Books and Culture | Page 3

which characterises the man of culture is not the
extent of his information, but the quality of his mind; it is not the mass
of things he knows, but the sanity, the ripeness, the soundness of his
nature. A man may have great knowledge and remain uncultivated; a
man may have comparatively limited knowledge and be genuinely
cultivated. There have been famous scholars who have remained crude,
unripe, inharmonious in their intellectual life, and there have been men
of small scholarship who have found all the fruits of culture. The man
of culture is he who has so absorbed what he knows that it is part of
himself. His knowledge has not only enriched specific faculties, it has
enriched him; his entire nature has come to ripe and sound maturity.
This personal enrichment is the very highest and finest result of
intimacy with books; compared with it the instruction, information,
refreshment, and entertainment which books afford are of secondary
importance. The great service they render us--the greatest service that
can be rendered us--is the enlargement, enrichment, and unfolding of
ourselves; they nourish and develop that mysterious personality which
lies behind all thought, feeling, and action; that central force within us
which feeds the specific activities through which we give out ourselves
to the world, and, in giving, find and recover ourselves.
Chapter II.
Time and Place.
To get at the heart of Shakespeare's plays, and to secure for ourselves
the material and the development of culture which are contained in
them, is not the work of a day or of a year; it is the work and the joy of
a lifetime. There is no royal road to the harmonious unfolding of the
human spirit; there is a choice of methods, but there are no "short cuts."
No man can seize the fruits of culture prematurely; they are not to be
had by pulling down the boughs of the tree of knowledge, so that he
who runs may pluck as he pleases. Culture is not to be had by
programme, by limited courses of reading, by correspondence, or by

following short prescribed lines of home study. These are all good in
their degree of thoroughness of method and worth of standards, but
they are impotent to impart an enrichment which is below and beyond
mere acquirement. Because culture is not knowledge but wisdom, not
quantity of learning but quality, not mass of information but ripeness
and soundness of temper, spirit, and nature, time is an essential element
in the process of securing it. A man may acquire information with great
rapidity, but no man can hasten his growth. If the fruit is forced, the
flavour is lost. To get into the secret of Shakespeare, therefore, one
must take time. One must grow into that secret.
This does not mean, however, that the best things to be gotten out of
books are reserved for people of leisure; on the contrary, they are
oftenest possessed by those whose labours are many and whose leisure
is limited. One may give his whole life to the pursuit of this kind of
excellence, but one does not need to give his whole time to it. Culture
is cumulative; it grows steadily in the man who takes the fruitful
attitude toward life and art; it is secured by the clear purpose which so
utilises all the spare minutes that they practically constitute an
unbroken duration of time. James Smetham, the English artist, feeling
keenly the imperfections of his training, formulated a plan of study
combining art, literature, and the religious life, and devoted twenty-five
years to working it out. Goethe spent more than sixty years in the
process of developing himself harmoniously on all sides; and few men
have wasted less time than he. And yet in the case of each of these
rigorous and faithful students there were other, and, for long periods,
more engrossing occupations. Any one who knows men widely will
recall those whose persistent utilisation of the odds and ends of time,
which many people regard as of too little value to save by using, has
given their minds and their lives that peculiar distinction of taste,
manner, and speech which belong to genuine culture.
It is not wealth of time, but what Mr. Gladstone has aptly called "thrift
of time," which brings ripeness of mind within reach of the great mass
of men and women. The man who has learned the value of five minutes
has gone a long way toward making himself a master of life and its arts.
"The thrift of time," says the English statesman, "will repay in after life

with a usury of profit beyond your most sanguine dreams, and waste of
it will make you dwindle alike in intellectual and moral stature beyond
your darkest reckoning." And Matthew