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BOOKS, CULTURE AND 
 CHARACTER 
 
BOOKS, CULTURE 
 AND CHARACTER 
 
 BY 
 
 J. N. LARNED 
 
 Author of "A Primer of Right and Wrong," 
 
 ETC. 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY 
 
 1906 
 
LIBRARY Of CONGRESS 
 
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 SEP 27 »90« 
 
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 COPY ». 
 
 7. 
 
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 COPYRIGHT I906 BY J. N. LARKED 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Published October igob 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. A FAMILIAR TALK ABOUT BOOKS . „ I 
 
 II. THE TEST OF QUALITY IN BOOKS . . 39 
 
 III. HINTS AS TO READING 49 
 
 IV. THE MISSION AND THE MISSIONARIES 
 
 OF THE BOOK . 73 
 
 V. GOOD AND EVIL FROM THE PRINTING 
 
 PRESS 115 
 
 VI. PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND PUBLIC EDU- 
 CATION 135 
 
 VII. SCHOOL-READING VERSUS SCHOOL- 
 TEACHING OF HISTORY . . . .159 
 
I 
 
 A FAMILIAR TALK ABOUT 
 BOOKS 
 
A FAMILIAR TALK ABOUT 
 BOOKS 1 
 
 I WAS asked to say something to you 
 about books ; but when I began to col- 
 lect my thoughts it seemed to me that 
 the subject on which I really wished to 
 speak is not well denned by the word 
 Books. 
 
 If you had been invited to listen to a 
 discourse on baskets, you would natu- 
 rally ask, " Baskets of what? " The bas- 
 ket, in itself, would seem to be a topic so 
 insignificant that you might reasonably 
 object to the wasting of time on it. It is 
 a thing which has no worth of its own, 
 but borrows all its useful value from the 
 things which are put into it. It belongs 
 
 1 Addressed originally to the students of the 
 Central High School, Buffalo, N. Y. 
 
4 A FAMILIAR TALK 
 
 to a large class of what may be called the 
 conjunctive utensils of mankind — the 
 vessels and vehicles which are good for 
 nothing but to hold together and to carry 
 whatever it may be that men need to con- 
 vey from one to another or from place to 
 place. 
 
 Now, books are utensils of that class 
 quite as distinctly as baskets are. In 
 themselves, as mere fabrications of paper 
 and ink, they are as worthless as empty 
 wickerware. They differ from one an- 
 other in value and in interest precisely as 
 a basket of fruit differs from a basket of 
 coals, or a basket of garbage from a bas- 
 ket of flowers, — which is the difference 
 of their contents, and that only. 
 
 So it is not, in reality, of books that 
 I wish to speak, but of the contents of 
 books. It may be well for us to think of 
 books in that way, as vessels — vehicles 
 — carriers — because it leads us, I am 
 sure, to more clearly classified ideas of 
 them. It puts them all into one category, 
 
ABOUT BOOKS 5 
 
 to begin with, as carriers in the com- 
 merce of mind with mind ; which instantly 
 suggests that there are divisions of 
 kind in that commerce, very much as 
 there are divisions of kind in the mer- 
 cantile traffic of the world ; and we pro- 
 ceed naturally to some proper assort- 
 ing of the mind-matter which books are 
 carriers for. The division we are likely 
 to recognize first is one that separates all 
 which we commonly describe to ourselves 
 as Knowledge, from everything which 
 mind can exchange with mind that is 
 not knowledge, in the usual sense, but 
 rather some state of feeling. Then we see 
 very quickly that, while knowledge is of 
 many kinds, it is divisible as a whole into 
 two great, widely different species, the 
 line between which is an interesting one 
 to notice. One of those species we may 
 call the knowledge of what has been, and 
 the other we will describe as the know- 
 ledge of what is. The first is knowledge 
 of the past ; the second is knowledge of 
 
6 A FAMILIAR TALK 
 
 the present. The first is History ; the 
 second is (using the word in a large 
 sense ) Science. We are not straining the 
 term Science if we make it cover every- 
 thing, in philosophy, politics, economics, 
 arts, that is not historical ; and we shall 
 not be straining the term Poetry if we use 
 that to represent everything which we 
 have left out of the category of positive 
 knowledge, being everything that be- 
 longs to imagination and emotion. 
 
 In History, Science, Poetry, then, we 
 name the most obvious assorting of the 
 matter known as Literature, of which 
 books are the necessary carriers. But 
 there is another classification of it, not 
 often considered, which is a more impor- 
 tant one, in my view, and which exhibits 
 the function of books much more impres- 
 sively. Draw one broad line through 
 everything that mind can receive from 
 mind, — everything, — memory, thought, 
 imagination, suggestion, — and put on 
 one side of it all that has come from the 
 
ABOUT BOOKS 7 
 
 past, against everything, on the other 
 side, that comes from the present, and 
 then meditate a little on what it signifies ! 
 In our first classification we considered 
 the past only with reference to history, 
 or knowledge of the past. Now, I wish 
 to put with that all of our knowledge, of 
 every kind, that has come to us out of the 
 past ; and when you have reflected a 
 moment you will see that that means al- 
 most everything that we know. For all 
 the knowledge now in the possession of 
 mankind has been a slow accumulation, 
 going on through not less than seventy 
 centuries. Each succeeding generation 
 has learned just a little that was new, to 
 add to what it received from the genera- 
 tions before, and has passed the inherit- 
 ance on with a trivial increase. We are 
 apt to look rather scornfully at any sci- 
 ence which is dated before 1900. But 
 where would our brand-new discoveries 
 have been without the older ones which 
 led up to them by painful steps ? In nine 
 
8 A FAMILIAR TALK 
 
 cases out of ten it was an eye of genius 
 that caught the early glimpses of things 
 which dull eyes can see plainly enough 
 now. 
 
 Most of the science, then, which we 
 value so in these days, has come to us, in 
 the train of all history, out of the past ; 
 and poetry, too, has come with it, and 
 music, and the great laws of righteous- 
 ness, without which we could be little bet- 
 ter than the beasts. How vast an estate 
 it is that we come into as the intellectual 
 heirs of all the watchers and searchers and 
 thinkers and singers of the generations 
 that are dead ! What a heritage of stored 
 wealth ! What perishing poverty of mind 
 we should be left in without it ! 
 
 Now, books are the carriers of all this 
 accumulating heritage from generation 
 to generation ; and that, I am sure you 
 will agree with me, is their most impres- 
 sive function. It will bear thinking of a 
 little further. 
 
 You and I, who live at this moment, 
 
ABOUT BOOKS 9 
 
 stand islanded, so to speak, on a narrow 
 strand between two great time-oceans, — 
 the ocean of Time Past and the ocean of 
 Time to Come. When we turn to one, 
 looking future-ward, we see nothing — 
 not even a ripple on the face of the silent, 
 mysterious deep, which is veiled by an 
 impenetrable mist. We turn backward 
 to the other sea, looking out across the 
 measureless expanse of Time Past, and, 
 lo ! it is covered with ships. We see 
 them rise from beyond the far horizon in 
 fleets which swarm upon the scene, and 
 they come sailing to us in numbers that 
 are greater than we can count. They are 
 freighted with the gifts of the dead, to us 
 who are the children of the dead. They 
 bring us the story of the forgotten life 
 of mankind, its experience, its learning, 
 its wisdom, its warnings, its counsels, its 
 consolations, its songs, its discoveries of 
 beauty and joy. What if there had been 
 no ships to bring us these ? Think of it I 
 What if the great ocean of Time Past 
 
io A FAMILIAR TALK 
 
 rolled as blankly and blackly behind us 
 as the ocean of Time to Come rolls before 
 us ? What if there were no letters and 
 no books ? For the ships in this picture 
 are those carriers of the commodities of 
 mind which we call Letters and Books. 
 
 Think what your state would be in a 
 situation like that ! Think what it would 
 be to know nothing, for example, of the 
 way in which American Independence 
 was won, and the federal republic of the 
 United States constructed ; nothing of 
 Bunker Hill ; nothing of George Wash- 
 ington, — except the little, half true and 
 half mistaken, that your fathers could 
 remember, of what their fathers had re- 
 peated, of what their fathers had told to 
 them ! Think what it would be to have 
 nothing but shadowy traditions of the 
 voyage of Columbus, of the coming of 
 the Mayflower pilgrims, and of all the 
 planting of life in the New World from 
 Old World stocks, — like Greek legends 
 of the Argonauts and of the Heraclidae ! 
 
ABOUT BOOKS n 
 
 Think what it would be to know no more 
 of the origins of the English people, their 
 rise and their growth in greatness, than 
 the Romans knew of their Latin begin- 
 nings ; and to know no more of Rome 
 herself than we might guess from the 
 ruins she has left ! Think what it would 
 be to have the whole story of Athens and 
 Greece dropped out of our knowledge, 
 and to be unaware that Marathon was 
 ever fought, or that one like Socrates had 
 ever lived ! Think what it would be to 
 have no line from Homer, no thought 
 from Plato, no message from Isaiah, no 
 Sermon on the Mount, nor any parable 
 from the lips of Jesus ! 
 
 Can you imagine a world intellectually 
 famine-smitten like that — a bookless 
 world — and not shrink with horror from 
 the thought of being condemned to it ? 
 
 Yet, — and here is the grim fact which 
 I am most anxious to impress on your 
 thought, — the men and the women who 
 take nothing from letters and books are 
 
12 A FAMILIAR TALK 
 
 choosing to live as though mankind did 
 actually wallow in the awful darkness of 
 that state from which writing and books 
 have rescued us. For them, it is as if no 
 ship had ever come from the far shores 
 of old Time where their ancestry dwelt ; 
 and the interest of existence to them is 
 huddled in the petty space of their own 
 few years, between walls of mist which 
 thicken as impenetrably behind them as 
 before. How can life be worth living on 
 such terms as that ? How can men or 
 women be content with so little, when 
 they might have so much ? 
 
 I have dwelt long enough on the gen- 
 eralized view of books, their function and 
 their value. It is time that I turned to 
 more definite considerations. 
 
 You will expect me, no doubt, to say 
 something of the relative value of books, 
 to indicate some principles in choosing 
 them, and to mark, perhaps, some lines 
 for reading. There must always be a 
 
ABOUT BOOKS 13 
 
 difficulty in that undertaking for any per- 
 son who would give advice to others con- 
 cerning books, though his knowledge of 
 them surpassed mine a hundredfold. For 
 the same book has never the same value 
 for all minds, and scarcely two readers 
 can follow the same course in their read- 
 ing with the same good. There is a per- 
 sonal bent of mind which ought to have 
 its way in this matter, so far as a deliber- 
 ate judgment in the mind itself will allow. 
 So far, that is, as one can willingly do it 
 who desires the fullest culture that his 
 mind is capable of receiving, he should 
 humor its inclinations. Against an eager 
 delight in poetry, for example, he should 
 not force himself, I am sure, to an obsti- 
 nate reading of science ; nor vice versa. 
 But the lover of poetry who neglects 
 science entirely, and the devotee of 
 science who scorns acquaintance with 
 poetry, are equally guilty of a foolish 
 mutilation of themselves. The man of 
 science needs, even for a large appre- 
 
i 4 A FAMILIAR TALK 
 
 hension of scientific truth, and still more 
 for a large and healthy development of 
 his own being, that best exercise of im- 
 agination which true poetry alone can 
 give. The man of poetic nature, on the 
 other hand, needs the discipline of judg- 
 ment and reason for which exact learn- 
 ing of some kind is indispensable. 
 
 So inclination is a guide to follow, in 
 reading as in other pursuits, with extrem- 
 est caution ; and there is one favorite di- 
 rection in which we can never trust it 
 safely. That is down the smooth way of 
 indolent amusement, where the gardens 
 of weedy romance are, and the fields in 
 which idle gossip is gathered by farmers 
 of news. Of the value of romance in 
 true literature, and of the intellectual 
 worth of that knowledge of passing 
 events which is news in the real sense, I 
 may possibly say something before I am 
 done. I touch them now only to remark, 
 that the inclination which draws many 
 people so easily into a dissipated reading 
 
ABOUT BOOKS 15 
 
 of trashy novels and puerile news-gossip 
 is something very different from the incli- 
 nation of mind which carries some to sci- 
 ence, some to history, some to poetry. 
 In the latter there is a turn of intellect, 
 a push of special faculties, a leaning of 
 taste, which demand respect, as I have 
 said. The former is nothing more than 
 one kind of the infirmity which produces 
 laziness in all its modes. The state of a 
 novel-steeped mind is just that of a loun- 
 ging, lolling, slouching body, awake and 
 alive enough for some superficial pleas- 
 ant tickling of sense-consciousness, but 
 with all energy drained out of it and all 
 the joy of strength in action unknown. 
 It is a loaferish mind that can loll by the 
 hour over trash and trivialities in a novel 
 or a newspaper. 
 
 To come back to the question of 
 choice among good books: there is a 
 certain high region in all departments 
 of literature which every reader who 
 cares to make the most of himself and 
 
16 A FAMILIAR TALK 
 
 the best of life ought to penetrate and 
 become in some measure acquainted 
 with, whatever his personal leanings may- 
 be. It is the region of the great books — 
 the greatest, that is, of the greater kinds. 
 For the realm of literature is a vast uni- 
 verse of solar systems — of suns and sat- 
 ellites ; and, while no man can hope 
 to explore it all, he may seek and find 
 the central sources of light in it and take 
 an illumination from them which no re- 
 flected rays can give. In poetry (which 
 I must speak of again), I doubt if many 
 people can read very much of minor 
 verse — the verse of merely ingenious 
 fancies and melodious lines — with intel- 
 lectual benefit, whatever pleasure it may 
 afford them. But the great poems, which 
 fuse thought and imagination into one 
 glorified utterance, will carry an enrich- 
 ment beyond measuring into any mind 
 that has capacity to receive them. I be- 
 lieve that those fortunate young people 
 who are wise enough, or wisely enough 
 
ABOUT BOOKS 17 
 
 directed, to engrave half of Shakespeare 
 upon their memories, lastingly, in their 
 youth, with , something of Milton, some- 
 thing of Goethe, something of Words- 
 worth, something of Keats, something of 
 Tennyson something of Browning, some- 
 thing of Dante, something of Homer and 
 the Greek dramatists, with much of He- 
 brew poetry from the Bible, have made 
 a noble beginning of the fullest and 
 finest culture that is possible. To mem- 
 orize great poems in early life is to lay 
 a store in the mind for which its happy 
 possessor can never be too thankful in 
 after years. I speak from experience, 
 not of the possession of such a store, 
 but of the want of it. I have felt the want 
 greatly since I came to years when mem- 
 ory will not take deposits graciously, 
 nor keep them with faithfulness, and I 
 warn you that if these riches are to be 
 yours at all you must gather them in 
 your youth. 
 
 A great poem is like a mountain top, 
 
18 A FAMILIAR TALK 
 
 which invites one toward the heavens, 
 into a new atmosphere, ami a new vision 
 of the world, and a new seise of being. 
 There are no other equal heights in liter- 
 ature except those which have been at- 
 tained by a few teachers of tl e divinest 
 truth, who have borne messages of right- 
 eousness to mankind. Even as literature, 
 to be read for nothing more than their 
 quality and their influence as such, what 
 can compare with the parables and dis- 
 courses of Jesus, as reported in the 
 Gospels ? I know of nothing else that 
 comes nearer to them than a few of the 
 dialogues of Plato, which exhibit the char- 
 acter and represent the higher teachings 
 of Socrates. The three dialogues called 
 the "Apology," the "Crito," and the 
 "Phaedo," which tell the sublime story of 
 the trial and death of Socrates, are writ- 
 ings that I would put next to the books 
 of the Evangelists in the library of every 
 young reader. They were published 
 separately a few years ago, in a small, 
 
ABOUT BOOKS 19 
 
 attractive volume, under the title of " The 
 Trial and Death of Socrates," and they 
 are also to be found in the second vol- 
 ume of the fine translation of Plato made 
 by Professor Jowett. Another selection of 
 half a dozen of the best of the Socratic 
 dialogues can be had in a charming little 
 book entitled "Talks with Athenian 
 Youths." By the side of these, I would 
 put the " Thoughts " of the Emperor 
 Marcus Aurelius and the " Enchiridion " 
 of Epictetus; and not far from them I 
 would place the " Essays " of Lord Bacon 
 and of our own wise Emerson. 
 
 These are books, not of mere Know- 
 ledge, but of Wisdom, which is far above 
 Knowledge. Knowledge is brought into 
 the mind ; Wisdom is from its own 
 springs. Knowledge is the fruit of learn- 
 ing ; Wisdom is the fruit of meditation. 
 Knowledge is related to the facts of life, 
 and to man in his dependence on them ; 
 Wisdom is concerned with life itself, and 
 with man in his own being. Knowledge 
 
20 A FAMILIAR TALK 
 
 equips us for our duties and tasks ; Wis- 
 dom lights them up for us. The great 
 meditative books, such as these I have 
 named, are books that have lifted, exalted, 
 illuminated millions of minds, and their 
 power will never be spent. A book of 
 science grows stale with age, and is 
 superseded by another. The book of 
 wisdom can never grow old. But in this 
 age of science it is apt to be neglected, 
 and therefore I speak with some plead- 
 ing for it. Do not pass it by in your read- 
 ing. 
 
 In what I say to you, I am thinking of 
 books as we use them in reading, not in 
 study. Study has some special cultivation 
 of mind or particular acquisition in view ; 
 reading is a more general, discursive, and 
 lighter pursuit of the good that is in 
 books. Now, it is looking at them in that 
 way, broadly, that I will make a few sug- 
 gestions about books which belong in 
 what I have classed as the literature of 
 knowledge. I would award the highest 
 
ABOUT BOOKS 21 
 
 place in that class to history, because it 
 gives more exercise than any other, not 
 alone to every faculty of our intelligence, 
 — to our reason, our judgment, our 
 memory, and our imagination, — but to 
 every moral sensibility we possess. But 
 if history is to be read with that effect, it 
 must not be read as a mere collection of 
 stories of war and battle, revolution and 
 adventure. It must not be traversed as 
 one strolls through a picture gallery, 
 looking at one thing in a frame here, and 
 another thing in a frame there, — an epi- 
 sode depicted by this historian, an epoch 
 by that one, the career of a nation by a 
 third, — each distinct from every other, 
 in its own framing, and considered in 
 itself. To read history in that way is to 
 lose all its meaning and teaching. On 
 the contrary, we must keep always in our 
 minds a view of history as one great 
 whole, and the chief interest we find in it 
 should be that of discovering the connec- 
 tion and relation of each part to other 
 
22 A FAMILIAR TALK 
 
 parts. Of course we have to pick up our 
 knowledge of it in pieces and sections ; 
 but only so fast as we can put them to- 
 gether, and acquire a wide, comprehen- 
 sive survey of events and movements, in 
 many countries, will historical knowledge 
 become real knowledge to us, and its 
 interest and value be disclosed to our 
 minds. We see then what a seamless web 
 it is, woven, as Goethe describes it, in 
 " the roaring loom of time," of unbroken 
 threads which stretch from the begin- 
 ning of the life of men on the earth, and 
 which will spin onward to the end. We 
 read then the history of our own country 
 as a part of the history of the English 
 people, and the history of the English 
 people as a part of the history of the Ger- 
 manic race, and Germanic history in its 
 close sequence to Roman history, and Ro- 
 man history as the outcome of conditions 
 which trace back to Greece and the an- 
 cient East. We read the thrilling nar- 
 rative of our great civil war, not as a 
 
ABOUT BOOKS 23 
 
 tragical story which begins at Sumter and 
 ends at Appomattox, but as the tremen- 
 dous catastrophe of a long, inflexible 
 series of effects and causes which runs 
 back from the New World into the Old, 
 and through centuries of time, slowly 
 engendering the conflict which exploded 
 at last in the rebellion of a slave-holding 
 self-interest against the hard-won supre- 
 macy of a national conscience. 
 
 Concerning history, then, I come back 
 again, with special emphasis, to the coun- 
 sel I gave generally before : read the 
 great books, which spread it out for you 
 in large views. Whatever you may seek 
 in the way of minute details and close 
 studies, here and there, for this and that 
 period and country, get a general ground- 
 work for them in your mind from the 
 comprehensive surveys of the great his- 
 torians. Above all, read Gibbon. If you 
 would comprehend modern history, you 
 must read his " Decline and Fall of the 
 Roman Empire." It is the one funda- 
 
24 A FAMILIAR TALK 
 
 mental work. Though it is old, nothing 
 supersedes it. It is an unequaled, unap- 
 proached panorama of more than a thou- 
 sand years of time, crowded with the 
 most pregnant events, on the central 
 stage of human history. Whatever else 
 you read or do not read, you cannot 
 afford to neglect Gibbon. 
 
 Of the ages before Gibbon's period, 
 in Roman, Greek, and Oriental history, 
 there is nothing which offers a really large, 
 comprehensive survey. But Maspero, 
 Sayce, McCurdy, Thirlwall, Grote, Cur- 
 tius, Mahaffy, Mommsen, Merivale, are 
 of the best. For a brief, clear account of 
 the Roman Republic, sketching its inner 
 rather than its surface history, I know of 
 nothing else so good as Horton's " His- 
 tory of the Roman People." 
 
 Generally, as regards ancient history, 
 there is a warning which I find to be 
 needed. Within quite recent years, the 
 discoveries that have been made, by 
 digging into buried ruins of old cities, 
 
ABOUT BOOKS 25 
 
 bringing to light and comparing great 
 numbers of records from the remotest 
 times, preserved by their inscription on 
 earthen tablets and on stone, have so 
 added to and so corrected our knowledge 
 of ancient history that the narratives of 
 the older historians have become of little 
 worth. It is an utter waste of time, for 
 example, to read the venerable Rollin, 
 new editions of whose history are still 
 being published and sold. You might 
 as well go to Ptolemy for astronomy, or 
 to Aristotle for physical science. It is a 
 worse waste of time to read Abbott his- 
 tories, and their kind. Beware of them. 
 Mediaeval history, too, and many pe- 
 riods more modern, have received new 
 light which discredits more or less the 
 historians who were trusted a generation 
 or two ago. Hallam is found to be wrong 
 in important parts of his view of the in- 
 stitutions of feudalism. Hume is seen to 
 give untrue representations of English 
 political history at some of its chief turn- 
 
26 A FAMILIAR TALK 
 
 ing points. Macaulay has done frequent 
 injustice in his powerful arraignment of 
 great actors on the British stage. The 
 study and the writing of history have be- 
 come more painstaking, more accurate, 
 more dispassionate, less partisan and less 
 eloquent, but more just. We get the 
 surest and broadest views of it in Free- 
 man, Stubbs, Maitland, Green, Gairdner, 
 Gardiner, Ranke, May, Lecky, and See- 
 ley for English history, with Bagehot to 
 describe the present working of the Eng- 
 lish Constitution. 
 
