We are not all the lucky possessors of such a capacity for acquiring knowledge. Wide reading may be good from an educational point of view, but unless we are able to assimilate what we read better a thousand times to restrict our reading. Gibbon's advice is bad, for it indicates merely the system he employed in compiling his monumental work. 'We ought not,' he remarks, 'to attend to the order of our books so much as (to the order) of our thoughts.' So, in the midst of Homer he would skip to Longinus; a passage in Longinus would send him to Pliny, and so on. General reading upon this plan, with no idea of collection in view, would in time reduce most of us to idiocy.
Let our reading be, above all things, well ordered and systematic. Let us imitate Ancillon rather than Gibbon. Ancillon never read a book throughout without reading in his progress many others of an exegetic nature; so that 'his library table was always covered with a number of books for the most part open.'[31] An excellent habit, provided that we can resist the temptation to be side-tracked. The list of books by this industrious student, however, shows by their curious variety that he at least was not sufficiently strong-minded to resist wandering, during the compilation of his historical works, in the byways of literature.
If we read the good solid books at all, let us at least read them with the aim of acquiring the maximum amount of information they afford. To read sketchily and diversely is not only a most painful waste of time, but it abuses our brains. Suppose now that our bookman has decided to 'read up' the French Revolution, a subject to which we all turn at some period of our lives. He has been led thereto, perhaps, by having lighted upon a translation of someone's memoirs, the recollections of some insignificant valet-de-chambre or dissolute curé (for such memoirs abound), more interesting by reason of its piquancy than its historical accuracy. He reads of persons and events that he recollects vaguely to have heard of before, and so he goes on and on.
At the end, he has an ambiguous and temporary knowledge of names and events. He has become acquainted with certain facts that he may possibly remember; such as that the name of the French King was Louis and that his Queen was Marie Antoinette, that they tried to escape and got as far as Varennes (wherever that may be), but were brought back and executed; that there were various politicians named Mirabeau, Danton, Robespierre, Desmoulins, and a curious party called the Girondins, et cetera. As to the causes which led up to the Revolution, the condition of the country and people, the ministry of Turgot, the characters of the King and Queen, Necker's policy, the Abbé Siéyès, the Tennis Court, the composition of the Assembly, and the host of essential facts, his knowledge is precisely nil. The terms Right Centre, Extreme Left, the Jacobins, the White Terror, Assignats, Hébertists and Dantonists, the Montagnards, the Old Cordelier, are so much 'Hebrew-Greek' to him. At the end of six months he will not be at all sure whether it was Louis xiv., xv., or xvi. who was beheaded.
Surely his reading of these dubious memoirs has been a most mistaken course and a lamentable waste of time? He has gained nothing that has benefited him intellectually, and he has loaded his mind with an indigestible hotch-potch of unclassified information. How then should he have approached the subject? Obviously he should have begun at the threshold, or rather at the outer gate. To plunge straight away into Louis Blanc's twelve volumes or Lamartine's 'History of the Girondins' would be as great a mistake as the reading of the unprofitable memoirs. A good beginning is half done. So, having prepared the way by a short study of the economic condition of France immediately prior to the Revolution, that he may readily understand the causes of that event, let our reader begin with some elementary school text-book which will give him a short and concise view of the Revolution as a whole. Having laid the foundations he will confine himself at the outset to works in his own tongue; choosing his literature for each succeeding phase of the Revolution in turn. But until he has obtained a thorough groundwork and has acquired sufficient knowledge to enable him to explore the more famous works in French, it were profitless to devour the scraps afforded by dubious memoir writers.
If we read three books consecutively on any one subject, we know not merely three times as much as if we had read one only, but thirty times. And our knowledge of the subject will not be vague, inaccurate and fleeting, but it will be concise, accurate and permanent. To acquire a correct and lasting knowledge of any subject, whether it be an event or an epoch of history, a science or an art or craft, it is essential that we read consecutively and comparatively as many books upon that subject as our opportunities and time allow. It should also be borne in mind that if we are content to read one volume only, it is quite possible that we may chance upon an author who is inaccurate or biased, or whose work does not represent the latest stage of our knowledge upon that subject.
FOOTNOTES:
[20] J. H. Burton.
[21] Mr. Frederic Harrison.
[22] Mr. Frederic Harrison.