Read Ebook: On reading in relation to literature by Hearn Lafcadio

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 509 lines and 28764 words, and 11 pages

ATLANTIC READINGS

NUMBER 17

ON READING IN RELATION TO LITERATURE

BY LAFCADIO HEARN

The Atlantic Monthly Press, Inc. BOSTON

For, to read the characters or the letters of the text does not mean reading in the true sense. You will often find yourselves reading words or characters automatically, even pronouncing them quite correctly, while your minds are occupied with a totally different subject. This mere mechanism of reading becomes altogether automatic at an early period of life, and can be performed irrespective of attention. Neither can I call it reading, to extract the narrative portion of a text from the rest simply for one's personal amusement, or, in other words, to read a book "for the story." Yet most of the reading that is done in the world is done in exactly this way. Thousands and thousands of books are bought every year, every month, I might even say every day, by people who do not read at all. They only think that they read. They buy books just to amuse themselves, "to kill time," as they call it; in one hour or two their eyes have passed over all the pages, and there is left in their minds a vague idea or two about what they have been looking at; and this they really believe is reading. Nothing is more common than to be asked, "Have you read such a book?" or to hear somebody say, "I have read such and such a book." But these persons do not speak seriously. Out of a thousand persons who say, "I have read this," or "I have read that," there is not one perhaps who is able to express any opinion worth hearing about what he has been reading. Many and many a time I hear students say that they have read certain books; but if I ask them some questions regarding the book, I find that they are not able to make any answer, or at best, they will only repeat something that somebody else has said about what they think that they have been reading. But this is not peculiar to students; it is in all countries the way that the great public devours books. And to conclude this introductory part of the lecture, I would say that the difference between the great critic and the common person is chiefly that the great critic knows how to read, and the common person does not. No man is really able to read a book who is not able to express an original opinion regarding the contents of a book.

No doubt you will think that this statement of the case confuses reading with study. You might say, "When we read history or philosophy or science, then we do read very thoroughly, studying all the meanings and bearings of the text, slowly, and thinking about it. This is hard study. But when we read a story or a poem out of class-hour, we read for amusement. Amusement and study are two different things." I am not sure that you all think this; but young men generally do so think. As a matter of fact, every book worth reading ought to be read in precisely the same way that a scientific book is read--not simply for amusement; and every book worth reading should have the same amount of value in it that a scientific book has, though the value may be of a totally different kind. For, after all, the good book of fiction or romance or poetry is a scientific work; it has been composed according to the best principles of more than one science, but especially according to the principles of the great science of life, the knowledge of human nature.

In regard to foreign books, this is especially true; but the advice suggested will be harder to follow when we read in a language which is not our own. Nevertheless, how many Englishmen do you suppose really read a good book in English? how many Frenchmen read a great book in their own tongue? Probably not more than one in two thousand of those who think that they read. What is more, although there are now published every year in London upwards of six thousand books, at no time has there been so little good reading done by the average public as to-day. Books are written, sold, and read after a fashion--or rather according to the fashion. There is a fashion in literature as well as in everything else; and a particular kind of amusement being desired by the public, a particular kind of reading is given to supply the demand. So useless have become to this public the arts and graces of real literature, the great thoughts which should belong to a great book, that men of letters have almost ceased to produce true literature. When a man can obtain a great deal of money by writing a book without style or beauty, a mere narrative to amuse, and knows at the same time that if he should give three, five, or ten years to the production of a really good book, he would probably starve to death, he is forced to be untrue to the higher duties of his profession. Men happily situated in regard to money matters might possibly attempt something great from time to time; but they can hardly get a hearing. Taste has so much deteriorated within the past few years, that, as I told you before, style has practically disappeared--and style means thinking. And this state of things in England has been largely brought about by bad habits of reading, by not knowing how to read.

