The Art of Reading, Past and Present By Oscar Kuhns 1910
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The habit of reading is so universal to-day, it seems so natural and necessary a part of our intellectual life, that it is hard to realize that there was a time when it was unknown. Of course, the art of reading could not exist before the invention of written language, an invention which seemed so marvelous in the eyes of primitive man that it is no wonder that the Greeks apotheosized Cadmus, that Egyptian hieroglyphics were held sacred, and that the Gothic runes were used in prophecy and religion. There was something mysterious about these strange figures which could communicate thought, and a sacred character was early attributed by all races to the written word; to this day the Chinese regard as a sacrilege the destruction of even scraps of printed paper, otherwise than by the purifying action of fire.
It is undoubtedly due to this innate reverence for the letter in a strictly literal sense, that certain formulas, or combinations of words, have always been regarded as having peculiar power, not only in religious worship, but in what has been variously called white magic, pow-wowing, or Beschworungsformeln. This is a superstition which by no means is peculiar to the distant past alone, but which we find exemplified in all ages, from the time when "Circe burnt her fragrant fires and sang her magic songs as she wove at the immortal loom," down through the sortes Virgilianae of the Middle Ages, the Cabbala of the Renaissance, the Bibel-los of German Pietists, to the Christian Science of to-day, when the reading or repeating of passages from Mrs. Eddy's Science and Health is supposed to have a healing effect. Even mottoes and quotations owe something of their charm to this same influence. Nay, the sacred books of the East, the Bible as the literal word of God, the use of Latin in the services of the Roman Church, are all probably more or less influenced by this atavistic reverence for the written word.
In the earliest ages, long after written language was invented, reading as we understand it now, was not known. Even after the Homeric poems were reduced to writing, they were chiefly brought to the knowledge of the people by the Rhapsodes, or public reciters; and this phenomenon was repeated during the Dark Ages by Minnesinger and Troubadour, who went from castle to castle, or stood in the public squares, singing the songs of King Arthur and Charlemagne, making their numbers flow,
For old unhappy, far-off things,
Or battles long ago.
It was only later, and especially after the invention of printing, that the mediaeval epics were actually read by the general public.
Yet reading, though infinitely less widely spread than to-day, became a veritable passion among certain Greeks and Romans. Horace tells his readers to turn over and over again the pages of the Greek writers; Cicero declares that reading, "Softens our manners, and does not allow us to become wild" while we shall see later with what enthusiasm, and at the same time remorse, the early Christian Fathers plunged into the reading of the great classics. Reading had become such a passion with the Romans that we hear, from time to time a warning voice, even as in later times. Thus Seneca says, "the reading of many authors and the greatest variety of books produces a vague and unsteady state of mind. We must linger over the great writers and get nourishment from them. Even in study, which is the noblest occupation of man, we must go about it in a common-sense way and be reasonable."
Like so many other things, during the long night of the Dark Ages, the ability to read was well-nigh lost. Learning practically died out, Greek was unknown, scholars were few and far between, and only a small number of those outside the Church could read; while the reading of the clergy themselves was largely confined to the breviary, lives of the saints and collections of exempla. Profane indigenous literature was almost entirely a matter of oral recital.
As in so many other respects, so in the love for reading we see a new life springing up during the period of the Renaissance. With the discovery of the ancient classics, a vast enthusiasm for books and reading took possession of men. Chief among these is Petrarch, whose services in the discovery of new manuscripts, in copying rare books, and in the formation of libraries, can hardly be overestimated. Petrarch is the consummate type of the passionate lover of books, the great apostle of the modern reader. A small sized volume could be compiled of all the notable things he has said of books and reading. From his earliest youth he was an incessant reader, and this passion grew and developed as the years went on. He read not merely from curiosity; as he himself says, "I do not read to cultivate my intellect, or to become more eloquent; but to make myself a better man." His passion for books was unquenchable; "Libris satiari nequeo," he says. It became almost a disease. "Gold, silver, marble palaces, fields, horses, delight me but little. Books only give us true and substantial satisfaction; they speak to us, counsel us and enter with us in harmonious and ultimate familiarity. It is not enough to gather books for vanity, to fill our library, and embellish our house. It is not enough to possess our books, we must know them; not to arrange them on the shelves of our library, but to make them a part and parcel of our memory and our intellects."
