Lafcadio Hearn

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is not even right that a person of ability should waste his time in “finding out” what to read. He can easily obtain a very correct idea of the limits of the best in all departments of literature, and keep to that best. Of course, if he has to become a specialist, a critic, a professional reader, he will have to read what is bad as well as what is good, and will be able to save himself from much torment only by an exceedingly rapid exercise of judgment, formed by experience. ”

“ 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 [Pg 6] 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. ”

“ The great things done in literature have not usually been done by men who thought themselves great. Many thousand years ago some wanderer in Arabia, looking at the stars of the night, and thinking about the relation of man to the unseen powers that shaped the world, uttered all his heart in certain verses that have been preserved to us in the Book of Job. ”

“ 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, [Pg 4] 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. ”

“ But the Greek myths, although eternally imperishable in their beauty, are not more intimately related to English literature than are the myths of the ancient English religion, the religion of the Northern races, which has left its echoes all through our forms of speech, even in the names of the days of the week. A student of English literature ought to know something about Northern mythology. It is full of beauty also, beauty of another and stranger kind ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 ”

“ Great art works unconsciously without ever suspecting that it is great; and the larger the genius of a writer, the less chance there is of his ever knowing that he has genius; for his power is less likely to be discovered by the public until long after he is dead. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Or, to descend to later times, about three hundred years ago a French priest conceived the idea of writing down the history of a student who had been charmed by a wanton woman, and led by her into many scenes of disgrace and pain. This little book, called Manon Lescaut, describes for us the society of a vanished time, a time when people wore swords and powdered their hair, a time when everything was as different as possible from the life of to-day. But the story is just as true of our own time as of any time in civilization; the pain and the sorrow affect us just as if they were our own ”

“ 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. ”

“ But as the whole foundation of European literature rests upon classical study, the student should certainly attempt to master the outlines of Greek mythology, and the character of the traditions which inspired the best of Greek literature and drama. You can scarcely open an English book belonging to any high class of literature, in which you will not find allusions to Greek beliefs, Greek stories, or Greek plays. ”

“ I am sure that if you follow this advice you will find Shakespeare become larger every time that you read him, and that at last he will begin to exercise a very strong and very healthy influence upon your methods of thinking and feeling. A man does not require to be a great scholar in order to [Pg 21] read Shakespeare. And what is true of reading Shakespeare, you will find to be true also in lesser degree of all the world’s great books. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Probably multitudes of these are inhabited by intelligent life; it is even possible that within a few years more we shall obtain proof positive of the existence of an older civilization than our own upon the planet Mars. How vast a difference between our conception of the universe and Job’s conception of it. Yet the poem of that simple-minded Arab or Jew has not lost one particle of its beauty and value because of this difference. ”

“ 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 [Pg 8] same way as the child reads a fairy tale. ”

“ As there is little more to say, except by way of suggestion, I think that you ought, every one of you, to have a good copy of Shakespeare, and to read Shakespeare through once every year, not caring at first whether you can understand all the sentences or not; that knowledge can be acquired at a later day. ”

“ No verse translation from the Greek can reproduce the Greek verse—we have only twenty or thirty lines of Homer translated by Tennyson, and a few lines of other Greek poets translated by equally able men, which are at all satisfactory. Under all circumstances take a prose translation when you [Pg 17] wish to study a Greek or Latin author. We should of course consider Homer first. I do not think that you can afford not to read something of Homer. There are two excellent prose translations in English, one of the Iliad and one of the Odyssey. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ If one is very [Pg 12] 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. ”

“ In the average of cases it is better for a man to confine himself to a small class of subjects—the subjects best [Pg 15] according with his natural powers and inclinations, the subjects that please him. ”

“ Teachers everywhere are cordially welcoming our series of Atlantic Readings; for material not otherwise available is here published for classroom use in convenient and inexpensive form. In most cases the selections reprinted have been suggested by teachers in schools and colleges where a need for a particular essay or story has been urgently felt. ”

“ There are not more than twenty people in the world who can do this, for the experience as well as the capacity required must be enormous. Very few of us can hope to become even third or fourth class critics after a lifetime of study. ”

“ By Robert M. Gay, Simmons College. A short course in composition for colleges and normal schools.
Edited by Stephen P. Duggan, College of the City of New York. A basic text on international relations.
By Catherine T. Bryce, Yale University. Especially suitable for public presentation at Teachers' Conventions.
By Dallas Lore Sharp, Boston University. For classes interested in discussing democracy in our public schools. ”