The Guide to Reading | Page 6

me a kind of fiction
that I had not learned to like. In time I did learn to like it, but I did not
outgrow Dickens. A person who can read "A Christmas Carol" aloud to
the end and keep his voice steady is, I suspect, not a safe person to trust
with one's purse or one's honor.
It is not necessary to argue about the value of literature or even to
define it. One way of bringing ourselves to realize vividly what
literature can do for us is to enter the libraries of great men and see
what books have done for the acknowledged leaders of our race.
You will recall John Stuart Mill's experience in reading Wordsworth.
Mill was a man of letters as well as a scientific economist and
philosopher, and we expect to find that men of letters have been
nourished on literature; reading must necessarily have been a large part
of their professional preparation. The examples of men of action who
have been molded and inspired by books will perhaps be more helpful
to remember; for most of us are not to be writers or to engage in purely
intellectual work; our ambitions point to a thousand different careers in
the world of action.
Lincoln was not primarily a man of letters, although he wrote noble
prose on occasion, and the art of expression was important, perhaps
indispensable, in his political success. He read deeply in the law and in
books on public questions. For general literature he had little time,
either during his early struggles or after his public life began, and his

autobiographical memorandum contains the significant words:
"Education defective." But these more significant words are found in a
letter which he wrote to Hackett, the player: "Some of Shakespeare's
plays I have never read, while others I have gone over perhaps as
frequently as any unprofessional reader. Among the latter are 'Lear,'
'Richard III,' 'Henry VIII,' 'Hamlet,' and, especially, 'Macbeth.'"
If he had not read these masterpieces, no doubt he would have become
President just the same and guided the country through its terrible
difficulties; but we may be fairly sure that the high philosophy by
which he lifted the political differences of his day above partisan
quarrels, the command of words which gives his letters and speeches
literary permanence apart from their biographical interest, the poetic
exaltation of the Gettysburg Address, these higher qualities of genius,
beyond the endowment of any native wit, came to Lincoln in some part
from the reading of books. It is important to note that he followed
Franklin's advice to read much but not too many books; the list of
books mentioned in the biographical records of Lincoln is not long. But
he went over those half dozen plays "frequently." We should remember,
too, that he based his ideals upon the Bible and his style upon the King
James Version. His writings abound in Biblical phrases.
We are accustomed to regard Lincoln as a thinker. His right arm in the
saddest duty of his life, General Grant, was a man of deeds; as Lincoln
said of him, he was a "copious worker and fighter, but a very meager
writer and telegrapher." In his "Memoirs," Grant makes a modest
confession about his reading:
"There is a fine library connected with the Academy [West Point] from
which cadets can get books to read in their quarters. I devoted more
time to these than to books relating to the course of studies. Much of
the time, I am sorry to say, was devoted to novels, but not those of a
trashy sort. I read all of Bulwer's then published, Cooper's, Marryat's,
Scott's, Washington Irving's works, Lever's, and many others that I do
not now remember."
Grant was not a shining light in his school days, nor indeed in his life
until the Civil War, and at first sight he is not a striking example of a

great man influenced by books. Yet who can deny that the fruit of that
early reading is to be found in his "Memoirs," in which a man of action,
unused to writing, and called upon to narrate great events, discovers an
easy adequate style? There is a dangerous kind of conjecture in which
many biographers indulge when they try to relate logically the scattered
events of a man's life. A conjectured relation is set down as a proved or
unquestioned relation. I have said something about this in [Footnote:
See John Macy's Guide to Reading, Chapter VIII.] writing on
biography, and I do not wish to violate my own teachings. But we may,
without harm, hazard the suggestion, which is only a suggestion, that
some of the chivalry of Scott's heroes wove itself into Grant's instincts
and inspired this businesslike, modern general, in the days