For the first thing which a scholar should bear in mind is that a book ought not to be read for mere amusement. Half-educated persons read for amusement, and are not to be blamed for it; they are incapable of appreciating the deeper qualities that belong to a really great literature. But a young man who has passed through a course of university training should discipline himself at an early day never to read for mere amusement. And once the habit of the discipline has been formed, he will even find it impossible to read for mere amusement. He will then impatiently throw down any book from which he cannot obtain intellectual food, any book which does not make an appeal to the higher emotions and to his intellect. But on the other hand, the habit of reading for amusement becomes with thousands of people exactly the same kind of habit as wine-drinking or opium-smoking; it is like a narcotic, something that helps to pass the time, something that keeps up a perpetual condition of dreaming, something that eventually results in destroying all capacity for thought, giving exercise only to the surface parts of the mind, and leaving the deeper springs of feeling and the higher faculties of perception unemployed.

Of course this is an extreme case; but it is the ultimate outcome of reading for amusement whenever such amusement becomes a habit, and when there are means close at hand to gratify the habit. At present in Japan there is little danger of this state of things; but I use the illustration for the sake of its ethical warning.

This does not mean that there is any sort of good literature which should be shunned. A good novel is just as good reading as even the greatest philosopher can possibly wish for. The whole matter depends upon the way of reading, even more than upon the nature of what is read. Perhaps it is too much to say, as has often been said, that there is no book which has nothing good in it; it is better simply to state that the good of a book depends incomparably more for its influence upon the habits of the reader than upon the art of the writer, no matter how great that writer may be. In a previous lecture I tried to call your attention to the superiority of the child's methods of observation to those of the man; and the same fact may be noticed in regard to the child's method of reading. Certainly the child can read only very simple things; but he reads most thoroughly; and he thinks and thinks untiringly about what he reads; one little fairy tale will give him mental occupation for a month after he has read it. All the energies of his little fancy are exhausted upon the tale; and if his parents be wise, they do not allow him to read a second tale, until the pleasure of the first, and its imaginative effect, has begun to die away. Later habits, habits which I shall venture to call bad, soon destroy the child's power of really attentive reading. But let us now take the case of a professional reader, a scientific reader; and we shall observe the same power, developed of course to an enormous degree. In the office of a great publishing house which I used to visit, there are received every year sixteen thousand manuscripts. All these must be looked at and judged; and such work in all publishing houses is performed by what are called professional readers. The professional reader must be a scholar, and a man of very uncommon capacity. Out of a thousand manuscripts he will read perhaps not more than one; out of two thousand he may possibly read three. The others he simply looks at for a few seconds--one glance is enough for him to decide whether the manuscript is worth reading or not. The shape of a single sentence will tell him that, from the literary point of view. As regards subject, even the title is enough for him to judge, in a large number of cases. Some manuscripts may receive a minute or even five minutes of his attention; very few receive a longer consideration. Out of sixteen thousand, we may suppose that sixteen are finally selected for judgment. He reads these from beginning to end. Having read them, he decides that only eight can be further considered. The eight are read a second time, much more carefully. At the close of the second examination the number is perhaps reduced to seven. These seven are destined for a third reading; but the professional reader knows better than to read them immediately. He leaves them locked up in a drawer, and passes a whole week without looking at them. At the end of the week he tries to see whether he can remember distinctly each of these seven manuscripts and their qualities. Very distinctly he remembers three; the remaining four he cannot at once recall. With a little more effort, he is able to remember two more. But two he has utterly forgotten. This is a fatal defect; the work that leaves no impression upon the mind after two readings cannot have real value. He then takes the manuscripts out of the drawer, condemns two , and re-reads the five. At the third reading everything is judged--subject, execution, thought, literary quality. Three are discovered to be first class; two are accepted by the publishers only as second class. And so the matter ends.

Something like this goes on in all great publishing houses; but unfortunately not all literary work is now judged in the same severe way. It is now judged rather by what the public likes; and the public does not like the best. But you may be sure that in a house such as that of the Cambridge or the Oxford University publishers, the test of a manuscript is very severe indeed; it is there read much more thoroughly than it is likely ever to be read again. Now this professional reader whom we speak of, with all his knowledge and scholarship and experience, reads the book very much in the same way as the child reads a fairy tale. He has forced his mind to exert all its powers in the same minute way that the child's mind does, to think about everything in the book, in all its bearings, in a hundred different directions. It is not true that a child is a bad reader; the habit of bad reading is only formed much later in life, and is always unnatural. The natural and also the scholarly way of reading is the child's way. But it requires what we are apt to lose as we grow up, the golden gift of patience; and without patience nothing, not even reading, can be well done.

