CHAPTER III
BOOKS TO BE OWNED, TO BE READ, AND TO BE REREAD
"The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one."—Goldsmith.
Just how far books and reading are questions of taste, or should be looked on as questions of taste merely, is passing hard to say. That there are prevailing fashions, local-colour variations, and a few more or less permanent models is noticeable to such a degree that an observer might conclude motley to be the only wear. The readers seem to be no more able to agree in what they like than did the urchins over the pease-porridge in the nursery rhyme:
Some like it hot,
Some like it cold,
Some like it in the pot
Nine days old.
So it goes in books with every one to his own liking, though the particular likings are a very unsubstantial guide to the literary merits of the books liked. A book may become a fashion based on conventional acquiescence and appearances rather than on real worth. Let the judgment of individualism, with courage and restraint, lay bare the fashion, and where then is its habitation or what is its name? Such judgment sets up more or less arbitrary lines of taste that run wide, and it makes a guess at what is enduring literature, a hazardous kind of guess. Yet the peculiar thing of it all is that in this guess pedantry is as likely to play false as is the capricious fancy of the reading public that takes the book of the hour, whatever it be. This makes a kind of self-constituted division of readers, each satisfied with his lot and each serving a purpose.
Some readers' tastes, however, are neither prudish nor slovenly. They are very catholic and succeed in picking out what is good from both the bookish and the popular kinds of books. They can read any book that is a book. But you recall that Charles Lamb could not reckon directories, scientific treatises, the works of Hume and Gibbon, and generally those "volumes which no gentleman's library should be without" as being books. If to these were added those books which no gentleman's library should contain, we come to a field fairly easy of investigation. In other words, we must get back to that field that includes the literature of power rather than the literature of knowledge. Of course, if somebody chooses to read blockheaded encyclopædias, withering economic essays, proper Sunday school books, sophomoric novels, or privately printed verse, that is purely his own concern; but such reading is beyond the pale of real books as they relate to well-regulated courses in the home or in school life.
How far is a teacher to be influenced in his selection of books for students by their lines of taste? That depends on how far the tastes of readers in general indicate that books of their liking are to be classed as books of power, as real literature. It is rash to say that a book has real merit because it becomes the best seller of a season; nor is it to be condemned for the very reason that it is a best seller. However, the general praise of a hundred thousand readers is not so much an index to the book's merit as the book is an index to the character of the readers who praise it. Unqualified laudation of a new book, especially a novel, is an annoying kind of hysteria that has failed to find any other outlet. But the very fact that the book is opportune or spectacular carries it along. It grows up and flourishes in a day, and in a day dies out.
It is curious to note how times change in the reading world and with them lines of taste. To-day the line most evident in the American reading public, and the one most difficult to meet in the development of a taste for good books, is the passion to be up-to-date, as its commercial phraseology would have it. It is awakened by that wonderful agent, the advertising appeal, that deals not with quality but with quantity. In books it calls for a story, and that story must be the latest or it is certain to be absolutely neglected. On being asked what dish he preferred at a dinner, Thoreau said, "The nearest." That was in keeping with his theory of cutting down the denominator; the theory of the reader of the latest is one of multiplying the numerator. As the proper thing, each new book is taken, horns, hide, and tallow. The reader's reverence for the present grows apace, and he no longer has use for old wine, old friends, and old books. This is a reflection of a widespread impression in American life that up to the present time but little truth of substantial value as to methods of living and thinking has been found out. A wonderful industrial progress, working through inventive skill, has given the notion that anything over a generation old is scarcely worth a passing notice, a notion fatal to all art. Every one must seize in a hurry the newest thing in the market, lest he be branded as out of date. And it all looks as if everybody was trying to do what Alice found them trying to do in Wonderland, running as fast as they could to keep where they were.