READING |
WITH A LITTLE more deliberation in the
choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially
students and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are
interesting to all alike. In accumulating property for ourselves or
our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame
even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and
need fear no change nor accident. The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo
philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the
divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze
upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then
so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. No dust has
settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was
revealed. That time which we really improve, or which is improvable,
is neither past, present, nor future.
My residence was more
favorable, not only to thought, but to serious reading, than a
university; and though I was beyond the range of the ordinary
circulating library, I had more than ever come within the influence
of those books which circulate round the world, whose sentences were
first written on bark, and are now merely copied from time to time on
to linen paper. Says the poet Mir Camar Uddin Mast, "Being
seated, to run through the region of the spiritual world; I have had
this advantage in books. To be intoxicated by a single glass of wine;
I have experienced this pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of the
esoteric doctrines." I kept Homer's Iliad on my table through
the summer, though I looked at his page only now and then. Incessant
labor with my hands, at first, for I had my house to finish and my
beans to hoe at the same time, made more study impossible. Yet I
sustained myself by the prospect of such reading in future. I read
one or two shallow books of travel in the intervals of my work, till
that employment made me ashamed of myself, and I asked where it was
then that I lived.
The student may read Homer or Aeschylus in
the Greek without danger of dissipation or luxuriousness, for it
implies that he in some measure emulate their heroes, and consecrate
morning hours to their pages. The heroic books, even if printed in
the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead
to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each
word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits
out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. The modern cheap
and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to
bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity. They seem as
solitary, and the letter in which they are printed as rare and
curious, as ever. It is worth the expense of youthful days and costly
hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient language, which are
raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be perpetual
suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain that the farmer
remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard. Men
sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make
way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous
student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be
written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics
but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles
which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern
inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well
omit to study Nature because she is old. To read well, that is, to
read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that
will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the
day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent,
the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books
must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. It
is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by
which they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the
spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language
read. The one is commonly transitory, a sound, a tongue, a dialect
merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the
brutes, of our mothers. The other is the maturity and experience of
that; if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a
reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the
ear, which we must be born again in order to speak. The crowds of men
who merely spoke the Greek and Latin tongues in the Middle Ages were
not entitled by the accident of birth to read the works of genius
written in those languages; for these were not written in that Greek
or Latin which they knew, but in the select language of literature.
They had not learned the nobler dialects of Greece and Rome, but the
very materials on which they were written were waste paper to them,
and they prized instead a cheap contemporary literature. But when the
several nations of Europe had acquired distinct though rude written
languages of their own, sufficient for the purposes of their rising
literatures, then first learning revived, and scholars were enabled
to discern from that remoteness the treasures of antiquity. What the
Roman and Grecian multitude could not hear, after the lapse of ages a
few scholars read, and a few scholars only are still reading
it.
However much we may admire the orator's occasional bursts
of eloquence, the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or
above the fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is
behind the clouds. There are the stars, and they who can may read
them. The astronomers forever comment on and observe them. They are
not exhalations like our daily colloquies and vaporous breath. What
is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in
the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient
occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear
him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who
would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the
orator, speaks to the intellect and health of mankind, to all in any
age who can understand him.
No wonder that Alexander carried
the Iliad with him on his expeditions in a precious casket. A written
word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate
with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work
of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every
language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human
lips;- not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved
out of the breath of life itself. The symbol of an ancient man's
thought becomes a modern man's speech. Two thousand summers have
imparted to the monuments of Grecian literature, as to her marbles,
only a maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carried their
own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect them
against the corrosion of time. Books are the treasured wealth of the
world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the
oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of
every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while
they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not
refuse them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy
in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an
influence on mankind. When the illiterate and perhaps scornful trader
has earned by enterprise and industry his coveted leisure and
independence, and is admitted to the circles of wealth and fashion,
he turns inevitably at last to those still higher but yet
inaccessible circles of intellect and genius, and is sensible only of
the imperfection of his culture and the vanity and insufficiency of
all his riches, and further proves his good sense by the pains which
be takes to secure for his children that intellectual culture whose
want he so keenly feels; and thus it is that he becomes the founder
of a family.