His love for books increased with age. A year before his death he says, "I study indefatigably, and from my studies I have never received greater delight than now. While in every other respect I feel the infirmities of old age, in my studies it seems to me that I grow younger every day. Therefore I shall be glad if death shall come upon me while I shall be engaged in reading or writing, or if God will, in praying." It is pleasant to add, that death did indeed surprise him bending over a book in his library.
It is not perhaps inappropriate to linger thus much over Petrarch, the most famous of all modern readers. Extensive quotations could be made of similar import from other great men of the Renaissance. The Humanists as a class were lovers of books, from Poggio Bracciolini, the follower of Petrarch, to Erasmus, who was known to go without his dinner in order to save the money to buy Greek books.
A famous lover of books, almost equal to Petrarch is Montaigne, although he is not so enthusiastic or passionate. He may be taken as the type of a rational user of books, ready to drop them when they threaten to become harmful. He tells us how he regards the commerce of books as more useful than that of men or women, how they console him in old age and solitude, relieve him from the weight of a wearisome idleness, and dull the edge of pain; "pour me distraire d'une imagination importune," he says, "il n'est que de recouvrir aux livres." He never travels without books, for it is a comfort to think they are always at his side, to give him pleasure when he wants them; "c'est la meilleure munition que j'aye trouvee a cet humain voyage."
Yet here, as in all things else, Montaigne avoids all extravagance. Books are pleasant, he says, but if from using them too much we lose our cheerfulness and health, two of the best things we have, let us quit them; "for I am among those who think that their fruit cannot counterbalance this loss." And so he tells us of his leisurely method of reading, turning over the pages now of this book, now of that, without order or design, "a pieces descousues," sometimes dreaming, sometimes taking notes, and sometimes dictating, as he walks, "mes songes que voici." Like those of all men, his motives for reading changed as he grew older; when young he studied for ostentation; later to make himself wise; "a cette heure pour m'esbattre; jamais pour le quest." Other famous readers were John Milton, who from his earliest youth was seized with such eagerness for learning that as he himself says, "from the twelfth year of my age, I scarce ever went to bed before midnight;" who read not as a theologian, but as a poet and scholar, and always in the light of his secret purpose; and for whom, as for Dom Rivet, reading was not an idle curiosity, but a serious occupation consecrated by religion; Montesquieu, who found comfort in all conditions of life in books, and who says "study has been for me the sovereign remedy against all the disappointments of life, and I have never had any sorrow that an hour's reading could not dissipate;" Gladstone, for whom "reading in the days of his full vigor was an habitual communion with the masterspirits of mankind as a vivifying and nourishing part of life." In some this love for reading has assumed a veritable mystical form, as in the case of Amiel, when he first went to the university of Berlin, and who tells us of the impression of august serenity which enwrapped him, when rising before the dawn and lighting his study lamp, he came to his desk as to an altar, reading, meditating, seeing before his "pensee recueillie," the centuries pass, space unroll itself, and the Absolute hovering above him.
Time would fail us to mention men who from earliest childhood have been filled with this strange passion for books,—even those who are of our own tongue and age. Everybody knows the group of book lovers in England during the early part of the nineteenth century,—Coleridge, the lonely dreamy lad, loving above all things knowledge, and who in school was found to be reading Vergil for his own amusement; Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt and Lamb, the latter of whom, according to Crabb Robinson, "possessed the finest collection of shabby books I ever saw." Among the great readers of the nineteenth century none are more interesting than three men, Shelley, Macaulay and Emerson. Of Shelley it was said, that no student at Oxford ever read more ardently than he. "He was to be found, book in hand, at all hours; reading in season and out of season, at table, in bed, and especially during a walk, not only in the quiet country, and in retired paths, not only at Oxford, in the public walks and High street, but in the most crowded thoroughfares of London." "I never saw eyes," says Hogg, "that devoured the pages more voraciously than his; I am convinced that two-thirds of the period of day and night were employed in reading. It is no exaggeration to affirm that out of the twenty-four hours, he frequently read sixteen."
