It is not the quantity of our reading, but the quality that makes it and us an influence for good to our fellows. A man who has read ten pages with real accuracy, says John Ruskin, is forevermore in some measure an educated person. You might read all the books in the British Museum, yet be an utterly illiterate and uneducated person. Our reading without digestion and assimilation is as useless as our food without them. Bacon says that reading makes a full man; but fullness without digestion is dyspepsia. The books whose reading impels us to live nobly and do noble service for others, are the books, and it is a wicked waste of time to read what is a negative quantity. Whoever masters one vital book can never become commonplace.
Thoroughness is the master-passion in reading, as in every other undertaking. Those who have accumulated wisdom, culture, power, riches, are always prominent for their indefatigable, painstaking thoroughness; nothing to them is a trifle, for "trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle." Those who have thought most and felt most and done most from their reading have brought this master passion to it.
When we begin to become acquainted with all the worthy men and women who trace the beginning of their worth to the careful reading of one book, it seems almost a loss to the world to have the libraries of the world so large. If they were all respectable occupants of their shelves, it might be condoned; but the copyright of millions of books is the only right, human or divine, for their existing at all. Many a country boy at the fireside during the long winter evenings has received inspiration from repeatedly reading one or two worthy books; these have spurred him on to fight his way valiantly through college, and from there to the heights in some worthy life-work.
If we are true to all that manhood involves, there is no self-deception in the conviction that each one of us is born for kingship. Supreme kingship "consists in a stronger moral state and a truer thoughtful state than that of other men, which enables us to guide and raise the misguided and the illiterate." Every thoughtful man and woman ultimately discovers that "all education and all literature are useful only so far as they confirm this calm and beneficent kingly power." Emerson's "man-thinking" is the supreme among human beings.
The best that can be known and experienced lies asleep in books, and one of the chief purposes for getting an education is to give us the well-made head and the finer feeling to awake this best knowledge and experience in these sleeping princes.
De Quincey reminds us that all the greatest books may be divided into the literature of knowledge and the literature of power. They have all been written in utmost sincerity by the right-minded and the strong-minded; they disclose boundless fields for soul-refreshment and soul-expansion. In the march of civilization, the men and the nations that have forged farthest ahead since Gutenberg invented printing are the men and the nations that have had most to do with the few books of knowledge and power of the greatest and the wisest. There can be no better test of a man's thought and feelings and actions than the books he reads and the books he keeps around him; and there is none so desolate as the poor rich man who lives in a great bookless house, and "has never fed upon the dainties that are bred in books," as John Milton says.
The very presence of books is refining, and the right kind of man would as soon think of building his house without windows as of furnishing it without books. In every well-regulated home of intelligent men and women the library is always one of the annual items of expenditure. When we have learned how to consult the books of knowledge and power, they let us mingle with the best society of all ages; they make the mightiest men and women of words and deeds our advisers; they bring us the gold of learning and the gems of thought; and they furnish us with the soul-food which brings the proper kind of soul-growth. Such books are the safest of companions, for they protect us from vice and the inferior passions; more than ever they are to-day indispensable for all who are striving to do the higher work of civilization and Christianity.
Every real book we really read gives us greater faith in the goodness and the nobility of life. As Lowell says, "Adds another block to the climbing spire of a great soul." The other sort which "swarm from the cozy marshes of immoral brains," the sort also who "rack their brains for lucre," do the devil's work for him, and are as baneful as the company of fools and vulgarians. Show an observant man your bookshelves, and he'll tell you what you are. The man who does not love some great book is not worth the time we spend in his company; we are fortunate if we are not in some way contaminated by him. If we knew the road they have traveled, we should likely find that those of modern times who have merited the crown of kings and queens for their stronger moral state and their truer thoughtful state have had most to do with some literature of knowledge and power; that they especially oftenest consulted the books of the greatest and wisest in their difficulties, and had been spurred on by their messages to the thoughts and the deeds which made them worthy.
It is fortunate that to-day the greatest of books are the common property of the printers of the world, for they are on this account the cheapest, and many of them can be had for the price of a poor man's dinner. It needs many a page to record even the names of the men and women who have become somebody and have done something just from reading some one worthy book which had fallen into their hands. Many believe that Franklin is the greatest American that has yet appeared, and he has said that "Cotton Mather's essays to do good gave me a turn of thinking which, perhaps, had an influence on some of the principal future events of my life."
As we become better acquainted with some of the great books in all departments of literature, we are surprised to find how few of them have been written by college men. This by no means belittles the good that may come from a true college course, but it does seem to emphasize that great books need some other environment for their growth than exclusive college courses. Perhaps the need is solitude, communion with nature, and frequent intercourse with the world's greatest and best in thought and feeling and action for the work. College-bred men are in a marked minority among the authors whose great books have been and are a potent force in shaping thought and conduct in the world. It is notable how few of these have anything commendatory to say about the influence which their college life had upon them and their accomplishments; many even of the text-books of schools and colleges have come from men whose powers were shaped by no school. How many text-books of medicine and law were prepared by physicians and lawyers whose knowledge was gleaned mainly from keen observation and long experience and deep thought!
It was no mere college education, but the sharpest home observation and strictest adherence to their instincts and their individuality that made forceful writers of Mark Twain, the Mississippi pilot; Bret Harte and William Dean Howells, the typesetters; James Whitcomb Riley, the itinerant sign-painter; Joel Chandler Harris and Eugene Field, the newspaper reporters; and Walt Whitman, the carpenter.
Of the four thousand and forty-three Americans with over twenty millions of dollars to their credit, only sixty-one had even a high-school course. Many among them, however, had high-class mentality and secured a comprehensive practical education. They have evidently been as alert to perceive the treasures hidden for them in the world of great books as they have been to perceive the treasuries hidden for them in their various enterprises. So we find that they have consulted the master spirits of books after their daily tasks were done, while myriads of those who scoff and sneer at them now because of their millions were feasting, frolicking, and dissipating. Among the highest types of American manhood to-day a large majority are the new-rich men. Whatever else may be said about them, all the world acknowledges that it is the parvenus in every land who do the largest part of the greatest work.
The larger our horizon becomes, the stronger is our conviction that the man himself is mainly the architect of his own fate;