Those who have not learned to read the ancient
classics in the language in which they were written must have a very
imperfect knowledge of the history of the human race; for it is
remarkable that no transcript of them has ever been made into any
modern tongue, unless our civilization itself may be regarded as such
a transcript. Homer has never yet been printed in English, nor
Aeschylus, nor Virgil even- works as refined, as solidly done, and as
beautiful almost as the morning itself; for later writers, say what
we will of their genius, have rarely, if ever, equalled the elaborate
beauty and finish and the lifelong and heroic literary labors of the
ancients. They only talk of forgetting them who never knew them. It
will be soon enough to forget them when we have the learning and the
genius which will enable us to attend to and appreciate them. That
age will be rich indeed when those relics which we call Classics, and
the still older and more than classic but even less known Scriptures
of the nations, shall have still further accumulated, when the
Vaticans shall be filled with Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, with
Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares, and all the centuries to come
shall have successively deposited their trophies in the forum of the
world. By such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last.
The
works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for
only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the
multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically.
Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they
have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated
in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know
little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not
that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to
sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tip-toe to read and
devote our most alert and wakeful hours to.
I think that
having learned our letters we should read the best that is in
literature, and not be forever repeating our a-b-abs, and words of
one syllable, in the fourth or fifth classes, sitting on the lowest
and foremost form all our lives. Most men are satisfied if they read
or hear read, and perchance have been convicted by the wisdom of one
good book, the Bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate and
dissipate their faculties in what is called easy reading. There is a
work in several volumes in our Circulating Library entitled "Little
Reading," which I thought referred to a town of that name which
I had not been to. There are those who, like cormorants and
ostriches, can digest all sorts of this, even after the fullest
dinner of meats and vegetables, for they suffer nothing to be wasted.
If others are the machines to provide this provender, they are the
machines to read it. They read the nine thousandth tale about Zebulon
and Sophronia, and how they loved as none had ever loved before, and
neither did the course of their true love run smooth- at any rate,
how it did run and stumble, and get up again and go on! how some poor
unfortunate got up on to a steeple, who had better never have gone up
as far as the belfry; and then, having needlessly got him up there,
the happy novelist rings the bell for all the world to come together
and hear, O dear! how he did get down again! For my part, I think
that they had better metamorphose all such aspiring heroes of
universal noveldom into man weather-cocks, as they used to put heroes
among the constellations, and let them swing round there till they
are rusty, and not come down at all to bother honest men with their
pranks. The next time the novelist rings the bell I will not stir
though the meeting-house burn down. "The Skip of the
Tip-Toe-Hop, a Romance of the Middle Ages, by the celebrated author
of 'Tittle-Tol-Tan,' to appear in monthly parts; a great rush; don't
all come together." All this they read with saucer eyes, and
erect and primitive curiosity, and with unwearied gizzard, whose
corrugations even yet need no sharpening, just as some little
four-year-old bencher his two-cent gilt-covered edition of
Cinderella- without any improvement, that I can see, in the
pronunciation, or accent, or emphasis, or any more skill in
extracting or inserting the moral. The result is dulness of sight, a
stagnation of the vital circulations, and a general deliquium and
sloughing off of all the intellectual faculties. This sort of
gingerbread is baked daily and more sedulously than pure wheat or
rye-and-Indian in almost every oven, and finds a surer market.
The
best books are not read even by those who are called good readers.
What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this town, with
a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books
even in English literature, whose words all can read and spell. Even
the college-bred and so-called liberally educated men here and
elsewhere have really little or no acquaintance with the English
classics; and as for the recorded wisdom of mankind, the ancient
classics and Bibles, which are accessible to all who will know of
them, there are the feeblest efforts anywhere made to become
acquainted with them. I know a woodchopper, of middle age, who takes
a French paper, not for news as he says, for he is above that, but to
"keep himself in practice," he being a Canadian by birth;
and when I ask him what he considers the best thing he can do in this
world, he says, beside this, to keep up and add to his English. This
is about as much as the college-bred generally do or aspire to do,
and they take an English paper for the purpose. One who has just come
from reading perhaps one of the best English books will find how many
with whom he can converse about it? Or suppose he comes from reading
a Greek or Latin classic in the original, whose praises are familiar
even to the so-called illiterate; he will find nobody at all to speak
to, but must keep silence about it. Indeed, there is hardly the
professor in our colleges, who, if he has mastered the difficulties
of the language, has proportionally mastered the difficulties of the
wit and poetry of a Greek poet, and has any sympathy to impart to the
alert and heroic reader; and as for the sacred Scriptures, or Bibles
of mankind, who in this town can tell me even their titles? Most men
do not know that any nation but the Hebrews have had a scripture. A
man, any man, will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver
dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity
have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have
assured us of;- and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading,
the primers and class-books, and when we leave school, the "Little
Reading," and story-books, which are for boys and beginners; and
our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all on a very low
level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins.
