In Franklin’s “Autobiography” we have an unusually clear statement of the debt of a man of affairs to literature: “From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books. Pleased with the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ my first collection was of John Bunyan’s works in separate little volumes.... My father’s little library consisted chiefly of books on polemic divinity, most of which I read, and have since often regretted that, at a time when I had such a thirst for knowledge, more proper books had not fallen in my way, since it was now resolved that I should not be a clergyman. ‘Plutarch’s Lives’ there was in which I read abundantly, and I still think that time spent to great advantage. There was also a book of De Foe’s, called an ‘Essay on Projects,’ and another of Dr. Mather’s, called ‘Essays to do Good,’ which perhaps gave me a turn of thinking that had an influence on some of the principal future events of my life.”
It is not surprising to find that the most versatile of versatile Americans read De Foe’s “Essay on Projects,” which contains practical suggestions on a score of subjects, from banking and insurance to national academics. In Cotton Mather’s “Essays to do Good” is the germ perhaps of the sensible morality of Franklin’s “Poor Richard.” The story of how Franklin gave his nights to the study of Addison and by imitating the Spectator papers taught himself to write, is the best of lessons in self-cultivation in English. The “Autobiography” is proof of how well he learned, not Addison’s style, which was suited to Joseph Addison and not to Benjamin Franklin, but a clear, firm manner of writing. In Franklin’s case we can see not only what he owed to books, but how one side of his fine, responsive mind was starved because, as he put it, more proper books did not fall in his way. The blind side of Franklin’s great intellect was his lack of religious imagination. This defect may be accounted for by the forbidding nature of the religious books in his father’s library. Repelled by the dull discourses, the young man missed the religious exaltation and poetic mysticism which the New England divines concealed in their polemic argument. Franklin’s liking for Bunyan and his confession that his father’s discouragement kept him from being a poet—“most probably,” he says, “a very bad one”—show that he would have responded to the right kind of religious literature, and not have remained all his life such a complacent rationalist.
If it is clear that the purpose of reading is to put ourselves in communication with the best minds of our race, we need go no farther for a definition of “good reading.” Whatever human beings have said well is literature, whether it be the Declaration of Independence or a love story. Reading consists in nothing more than in taking one of the volumes in which somebody has said something well, opening it on one’s knee, and beginning.
We take it for granted, then, that we know why we read. We may ask one further question: How shall we read? One answer is that we should read with as much of ourselves as a book warrants, with the part of ourselves that a book demands. Mrs. Browning says:
We get no good
By being ungenerous, even to a book,
And calculating profits—so much help
By so much reading. It is rather when
We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge
Soul-forward, headlong, into a book’s profound,
Impassioned for its beauty, and salt of truth—
’Tis then we get the right good from a book.
We sometimes know exactly what we wish to get from a book, especially if it is a volume of information on a definite subject. But the great book is full of treasures that one does not deliberately seek, and which indeed one may miss altogether on the first journey through. It is almost nonsensical to say: Read Macaulay for clearness, Carlyle for power, Thackeray for ease. Literary excellence is not separated and bottled up in any such drug-shop array. If Macaulay is a master of clearness it is because he is much else besides. Unless we read a man for all there is in him, we get very little; we meet, not a living human being, not a vital book, but something dead, dismembered, disorganized. We do not read Thackeray for ease; we read him for Thackeray and enjoy his ease by the way.
We must read a book for all there is in it or we shall get little or nothing. To be masters of books we must have learned to let books master us. This is true of books that we are required to read, such as text-books, and of those we read voluntarily and at leisure. The law of reading is to give a book its due and a little more. The art of reading is to know how to apply this law. For there is an art of reading, for each of us to learn for himself, a private way of making the acquaintance of books.
Macaulay, whose mind was never hurried or confused, learned to read very rapidly, to absorb a page at a glance. A distinguished professor, who has spent his life in the most minutely technical scholarship, surprised us one day by commending to his classes the fine art of “skipping.” Many good books, including some most meritorious “three-decker” novels, have their profitless pages, and it is useful to know by a kind of practised instinct where to pause and reread and where to run lightly and rapidly over the page. It is a useful accomplishment not only in the reading of fiction, but in the business of life, to the man of affairs who must get the gist of a mass of written matter, and to the student of any special subject.
Usually, of course, a book that is worth reading at all is worth reading carefully. Thoroughness of reading is the first thing to preach and to practise, and it is perhaps dangerous to suggest to a beginner that any book should be skimmed. The suggestion will serve its purpose if it indicates that there are ways to read, that practice in reading is like practice in anything else; the more one does, and the more intelligently one does it, the farther and more easily one can go. In the best reading—that is, the most thoughtful reading of the most thoughtful books—attention is necessary. It is even necessary that we should read some works, some passages, so often and with such close application that we commit them to memory. It is said that the habit of learning pieces by heart is not so prevalent as it used to be. I hope that this is not so. What! have you no poems by heart, no great songs, no verses from the Bible, no speeches from Shakespeare? Then you have not begun to read, you have not learned how to read.
We have said enough, perhaps, of the theories of reading. The one lesson that seems most obvious is that we must come close to literature.