the time which many of their readers dawdle away over them, it is no concern of ours to determine. 2. It follows that we should read with a certain degree of deference and docility to our author. If we do an author the honor to confer with him through his book, for the supposed pleasure or advantage which his society will afford us, we ought to observe toward him the courtesies of polite intercourse. By the act of reading him we profess a respect for the thoughts and feelings which he expresses through the printed page, and we ought to maintain toward him that attitude of deference and courtesy which consistency requires. If we do not weigh his arguments with candor and accept his facts with confidence, if we do not yield our feelings to his control by that pliant sympathy which is requisite for the enjoyment of his enthusiasm, his wit or his eloquence; if instead of this deferential temper we are captious, critical and hard to be convinced or moved, we had better dismiss the author from our presence by closing his book. It is far more civil to our author and more profitable to ourselves to dispose of him with a courteous bow than it is to detain him with a discontented air and a captious temper. It were better to be content with our own thinking than to treat the thoughts of another so unjustly and ill-naturedly. We had better even act after the rule quoted by Charles Lamb, "To mind the inside of a book is to entertain one's self with the forced product of another man's brain. Now I think a man of quality and breeding may be much amused with the natural sprouts of his own." As a general rule we had better not read an author from whom we cannot derive some important benefit and with whom we cannot sympathize at least in some particulars. There may be special reasons for breaking this rule. Those who read for investigation, for criticism or for refutation, are often obliged to deviate from it. But such exceptions justify and enforce the rule in a gen eral way for all those who read chiefly to enrich their minds, to confirm their faith, to enlarge their knowledge and to elevate and kindle their aspirations. Mrs. Browning has said, and doubtless from her own experience, "We get no good By being ungenerous even to a book 3. We add another rule, to correct any excess or abuse in the application of the foregoing, viz.: We should read with an independent judgment and a critical spirit. It does not follow, because we should treat an author with confidence and respect that we are to accept all his opinions and may not revise his conclusions and arguments by our own. Indeed we shall best evince our respect for his thoughts by subjecting them to our own revision. But it by no means follows because we re-judge his argument and opinions that we are not instructed by both. Milton, in the Paradise Regained, in connection with some important truth, puts a singular argument into the mouth of the Great Teacher. "Who reads Incessantly, and to his reading brings not A spirit and judgment equal or superior, Deep versed in books, and shallow in himself." The parenthetical line would imply that the capacity to judge and revise the opinions of an author renders a man independent of aid and incapable of instruction from and of his fellow-men. To a similar effect a saying of Charles Butler is quoted by one of Milton's editors, viz., "No man is the wiser for his books until he is above them." If this were true, the wisdom of another could not become our own except by the suspension or displacement of our individual activity of thought; instruction by books would be an assertion of simple dogmatism; and confidence and docility would only be other names for subservience and credulity. Still whatever is our deference for an author we cannot exalt his intellect into the place of our own; we cannot receive his facts without evidence, nor his arguments except so far as they produce conviction; nor should we profess to admire his eloquence, to love his poetry, or be delighted with his novels, because he is reputed to be a great genius or a splendid writer. Here we observe that: 4. Favorite authors often exert an excessive and occasionally a blinding and stupifying influence over their admirers. We speak of such in connection with the duty of reserving to ourselves the rights of independent judgment and criticism, because it is rare that one human being ever gains a more complete possession of another than does a favorite author over his devoted readers. The most confiding friend and enraptured lover are rarely more completely taken captive in thought and feeling, than are the readers of some fascinating writer, who is for the time being in the ascendant, whether over a small coterie of select worshipers or a whole generation which he sways by his genius. A special chapter might be written on the favorite authors of the present century; the secret of their influence; the explanation of their power—its rise, culmination and its sudden or gradual decline. The names of Scott, Southey, Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Moore, Byron, Bulwer-Lytton, Carlyle, James, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot," Mrs. Browning, Tennyson and many others in England, and of Irving, Longfellow, Mrs. Stowe, Beecher, Hawthorne, Emerson, Lowell, etc., in this country will occur to most persons as examples of 66 writers who have more or less extensively exerted this peculiar influence. When it is salutary and elevating it cannot be estimated too highly as an influence for good. When it is equivocal or positively evil its disastrous power cannot be too greatly deplored. Of both we shall have abundant occasion to adduce illustrations as we proceed. We hasten to observe: 5. That it is a good rule to read those authors whom we are competent both to understand and appreciate. This seems so true and obvious as to be a truism and a commonplace. If a man is to sympathize with his author, much more if he is to criticise and judge him, he must certainly be able to understand his meaning. His thoughts and feelings if they do not produce answering thoughts and feelings, are nought to the reader. A complete and familiar mastery of both are necessary to instruction and pleasure in the recipient. We do not say an easy mastery nor a mastery which does not cost at times severe and patient labor; for he who has never struggled to comprehend a profound and subtile author has never had experience of the manliest of activities-but we do say that the struggle should be successful or it should be sooner or later abandoned. There is not a more silly spectacle often exhibited, than that of an untrained or an uninstructed person professing to follow and enjoy a writer to whom he is unequal, looking wise over his philosophy, interested in his narrative or enraptured by his eloquence and poetry, when they are all Greek or Chinese to him. The silliness is especially conspicuous if the author is at once popular, conceited and arrogant; if he understands and practises the arts of intellectual trickery and delights to set people agape with wonderment by sundry small artifices of high-sounding phraseology, far-fetched allusions, or any of the manifold impositions of word-play and imagery, or the more offensive attractions which are found in cool irreverence and audacious nonchalance with respect to the prevailing religion of the country in which he lives. The more real genius he has, the more provoking is the effrontery of the author who believes in and practises any kind of philosophical or poetical trickery, and so much the more conspicuous becomes the ridiculous plight into which his credulous but ignorant admirers bring themselves by trying to persuade themselves that they understand a writer who may not completely understand himself. A reader should never be afraid to confess that he does not understand or enjoy an author. He ought indeed at times to say this with humility, and to feel that he thereby makes a confession of some kind of incapacity, but he ought to have the manliness to say it notwithstanding, if the truth requires it. It is a fundamental condition of all profitable study and thought, that a man should know his ignorance and frankly confess it to himself. If a reader does not appreciate a popular writer the fault may not be his own. It may perchance be in the author. But it can never be settled with whom it lies, unless the reader has the honesty to confess to himself his incapacity to understand or enjoy his writer. This bravery of an honest confession of one's incompetence to understand some things that are written, would be of especial service nowadays when so much brilliant guess-work and imposing dogmatism is put forth in the guise of all manner of philosophies -as the Philosophy of Religion, of Worship, of Art, of Literature, of Reform, of Education, of Voting, of Finance, of Woman's Rights and of Man's Duties, etc., etc. The fable of Aristophanes concerning Socrates is literally fulfilled in our time, except that we have at least a score of sages of different schools hanging side by side each in his own basket, soaring and sinking between the heavens and the earth, swaying to and fro in peril of a sudden tilt from a capricious gust; each not rarely obscured by investing |