I aspire to be
acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord soil has produced,
whose names are hardly known here. Or shall I hear the name of Plato
and never read his book? As if Plato were my townsman and I never saw
him- my next neighbor and I never heard him speak or attended to the
wisdom of his words. But how actually is it? His Dialogues, which
contain what was immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and yet I
never read them. We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and
in this respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction
between the illiterateness of my townsman who cannot read at all and
the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for
children and feeble intellects. We should be as good as the worthies
of antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were. We are
a race of tit-men, and soar but little higher in our intellectual
flights than the columns of the daily paper.
It is not all
books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words
addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really bear
and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring
to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for
us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading
of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, which will explain our
miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we
may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and
puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise
men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according
to his ability, by his words and his life. Moreover, with wisdom we
shall learn liberality. The solitary hired man on a farm in the
outskirts of Concord, who has had his second birth and peculiar
religious experience, and is driven as he believes into the silent
gravity and exclusiveness by his faith, may think it is not true; but
Zoroaster, thousands of years ago, travelled the same road and had
the same experience; but he, being wise, knew it to be universal, and
treated his neighbors accordingly, and is even said to have invented
and established worship among men. Let him humbly commune with
Zoroaster then, and through the liberalizing influence of all the
worthies, with Jesus Christ himself, and let "our church"
go by the board.
We boast that we belong to the Nineteenth
Century and are making the most rapid strides of any nation. But
consider how little this village does for its own culture. I do not
wish to flatter my townsmen, nor to be flattered by them, for that
will not advance either of us. We need to be provoked- goaded like
oxen, as we are, into a trot. We have a comparatively decent system
of common schools, schools for infants only; but excepting the
half-starved Lyceum in the winter, and latterly the puny beginning of
a library suggested by the State, no school for ourselves. We spend
more on almost any article of bodily aliment or ailment than on our
mental ailment. It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did
not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It is
time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the
fellows of universities, with leisure- if they are, indeed, so well
off- to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives. Shall the
world be confined to one Paris or one Oxford forever? Cannot students
be boarded here and get a liberal education under the skies of
Concord? Can we not hire some Abelard to lecture to us? Alas! what
with foddering the cattle and tending the store, we are kept from
school too long, and our education is sadly neglected. In this
country, the village should in some respects take the place of the
nobleman of Europe. It should be the patron of the fine arts. It is
rich enough. It wants only the magnanimity and refinement. It can
spend money enough on such things as farmers and traders value, but
it is thought Utopian to propose spending money for things which more
intelligent men know to be of far more worth. This town has spent
seventeen thousand dollars on a town-house, thank fortune or
politics, but probably it will not spend so much on living wit, the
true meat to put into that shell, in a hundred years. The one hundred
and twenty-five dollars annually subscribed for a Lyceum in the
winter is better spent than any other equal sum raised in the town.
If we live in the Nineteenth Century, why should we not enjoy the
advantages which the Nineteenth Century offers? Why should our life
be in any respect provincial? If we will read newspapers, why not
skip the gossip of Boston and take the best newspaper in the world at
once?- not be sucking the pap of "neutral family" papers,
or browsing "Olive Branches" here in New England. Let the
reports of all the learned societies come to us, and we will see if
they know anything. Why should we leave it to Harper & Brothers
and Redding & Co. to select our reading? As the nobleman of
cultivated taste surrounds himself with whatever conduces to his
culture- genius- learning- wit- books- paintings- statuary- music-
philosophical instruments, and the like; so let the village do-not
stop short at a pedagogue, a parson, a sexton, a parish library, and
three selectmen, because our Pilgrim forefathers got through a cold
winter once on a bleak rock with these. To act collectively is
according to the spirit of our institutions; and I am confident that,
as our circumstances are more flourishing, our means are greater than
the nobleman's. New England can hire all the wise men in the world to
come and teach her, and board them round the while, and not be
provincial at all. That is the uncommon school we want. Instead of
noblemen, let us have noble villages of men. If it is necessary, omit
one bridge over the river, go round a little there, and throw one
arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.
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