The most valuable function of standard authors lies in their quickening influence upon the intellectual life. The effort to appropriate their ideas and to master their thoughts is the best possible exercise for the understanding. In thinking their thoughts, weighing their arguments, and following their train of reasoning the mind gains vigor, strength, and the capacity for sustained effort. The invigorating atmosphere which a great thinker creates has a most remarkable tonic effect upon all who dwell in it. By unconscious absorption they acquire his spirit of inquiry, his methods of research, his habits of investigation, his way of attacking and mastering difficulties. While trying to walk in his footsteps they learn to take giant strides. His idioms, his choice of words, his favorite phrases and expressions are at their service when they enter new fields of truth. Both in power and aspiration they become like him through the mysterious process of mind acting upon mind, of heart evoking heart, and of will transfusing itself into will. A great thinker gets his place in the galaxy of shining intellects through the truths which he communicates; and as truth is the best food for the soul, so the quest of truth is the best exercise for all its faculties.
The literature of knowledge and the literature of power.
De Quincey, in his essay on Alexander Pope, draws an important and oft-quoted distinction between the literature of knowledge and the literature of power. He says the function of the one is to teach, of the other to move. The former he likens to a rudder, the latter to an oar or a sail. To illustrate the difference he asks, “What do you learn from ‘Paradise Lost’? Nothing at all. What do you learn from a cookery-book? Something new, something that you did not know before, in every paragraph. But would you, therefore, put the wretched cookery-book on a higher level of estimation than the divine poem? What you owe to Milton is not any knowledge, of which a million separate items are still but a million of advancing steps on the same earthly level; what you owe is power,—that is, exercise and expansion to your own latent capacity of sympathy with the infinite, where every pulse and each separate influx is a step upward, a step ascending, as upon Jacob’s ladder, from earth to mysterious altitudes above the earth. All the steps of knowledge, from first to last, carry you farther on the same plane, but could never raise you one foot above your ancient level of earth; whereas, the very first step in power is a flight, is an ascending into another element where earth is forgotten.”
Lowell.
The value of the literature of power as a means of imparting power to every soul that lives under its influence is easily seen and generally acknowledged. But the literature of knowledge serves the double purpose of furnishing us material for thought and of acting as a stimulus to thought. On this point we have the testimony of the wisest who have ventured to give advice upon the use of books. Lowell says, “It is certainly true that the material of thought reacts upon the thought itself. Shakespeare himself would have been commonplace had he been padlocked in a thinly shaven vocabulary, and Phidias, had he worked in wax, only a more inspired Mrs. Jarley.”
The advice which Lowell gives concerning a course of reading and the ends of scholarship to be kept in mind by those who read with a purpose is too valuable to be omitted in this connection:
His advice.
“One is sometimes asked by young people to recommend a course of reading. My advice would be that they should confine themselves to the supreme books in whatever literature, or, still better, to choose some one great author and make themselves thoroughly familiar with him. For, as all roads lead to Rome, so do they likewise lead away from it, and you will find that in order to understand perfectly and to weigh exactly any vital piece of literature you will be gradually and pleasantly persuaded to excursions and explorations of which you little dreamed when you began, and will find yourselves scholars before you are aware. For, remember, there is nothing less profitable than scholarship for the mere sake of scholarship, nor anything more wearisome in the attainment. But the moment you have a definite aim, attention is quickened, the mother of memory, and all that you acquire groups and arranges itself in an order that is lucid, because everywhere and always it is in intelligent relation to a central object of constant and growing interest. This method also forces upon us the necessity of thinking, which is, after all, the highest result of all education. For what we want is not learning, but knowledge; that is, the power to make learning answer its true end as a quickener of intelligence and a widener of our intellectual sympathies. I do not mean to say that every one is fitted by nature or inclination for a definite course of study, or, indeed, for serious study in any sense. I am quite willing that these should ‘browse in a library,’ as Dr. Johnson called it, to their heart’s content. It is perhaps the only way in which time may be profitably wasted. But desultory reading will not make a ‘full man,’ as Bacon understood it, of one who has not Johnson’s memory, his power of assimilation, and, above all, his comprehensive view of the relations of things. ‘Read not,’ says Lord Bacon, in his ‘Essay of Studies,’ ‘to contradict and confute; not to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously (carefully), and some few to be read wholly and with diligence and attention. Some books, also, may be read by deputy.’
“This is weighty and well said, and I would call your attention especially to the wise words with which the passage closes. The best books are not always those which lend themselves to discussions and comment, but those (like Montaigne’s ‘Essays’) which discuss and comment ourselves.”[16]