Yet after all, the greatest of critics is the public--not the public of a day or a generation, but the public of centuries, the consensus of national opinion or of human opinion about a book that has been subjected to the awful test of time. Reputations are made not by critics, but by the accumulation of human opinion through hundreds of years. And human opinion is not sharply defined like the opinion of a trained critic; it cannot explain; it is vague, like a great emotion of which we cannot exactly describe the nature; it is based upon feeling rather than upon thinking; it only says, "we like this." Yet there is no judgment so sure as this kind of judgment, for it is the outcome of an enormous experience. The test of a good book ought always to be the test which human opinion, working for generations, applies. And this is very simple.

The test of a great book is whether we want to read it only once or more than once. Any really great book we want to read the second time even more than we wanted to read it the first time; and every additional time that we read it we find new meanings and new beauties in it. A book that a person of education and good taste does not care to read more than once is very probably not worth much. Some time ago there was a very clever discussion going on regarding the art of the great French novelist, Zola; some people claimed that he possessed absolute genius; others claimed that he had only talent of a very remarkable kind. The battle of argument brought out some strange extravagances of opinion. But suddenly a very great critic simply put this question: "How many of you have read, or would care to read, one of Zola's books a second time?" There was no answer; the fact was settled. Probably no one would read a book by Zola more than once; and this is proof positive that there is no great genius in them, and no great mastery of the highest form of feeling. Shallow or false any book must be, that, although bought by a hundred thousand readers, is never read more than once. But we cannot consider the judgment of a single individual infallible. The opinion that makes a book great must be the opinion of many. For even the greatest critics are apt to have certain dullnesses, certain inappreciations. Carlyle, for example, could not endure Browning; Byron could not endure some of the greatest of English poets. A man must be many-sided to utter a trustworthy estimate of many books. We may doubt the judgment of the single critic at times. But there is no doubt possible in regard to the judgment of generations. Even if we cannot at once perceive anything good in a book which has been admired and praised for hundreds of years, we may be sure that by trying, by studying it carefully, we shall at last be able to feel the reason of this admiration and praise. The best of all libraries for a poor man would be a library entirely composed of such great works only, books which have passed the test of time.

This then would be the most important guide for us in the choice of reading. We should read only the books that we want to read more than once, nor should we buy any others, unless we have some special reason for so investing money. The second fact demanding attention is the general character of the value that lies hidden within all such great books. A great book is not apt to be comprehended by a young person at the first reading except in a superficial way. Only the surface, the narrative, is absorbed and enjoyed. No young man can possibly see at first reading the qualities of a great book. Remember that it has taken humanity in many cases hundreds of years to find out all that there is in such a book. But according to a man's experience of life, the text will unfold new meanings to him. The book that delighted us at eighteen, if it be a good book, will delight us much more at twenty-five, and it will prove like a new book to us at thirty years of age. At forty we shall re-read it, wondering why we never saw how beautiful it was before. At fifty or sixty years of age the same facts will repeat themselves. A great book grows exactly in proportion to the growth of the reader's mind. It was the discovery of this extraordinary fact by generations of people long dead that made the greatness of such works as those of Shakespeare, of Dante, or of Goethe. Perhaps Goethe can give us at this moment the best illustration. He wrote a number of little stories in prose, which children like, because to children they have all the charm of fairy tales. But he never intended them for fairy tales; he wrote them for experienced minds. A young man finds very serious reading in them; a middle aged man discovers an extraordinary depth in their least utterance; and an old man will find in them all the world's philosophy, all the wisdom of life. If one is very dull, he may not see much in them, but just in proportion as he is a superior man, and in proportion as his knowledge of life has been extensive, so will he discover the greatness of the mind that conceived them.

