Let us here set down, briefly and clearly, what seems to us the most enjoyable and natural method to use. In the first place, ask yourself if you are willing to be a hard worker, self-sacrificing and humble. Unless you are, you will find that great spirits are slow to share with you their richest treasures. You must first make yourself worthy before you can expect to enter into their sanctum. In the words of Ruskin:
You must be willing to work hard to find the hidden meaning of the author. Ask yourself, “Am I inclined to work as an Australian miner would? Are my pick-axes and shovels in good order, and am I in good trim myself, my sleeves well up to my elbows, and my breath good, and my temper?” ... The metal you are in search of being the author’s mind or meaning, his words are as the rock which you have to crush and smelt in order to get at it. And your pick-axes are your own care, wit, and learning; your smelting furnace is your own thoughtful soul. Do not hope to get at any good author’s meaning without those tools and that fire; often you will need sharpest, finest chiseling, and patientest fusing, before you can gather one grain of the metal.
Then, too, you must be patient. An untrained reader is, as it were, wandering in a great forest where he sees many paths, but he knows not which to take. If he pursue a wrong path the first, second or the third time, he should not lose hope, but seek again and again. By such experiences he is sharpening his faculty of discrimination, and erelong can, in a brief space, detect which paths he should follow. No one but yourself can prescribe rightly a course of reading best suited to your particular needs. It must be a voluntary search on your own part, and an enjoyable one, if you are to get the most from it.
But here enters a serious consideration: Is what I enjoy most the best for me? The answer is Yes and No! Yes, if you enjoy most what appeals to the best in you; no, if you enjoy most what in your heart you know appeals to what is the worst in you. Therefore, the important question for you to answer is—does this book, article, essay or poem merely interest me, or does it appeal to the best in me?
Henry Van Dyke expresses the matter perfectly:
The person who wants to grow, turns to books as a means of purifying his tastes, deepening his feelings, broadening his sympathies, and enhancing his joy of life. Literature he loves because it is the most humane of the arts. Its forms and processes interest him as expressions of the human striving towards clearness of thought, purity of emotion, and harmony of action with the ideal. The culture of a finer, fuller manhood is what this reader seeks. He is looking for the books in which the inner meanings of nature and life are translated into language of distinction and charm, touched with the human personality of the author, and embodied in forms of permanent interest and power. This is literature. And the reader who sets his affections on these things enters the world of books as one made free of a city of wonders, a garden of fair delights. He reads not from a sense of duty, not from a constraint of fashion, not from an ambition of learning, but from a thirst of pleasure; because he feels that pleasure of the highest kind,—a real joy in the perception of things lucid, luminous, symmetrical, musical, sincere, passionate, and profound,—such pleasure restores the heart and quickens it, makes it stronger to endure the ills of life and more fertile in all good fruits of cheerfulness, courage and love. This reader for vital pleasure has less need of maps and directories, rules and instructions, than of companionship. A criticism that will go with him in his reading, and open up new meaning in familiar things, and touch the secrets of beauty and power, and reveal the hidden relations of literature to life, and help him to see the reasonableness of every true grace of style, the sincerity of every real force of passion,—a criticism that penetrates, illuminates, and appreciates, making the eyes clearer and the heart more sensitive to perceive the living spirit in good books,—that is the companionship which will be most helpful, and most grateful to the gentle reader.
CHAPTER II
EFFECTIVE SPEECH
There are four definite steps in the mastery of effective speech: