The love of great books is in itself a mark of greatness. Biography teaches no more practical lesson than this; that the world’s really noble men have spent little time in reading any books but the best, and that there has been a general agreement among them as to what the best books are. Socrates was familiar with Homer and Aesop. Alexander slept with Homer under his pillow. Montaigne alludes constantly to the Bible and to Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Seneca, Ovid and other classical authors. Bacon makes frequent quotations from the Bible and also shows a knowledge of Aesop, Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, Seneca, Montaigne and other great writers. Emerson notes the fact that Montaigne was in the libraries of Shakespeare and of Ben Jonson. Emerson read Chaucer, Montaigne, Plutarch and Plato while at college and knew Shakespeare almost by heart.
When we realize how few books the men of antiquity had we understand that they were obliged to read not many things but much. Homer probably had no books at all. Socrates had very few and even Cicero, the accomplished scholar, few in comparison with a modern library. He never read Dante or Milton or Shakespeare.
The habit of communing with great thoughts gives health and vigor to the mind. Men who habitually read the classics have a breadth of view and a toughness of mental fibre which cannot be obtained by those whose highest inspiration is derived from the newspaper and the last novel. Reading the best books gives an elevation of thought which raises above the level of common things, ennobles and makes fine the ordinary daily occupations, dignifies life and makes it worth living. The woman who keeps her Bible open while she is sewing and refreshes herself with the Psalms or the Gospels is deriving mental as well as spiritual nourishment; without such inspiration her labor would fade into the light of common day.
We need great books to take us out of ourselves, and to show us in true perspective our relations to the past, the present and the future. We may find from books if we have not learned from our own observation the true heroism that is present in the pain and poverty and distress of everyday life. “Books,” said Emerson, “impart sympathetic activity to the moral powers. Go with mean people and you think life is mean. Then read Plutarch, and the world is a proud place, peopled with men of positive quality, with heroes and demigods standing around us, who will not let us sleep.” Michael Angelo said “When I read Homer I look to see if I am not twenty feet tall.”
CHAPTER II.
THE USE OF BOOKS.
“He that shall make search after knowledge, let him seek it where it is,” said Montaigne of books.
Whatever your purpose, books will help you to accomplish it. They make the knowledge of mankind our own if we know how to avail ourselves of them. Only the wise can get the best out of books, they refuse to deliver their message to the ignorant.
Next to knowing a thing yourself the most necessary thing is knowing where to find it, and the method of getting at the information which is stored in books is an art that must be acquired.
It is an education to take up some subject and master it, examining all the books about it and weighing all the varying and conflicting opinions. You never realize the depth of human knowledge and the difficulty of judging what the truth is, until you have found out from your own experience the infinite labor of mastering one small division of one subject.
From catalogues and bibliographies you may make a list of the best works on the subject that you are investigating and you must then quarry from these books what is of use to you and arrange it in a logical and orderly way.