Emerson's reading was not so wide-spread as Shelley's, it ran very largely in the line of the transcendental and the mystical,—Shakespeare, Plato, Plotinus, Epictetus, Thomas a Kempis, Saadi and the Persian poets. Yet from his earliest youth he lived in an atmosphere of letters,—"books were meat and drink to him." No man has ever uttered nobler words in praise of books and reading and their power to uplift than he. "In sickness, in languor, give us a strain of poetry, or a profound sentence, and we are refreshed; or produce a volume of Shakespeare or Plato, or remind us of their names, and instantly we come into a feeling of longevity." "Let us not forget the genial miraculous force we have known to proceed from a book. We go musing into the vault of day and night; no constellation shines, no muse descends, the stars are white points, the roses brick-colored dust, mice peep and wagons creep along the road. We return to the house and take up Plutarch or Augustine, and read a few sentences or pages and lo! the air swims with life; the front of heaven is full of fiery shapes; secrets of magnanimity and grandeur invite us on every hand; life is made up of them; such is our debt to a book."
Yet perhaps the most enthusiastic devotee of reading and books of modern times, worthy of a place beside Petrarch himself, was Lord Macaulay. Even in school, says his biographer [Trevelyan], in spite of time necessarily spent on his classics, or mathematics, he found time to gratify that insatiable thirst for European literature, which he retained throughout life. All through his life he retained his omnivorous and insatiable appetite for books, and a large part of that life was spent in extensive and diversified reading. More and more as the years went on, he shut himself up among his books, and established a deep personal relation with them. He cared little for modern books, but he loved to read over and over again the books he loved from his youth up, of which he had by heart "every incident, and almost every sentence."
"Of the feelings which he entertained towards the great minds of by-gone ages, it is not for anyone but himself to speak. He has told us how his debt to them was incalculable; how they guided him to truth; how they filled his mind with noble and graceful images; how they stood by him in all vicissitudes, comforters in sorrow, nurses in sickness, companions in solitude, 'the old friends who are never seen with new faces; who are the same in wealth and in poverty, in glory and in obscurity.' The confidence with which he could rely upon intellectual pursuits for occupation and amusement, assisted him not a little to preserve that dignified composure with which he met his public career, and that spirit of cheerful and patient endurance which sustained him through the years of broken health and enforced seclusion. He had no pressing need to seek for excitement and applause abroad, when he had beneath his own roof a never-failing store of exquisite enjoyment. That invincible love for reading, which Gibbon declared he would not exchange for the treasure of India, was with Macaulay, a main element of happiness in one of the happiest lives that it has ever fallen to the lot of a biographer to record."
The habit of reading is so universal to-day, it seems so natural and necessary a part of our intellectual life, that it is hard to realize that there was a time when it was unknown. Of course, the art of reading could not exist before the invention of written language, an invention which seemed so marvelous in the eyes of primitive man that it is no wonder that the Greeks apotheosized Cadmus, that Egyptian hieroglyphics were held sacred, and that the Gothic runes were used in prophecy and religion. There was something mysterious about these strange figures which could communicate thought, and a sacred character was early attributed by all races to the written word; to this day the Chinese regard as a sacrilege the destruction of even scraps of printed paper, otherwise than by the purifying action of fire.
It is undoubtedly due to this innate reverence for the letter in a strictly literal sense, that certain formulas, or combinations of words, have always been regarded as having peculiar power, not only in religious worship, but in what has been variously called white magic, pow-wowing, or Beschworungsformeln. This is a superstition which by no means is peculiar to the distant past alone, but which we find exemplified in all ages, from the time when "Circe burnt her fragrant fires and sang her magic songs as she wove at the immortal loom," down through the sortes Virgilianae of the Middle Ages, the Cabbala of the Renaissance, the Bibel-los of German Pietists, to the Christian Science of to-day, when the reading or repeating of passages from Mrs. Eddy's Science and Health is supposed to have a healing effect. Even mottoes and quotations owe something of their charm to this same influence. Nay, the sacred books of the East, the Bible as the literal word of God, the use of Latin in the services of the Roman Church, are all probably more or less influenced by this atavistic reverence for the written word.
In the earliest ages, long after written language was invented, reading as we understand it now, was not known. Even after the Homeric poems were reduced to writing, they were chiefly brought to the knowledge of the people by the Rhapsodes, or public reciters; and this phenomenon was repeated during the Dark Ages by Minnesinger and Troubadour, who went from castle to castle, or stood in the public squares, singing the songs of King Arthur and Charlemagne, making their numbers flow,
For old unhappy, far-off things,
Or battles long ago.
It was only later, and especially after the invention of printing, that the mediaeval epics were actually read by the general public.