You will understand now exactly what I mean by a great book. What about the choice of books? Some years ago you will remember that an Englishman of science, Sir John Lubbock, wrote a list of what he called the best books in the world--or at least the best hundred books. Then some publishers published the hundred books in cheap form. Following the example of Sir John, other literary men made different lists of what they thought the best hundred books in existence; and now quite enough time has passed to show us the value of these experiments. They have proved utterly worthless, except to the publishers. Many persons may buy the hundred books; but very few read them. And this is not because Sir John Lubbock's idea was bad; it is because no one man can lay down a definite course of reading for the great mass of differently constituted minds. Sir John expressed only his opinion of what most appealed to him; another man of letters would have made a different list; probably no two men of letters would have made exactly the same one. The choice of great books must, under all circumstances, be an individual one. In short, you must choose for yourselves according to the light that is in you. Very few persons are so many-sided as to feel inclined to give their best attention to many different kinds of literature. In the average of cases it is better for a man to confine himself to a small class of subjects--the subjects best according with his natural powers and inclinations, the subjects that please him. And no man can decide for us, without knowing our personal character and disposition perfectly well and being in sympathy with it, where our powers lie. But one thing is easy to do--that is, to decide, first, what subject in literature has already given you pleasure; to decide, secondly, what is the best that has been written upon that subject, and then to study that best to the exclusion of ephemeral and trifling books which profess to deal with the same theme, but which have not yet obtained the approbation of great critics or of a great public opinion.

Those books which have obtained both are not so many in number as you might suppose. Each great civilization has produced only two or three of the first rank, if we except the single civilization of the Greeks. The sacred books embodying the teaching of all great religions necessarily take place in the first rank, even as literary productions; for they have been polished and repolished, and have been given the highest possible literary perfection of which the language in which they are written is capable. The great epic poems which express the ideals of races, these also deserve a first place. Thirdly, the masterpieces of drama, as reflecting life, must be considered to belong to the highest literature. But how many books are thus represented? Not very many. The best, like diamonds, will never be found in great quantities.

As for Dante, I do not know whether he can make a strong appeal to you in any language except his own; and you must understand the Middle Ages very well to feel how wonderful he was. I might say something similar about other great Italian poets. Of the French dramatists, you must study Moli?re; he is next in importance only to Shakespeare. But do not read him in any translation. Here I should say positively, that one who cannot read French might as well leave Moli?re alone; the English language cannot reproduce his delicacies of wit and allusion.

ATLANTIC READINGS

The titles already published follow:--

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS, INC. 8 ARLINGTON STREET, BOSTON

ATLANTIC TEXTS

ESSAYS AND ESSAY-WRITING 1.25 Collected and edited by WILLIAM M. TANNER, University of Texas. For literature and composition classes.

ATLANTIC PROSE AND POETRY 1.00 Collected and edited by CHARLES SWAIN THOMAS and HARRY G. PAUL of the University of Illinois. A literary reader for upper grammar grades and junior high schools.

THE PROFESSION OF JOURNALISM 1.25 Collected and edited by WILLARD G. BLEYER, University of Wisconsin. For college use.

THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS: The Principle and the Practice 2.50 Edited by STEPHEN P. DUGGAN, College of the City of New York. A basic text on international relations.

THE VOICE OF SCIENCE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE 2.00 Collected and edited by ROBERT E. ROGERS and HENRY G. PEARSON, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Atlantic Monthly Press, INC. 8 Arlington Street, Boston

Transcriber's Note

On page 22, the "15c" which appears opposite title 17 was moved opposite the name of the author, rather than that of the book title, to match the other items in the table. Otherwise, as far as possible, the original text was maintained.

Quatre fois Nodier vendit ses livres, mais il gardait toujours un certain fonds, un noyau pr?cieux ? l'aide duquel, au bout de deux ou trois ans, il avait reconstruit sa biblioth?que.

