It would be a good thing if every girl would study Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, and follow the advice therein contained. It has been so often quoted that we hesitate again to transcribe it; but it cannot be read too frequently.
“Have you measured and mapped out this short life and its possibilities? Do you know if you read this that you cannot read that; that what you lose to-day you cannot gain to-morrow? Will you go and gossip with your housemaid or your stable boy when you may talk with queens and kings? Will you jostle with the common crowd for entrée here and audience there, when all the while this eternal court is open to you, with its society wide as the world, multitudinous as its days, the chosen and the mighty of every place and time?”
Time is precious and is fleeting fast. There would be less poring over fashion-plates, fewer pennies spent on miscellaneous collections of tawdry scraps of useless information garnished with comic anecdotes, if it were realised that each hour spent in aimless, silly reading is an hour lost, never to be regained.
This may seem “a counsel of perfection.” We do not say, read nothing at all of the ephemeral literature whose aim is to enliven and amuse, but if you have any desire for self-culture, read something else as well. If you get into the habit of this light, disconnected, desultory reading, you will find it spoil your taste and your appetite for anything else. The loss you will suffer will be simply incalculable. Amuse a few spare minutes at the railway station, on the tedious journey, by all means: but do not let your reading stop short at mere entertainment or information about dress.
It is a terrible thing when this power of reading—the instrument, almost the only instrument, of self-culture—is turned so persistently to other ends that it becomes a warped and worthless tool.
“It is of paramount importance,” says Schopenhauer, the German philosopher, “to acquire the art not to read.... We should recollect that he who writes for fools finds an enormous audience, and we should devote the ever scant leisure of our circumscribed existence to the master spirits of all ages and nations—those who tower over humanity, and whom the voice of Fame proclaims; only such writers cultivate and instruct us.”
Too stringent perhaps! and yet a truth lies here which may well be taken to heart. A more modern critic, Frederic Harrison, puts it thus:
“Every book that we take up without a purpose is an opportunity lost of taking up a book with a purpose; every bit of stray information which we cram into our heads without any sense of its importance is for the most part a bit of the most useful information driven out of our heads and choked off from our minds.... We know that books differ in value as much as diamonds differ from the sand on the seashore ... and I cannot but think the very infinity of opportunities is robbing us of the actual power of using them.”
What to read, will form the subject of future articles; only let the girl who scans this page make up her mind that she will follow its advice and read something. “Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability” is a familiar sentence of Lord Bacon. Even the busiest girl can lay this to heart and profit by it, as was shown by some articles which appeared in The Girl’s Own Paper on the life of working girls—“My Daily Round.” Some of the most charming sentences in those interesting papers were the sentences where appreciation of literature as a companion to the scant hour of freedom held a conspicuous place.
Life is often a very hard and sordid thing, and far too many women are forced to spend their days in detail of a distasteful kind. We must not extol a spirit of discontent with “the trivial round, the common task,” and must remember the French motto, “When one cannot have what one likes, one must like what one has.” Yet we all need a resource. Every man or woman, young or old, ought to have a refuge wherein to flee from the worries and minute cares of “this troublesome world”—a refuge that shall prove