The Guide to Reading | Page 8

the religious exaltation and poetic mysticism which the New England
divines concealed in their polemic argument. Franklin's liking for
Bunyan and his confession that his father's discouragement kept him
from being a poet--"most probably," he says, "a very bad one"--show
that he would have responded to the right kind of religious literature,
and not have remained all his life such a complacent rationalist.
If it is clear that the purpose of reading is to put ourselves in
communication with the best minds of our race, we need go no farther
for a definition of "good reading." Whatever human beings hare said
well is literature, whether it be the Declaration of Independence or a
love story. Reading consists in nothing more than in taking one of the
volumes in which somebody has said something well, opening it on
one's knee, and beginning.
We take it for granted, then, that we know why we read. We may ask
one further question: How shall we read? One answer is that we should
read with as much of ourselves as a book warrants, with the part of
ourselves that a book demands. Mrs. Browning says:
We get no good By being ungenerous, even to a book, And calculating
profits--so much help By so much reading. It is rather when We
gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge Soul-forward, headlong, into a
book's profound, Impassioned for its beauty, and salt of truth-- 'Tis then
we get the right good from a book.
We sometimes know exactly what we wish to get from a book,
especially if it is a volume of information on a definite subject. But the
great book is full of treasures that one does not deliberately seek, and
which indeed one may miss altogether on the first journey through. It is
almost nonsensical to say: Read Macaulay for clearness, Carlyle for

power, Thackeray for ease. Literary excellence is not separated and
bottled up in any such drug-shop array. If Macaulay is a master of
clearness it is because he is much else besides. Unless we read a man
for all there is in him, we get very little; we meet, not a living human
being, not a vital book, but something dead, dismembered,
disorganized. We do not read Thackeray for ease; we read him for
Thackeray and enjoy his ease by the way.
We must read a book for all there is in it or we shall get little or nothing.
To be masters of books we must have learned to let books master us.
This is true of books that we are required to read, such as text-books,
and of those we read voluntarily and at leisure. The law of reading is to
give a book its due and a little more. The art of reading is to know how
to apply this law. For there is an art of reading, for each of us to learn
for himself, a private way of making the acquaintance of books.
Macaulay, whose mind was never hurried or confused, learned to read
very rapidly, to absorb a page at a glance. A distinguished professor,
who has spent his life in the most minutely technical scholarship,
surprised us one day by commending to his classes the fine art of
"skipping." Many good books, including some most meritorious "three-
decker" novels, have their profitless pages, and it is useful to know by a
kind of practised instinct where to pause and reread and where to run
lightly and rapidly over the page. It is a useful accomplishment not
only in the reading of fiction, but in the business of life, to the man of
affairs who must get the gist of a mass of written matter, and to the
student of any special subject.
Usually, of course, a book that is worth reading at all is worth reading
carefully. Thoroughness of reading is the first thing to preach and to
practise, and it is perhaps dangerous to suggest to a beginner that any
book should be skimmed. The suggestion will serve its purpose if it
indicates that there are ways to read, that practice in reading is like
practice in anything else; the more one does, and the more intelligently
one does it, the farther and more easily one can go. In the best
reading--that is, the most thoughtful reading of the most thoughtful
books--attention is necessary. It is even necessary that we should read

some works, some passages, so often and with such close application
that we commit them to memory. It is said that the habit of learning
pieces by heart is not so prevalent as it used to be. I hope that this is not
so. What! have you no poems by heart, no great songs, no verses from
the Bible, no speeches from Shakespeare? Then you