The Guide to Reading | Page 5

answer in a single article would be like turning a spyglass for a moment
toward the stars. We take the great simple things for granted, like the
air we breathe. In a country that holds popular education to be the
foundation of all its liberties and fortunes, we do not find many people
who need to be argued into the belief that the reading of books is good
for us; even people who do not read much acknowledge vaguely that
they ought to read more.
There are, to be sure, men of rough worldly wisdom, even endowed
with spiritual insight, who distrust "book learning" and fall back on the
obvious truth that experience of life is the great teacher. Such persons
are in a measure justified in their conviction by the number of unwise
human beings who have read much but to no purpose.
The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber
in his head
is a living argument against mere reading. But we can meet such
argument by pointing out that the blockhead who cannot learn from
books cannot learn much from life, either. That sometimes useful
citizen whom it is fashionable to call a Philistine, and who calls himself
a "practical man," often has under him a beginner fresh from the
schools, who is glib and confident in repeating bookish theories, but is
not yet skillful in applying them. If the practical man is thoughtless, he
sniffs at theory and points to his clumsy assistant as proof of the

uselessness of what is to be got from books. If he is wise, the practical
man realizes how much better off he would be, how much farther his
hard work and experience might have carried him, if he had had the
advantage of bookish training.
Moreover, the hard-headed skeptic, self-made and self-secure, who will
not traffic with the literature that touches his life work, is seldom so
confined to his own little shop that he will not, for recreation, take
holiday tours into the literature of other men's lives and labors. The
man who does not like to read any books is, I am confident, seldom
found, and at the risk of slandering a patriot, I will express the doubt
whether he is a good citizen. Honest he may be, but certainly not wise.
The human race for thousands of years has been writing its experiences,
telling how it has met our everlasting problems, how it has struggled
with darkness and rejoiced in light. What fools we should be to try to
live our lives without the guidance and inspiration of the generations
that have gone before, without the joy, encouragement, and sympathy
that the best imaginations of our generation are distilling into words.
For literature is simply life selected and condensed into books. In a few
hours we can follow all that is recorded of the life of Jesus--the best
that He did in years of teaching and suffering all ours for a day of
reading, and the more deeply ours for a lifetime of reading and
meditation!
If the expression of life in words is strong and beautiful and true it
outlives empires, like the oldest books of the Old Testament. If it is
weak or trivial or untrue, it is forgotten like most of the "stories" in
yesterday's newspaper, like most of the novels of last year. The
expression of truth, the transmission of knowledge and emotions
between man and man from generation to generation, these are the
purposes of literature. Not to read books is like being shut up in a
dungeon while life rushes by outside.
I happen to be writing in Christmas week, and I have read for the tenth
time "A Christmas Carol," by Dickens, that amazing allegory in which
the hard, bitter facts of life are involved in a beautiful myth, that
wizard's caldron in which humor bubbles and from which rise phantom

figures of religion and poetry. Can any one doubt that if this story were
read by every man, woman, and child in the world, Christmas would be
a happier time and the feelings of the race elevated and strengthened?
The story has power enough to defeat armies, to make revolutions in
the faith of men, and turn the cold markets of the world into festival
scenes of charity. If you know any mean person you may be sure that
he has not read "A Christmas Carol," or that he read it long ago and has
forgotten it. I know there are persons who pretend that the
sentimentality of Dickens destroys their interest in him. I once took a
course with an over-refined, imperfectly educated professor of
literature, who advised me that in time I should outgrow my liking for
Dickens. It was only his way of recommending to