Un jour, toutes ces charmantes f?tes s'interrompirent. Depuis un mois ou deux, Nodier ?tait plus souffreteux, plus plaintif. Au reste, l'habitude qu'on avait d'entendre plaindre Nodier faisait qu'on n'attachait pas une grande attention ? ses plaintes. C'est qu'avec le caract?re de Nodier il ?tait assez difficile de s?parer le mal r?el d'avec les souffrances chim?riques. Cependant, cette fois, il s'affaiblissait visiblement. Plus de fl?neries sur les quais, plus de promenades sur les boulevards, un lent acheminement seulement, quand du ciel gris filtrait un dernier rayon du soleil d'automne, un lent acheminement vers Saint-Mand?.

Le but de la promenade ?tait un m?chant cabaret, o?, dans les beaux jours de sa bonne sant?, Nodier se r?galait de pain bis. Dans ses courses, d'ordinaire, toute la famille l'accompagnait, except? Jules, retenu ? son bureau. C'?tait madame Nodier, c'?tait Marie, c'?taient les deux enfants, Charles et Georgette; tout cela ne voulait plus quitter le mari, le p?re et le grand-p?re. On sentait qu'on n'avait plus que peu de temps ? rester avec lui, et l'on en profitait.

Jusqu'au dernier moment, Nodier insista pour la conversation du dimanche; puis, enfin, on s'aper?ut que de sa chambre le malade ne pouvait plus supporter le bruit et le mouvement qui se faisaient dans le salon. Un jour, Marie nous annon?a tristement que, le dimanche suivant, l'Arsenal serait ferm?; puis tout bas elle dit aux intimes:

--Venez, nous causerons. Nodier s'alita enfin pour ne plus se relever. J'allai le voir.

--Oh! mon cher Dumas, me dit-il en me tendant les bras du plus loin qu'il m'aper?ut, du temps o? je me portais bien, vous n'aviez en moi qu'un ami; depuis que je suis malade, vous avez en moi un homme reconnaissant. Je ne puis plus travailler, mais je puis encore lire, et, comme vous voyez, je vous lis, et quand je suis fatigu?, j'appelle ma fille, et ma fille vous lit.

Et Nodier me montra effectivement mes livres ?pars sur son lit et sur sa table.

Ce fut un de mes moments d'orgueil r?el. Nodier isol? du monde, Nodier ne pouvant plus travailler, Nodier, cet esprit immense, qui savait tout, Nodier me lisait et s'amusait en me lisant.

Je lui pris les mains, j'eusse voulu les baiser, tant j'?tais reconnaissant.

--C'est vrai, me dit-il, j'ai eu tort; mais j'en ai une autre; celle-l? je ne la g?terai pas, soyez tranquille.

--? la bonne heure, et quand vous y mettrez-vous, ? cette oeuvre-l?? Nodier me prit la main.

--Celle-l?, je ne la g?terai pas, parce que ce n'est pas moi qui l'?crirai, dit-il.

--Et qui l'?crira?

--Vous.

--Comment! moi, mon bon Charles? mais je ne la sais pas, votre histoire.

--Je vous la raconterai. Oh! celle-l?, je la gardais pour moi, ou plut?t pour vous.

--Mon bon Charles, vous me la raconterez, vous l'?crirez, vous l'imprimerez. Nodier secoua la t?te.

--Je vais vous la dire, fit-il; vous me la rendrez si j'en reviens.

--Attendez ? ma prochaine visite, nous avons le temps.

--Mon ami, je vous dirai ce que je disais ? un cr?ancier quand je lui donnais un acompte: Prenez toujours. Et il commen?a. Jamais Nodier n'avait racont? d'une fa?on si charmante. Oh! si j'avais eu une plume, si j'avais eu du papier, si j'avais pu ?crire aussi vite que la parole! L'histoire ?tait longue, je restai ? d?ner. Apr?s le d?ner, Nodier s'?tait assoupi. Je sortis de l'Arsenal sans le revoir. Je ne le revis plus.

Nodier, que l'on croyait si facile ? la plainte, avait au contraire cach? jusqu'au dernier moment ses souffrances ? sa famille.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet