Young people who determine to study English literature seriously sometimes find themselves discouraged by the multitude of books; consequently they get into an idle way of accepting opinions at second hand—the ready-made opinions of the text-book. In order to study English literature, it is not necessary to read many books; but it is necessary to read a few books carefully. The evident insincerity of some of the people who “go in” for literary culture has given the humorous paragrapher, often on the verge of paresis from trying to be funny every day, many a straw to grasp at. There is no doubt that some of his gibes and sneers are deserved, and that others, undeserved, serve as cheap stock in trade for people who are too idle or too stupid to take any interest in literary matters.
Literary insincerity and pretension are sufficiently bad, but they are not worse than the superficial and silly jeers at poetry and art in the line of the worn-out witticisms about the “spring poet” and the “mother-in-law.”
The young woman who thinks it the proper thing to go into ecstasies over Robert Browning without having read a line of the poet’s work, except, perhaps, “How They Carried the News from Ghent to Aix,” is foolish enough; but is the man who sneers at Browning and knows even less about him any better? The earnest student of literature makes no pretensions. He reads a few books well, and by that obtains the key to the understanding of all others. He does not pretend to admire epics he has not read. He knows, of course, that the Nibelungenlied is the great German epic; but he does not talk about it as if he had studied and weighed every line. If he finds that the Inferno of Dante is more interesting than the Paradiso, he says so without fear, and he does not express ready-made opinions without having probed them. If the perfection of good manners is simplicity, the perfection of literary culture is sincerity.
Among Catholics there sometimes crops out a kind of insincerity which almost amounts to snobbishness. It is the tendency to praise no book until it has had a non-Catholic approbation. Now that Dr. Gasquet’s remarkable volume on the suppression of the English monasteries and Father Bridgett’s “Sir Thomas More” have received the highest praise in England and swept Mr. Froude’s historical rubbish aside, there are Catholics who will not hesitate to respect them, although they did hesitate before the popular laudation was given to these two great books.
When a reader has begun to acquire the rudiments of literary taste, he ought to choose the books he likes; but he cannot be trusted to choose books for himself until he has—perhaps with some labor—gained taste. All men are born with taste very unequally developed. A man cannot, I repeat, hope to gain a correct judgment in literary matters unless he works for it.
Mr. Frederick Harrison says: “When will men understand that the reading of great books is a faculty to be acquired, not a natural gift, at least to those who are spoiled by our current education and habits of life? An insatiable appetite for new novels makes it as hard to read a masterpiece as it seems to a Parisian boulevardier to live in a quiet country. Until a man can really enjoy a draught of clear water bubbling from a mountain-side, his taste is in an unwholesome state. To understand a great national poet, such as Dante, Calderon, Corneille, or Goethe, is to know other types of human civilization in ways which a library of histories does not sufficiently teach.”
Mr. Harrison is right. It is not always easy to like good books; but it is easier to train the young to like them than to cleanse the perverted taste of the older. The chief business of the teacher of literature ought to be the cultivation of taste. At his best, he can do no more than that; at his worst, he can fill the head of the student with mere names and dates and undigested opinions.
When the student of literature begins really to enjoy Shakspere, his taste has begun to be formed. He may read the “Vicar of Wakefield” after that without a yawn, and learn to enjoy the quiet humor of Charles Lamb. He finds himself raised into pure air, above the malaria of exaggeration and sensationalism. His style in writing insensibly improves; he becomes critical of the slang and careless English of his every-day speech; and surely these things are worth all the trouble spent in gaining them. Besides, he has secured a perpetual solace for those long nights—and perhaps days—of loneliness which must come to nearly every man when he begins to grow old. After religion, there is no comfort in life, when the links of love begin to break, like a love for great literature. But this love must be genuine; pretence will not avail; nor will mere “top-dressing” be of any use.
Literature used to be considered in the light of a “polite accomplishment.” A book of “elegant extracts” skimmed through was the only means deemed necessary for the acquirement of an education in letters. It means a very different thing now, and the establishment of the reading circles has emphasized its meaning for Catholic Americans. It means, first of all, some knowledge of philology; it means a critical understanding of the value of the stones that make up the great mosaic of literature, and these stones are words.
A bit of Addison, a chunk of Gibbon, a taste of Macaulay, no longer reach the ideal of what a student of English literature should read. We first form our taste, and then read for ourselves. We do not even accept Cardinal Newman’s estimate of “The Vision of Mirza” or “Thalaba” without inquiry; nor do we throw up our hats for Browning merely because Browning has become fashionable. A healthy sign of a robuster taste is the return to Pope, the poet of common-sense, and to Walter Scott. But we accept neither of these writers on a cut-and-dried judgment made by somebody else. It is better to give two months to the reading of Pope and about Pope than to fill two months with desultory reading and take an opinion of Pope at second hand.