On The Art of Reading | Page 8

to face, so the heart of man to man.
(2) And this other, from the writings of an obscure Welsh clergyman of
the 17th century:
You will never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your
veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars.

[Footnote 1: The reader will kindly turn back to p.1, and observe the
date at the head of this lecture. At that time I was engaged against a
system of English teaching which I believed to be thoroughly bad. That
system has since given place to another, which I am prepared to defend
as a better.]

LECTURE II
APPREHENSION VERSUS COMPREHENSION
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 1916
I
Let us attempt to-day, Gentlemen, picking up the scent where we left at
the conclusion of my first lecture, to hunt the Art of Reading (as I shall
call it), a little further on the line of common-sense; then to cast back
and chase on a line somewhat more philosophical. If these lines run
wide and refuse to unite, we shall have made a false cast: if they
converge and meet, we shall have caught our hare and may proceed, in
subsequent lectures, to cook him.
Well, the line of common-sense has brought us to this point-- that, man
and this planet being such as they are, for a man to read all the books

existent on it is impossible; and, if possible, would be in the highest
degree undesirable. Let us, for example, go back quite beyond the
invention of printing and try to imagine a man who had read all the
rolls destroyed in the Library of Alexandria by successive burnings.
(Some reckon the number of these MSS at 700,000.) Suppose, further,
this man to be gifted with a memory retentive as Lord Macaulay's.
Suppose lastly that we go to such a man and beg him to repeat to us
some chosen one of the fifty or seventy lost, or partially lost, plays of
Euripides. It is incredible that he could gratify us.
There was, as I have said, a great burning at Alexandria in 47 B.C.,
when Caesar set the fleet in the harbour on fire to prevent its falling
into the hands of the Egyptians. The flames spread, and the great
library stood but 400 yards from the quayside, with warehouses full of
books yet closer. The last great burning was perpetrated in A.D. 642.
Gibbon quotes the famous sentence of Omar, the great Mohammedan
who gave the order: 'If these writings of the Greeks agree with the book
of God, they are useless and need not be preserved; if they disagree,
they are pernicious and ought to be destroyed,' and goes on:
The sentence was executed with blind obedience; the volumes of paper
or parchment were distributed to the four thousand baths of the city;
and such was their incredible multitude that six months were barely
sufficient for the consumption of this precious fuel.... The tale has been
repeatedly transcribed; and every scholar, with pious indignation, has
deplored the irreparable shipwreck of the learning, the arts, and the
genius, of antiquity. For my own part, I am strongly tempted to deny
both the fact and the consequences.
Of the consequence he writes:
Perhaps the church and seat of the patriarchs might be enriched with a
repository of books: but, if the ponderous mass of Arian and
Monophysite controversy were indeed consumed in the public baths, a
philosopher may allow, with a smile, that it was ultimately devoted to
the benefit of mankind. I sincerely regret the more valuable libraries,
which have been involved in the ruin of the Roman empire; but, when I
seriously compute the lapse of ages, the waste of ignorance, and the

calamities of war, our treasures, rather than our losses, are the object of
my surprise. Many curious and interesting facts are buried in oblivion:
the three great historians of Rome have been transmitted to our hands
in a mutilated state, and we are deprived of many pleasing
compositions of the lyric, iambic, and dramatic poetry of the Greeks.
Yet we should gratefully remember that the mischances of time and
accident have spared the classic works to which the suffrage of
antiquity had adjudged the first place of genius and glory; the teachers
of ancient knowledge, who are still extant, had perused and compared
the writings of their predecessors; nor can it fairly be presumed that any
important truth, any useful discovery in art or nature, has been snatched
away from the curiosity of modern ages.
I certainly do not ask you to subscribe to all that. In fact when Gibbon
asks us to remember gratefully 'that the mischances of time and
accident have spared the classic works to which the suffrage of