetry does undoubtedly tend to form the Soul and character; it tends to beget a love of beauty and of truth in alliance together; it suggests however indirectly high and noble principles of action, and it inspires the emotions helpful in making principles operative,” and he added, “We have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.”

It is one of the fortunate miracles of literature that so much of the very best poetry is also within the comprehension of the humblest understanding. Many of the poems which have been the delight and consolation of men of the greatest mental capacities have also the power to encourage and uplift those of far lower abilities. The Psalms of David, for example, have heights and depths which have made them the inspiration of men of all classes in all ages. Progress in the understanding of the poets is the result of reading which, beginning with those that are easiest to comprehend, goes on with increasing power to those, who, like Wordsworth, are philosophical and deep and those, who, like Browning, present particular difficulties the overcoming of which is rewarded by a vast wealth of inspiring thought.

Matthew Arnold, who speaks with authority on these subjects says, “Constantly in reading poetry a sense of the best, the really excellent, and of the strength and joy to be drawn from it, should be present in our minds, and should govern our estimate of what we read.” and he remarks of the poet that, “if he is a real classic, if his work belongs to the class of the very best (for this is the true and right meaning of the word, classic, classical), then the great thing for us is to feel and enjoy his work as deeply as ever we can, and to appreciate the wide difference between it and all work which has not the same high character. This is what is salutary, this is what is formative, this is the great benefit to be got from the study of poetry.”

It is not to be expected that at the first reading you can see all the beauties that a word-painter like Tennyson spent years in elaborating. A masterpiece cannot be read too carefully nor too often. To appreciate a great picture like the Sistine Madonna, you must return to it again and again and let its gracious sweetness sink into your soul. It is so that you must study a great poem.

Hence it follows naturally that there is great culture value in storing the memory with noble poems. While we should not go so far as to say with Ruskin that no poetry is worth reading which is not worth learning by heart, there is an inspiration in adorning our minds with as much as we can learn accurately from the great poets; and this inspiration is derived especially from the poetry we have known and loved in youth, which has, from its very associations, a strength and sweetness that no other can have.

“Many a noble poem,” says Henry Pancoast, “early acquired by a pure effort of the memory and at first but dimly understood, has gradually worked its way into the hidden depths of a child’s conscious life, revealing its full power and beauty only by slow degrees, and elevating, quickening, and enlarging his spirit in secrecy and in silence.”

Poetry as the truest expression of the life and morals of an age is at once a prophecy and a history. A prophecy as indicating that to which the nation would aspire—a history as a record of the fact of past aspiration. Concrete individual fact has little significance to poetry except as the manifestation of an idea or of a universal truth.—The poet is the embodiment of his age and his era and a full understanding of his poetry gives us an insight into the very heart of them.

CHAPTER VIII.
BIOGRAPHY.

Great poetry is the expression of the spiritual life, not of the poet merely, but of the poet in his capacity of forthteller of what is divine and universal in human life. History deals with the life and actions and motives of men in a particular age and treats of human achievements and relations, and of their causes and effects. Both Poetry and History are in a sense impersonal, being concerned not so much with individuals as such, as with the ideals toward which or the ideas with which men live their lives and do their work. It is biography to which we turn for the most intimate and detailed personal knowledge of a particular great man who may have been the poet whose lines have met response in every heart or the writer whose mind has guided a nation. As dealing with life itself biography may well be regarded as one of the important divisions of literature. It may be and usually is found to belong in both classes, the literature of knowledge, and the literature of power. There is a directness about a great biography that causes us to feel personally acquainted with the subject of it.