Yet reading, though infinitely less widely spread than to-day, became a veritable passion among certain Greeks and Romans. Horace tells his readers to turn over and over again the pages of the Greek writers; Cicero declares that reading, "Softens our manners, and does not allow us to become wild" while we shall see later with what enthusiasm, and at the same time remorse, the early Christian Fathers plunged into the reading of the great classics. Reading had become such a passion with the Romans that we hear, from time to time a warning voice, even as in later times. Thus Seneca says, "the reading of many authors and the greatest variety of books produces a vague and unsteady state of mind. We must linger over the great writers and get nourishment from them. Even in study, which is the noblest occupation of man, we must go about it in a common-sense way and be reasonable."
Like so many other things, during the long night of the Dark Ages, the ability to read was well-nigh lost. Learning practically died out, Greek was unknown, scholars were few and far between, and only a small number of those outside the Church could read; while the reading of the clergy themselves was largely confined to the breviary, lives of the saints and collections of exempla. Profane indigenous literature was almost entirely a matter of oral recital.
As in so many other respects, so in the love for reading we see a new life springing up during the period of the Renaissance. With the discovery of the ancient classics, a vast enthusiasm for books and reading took possession of men. Chief among these is Petrarch, whose services in the discovery of new manuscripts, in copying rare books, and in the formation of libraries, can hardly be overestimated. Petrarch is the consummate type of the passionate lover of books, the great apostle of the modern reader. A small sized volume could be compiled of all the notable things he has said of books and reading. From his earliest youth he was an incessant reader, and this passion grew and developed as the years went on. He read not merely from curiosity; as he himself says, "I do not read to cultivate my intellect, or to become more eloquent; but to make myself a better man." His passion for books was unquenchable; "Libris satiari nequeo," he says. It became almost a disease. "Gold, silver, marble palaces, fields, horses, delight me but little. Books only give us true and substantial satisfaction; they speak to us, counsel us and enter with us in harmonious and ultimate familiarity. It is not enough to gather books for vanity, to fill our library, and embellish our house. It is not enough to possess our books, we must know them; not to arrange them on the shelves of our library, but to make them a part and parcel of our memory and our intellects."
His love for books increased with age. A year before his death he says, "I study indefatigably, and from my studies I have never received greater delight than now. While in every other respect I feel the infirmities of old age, in my studies it seems to me that I grow younger every day. Therefore I shall be glad if death shall come upon me while I shall be engaged in reading or writing, or if God will, in praying." It is pleasant to add, that death did indeed surprise him bending over a book in his library.
It is not perhaps inappropriate to linger thus much over Petrarch, the most famous of all modern readers. Extensive quotations could be made of similar import from other great men of the Renaissance. The Humanists as a class were lovers of books, from Poggio Bracciolini, the follower of Petrarch, to Erasmus, who was known to go without his dinner in order to save the money to buy Greek books.
A famous lover of books, almost equal to Petrarch is Montaigne, although he is not so enthusiastic or passionate. He may be taken as the type of a rational user of books, ready to drop them when they threaten to become harmful. He tells us how he regards the commerce of books as more useful than that of men or women, how they console him in old age and solitude, relieve him from the weight of a wearisome idleness, and dull the edge of pain; "pour me distraire d'une imagination importune," he says, "il n'est que de recouvrir aux livres." He never travels without books, for it is a comfort to think they are always at his side, to give him pleasure when he wants them; "c'est la meilleure munition que j'aye trouvee a cet humain voyage."
Yet here, as in all things else, Montaigne avoids all extravagance. Books are pleasant, he says, but if from using them too much we lose our cheerfulness and health, two of the best things we have, let us quit them; "for I am among those who think that their fruit cannot counterbalance this loss." And so he tells us of his leisurely method of reading, turning over the pages now of this book, now of that, without order or design, "a pieces descousues," sometimes dreaming, sometimes taking notes, and sometimes dictating, as he walks, "mes songes que voici." Like those of all men, his motives for reading changed as he grew older; when young he studied for ostentation; later to make himself wise; "a cette heure pour m'esbattre; jamais pour le quest." Other famous readers were John Milton, who from his earliest youth was seized with such eagerness for learning that as he himself says, "from the twelfth year of my age, I scarce ever went to bed before midnight;" who read not as a theologian, but as a poet and scholar, and always in the light of his secret purpose; and for whom, as for Dom Rivet, reading was not an idle curiosity, but a serious occupation consecrated by religion; Montesquieu, who found comfort in all conditions of life in books, and who says "study has been for me the sovereign remedy against all the disappointments of life, and I have never had any sorrow that an hour's reading could not dissipate;" Gladstone, for whom "reading in the days of his full vigor was an habitual communion with the masterspirits of mankind as a vivifying and nourishing part of life." In some this love for reading has assumed a veritable mystical form, as in the case of Amiel, when he first went to the university of Berlin, and who tells us of the impression of august serenity which enwrapped him, when rising before the dawn and lighting his study lamp, he came to his desk as to an altar, reading, meditating, seeing before his "pensee recueillie," the centuries pass, space unroll itself, and the Absolute hovering above him.
Time would fail us to mention men who from earliest childhood have been filled with this strange passion for books,—even those who are of our own tongue and age. Everybody knows the group of book lovers in England during the early part of the nineteenth century,—Coleridge, the lonely dreamy lad, loving above all things knowledge, and who in school was found to be reading Vergil for his own amusement; Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt and Lamb, the latter of whom, according to Crabb Robinson, "possessed the finest collection of shabby books I ever saw." Among the great readers of the nineteenth century none are more interesting than three men, Shelley, Macaulay and Emerson. Of Shelley it was said, that no student at Oxford ever read more ardently than he. "He was to be found, book in hand, at all hours; reading in season and out of season, at table, in bed, and especially during a walk, not only in the quiet country, and in retired paths, not only at Oxford, in the public walks and High street, but in the most crowded thoroughfares of London." "I never saw eyes," says Hogg, "that devoured the pages more voraciously than his; I am convinced that two-thirds of the period of day and night were employed in reading. It is no exaggeration to affirm that out of the twenty-four hours, he frequently read sixteen."
Emerson's reading was not so wide-spread as Shelley's, it ran very largely in the line of the transcendental and the mystical,—Shakespeare, Plato, Plotinus, Epictetus, Thomas a Kempis, Saadi and the Persian poets. Yet from his earliest youth he lived in an atmosphere of letters,—"books were meat and drink to him." No man has ever uttered nobler words in praise of books and reading and their power to uplift than he. "In sickness, in languor, give us a strain of poetry, or a profound sentence, and we are refreshed; or produce a volume of Shakespeare or Plato, or remind us of their names, and instantly we come into a feeling of longevity." "Let us not forget the genial miraculous force we have known to proceed from a book. We go musing into the vault of day and night; no constellation shines, no muse descends, the stars are white points, the roses brick-colored dust, mice peep and wagons creep along the road. We return to the house and take up Plutarch or Augustine, and read a few sentences or pages and lo! the air swims with life; the front of heaven is full of fiery shapes; secrets of magnanimity and grandeur invite us on every hand; life is made up of them; such is our debt to a book."
Yet perhaps the most enthusiastic devotee of reading and books of modern times, worthy of a place beside Petrarch himself, was Lord Macaulay. Even in school, says his biographer [Trevelyan], in spite of time necessarily spent on his classics, or mathematics, he found time to gratify that insatiable thirst for European literature, which he retained throughout life. All through his life he retained his omnivorous and insatiable appetite for books, and a large part of that life was spent in extensive and diversified reading. More and more as the years went on, he shut himself up among his books, and established a deep personal relation with them. He cared little for modern books, but he loved to read over and over again the books he loved from his youth up, of which he had by heart "every incident, and almost every sentence."
"Of the feelings which he entertained towards the great minds of by-gone ages, it is not for anyone but himself to speak. He has told us how his debt to them was incalculable; how they guided him to truth; how they filled his mind with noble and graceful images; how they stood by him in all vicissitudes, comforters in sorrow, nurses in sickness, companions in solitude, 'the old friends who are never seen with new faces; who are the same in wealth and in poverty, in glory and in obscurity.' The confidence with which he could rely upon intellectual pursuits for occupation and amusement, assisted him not a little to preserve that dignified composure with which he met his public career, and that spirit of cheerful and patient endurance which sustained him through the years of broken health and enforced seclusion. He had no pressing need to seek for excitement and applause abroad, when he had beneath his own roof a never-failing store of exquisite enjoyment. That invincible love for reading, which Gibbon declared he would not exchange for the treasure of India, was with Macaulay, a main element of happiness in one of the happiest lives that it has ever fallen to the lot of a biographer to record."
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