 In continental history, mediaeval and 
 modern, I will mention just a few among 
 many of the books which I think can be 
 recommended safely : Church's " Begin- 
 nings of the Middle Ages," Emerton's 
 "Mediaeval Europe," Bryce's "Holy 
 Roman Empire," some of Freeman's 
 " Historical Essays," Milman's "History 
 of Latin Christianity," Symonds's " Re- 
 naissance in Italy," Trollope's " Com- 
 monwealth of Florence," Ranke' s and 
 
ABOUT BOOKS 27 
 
 Creighton's histories of the Papacy in 
 the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 
 Hausser's " Period of the Reformation," 
 Baird's Huguenot histories, Motley's 
 M Rise of the Dutch Republic " and 
 " United Netherlands," Gindely or Gar- 
 diner's " Thirty Years War," Perkins's 
 " France under Mazarin," " France under 
 the Regency," and " France under Louis 
 XV.," Rocquain's " Revolutionary Spirit 
 Preceding the Revolution," Prof. Henry 
 Morse Stephen's " French Revolution," 
 Fournier's " Napoleon," Thayer's " Dawn 
 of Italian Independence," Andrews's 
 " Historical Development of Modern Eu- 
 rope," and the series by different writers, 
 entitled " Periods of European History," 
 edited by Arthur Hassell. Moreover, the 
 little books in the series called " Epochs 
 of English History" and "Epochs of 
 Modern History" are almost all of them 
 excellent. 
 
 Into American history it is best, for 
 several reasons, that we, of this country, 
 
28 A FAMILIAR TALK 
 
 should go more thoroughly than into that 
 of other countries. One who tries to get 
 his knowledge of it from a single book 
 or two will remain very ignorant. The 
 best of the general narratives which at- 
 tempt to cover the whole, from Columbus, 
 or even from Captain John Smith, to 
 President McKinley, are only sketches 
 that need to be filled. For many parts of 
 that filling, the series of volumes now in 
 course of publication under the general 
 editorship of Professor Hart, of Harvard 
 University, in which successive periods 
 and movements are treated by different 
 writers, can be recommended safely. 
 "The American Nation: A History," is 
 the title of the series. But take from John 
 Fiske, I would say, his colonial histo- 
 ries, — especially " Old Virginia and her 
 Neighbours " and " The Dutch and Qua- 
 ker Colonies," — and his story of " The 
 American Revolution," together with 
 that of "The Critical Period " which fol- 
 lowed it, down to the adoption of the Fed- 
 
ABOUT BOOKS 29 
 
 eral Constitution. For your own delight 
 you should linger long enough in colo- 
 nial times to read all that Parkman has 
 written of the French in America and of 
 their great effort to possess the continent. 
 Irving, in his " Life of Washington," and 
 McMaster, in his " History of the People 
 of the United States," will give you a good 
 knowledge of the first years of the repub- 
 lic ; but you will never understand Jeffer- 
 son and Madison, and the rise of the great 
 old political parties, and the War of 181 2 
 with England, if you do not read the his- 
 tory written by Henry Adams, which cov- 
 ers the time between John Adams and 
 Monroe. For the next third of a century, 
 I would trust to Hoist's " Constitutional 
 and Political History," and Professor 
 Burgess's history of "The Middle Pe- 
 riod," as it is named in the " American 
 History Series." These works are made 
 needlessly hard reading by their style, 
 but they are full of good instruction. 
 With them I would place half a dozen 
 
30 A FAMILIAR TALK 
 
 of the biographies in the series of the 
 "American Statesmen," for side lights 
 thrown upon the politics of the time. 
 Then take Rhodes's " History of the 
 United States from the Compromise of 
 1850," which carries you through and be- 
 yond the civil war. For that great strug- 
 gle I consider Nicolay and Hay's " Abra- 
 ham Lincoln " to be, on the whole, the best 
 history that has been written yet. It is a 
 huge work, in many volumes, but no one 
 who reads it will waste time or easily tire. 
 Along with it should be read the collected 
 writings of Abraham Lincoln, which are 
 the most lasting literature, excepting, 
 perhaps, Emerson's " Essays," that Amer- 
 ica has produced. As a whole series of 
 state papers, I believe that the speeches, 
 letters, messages, and proclamations of 
 President Lincoln are the most extraor- 
 dinary, in wisdom, in spirit, and in com- 
 position, that ever came, in any country 
 or any age, from the tongue and pen 
 of one man. You will find it an educa- 
 
ABOUT BOOKS 31 
 
 tion, both in literature and in politics, to 
 read them again and again. Read, too, 
 the simply and nobly written " Personal 
 Memoirs," of General Grant, with those 
 of Sherman, Sheridan, and Joe Johnston, 
 Long's " Life of Lee," Blame's " Twenty 
 Years in Congress," and your knowledge 
 of rebellion history will be quite complete. 
 Then cap your reading in this region of 
 history and politics with Bryce's " Amer- 
 ican Commonwealth," and I would have 
 no great desire to urge more. 
 
 Biography is in one sense a part of 
 history ; but that which interests us in 
 it most, and from which we take the 
 most good, if we take any, is more than 
 historical. The story of a life which offers 
 nothing but its incidents, informs us of 
 nothing but its achievements, was never 
 worth the telling. Fill it with romance, 
 or glorify it with great triumphs, and still 
 there is small worth in it. If he who lived 
 the life is not in himself more interesting 
 and more significant to us than all the 
 
32 A FAMILIAR TALK 
 
 circumstance of his life, then the circum- 
 stance is vainly set forth. What biogra- 
 phy at its best can give us, as the finest 
 form of history, and as more than his- 
 tory, is the personal revelation, the in-seen 
 portraiture of here and there a human 
 soul which is not common in its quality. 
 The exemplars that it sets most abun- 
 dantly before us, of a vulgar kind of prac- 
 tical success in the world, — the success 
 of a mere self-seeking talent and industry 
 applied to private business or to public 
 affairs, — are well enough in their way, 
 and may make some small impressions 
 of good effect on some minds ; but we 
 take no inspiration from them — they 
 give us no ideals. What we ought to seek 
 everywhere in books is escape from the 
 commonplace — the commonplace in 
 thought and the commonplace in char- 
 acter with which our daily life surrounds 
 us. Our chief dependence is on books 
 to bring us into intercourse with the 
 picked, choice examples of human kind ; 
 
ABOUT BOOKS 33 
 
 to show us what they are or what they 
 have beetiy as well as what they have 
 thought, — what they have done, as well 
 as what they have said, — with what mo- 
 tives, from what impulses, with what 
 powers, to what ends, in what spirit, the 
 work of their lives has been done. When 
 biography does that for us it is one of 
 the most precious forms of literature. But 
 when it only crams our library shelves 
 with " process-print " pictures, so to 
 speak, of commonplace characters in 
 commonplace settings of life, we waste 
 time in reading it. I know people who 
 relish biography as they would relish 
 gossip in talk, delighting in disclosures 
 from other men's and other women's 
 lives, no matter how trivial, and all the 
 more, perhaps, when some spicing of 
 scandal is in them. So far as it invites 
 reading in that spirit there is nothing to 
 commend it. But I have never known 
 one person who enjoyed what may be 
 called the fine flavors of character in 
 
34 A FAMILIAR TALK 
 
 biography who had not fine tastes in all 
 literature. 
 
 The composition of biography would 
 seem to be one of the most difficult of 
 literary arts, since masterpieces in it are 
 so few. The delightful and noble sub- 
 jects that have been offered it in every 
 age of the world are abounding in num- 
 ber, but how many have been worthily 
 treated? One can almost count on his 
 fingers the biographical works that hold a 
 classic place in common esteem. Gener- 
 ally, of the best and greatest and most 
 beautiful lives that have been lived there 
 is no story which communicates the gran- 
 deur or the charm as we ought to be 
 made to feel it. 
 
 The most famous of biographies, that 
 of Doctor Samuel Johnson by his ad- 
 miring friend Boswell, has a strong and 
 striking personality for its subject ; but 
 who can read it without wishing that 
 some figure more impressive in human 
 history stood where a strange fortune has 
 
ABOUT BOOKS 35 
 
 put the sturdy old Tory, in the wonder- 
 ful light that reveals him so immortally ? 
 Among literary men, Sir Walter Scott 
 has come nearer, perhaps, than any other 
 to Doctor Johnson's good fortune, in the 
 life of him written by Lockhart, his son- 
 in-law. Trevelyan's " Life and Letters of 
 Macaulay," and the " Memoirs of Charles 
 Kingsley " by his wife, are probably the 
 best of later examples in literary biogra- 
 phy. But in a certain view all the more 
 eminent " Men of Letters," English and 
 American, may be called biographically 
 fortunate since the publication in Eng- 
 land and America of the two series of 
 small biographies so named. It is true 
 that these are rather to be looked upon 
 as critical studies and sketches than as 
 biographies in the adequate sense ; but 
 most of them are remarkably good in 
 their way, and for these busy days of 
 many books they may suffice. The same 
 is true of the " Twelve English States- 
 men" series in political biography, as 
 
36 A FAMILIAR TALK 
 
 well as of the series of " American States- 
 men," alluded to before. 
 
 Using the term " study" in the sense 
 in which artists use it, when, for example, 
 they distinguish between a portrait and 
 a " study of a head," I should apply it 
 to a large class of biographical sketches 
 which are as true to literary art as the 
 most finished biography could be, and 
 only lack its completeness in detail. The 
 prototype of all such writings is found in 
 " Plutarch's Lives," which are studies — 
 comparative studies — of the great char- 
 acters of antiquity, and models to this day 
 of their kind. As we have them in Dry- 
 den's translation revised by Clough, or 
 in the old translation by North which 
 Shakespeare used, there is no better read- 
 ing for old or for young. 
 
 Scientific biography is at its best, I 
 should say, in the " Life and Letters 
 of Charles Darwin," by his son. In the 
 a Life and Letters " of Huxley, the letters 
 are delightful, and the story of the life 
 
ABOUT BOOKS 37 
 
 is most interesting, despite a lack of skill 
 in the telling. The " Life of Thomas 
 Edward," the humble Scotch naturalist, 
 by Doctor Samuel Smiles, is hardly to 
 be surpassed as a book of edification 
 and delight, especially for the young. 
 Smiles's " Life of Robert Dick " is nearly 
 but not quite as good ; and the " Auto- 
 biography of James Nasmyth," man of 
 science and great engineer, edited by the 
 same skillful hand, is one of the books 
 which I never lose an opportunity to press 
 upon boys, for the sake of the wonderful 
 example it sets before them, of a thought- 
 ful plan of life perse veringly carried out, 
 from beginning to end. Other works of 
 Smiles in industrial biography — lives 
 of Watts, the Stephensons, and many 
 more — are all exceptionally interesting 
 and wholesome to read. 
 
 Franklin's autobiography, in the same 
 line of interest and influence, is one of the 
 books which the world would be greatly 
 poorer without. Grimm's " Life of Mi- 
 
38 A FAMILIAR TALK 
 
 chael Angelo " takes a kindred lesson of 
 life and lifts it to a setting more heroic. 
 Goethe's autobiography and his " Con- 
 versations with Eckermann " are of the 
 books that stamp themselves inefface- 
 ably on a receptive mind, and that ought 
 to be read before the enthusiasms of 
 youth are outworn. 
 
 But I am particularizing books much 
 more than it was my intention to do. I 
 had planned a hasty excursion along the 
 watersheds of literature, so to speak, just 
 to notice some features of the geography 
 of the world of books, and point here and 
 there to a monument that seemed impor- 
 tant in my view. To assume to be really 
 a guide for any other reading than my 
 own is more than I am willing to under- 
 take. 
 
II 
 
 THE TEST OF QUALITY IN 
 BOOKS 
 
THE TEST OF QUALITY IN 
 BOOKS 1 
 
 The total result of the education of man- 
 kind is that which we call Civilization, 
 meaning progress toward the finer fitting 
 of men and women for life in the social 
 state. Most of us are too much inclined, 
 I think, to measure the civilization of our 
 own day by its science, which is no true 
 measure at all. The science of the pre- 
 sent age has grown to be very wonderful ; 
 but, much as it may excite us to aston- 
 ishment, there are fruits of civilization, 
 even in this crude period (and it is very 
 crude), which command our admiration 
 more. The finest and most beautiful 
 human products of the time, whom even 
 the Philistines would join us in choosing 
 
 1 From some remarks to the Library School at 
 the New York State Library, in May, 1895. 
 
42 THE TEST OF 
 
 for honor, as exemplars to their genera- 
 tion, might not pass an examination in 
 physics or biology. They are the men 
 and women, sweet with the sweetness and 
 luminous with the light which Matthew 
 Arnold never tired of extolling, who re- 
 present that side of civilization which is 
 refinement more than knowledge, or 
 which is knowledge refined. I speak 
 wrongly, however, when I say of that re- 
 finement that it is one side of civilization ; 
 for it is civilization, and all science that 
 lacks it is barbaric, even though steam 
 engines and the dynamos of Niagara are 
 shaking the earth at its command. 
 
 Now, the refinements of life come 
 chiefly from its pleasures. That is true to 
 an extent that is sure to surprise us when 
 we think of it first. Unfortunately, it is 
 no less true that the meaner influences 
 which vitiate and vulgarize life, making 
 it gross and coarse, come from the plea- 
 sure side of existence, too. There the 
 main sources of the two are together : on 
 
QUALITY IN BOOKS 43 
 
 one hand, the springs of all art, — music, 
 poetry, romance, drama, sculpture, paint- 
 ing, — brimmed with delights of the im- 
 agination and the joy of the beauty of 
 the world ; on the other hand, the muddy 
 wells into which so many people choose 
 perversely to dip. From these two foun- 
 tains of pleasure-giving art, one polluted 
 and the other pure, the differing streams 
 are ever flowing. Which of them has 
 floated to us an offered book of entertain- 
 ment is what we must know, if we can. 
 
 Whether the book is alive with genius 
 or dead with the lack of it, — whether it 
 is brilliant or commonplace, — whether 
 clumsiness or skill is in the construction 
 of it, — are not the first questions to be 
 asked. The prior question, as I conceive, 
 is this : Does the book leave any kind of 
 wholesome and fine feeling in the mind 
 of one who reads it ? That is not a ques- 
 tion concerning the mere morality of the 
 book, in the conventional meaning of the 
 term. It touches the whole quality of the 
 
44 THE TEST OF 
 
 work as one of true literature. "Does 
 it leave any kind of wholesome and fine 
 feeling in the mind of one who reads it ? " 
 There is no mistaking a feeling of that 
 nature, though it may never seem twice 
 the same in our experience of it. Some- 
 times it may be to us as though we had 
 eaten of good food ; at other times like 
 the tasting of wine ; at others, again, like 
 a draught of water from a cool spring. 
 Some books that we read will make us 
 feel that we are lifted as on wings ; some 
 will make music within us ; some will 
 give us visions ; some will just fill us with 
 a happy content. In such feelings there 
 is a refining potency that seems to be 
 equaled in nothing else. The simplest 
 art is as sure to produce them as the high- 
 est. We take them from Burns' s lines 
 " To a Field-Mouse,' ' from Wordsworth's 
 " Poor Susan," from the story of Ruth, 
 from the story of " The Vicar of Wake- 
 field," from the story of " Picciola," from 
 the story of " Daddy Darwin's Dovecot," 
 
QUALITY IN BOOKS 45 
 
 as certainly as from " Hamlet" or from 
 " Henry Esmond." The true pleasure, 
 the fine pleasure, the civilizing pleasure 
 to be drawn from any form of art is one 
 which leaves a distinctly wholesome feel- 
 ing of some such nature as these that I 
 have tried to describe ; and the poem, the 
 romance, the play, the music, or the pic- 
 ture, which has nothing of the sort to 
 give us, but only a moment of sensation 
 and then blankness, does us no kind of 
 good, however innocent of positive evil 
 it may be. 
 
 If the wholesome feeling which all true 
 art produces, in literature or elsewhere, is 
 unmistakable, so, too, are those feelings 
 of the other nature which works of an op- 
 posite character give rise to. Our minds 
 are as sensitive to a moral force of gravi- 
 tation as our bodies are sensitive to the 
 physical force, and we are as conscious 
 of the downward pull upon us of a vulgar 
 tale or a vicious play as we are conscious 
 of the buoyant lift of one that is nobly 
 
46 THE TEST OF 
 
 written. We have likewise a mental 
 touch, to which the texture of coarse lit- 
 erature is a fact as distinct as the grit 
 in a muddy road that we grind with our 
 heels; And so I will say again that the 
 conclusive test for a book which offers 
 pleasure rather than knowledge is in the 
 question, " Does it leave any kind of 
 wholesome and fine feeling in the mind 
 of one who reads it ? " 
 
 All this which I am saying is opposed 
 to a doctrine preached in our day, by a 
 school of pretenders in art, whose chat- 
 ter has made too much impression on 
 careless minds. It appeared first, I be- 
 lieve, among the painters, in France, and 
 French literature took infection from it ; 
 then England became somewhat diseased, 
 and America is not without peril. It is 
 the false doctrine which phrases itself in 
 the meaningless motto — " Art for Art's 
 sake ! " " Pursue Art for Art's sake," — 
 "Enjoy Art for Art's sake," cry these 
 aesthetic prophets, who have no compre- 
 
QUALITY IN BOOKS 47 
 
 hension of what Art is. As well talk of 
 sailing a ship for the ship's sake, — of 
 wheeling a cart for the cart's sake, — of 
 articulating words for the words' sake. 
 Art is a vessel, a vehicle, for the carriage 
 and communication of something from 
 one mind to another mind, — from one 
 soul to another soul. Without a content, 
 it has no more reason for its being than 
 a meaningless word could have in human 
 speech. Considered in itself and for its 
 own sake, it has no existence ; it is an 
 imposture — a mere simulation of Art ; 
 for that which would be Art, if filled duly 
 with meanings and laden with a mes- 
 sage, is then but an artisan's handicraft. 
 The truth is, there are cunning deceits 
 in this pretension to " Art for Art's sake." 
 Those who lead the cry for it do not 
 mean what their words seem to imply. 
 They do not mean the emptiness that one 
 might suppose. What they do mean, as 
 a rule, is to put something ignoble in the 
 place of what should be noble ; some- 
 
48 TEST OF QUALITY IN BOOKS 
 
 thing vulgar or something vile in the 
 place of what should be wholly pure and 
 wholly fine. What they really strive to 
 do is to degrade the content of Art, and 
 to persuade the world that it can be made 
 the vehicle of mean ideals without ceasing 
 to be Art in the noble sense. The work- 
 ers to that end in literature are very busy, 
 and I suggest this as an important rule 
 in the choosing of books : Beware of the 
 literature of the school which preaches 
 " Art for Art's sake." 
 
Ill 
 
 HINTS AS TO READING 
 
HINTS AS TO READING 1 
 
 I MAY take for granted, in what I say 
 this evening, that no one who hears me 
 is .indifferent to what Mr. Maurice has 
 called " the friendship of books/' nor re- 
 quires to be persuaded that the reading 
 of good books is an occupation of time 
 so delightful and so profitable that hardly 
 any other can be preferred to it. I may 
 take that for granted, because it is fair to 
 assume that no one who feels indifferent 
 or repugnant to books would come to hear 
 them talked about. And I am glad that 
 it is so ; because I should have no faith to 
 encourage me in speaking to people of 
 that mind. I should not hope to make 
 books appear attractive to any man or 
 any woman who has grown to maturity 
 without feeling the charm of them. I 
 1 From a lecture. 
 
52 HINTS AS TO READING 
 
 would do so most gladly if I could ; for 
 not many misfortunes appeal to me more. 
 To know nothing of the friendship that 
 never fails, the companionship that never 
 tires, the entertainment that is never far 
 to seek nor costly to command, the 
 blessed resource that can save every pre- 
 cious hour of life from the dreadful wick- 
 edness of " the killing of Time," — what 
 poverty is greater than that ! 
 
 Assuming that the worth and the 
 charm of books are undisputed in this 
 company, there is nothing in question 
 here except the discriminations to be ex- 
 ercised among them. I am to offer you 
 such suggestions as I can concerning the 
 reading of books and the choice of books 
 for reading. For reading, be it remem- 
 bered, not for study. The distinction be- 
 tween readers and students is one that I 
 wish to keep in mind. The student, as 
 we think of him, stands for the scholar, 
 to whom books are the business of life, 
 first and before all things, — fundamen- 
 
HINTS AS TO READING 53 
 
 tal, — implemental, — professional. The 
 reader, on the other hand, has something 
 else for vocation and chief employment, 
 and his book is a happy incident, which 
 night brings to him, perhaps, with his 
 slippers, his easy-chair, and his lamp. 
 What he asks from it is not scholarship, 
 but a well-rounded knowledge, — a 
 wholesome culture, — a quickened im- 
 agination, — a mind nourished and re- 
 freshed. We may all be readers, even to 
 a large, broad measure of the term ; but 
 not many can be students and scholars, 
 in the completer sense. Yet some fraction 
 of true scholarship ought to be perfected 
 in every one. 
 
 And this, in fact, is the first suggestion 
 I am moved to make, — namely, that, 
 while it is both necessary and better for 
 the majority of people that they should 
 be readers of books in a general way, 
 rather than students and specialists of 
 learning, it is better still that the reading 
 of each one should range with wide free- 
 
54 HINTS AS TO READING 
 
 dom round some centre of actual study, 
 some chapter of history, some question, 
 some language, some work or some per- 
 sonality in literature, — it scarcely mat- 
 ters what, so long as a little definite 
 province of knowledge is really occupied 
 and possessed, while larger territories 
 around it are only reconnoitred and over- 
 run. I say it is better for the majority of 
 people that they should be readers in a 
 general way, rather than students, be- 
 cause they have not the leisure nor the 
 freedom of mind for large subjects of 
 study, and it is ill for the mind to focus 
 it on small themes too exclusively. 
 Among teachers and original investi- 
 gators the specialization of learning be- 
 comes every day more necessary, as the 
 bulk of science increases ; but every spe- 
 cialist puts his soul in peril, so to speak, 
 by the risk of narrowed faculties and an 
 intellectual myopia to which he is ex- 
 posed. So I would not, for my own part, 
 give a word of encouragement to that 
 
HINTS AS TO READING 55 
 
 growing class of people who may be 
 called the class of amateur specialists ; be- 
 cause their exclusive devotion to special 
 subjects seems too little and too much; — 
 too little, that is, for any service to human 
 knowledge, and too much for the best 
 development of themselves. I feel no 
 doubt, in the least, that breadth of culture 
 is more important, on the whole, than its 
 depth, to the generality of mankind ; that 
 their character and capability as mem- 
 bers of society are affected more by the 
 area of their knowledge and by the diver- 
 sity of their acquaintance with good lit- 
 erature, than by the minuteness of either. 
 At the same time, I would urge, as I 
 say, the specializing of some object in the 
 intellectual pursuits of every man and 
 woman; not to the exclusion of other 
 subjects and objects, but to their subor- 
 dination. Let there be one thing for each 
 of us that we try to know somewhere 
 nearly to the bottom, with certainty, pre- 
 cision, exactness ; not so much for the 
 
56 HINTS AS TO READING 
 
 value of the knowledge itself, as for the 
 value of the discipline of thoroughness. 
 If it is something in the line of our daily 
 occupations, — something bearing upon 
 our particular work in the world, me- 
 chanical, commercial, professional, what- 
 ever it maybe, — so much the better. 
 Then, around that one centre of positive 
 study, turning on it as on a pivot, let 
 there be circle after circle drawn of wide 
 discursive reading. 
 
 If this seems to be a doctrine that is 
 too indulgent of easy habits in reading, 
 and too favorable to superficiality, I will 
 hasten to introduce a second suggestion 
 which cannot be so suspected. It shall 
 be more than a suggestion, for I would 
 make it a very serious admonition and 
 injunction to all who will give atten- 
 tion to me on this subject : Be temperate 
 in Newspapers ! For there is an intem- 
 perance in the newspaper-reading of the 
 day which looks nearly as threatening to 
 me as the intemperance that is fed from 
 
HINTS AS TO READING 57 
 
 the brewery and the still. To a certain 
 extent, — and I would not be narrow in 
 measuring it, — good newspapers are to 
 be rated with good books, and even be- 
 fore them in one view, because no other 
 reading is so indispensable to the edu- 
 cation that accords with the conditions 
 of life at the present day. I value as 
 highly as one reasonably can the wonder- 
 ful news-knowledge of our time. It is 
 sweeping so much pettiness, so much 
 small provincialism, out of the feeling and 
 thinking of men, making them cosmo- 
 politan, cooperative, tolerant ! With the 
 whole world gathered into one neighbor- 
 hood, so to speak, and the daily story of 
 its doings and happenings made the talk 
 of the breakfast-table, morning by morn- 
 ing, and the chat of the club and the sit- 
 ting-room evening by evening ; with the 
 calamities of Asia, the catastrophes of 
 the South Sea, the tragedies of Muscovy, 
 the agitations of Paris, the politics of 
 London, the sensations of New York, 
 
58 HINTS AS TO READING 
 
 poured hourly into our consciousness, 
 along with the passing events of our own 
 lives and of the little circles in which we 
 revolve, — how can we fail to outgrow 
 in our sympathies and ideas the provin- 
 cial boundaries that were hard and fast 
 for earlier men ? It is a mighty factor in 
 modern education, this flying world-news 
 that takes wings from the daily press and 
 is gathered from the uttermost parts of 
 the earth. 
 
 But the staple of it, after all, is gossip ; 
 — world-gossip, to be sure, — history- 
 gossip in great part, — but gossip, never- 
 theless ; and overmuch of it is thin nour- 
 ishment for any robust and capable mind. 
 Unwholesome, too, as well as thin. There 
 is a kind of moral narcotism common 
 to every species of gossip, high or low, 
 which takes possession, like an opium- 
 habit, of the minds that are much given 
 to it, and works degeneracy in them. 
 Who can mistake the morbid effects in 
 that direction which appear in the news- 
 
HINTS AS TO READING 59 
 
 paper-reading world, and which seem 
 to be magnified from day to day ? The 
 craving for coarser flavors in the news- 
 reports ; for more pungency of sensation ; 
 more photography of vice ; more dram- 
 atization of crime ; more puerile person- 
 ality ; more spying and eaves-dropping ; 
 more invasion and desecration of the pri- 
 vacies and sacred things of life ; — that 
 insatiable craving, which popular jour- 
 nalism panders to, seems to have an in- 
 cessant growth from what it feeds on, 
 and one shudders in imagining the pitch 
 of enterprise and audacity to which re- 
 porters may yet be pushed by it. The 
 fault is no more than half on the side of 
 the newspapers ; it belongs as much, or 
 more, to the readers for whose taste the 
 popular newspapers are made up ; and I 
 am convinced that, if we track home this 
 disease of taste which is gluttonous of the 
 garbage of news, we shall find it mostly 
 among people whose sole literature is 
 from the daily and hebdomadal press ; 
 
60 HINTS AS TO READING 
 
 who read newspapers and nothing else. 
 They constitute a great class, and I fear 
 it is a growing class, — in this country 
 more, perhaps, than in any other. We are 
 called "a reading people ; " but a news- 
 paper-reading people may be the truer 
 description ; and neither we nor our news- 
 papers, as I have tried to indicate, are im- 
 proved by the excess of interest in them. 
 Let us read the news of the day, by 
 all means. Let us never fail to keep 
 abreast of it, in fair acquaintance with the 
 current movements of event and opinion, 
 maintaining and cultivating a healthy 
 interest in the affairs of the world, great 
 and small, and in the doing, feeling, and 
 thinking of our living fellow men. But 
 let us be temperate in it ; let us not 
 saturate ourselves with the sensations of 
 the passing day. Let us reserve some 
 room in our minds for a knowledge of 
 the past, its ideas and its history, and of 
 present things that are not caught by the 
 reporter's pencil or the editor's pen. 
 
HINTS AS TO READING 61 
 
 I have placed intemperance in news- 
 paper-reading even before intemperance 
 in novel-reading, because I look upon it 
 as the more serious of the two ; but the 
 latter is a very grave evil, contributing 
 to a mental and moral debility which we 
 must not treat lightly. Understand that 
 I speak only of intemperance in novel- 
 reading, or of intemperance and ill-selec- 
 tion together ; for I am not of those who 
 despise the novel, or condemn it in a 
 sweeping way. In my view it has its 
 place among the higher forms of litera- 
 ture, — of literature as art, — and so far 
 as it is made fitting to that high place, 
 by the genius which has a right to create 
 it, the novel is a gift to be welcomed and 
 enjoyed. In the reading of a young per- 
 son I would not withhold a fair — even a 
 liberal — proportion of wholesome and 
 finely woven romance. We must not be 
 of the school of the Gradgrinds. Some 
 nutriment is demanded for our souls be- 
 sides the nutriment of facts. The intel- 
 
62 HINTS AS TO READING 
 
 lectual life is not all remembering, or all 
 reckoning and reasoning. It includes 
 feeling and imagination, and we need to 
 cultivate that side of our nature no less 
 than the other, for a rounded, sane devel- 
 opment of ourselves. We need to culti- 
 vate it, moreover, by other means and 
 from other sources than books. Nature, 
 to those who read her, is more eloquent 
 than any poem ; and no love-tale is so 
 interesting as the every-day life that we 
 have under our eyes. Yet the poetry and 
 romance in books have a singular impor- 
 tance in this region of culture, because, 
 if we choose them well, they can bring 
 to us the reinforcement of imaginations 
 that are greater than our own, and touch 
 us through sensibilities and sympathies 
 that are finer than we possess. If they do 
 not that, they can do us no good, and 
 we may better leave them unread. 
 
 What I say of romance need only be 
 writ larger for poetry, and it is equally 
 true. A true poem — the simplest true 
 
HINTS AS TO READING 63 
 
 poem — will bring something to us that 
 is a revelation ; some glimpse that we 
 never had before of a meaning in things 
 that lights them up to us ; or some thrill 
 of an emotion which attunes us in newly- 
 felt relations with God, or Nature, or Man. 
 There is no true poetry which does not 
 that ; and the idle rhyme that has only 
 the lilt in it of a few dancing words, or 
 the sparkle of a few trifling fancies, will 
 defraud us of the time spent in reading 
 it. Read pure, true poetry, as you would 
 open your window on a morning in 
 June ; as you would walk in a garden 
 when the flowers are spread, or into the 
 fields when the corn is ripe ; as you would 
 go up to the mountains, or out on the 
 shore of the sea. Go to it for the light 
 and the gladness and the bloom of beauty 
 and the larger horizons and the sweeter 
 atmosphere you can find in it, for the 
 rest and refreshment and revivifying of 
 your souls. 
 
 What is not read for the kinds of prac- 
 
64 HINTS AS TO READING 
 
 tical knowledge that we call information 
 is to be read for some such good to one's 
 soul, if there is anything of worth in its 
 print. Facts for our store of practical 
 knowledge ; teachings and exercises for 
 our understanding and reason ; illumin- 
 ation and inspiration for the spiritual- 
 ities that are in us ; wholesome stimulants 
 for our lighter sensibilities, of fancy and 
 of humor and the like, — these are the 
 differing kinds of good for which we can 
 go to books, and one or the other of 
 which we should require them to supply. 
 We know when they answer the demand ; 
 generally we know when they fail. 
 Teachings, illuminations, inspirations, 
 are unmistakable experiences of mind ; 
 but the wholesome gratifications of fancy 
 and humor are not always so distinguish- 
 able from the unwholesome, and it is 
 there that the flood of modern fiction 
 brings difficulty into the question of 
 books. It is a difficulty which each 
 reader must prepare to overcome, in the 
 
HINTS AS TO READING 65 
 
 main, for himself. The discriminating 
 sense — the feeling for what is good 
 and for what is not good in the vast out- 
 put of novel-writing at the present day 
 — can be trained by exercising it on the 
 undisputed classics of fiction that we in- 
 herit from the past. One who reads Cer- 
 vantes, Defoe, Scott, Dickens, Thack- 
 eray, George Eliot, Charles Kingsley, 
 Erckmann-Chatrian, and others of the 
 " old masters " of romance, till they have 
 grooved habits of taste in his mind, is not 
 likely to be cheated by any prentice- 
 work, tricked out in later styles. 
 
 And the more substantial literature, — 
 the concrete literature of fact, — what 
 shall I say of that? I am not here to 
 urge people into this course of reading 
 or that, dictated, as the counsel would 
 naturally be, by my own inclinations of 
 taste. There can be no kind or course 
 of reading that is best for all. The bent 
 of each mind is to be yielded to ; not 
 wholly, but so far as will determine the 
 
66 HINTS AS TO READING 
 
 main direction pursued : as to whether it 
 shall be in history, or travel, or natural 
 science, or social science, or philosophy, 
 or art. Embarrassed as we are by the 
 multitude and variety of things that claim 
 attention in the world, we may, any of 
 us, neglect philosophy, or the arts, or 
 half the sciences ; but we must read some- 
 thing of history, if we are to understand at 
 all the stage on which we are acting, — 
 the plot of the drama of life in which we 
 are playing parts, — the world and the 
 humanity to which we belong. And there 
 are some suggestions on that point that I 
 am glad to have an opportunity to make. 
 First, I would say, give a little atten- 
 tion — more than is given commonly - — 
 to the background of history. It is one 
 of the discoveries of recent times that 
 there is such a thing as a background to 
 history. Our ancestors knew of nothing 
 behind the written annals of mankind, 
 except the mist-cloud of fables from which 
 they start. For us, however, there is 
 
HINTS AS TO READING 67 
 
 accumulated already a wonderful body 
 of prehistoric knowledge, more or less 
 conjecturable and debatable, to be sure, 
 but exceedingly significant, nevertheless, 
 throwing flashes of light into the dim 
 dawns of civilization and society. It is 
 made up of a multitude of hints and frag- 
 ments of fact, picked here and there out 
 of the roots of old languages and the 
 kitchen - heaps, cave -relics, and burial- 
 mounds of primitive savage men, which 
 are found to have surprising meanings 
 when they are put together and com- 
 pared and construed. To learn what we 
 are able to learn from them, concerning 
 the early divisions, relations, and move- 
 ments of the tribes and races of mankind, 
 before any kind of written record was 
 made, or any name or personal figure 
 appears, to produce for us the first dim 
 picture of living history, is to acquire a 
 most important ground of understanding 
 for the recorded history that starts out 
 from it later on. 
 
68 HINTS AS TO READING 
 
 Even more interesting than this pre- 
 historic background is what may be 
 called the semi-historic background 
 which lies between it and the fairly 
 visible, well-lighted scenery of historic 
 time. That, too, is a discovery of our 
 own exploring age. Half a century ago 
 the beginnings of the most dimly known 
 history antedated our Christian era by 
 little more than two thousand years. 
 Now, as the result of inquisitive digging 
 into the sand-covered ruins of ancient 
 cities of the East, where civilization and 
 letters had their birth, we are reading 
 messages from more than twice that 
 depth in the pre-Christian past ; and the 
 story of the most ancient world has not 
 only been extended but retold. It has 
 been set before us in entirely new lights. 
 In a thousand particulars, and in most 
 of the meaning it had to modern minds, 
 the old understanding of it is found to 
 have been wrong. We who were read- 
 ers of ancient history as it was written 
 
HINTS AS TO READING 69 
 
 half a century ago are having to read it 
 and learn it anew. The books that were 
 classic in this department of history a 
 generation ago — and they include the 
 books of Biblical exposition and illustra- 
 tion, as well as those in profane history 
 — are as nearly worthless to-day as hon- 
 est books can be made. Many readers, 
 I fear, are not clearly conscious of that 
 fact, and are wasting study on obsolete 
 books. The parts of history much affected 
 by these recent discoveries are those 
 which touch primitive Egypt and west- 
 ern Asia, and the legendary ages of the 
 Greeks. Otherwise, the literature of an- 
 cient history that was authoritative and 
 good a generation ago is so, for the most 
 part, now. 
 
 This reminds me to repeat a word of 
 counsel which I find frequent reason to 
 urge : Take your history, as much as 
 possible, from the greater writers, — 
 from the historians who treat it in the 
 largest way, with the amplest knowledge, 
 
7 o HINTS AS TO READING 
 
 the most illuminating thought, the clear- 
 est style. This may seem uncalled-for 
 advice, but it is not. In my library ex- 
 perience I have encountered many people 
 who entertain a certain fear or distrust 
 of the really great historical works. 
 They want, as they say, something less 
 learned, less elaborate, — something sim- 
 ple, comprehensive, and plain. They 
 think it will be easier to take instruction 
 from one volume of a compiler than from 
 half-a-dozen of a great original work. 
 They make a very serious mistake. The 
 history that is "writ large,' ' from full 
 knowledge, is the history that can be 
 made easy of apprehension and delight- 
 fully interesting to the mind. Those who 
 read it in compends and compilations 
 lose its flavors ; lose the taste of life and 
 living people in it; lose its organic whole- 
 ness, — the logic and the lesson of it ; 
 lose most, in fact, of what history is worth 
 reading for, and do not get the simplicity 
 and comprehensiveness they sought. 
 
HINTS AS TO READING 71 
 
 At the same time, I am convinced that 
 it is well to prepare for the large reading 
 of any part of history by etching into the 
 mind, as it were, a rough outline of the 
 whole career of the greater races of man- 
 kind, from Egypt and Babylon down to 
 Britain and America, so that, whenever 
 and wherever we fill in the details by 
 fuller reading of this and that national 
 history or individual biography, the parts 
 will adjust themselves in their relative 
 places and be correlated properly with 
 each other. I do not mean by this to 
 advise the general reader of history to 
 cumber his mind with an extensive store 
 of precise dates, but only that he should 
 establish in his memory a fixed and firm 
 association of the epochs, the important 
 movements and the great characters that 
 are contemporaneous, co-sequent and in- 
 teractive in different regions of the world. 
 To leave this chronological framework 
 of historical knowledge to be pieced to- 
 gether as one goes on with his larger 
 
72 HINTS AS TO READING 
 
 reading seems to me a mistake. Better, 
 I should say, sit down with a good epit- 
 ome and make a business of building 
 the main sections of it into the memory 
 at once. 
 
 It is not my purpose to commend 
 writers or writings specifically ; I am 
 simply urging fealty to the indisputably 
 best, which do not need, as a rule, to be 
 advertised. In name, at least, they are 
 marked generally by common fame. If 
 they are not known they can easily be 
 ascertained ; and it is part of a reader's 
 training to learn by sedulous inquiry 
 what is the superlative literature in any 
 field he may approach. 
 
IV 
 
 THE MISSION AND THE MIS- 
 SIONARIES OF THE BOOK 
 
THE MISSION AND THE MIS- 
 SIONARIES OF THE BOOK. 1 
 
 FOR the most part, that lifting of the 
 human race in condition and character 
 which we call civilization has been 
 wrought by individual energies acting 
 on simply selfish lines. When I say this, 
 I use the term selfish in no sense that is 
 necessarily mean, but only as indicating 
 the unquestionable fact that men have 
 striven, in the main, each for himself more 
 than for one another, even in those striv- 
 ings that have advanced the whole race. 
 Within certain limits there is no discredit 
 to human nature in the fact. A measure 
 of selfishness is prescribed to man by 
 the terms of his individuality and the 
 conditions of his life. His only escape 
 
 1 An Address at the University Convocation 
 (State of New York), in June, 1896. 
 
76 THE MISSION AND THE 
 
 from it is through exertions which he 
 must employ at first in his own behalf, in 
 order to win the independence and the 
 power to be helpful to his fellows. So it 
 seems to me quite impossible to imagine 
 a process that would have worked out 
 the civilization of the race otherwise than 
 by the self-pushing energy that has im- 
 pelled individual men to A plant, to build, 
 to trade, to explore, to experiment, to 
 think, to plan, primarily and immediately 
 for their own personal advantage. 
 
 But if the more active forces in civili^ 
 zation are mainly from selfish springs, 
 there are two, at least, which have nobler 
 sources and a nobler historic part. One 
 is the sympathetic impulse which repre- 
 sents benevolence on its negative side, 
 pained by the misfortunes of others and 
 active to relieve them. In the second, 
 which is more rare, we find benevolence 
 of the positive kind. Its spring is in a 
 purely generous feeling, which strongly 
 moves one to communicate to others 
 
MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 77 
 
 some good which is precious to him in 
 his own experience of it. It is a feeling 
 which may rise in different minds from 
 different estimates of good, and be 
 directed toward immediate objects that 
 are unlike, but the disinterested motive 
 and ultimate aim are unvarying, and it 
 manifests in all cases the very noblest 
 enthusiasm that humanity is capable of. 
 There seems to be no name for it so true 
 as that used when we speak of a mission- 
 ary spirit, in efforts that aim at the shar- . 
 ing of some greatly cherished good with 
 people who have not learned that it is 
 good. At the same time we must re- 
 member that mere propagandisms put 
 on the missionary garb without its spirit, 
 and spuriously imitate its altruistic zeal ; 
 and we must keep our definition in 
 mind. 
 
 There are always true missionaries in 
 the world, laboring with equally pure 
 hearts, though with minds directed to- 
 ward many different ends of benefaction 
 
78 THE MISSION AND THE 
 
 to their fellows. But only two objects — 
 the spiritual good of mankind, contem- 
 plated in religious beliefs, and the intel- 
 lectual good, pursued in educational 
 plans — have ever wakened the mission- 
 ary spirit in a large, world-moving way. 
 The supremely great epochs in human 
 history are those few which have been 
 marked by mighty waves of altruistic en- 
 thusiasm, sweeping over the earth from 
 sources of excitation found in one or the 
 other of these two ideals of good. 
 
 Naturally the first wakening was under 
 the touch of beliefs which contemplate a 
 more than earthly good ; and those be- 
 liefs have moved the missionary spirit at 
 all times with the greatest passion and 
 power. But even the religious wakening 
 was not an early event in history. I think 
 I may safely say that no trace of it is to 
 be found among the worshipers of remote 
 antiquity. The Hebrew prophets never 
 labored as dispensers of a personal bless- 
 ing from their faith. It was for Israel, the 
 
MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 79 
 
 national Israel, that they preached the 
 claims and declared the requirements of 
 the God of Israel. The priests of Osiris 
 and Bel were still more indifferent to the 
 interest of the worshiper in the worship 
 of their gods, thinking only of the honor 
 demanded by the gods themselves. So 
 far as history will show, the first mission- 
 ary inspiration would seem to have been 
 brought into religion by Gotama, the 
 Buddha, whose pure and exalted but 
 enervating gospel of renunciation filled 
 Asia with evangelists, and was carried to 
 all peoples as the message of a hope of 
 deliverance from the universal sorrow of 
 the world. Then, centuries later, came 
 the commission more divine which sent 
 forth the apostles of Christianity to tell 
 the story of the Cross and to bear the 
 offer of salvation to every human soul. 
 As religiously kindled, the missionary 
 spirit has never burned with more fervor 
 than it did in the first centuries of Chris- 
 tian preaching; but nothing akin to it 
 
80 THE MISSION AND THE 
 
 was set aflame in the smallest degree by 
 any other eagerness of desire for the com- 
 munication of a blessing or good to man- 
 kind. Until we come to modern times, I 
 can see no mark of the missionary mo- 
 tive in any labor that was not religious. 
 The one object which, in time, as I have 
 said, came to rival the religious object 
 as an inspiration of missionary work, the 
 modern zeal for education, was late and 
 slow in moving feelings to an unselfish 
 depth. Enthusiasm for learning at the 
 period of the renaissance was enthusiasm 
 among the few who craved learning, and 
 was expended mostly within their own 
 circle. There was little thought of press- 
 ing the good gift on the multitude who 
 knew not their loss in the lack of it. The 
 earliest great pleader for a common edu- 
 cation of the whole people was Luther ; 
 but the school was chiefly important in 
 Luther's view as the nursery of the 
 church and as a health-bringer to the 
 state, and he labored for it more as a 
 
MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 81 
 
 means to religious and political ends than 
 as an end in itself. Almost a century 
 after Luther there appeared one whom 
 Michelet has called " the first evangelist 
 of modern pedagogy," John Amos Co- 
 menius, the Moravian. The same thought 
 of him, as an evangelist, is expressed by 
 the historian Raumer, who says : " Co- 
 menius is a grand and venerable figure 
 of sorrow. Wandering, persecuted and 
 homeless during the terrible and desolat- 
 ing Thirty Years' War, he yet never de- 
 spaired, but with enduring truth and 
 strong in faith he labored unweariedly to 
 prepare youth by a better education for a 
 better future. He labored for them with 
 a zeal and love worthy of the chief of the 
 Apostles." And the education for which 
 Comenius labored was no less, in his own 
 words, than "the teaching to all men 
 of all the subjects of human concern." 
 Proclaiming his educational creed at an- 
 other time, he said : "I undertake an 
 organization of schools whereby all the 
 
82 THE MISSION AND THE 
 
 youth maybe instructed save those to 
 whom God has denied intelligence, and 
 instructed in all those things which make 
 man wise, good and holy." 
 
 Here, then, had arisen the first true mis- 
 sionary of common teaching, who bore 
 the invitation to learning as a gospel 
 proffered to all childhood and all youth, 
 and who strove in its behalf with apostolic 
 zeal. The period of the active labors of 
 Comenius was before and a little after 
 the middle of the seventeenth century. 
 He made some impression upon the ideas 
 and the educational methods of his time, 
 but Europe generally was cold to his 
 enthusiasm. In one small corner of it, 
 alone, there was a people already pre- 
 pared for and already beginning to real- 
 ize his inspiring dreams of universal edu- 
 cation. That was Holland, where the 
 state, even in the midst of its struggle 
 for an independent existence, was assum- 
 ing the support of common schools and 
 attempting to provide them for every 
 
MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 83 
 
 child. In that one spot the true mission- 
 ary leaven in education was found work- 
 ing while the seventeenth century was 
 still young, and from Holland it would 
 seem to have been carried to America 
 long before the fermentation was really 
 felt in any other land. 
 
 Elsewhere in the Old World, if Come- 
 nius found any immediate successor in the 
 new field of missionary labor which he 
 had practically discovered and opened, 
 it was the Abbe La Salle, founder of the 
 great teaching order of the Christian 
 Brothers. But the zeal kindled by La 
 Salle, which has burned even to the pre- 
 sent day, was essentially religious in its 
 aims and dedicated to the service of his 
 church. The spirit in common teach- 
 ing still waited generally for that which 
 would make a secular saving faith of it, 
 urgent, persisting, not to be denied or 
 escaped from. The world at large made 
 some slow progress toward better things 
 in it ; schools were increased in number 
 
84 THE MISSION AND THE 
 
 and improved ; Jesuits, Jansenists, Ora- 
 torians and other teaching orders in 
 the Roman Church labored more intelli- 
 gently ; middle-class education in Eng- 
 land and other countries received more 
 attention. But the conscience of society 
 in general was satisfied with the open- 
 ing of the school to those who came with 
 money in their hands and knocked at its 
 door. There was no thought yet of stand- 
 ing in the door and crying out to the 
 moneyless and to the indifferent, bidding 
 them come. Far less was there thought 
 of going out into the highways and 
 hedges to bring them in. Another cen- 
 tury of time was needed and a long 
 line of apostolic teachers, agitators, and 
 administrators, like Pestalozzi, Father 
 Girard, Frobel, Humboldt, Brougham, 
 Horace Mann, to inspire that feeling for 
 education which warms the western na- 
 tions of the world at last : the feeling for 
 education as a supreme good in itself, not 
 merely as a bread-making or a money- 
 
MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 85 
 
 making instrument ; not merely for giv- 
 ing arithmetic to the shop-keeper, or 
 bookkeeping to the clerk, or even politi- 
 cal opinions to the citizen ; not merely 
 for supplying preachers to the pulpit, or 
 physicians to the sick-room, or lawyers 
 to the bench and bar ; but in and of and 
 for its own sake, as a good to humanity 
 which surpasses every other good, save 
 one. This is what I call the missionary 
 spirit in education, and it has so far been 
 wakened in the world that we expect and 
 demand it in the teaching work of our 
 time, and when we do not have it, we are 
 cheated by its counterfeit. 
 
 But this zeal for education was ani- 
 mated in most communities sooner than 
 the thought needed for its wise direction. 
 There was a time not long ago when it 
 expended itself in schoolrooms and col- 
 leges and was satisfied. To have laid be- 
 nignant hands on the children of the gen- 
 eration and pushed them, with a kindly 
 coercion, through some judicious cur- 
 
86 THE MISSION AND THE 
 
 riculum of studies was thought to be 
 enough. That limited conception of edu- 
 cation as a common good sufficed for a 
 time, but not long. The impulse which 
 carried public sentiment to that length 
 was sure to press questions upon it that 
 would reach farther yet. " Have we ar- 
 rived," it began to ask, "at the end for 
 which our public schools are the means ? 
 We have provided broadly and liberally 
 — for what ? For teaching our children to 
 read their own language in print, to trace 
 it in written signs, to construct it in gram- 
 matical forms, to be familiar with arith- 
 metical rules, to know the standards and 
 divisions of weight and measure, to form 
 a notion of the surface features of the 
 earth and to be acquainted with the 
 principal names that have been given to 
 them, to remember a few chief facts in 
 the past of their own country. But these 
 are only keys which we expect them to 
 use in their acquisition of knowledge, 
 rather than knowledge itself. When they 
 
MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 87 
 
 quit the school with these wonderful keys 
 of alphabet and number in their posses- 
 sion, they are only in the vestibule cham- 
 bers of education. Can we leave them 
 there, these children and youth of our 
 time, to find as best they may, or not find 
 at all, the treasuries we would have them 
 unlock?" To ask the question was to 
 answer it. Once challenged to a larger 
 thought of education, the missionary spirit 
 of the age rose boldly in its demands. 
 The free school, the academy, the college 
 even, grew in importance when looked 
 at in the larger view, but they were seen 
 to be not enough. They were seen to 
 be only blessed openings in the way to 
 knowledge, — garlanded gates, ivory 
 portals, golden doors, but passage-ways 
 only, after all, to knowledge beyond 
 them. And the knowledge to which they 
 led, while much and of many kinds may 
 need to be gleaned in the open fields of 
 life, out of living observations and expe- 
 riences, yet mainly exists as a measure- 
 
88 THE MISSION AND THE 
 
 less store of accumulated savings from 
 the experience and observation of all the 
 generations that have lived and died, re- 
 corded in writing and preserved in print. 
 There, then, in the command and posses- 
 sion of that great store, the end of edu- 
 cation was seen to be most nearly real- 
 ized ; and so the free public library was 
 added to the free public school. 
 
 But strangely enough, when that was 
 first done, there happened the same halt- 
 ing of spirit that had appeared in the free 
 public school. To have collected a li- 
 brary of books, and to have set its doors 
 open to all comers, was assumed to be 
 the fulfillment of duty in the matter. The 
 books waited for readers to seek them. 
 The librarian waited for inquirers to press 
 their way to him. No one thought of out- 
 spreading the books of the library like a 
 merchant's wares, to win the public eye 
 to them. None thought of trying by any 
 means to rouse an appetite for books in 
 minds not naturally hungry for learning 
 
MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 89 
 
 or poetry or the thinking of other men. 
 So the free or the nearly free public li- 
 braries, for a time, wrought no great good 
 for education beyond a circle in which 
 the energy of the desire to which they 
 answered was most independent of any 
 public help. 
 
 But this stage of passive existence in 
 the life of the free public library had no 
 long duration. Soon the missionary pas- 
 sion began to stir men here and there in 
 the library field, as it had stirred teach- 
 ers in the schools before. One by one, 
 the inspiration of their calling began to 
 burn in their hearts. They saw with new 
 eyes the greatness of the trust confided 
 to them, and they rose to a new sense 
 of the obligations borne with it. No 
 longer a mere keeper, custodian, watch- 
 man, set over dumb treasures to hold 
 them safe, the librarian now took active 
 functions upon himself and became 
 the minister of his trust, commanded by 
 his own feelings and by many incen- 
 
9 o THE MISSION AND THE 
 
 tives around him to make the most in 
 all possible ways of the library as an in- 
 fluence for good. The new spirit thus 
 brought into library work spread quickly, 
 as a beneficent epidemic, from New Eng- 
 land, where its appearance was first no- 
 tably marked, over America and Great 
 Britain and into all English lands, and 
 is making its way more slowly in other 
 parts of the world. 
 
 The primary effort to which it urged 
 librarians and library trustees was that 
 toward bettering the introduction of 
 books to readers ; toward making them 
 known, in the first instance, with a due 
 setting forth of what they are and what 
 they offer; then toward putting them 
 in right relations with one another, by 
 groupings according to subject and lit- 
 erary form and by cross-bindings of 
 reference ; then toward establishing the 
 easiest possible guidance to them, both 
 severally and in their groups, for all seek- 
 ers, whether simple or learned. When 
 
MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 91 
 
 serious attention had once been given to 
 these matters there was found to be need 
 in them of a measure of study, of experi- 
 ment, of inventive ingenuity, of individ- 
 ual and collective experience, of practical 
 and philosophical attainments, that had 
 never been suspected before. These dis- 
 coveries gave form to a conception of 
 "library science," of a department of 
 study that is entitled to scientific rank 
 by the importance of its results, the pre- 
 cision of its methods, the range of its de- 
 tails. The quick development of the new 
 science, within the few years that have 
 passed since the first thought of it came 
 into men's minds, is marked by the rise 
 of flourishing library schools and classes 
 in all parts of the United States, east and 
 west. 
 
 For more efficiency in their common 
 work, the reformers of the library were 
 organized at an early day. The American 
 Library Association on this side of the 
 sea and the Library Association of the 
 
92 THE MISSION AND THE 
 
 United Kingdom on the other side, with 
 journals giving voice to each, proved pow- 
 erful in their unifying effect. Ideas were 
 exchanged and experiences compared. 
 Each was taught by the successes or 
 warned by the failures of his neighbors. 
 What each one learned by investigation 
 or proved by trial became the property 
 of every other. The mutual instruction 
 that came about was equaled only by 
 the working cooperation which followed. 
 Great tasks, beyond the power of indi- 
 viduals, and impossible as commercial 
 undertakings, because promising no pe- 
 cuniary reward, were planned and labori- 
 ously performed by the union of many 
 coworkers, widely scattered in the world, 
 but moved by one disinterested aim. 
 From one hundred and twenty-two libra- 
 ries, in that mode of alliance, there was 
 massed the labor which indexed the whole 
 body of general magazine literature, thus 
 sweeping the dust from thousands of vol- 
 umes that had been practically useless 
 
MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 93 
 
 before, bringing the invaluable miscel- 
 lany of their contents into daily, definite 
 service, by making its subjects known 
 and easily traced. The same work of 
 cooperative indexing was next carried 
 into the indeterminate field of general 
 miscellaneous books. By still broader co- 
 operation, a selection of books was made 
 from the huge mass of all literature, with 
 sittings and resiftings, to be a standard 
 of choice and a model of cataloguing for 
 small new libraries. And now topical lists 
 on many subjects are being prepared for 
 the guidance of readers by specialists in 
 each subject, with notes to describe and 
 value the books named. The possibili- 
 ties of cooperation in library work are 
 just beginning to be realized, and the 
 great tasks accomplished already by it 
 will probably look small when compared 
 with undertakings to come hereafter. 
 
 But, after all, it is the individual work 
 in the libraries which manifests most dis- 
 tinctly the new spirit of the time. The 
 
94 -HE MISSION AND THE 
 
 perfected cataloguing, which opens paths 
 for the seeker from every probable start- 
 ing-point of inquiry, not only to books, 
 but into the contents of books ; the mul- 
 tiplied reading lists and reference lists 
 on questions and topics of the day, which 
 are quick to answer a momentary inter- 
 est in the public mind and direct it to 
 the best sources for its satisfaction ; the 
 annotated bulletins of current literature, 
 which announce and value as far as 
 practicable, by some word of competent 
 criticism, the more important publications 
 of each month; the opening of book- 
 shelves to readers, to which libraries are 
 tending as far as their constitution and 
 their circumstances will permit ; the evo- 
 lution of the children's reading-room, now 
 become a standard feature to be provided 
 for in every new building design, and to 
 be striven for in buildings of an older 
 pattern ; the invention of traveling libra- 
 ries and home libraries ; the increasing 
 provision made in library service for 
 
MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOiv 5 
 
 helping students and inquirers to pur- 
 sue their investigations and make their 
 searches ; the increasing cooperation of 
 libraries and schools, with the growing 
 attraction of teachers and pupils toward 
 the true literature of their subjects of 
 study, and the waning tyranny of the 
 dessicated text-book ; in all these things 
 there is the measure of an influence which 
 was hardly beginning to be felt a quarter 
 of a century ago. 
 
 I have named last among the fruits of 
 this potent influence the cooperation of 
 libraries and schools, not because it stands 
 least in the list, but because the whole 
 missionary inspiration from every stand- 
 point of solicitude for the educational 
 good of mankind is united and culminated 
 in it and is doing its greatest work. The 
 missionary teacher and the missionary 
 librarian come together in these new ar- 
 rangements, working no longer one in 
 the steps of the other, — one carrying 
 forward the education which the other 
 
96 THE MISSION AND THE 
 
 has begun, — but hand in hand and side 
 by side, leading children from the earliest 
 age into the wonderful and beautiful book- 
 world of poetry, legend, story, nature- 
 knowledge, or science, time-knowledge 
 or history, life-knowledge or biography, 
 making it dear and familiar to them in 
 the impressionable years within which 
 their tastes are formed. The school alone, 
 under common conditions, can do no- 
 thing of that. On the contrary, its text 
 books, as known generally in the past, 
 have been calculated to repel the young 
 mind. They have represented to it little 
 but the dry task of rote-learning and 
 recitation. They have brought to it no- 
 thing of the flavor of real literature, nor 
 any of that rapturous delight from an 
 inner sense of rhythmic motions which 
 real literature can give : neither the 
 dancing step, nor the swinging march, 
 nor the rush as with steeds, nor the lift 
 and sweep as with wings, which even a 
 child may be made to feel in great poetry 
 
MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 97 
 
 and in noble prose, and which once expe- 
 rienced is a beguiling charm forever. 
 The whole tendency of the text-book 
 teaching of school is toward deadening 
 the young mind to that feeling for liter- 
 ature, and alienating it from books by a 
 prejudice born of wrong impressions at 
 the beginning. Just so far as the school 
 reader, the school geography, the school 
 history and their fellow compends, are 
 permitted to remain conspicuous in a 
 child's thought during his early years, as 
 representative of the books which he will 
 be admonished by and by to read, so far 
 he will be put into an opposition never 
 easy to overcome. 
 
 The tenderest years of childhood are 
 the years of all others for shaping a pure 
 intellectual taste and creating a pure in- 
 tellectual thirst which only a noble liter- 
 ature can satisfy in the end. We have 
 come at last to the discernment of that 
 pregnant fact, and our schemes of edu- 
 cation for the young are being recon- 
 
98 THE MISSION AND THE 
 
 structed accordingly. There is no longer 
 the division of labor between school and 
 library which seemed but a little time ago 
 to be marked out so plainly. Schools are 
 not to make readers for libraries, nor are 
 libraries to wait for readers to come to 
 them out of the schools. The school and 
 the world of books which it makes known 
 to him are to be identified in the child's 
 mind. There is to be no distinction in 
 his memory between reading as an art 
 learned and reading as a delight dis- 
 covered. The art and the use of the art 
 are to be one simultaneous communica- 
 tion to him. 
 
 That is the end contemplated in the 
 cooperative work of libraries and schools, 
 which, recent in its beginning, has made 
 great advances already, and which espe- 
 cially appeals to what I have called the 
 missionary enthusiasm in both libraries 
 and schools. It contemplates what seems 
 to be the truest ideal of teaching ever 
 shaped in thought: of teaching not as 
 
MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 99 
 
 educating, but as setting the young in 
 the way of education ; as starting them 
 on a course of self-culture which they 
 will pursue to the end of their lives, with 
 no willingness to turn back. The high- 
 est ideal of education is realized in that 
 life-long pursuit of it, and the success 
 of any school is measured, not by the 
 little portion of actual learning which 
 its students take out of it, but by the 
 persisting strength of the impulse to 
 know and to think, which they carry 
 from the school into their later lives. 
 
 But there are people who may assent 
 to all that is said of education in this life- 
 lasting view of it, who will deny that there 
 is a question in it of books. " We," they 
 say, " find more for our instruction in life 
 than in books. The reality of things in- 
 terests us more and teaches us more than 
 the report and description of them by 
 others. We study men among men and 
 God's works in the midst of them. We 
 prefer to take knowledge at first hand, 
 
 L OF C. 
 
ioo THE MISSION AND THE 
 
 from nature and from society, rather than 
 second-handedly, out of a printed page. 
 Your book- wisdom is from the closet and 
 for closet-use. It is not the kind needed 
 in a busy and breezy world." Well, there 
 is a half-truth in this which must not be 
 ignored. To make everything of books 
 in the development of men and women 
 is a greater mistake, perhaps, than to 
 make nothing of them. For life has teach- 
 ings, and nature out of doors has teach- 
 ings, for which no man, if he misses them, 
 can find compensation in books. We can 
 say that frankly to the contemner of 
 books and we yield no ground in doing 
 so ; for then we turn upon him and say : 
 " Your life, sir, to which you look for all 
 the enlightenment of soul and mind that 
 you receive, is a brief span of a few tens 
 of years ; the circle of human acquain- 
 tances in which you are satisfied to make 
 your whole study of mankind is a little 
 company of a few hundred men and 
 women, at the most ; the natural world 
 
MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 101 
 
 from which you think to take sufficient 
 lessons with your unassisted eyes is made 
 up of some few bits of city streets and 
 country lanes and seaside sands. What 
 can you, sir, know of life, compared with 
 the man who has had equal years of 
 breath and consciousness with you, and 
 who puts with that experience some large, 
 wide knowledge of seventy centuries of 
 human history in the whole round world 
 besides ? What can you know of man- 
 kind and human nature compared with 
 the man who meets and talks with as 
 many of his neighbors in the flesh as 
 yourself, and who, beyond that, has com- 
 panionship and communion of mind with 
 the kingly and queenly ones of all the 
 generations that are dead? What can 
 you learn from nature compared with 
 him who has Darwin and Dana and Hux- 
 ley and Tyndall and Gray for his tutors 
 when he walks abroad, and who, besides 
 the home-rambling which he shares with 
 you, can go bird-watching with John 
 
102 THE MISSION AND THE 
 
 Burroughs up and down the Atlantic 
 states, or roaming with Thoreau in Maine 
 woods, or strolling with Richard Jefferies 
 in English lanes and fields?" 
 
 Truth is, the bookless man does not 
 understand his own loss. He does not 
 know the leanness in which his mind 
 is kept by want of the food which he 
 rejects. He does not know what starving 
 of imagination and of thought he has 
 inflicted upon himself. He has suffered 
 his interest in the things which make up 
 God's knowable universe to shrink until 
 it reaches no farther than his eyes can 
 see and his ears can hear. The books 
 which he scorns are the telescopes and 
 reflectors and reverberators of our intel- 
 lectual life, holding in themselves a hun- 
 dred magical powers for the overcoming 
 of space and time, and for giving the 
 range of knowledge which belongs to a 
 really cultivated mind. There is no equal 
 substitute for them. There is nothing else 
 which will so break for us the poor 
 
MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 103 
 
 hobble of every-day sights and sounds 
 and habits and tasks, by which our think- 
 ing and feeling are prone to be tethered 
 to a little worn round. 
 
 Some may think, perhaps, that news- 
 papers should be named with books as 
 sharing this high office. In truth, it 
 ought to be possible to rank the news- 
 paper with the book as an instrument of 
 culture. Equally in truth, it is not pos- 
 sible to do so, except in the case of some 
 small number. The true public journal 
 — diary of the world — which is actually 
 a news-paper and not a gossip-paper, is 
 most powerfully an educator, cultivator, 
 broadener of the minds of those who read 
 it. It lifts them out of their petty per- 
 sonal surroundings, and sets them in the 
 midst of all the great movements of the 
 time on every continent. It makes them 
 spectators and judges of everything that 
 happens or is done, demands opinions 
 from them, extorts their sympathy and 
 moves them morally to wrath or admi- 
 
104 THE MISSION AND THE 
 
 ration. In a word, it produces daily, in 
 their thought and feeling, a thousand 
 large relations with their fellow men of 
 every country and race, with noble re- 
 sults of the highest and truest culti- 
 vation. 
 
 But the common so-called newspaper 
 of the present day, which is a mere rag- 
 picker of scandal and gossip, searching 
 the gutters and garbage-barrels of the 
 whole earth for every tainted and unclean 
 scrap of personal misdoing or mishap 
 that can be dragged to light ; the so-called 
 newspaper which interests itself, and 
 which labors to interest its readers, in the 
 trivialities and ignoble occurrences of the 
 day — in the prize fights, and mean pre- 
 liminaries of prize fights, the boxing 
 matches, the ball games, the races, the 
 teas, the luncheons, the receptions, the 
 dresses, the goings and comings and 
 private doings of private persons — 
 making the most in all possible ways of 
 all petty things and low things, while 
 
MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 105 
 
 treating grave matters with levity and 
 impertinence, with what effect is such 
 a newspaper read? I do not care to 
 say. If I spoke my mind I might strike 
 harshly at too many people whose read- 
 ing is confined to such sheets. I will 
 venture only so much remark as this : 
 that I would prefer absolute illiteracy 
 for a son or daughter of mine, total in- 
 ability to spell a printed word, rather 
 than that he or she should be habitually 
 a reader of the common newspapers of 
 America to-day, and a reader of nothing 
 better. 
 
 I could say the same of many books. 
 So far, in speaking of books, I have been 
 taking for granted that you will under- 
 stand me to mean, not everything with- 
 out discrimination which has the form of 
 a book, but only the true literature which 
 worthily bears that printed form. For if 
 we must give the name to all printed 
 sheets, folded and stitched together in a 
 certain mode, then it becomes necessary 
 
106 THE MISSION AND THE 
 
 to qualify the use we make of the name. 
 Then we must sweep out of the question 
 vast numbers of books which belong to 
 literature no more than a counterfeit 
 dollar belongs to the money of the coun- 
 try. They are counterfeits in literature, 
 — base imitations of the true book ; that 
 is their real character. Readers may be 
 cheated by them precisely as buyers and 
 sellers may be cheated by the spurious 
 coin, and the detection and rejection of 
 them are effected by identically the same 
 process of scrutiny and comparison. 
 Every genuine book has a reason for its 
 existence, in something of value which it 
 brings to the reader. That something 
 may be information, it may be in ideas, 
 it may be in moral stimulations, it may be 
 in wholesome emotions, it may be in gifts 
 to the imagination, or to the fancy, or to 
 the sense of humor, or to the humane 
 sympathies, or indefinably to the whole 
 conscious contentment of the absorbing 
 mind ; but it will always be a fact which 
 
MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 107 
 
 those who make themselves familiar 
 with good and true books can never 
 mistake. Whether they find it in a book 
 of history, or of travel, or of biography, 
 or of piety, or of science, or of poetry, 
 or of nonsense (for there are good books 
 of nonsense, like "Alice in Wonder- 
 land," for example), they will infallibly 
 recognize the stamp of genuineness upon 
 it. The readers who are cheated by 
 base and worthless books are the readers 
 who will not give themselves an expert 
 knowledge of good books, as they might 
 easily do. 
 
 Here, then, opens one of the greater 
 missionary fields of the public library. 
 To push the competition of good books 
 against worthless books, making readers 
 of what is vulgar and flat acquainted 
 with what is wholesome and fine, is a 
 work as important as the introduction 
 of books among people who have never 
 read at all. There is a theory which has 
 some acceptance, that any reading is 
 
108 THE MISSION AND THE 
 
 better than no reading. It rests on the 
 assumption that an appetite for letters 
 once created, even by the trash of the 
 press, will either refine its own taste or 
 else will have prepared a susceptibility 
 to literary influences which could not 
 otherwise exist. Those who hold this 
 doctrine have confidence that a young 
 devourer of dime novels, for example, 
 may be led on an ascending plane 
 through Castlemon, Optic, Alger, Mayne 
 Reid, Henty, Verne, Andersen, De Foe, 
 Scott, Homer, Shakspere, more easily 
 than a boy or girl who runs away from 
 print of every sort can be won into any 
 similar path. For my own part, I fear the 
 theory is unsafe for working. It will prob- 
 ably prove true in some cases ; I am 
 quite sure that it will prove dangerously 
 false in many others. There are kinds 
 of habit and appetite in reading which 
 seem to be as deep-rooted in unhealthy 
 states of mind and brain as the appetite 
 for opium or alcohol. They grow up 
 
MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 109 
 
 among the habitual readers of such news- 
 papers as I have been speaking of, and 
 equally among readers of the slop-shop 
 novels, vulgar or vile, with which the 
 world is flooded in this age of print. The 
 newspaper appetite or the trash-novel 
 appetite, once fastened on the brain of 
 its victim, is not often unloosed. It 
 masters all other inclinations, permits no 
 other taste or interest to be wakened. 
 The stuff which produces it is as danger- 
 ous to tamper with as any other dream- 
 and stupor-making narcotic. To bait 
 readers with it, expecting to lure them 
 on to better literature, is to run a grave 
 risk of missing the end and realizing 
 only the mischiefs of the temptation. 
 
 Far safer will it be to hold the public 
 library as strictly as can be done to the 
 mission of good books. And that is a 
 vague prescription. How are " good 
 books" to be defined? — since their 
 goodness is of many degrees. The mere 
 distinction between good and bad in lit- 
 
 J 
 
no THE MISSION AND THE 
 
 erature I believe to be recognized easily, 
 as I have said, by every person who has 
 tasted the good and whose intellectual 
 sense has been cultivated by it to even a 
 small extent. But between the supremely 
 good and that which is simply not bad, 
 there are degrees beyond counting. From 
 Sardou to Shakspere, from Trumbull to 
 Homer, from Roe to Thackeray, from 
 Tupper to Marcus Aurelius, from Tal- 
 mage to Thomas a Kempis or Thomas 
 Fuller, from Jacob Abbott to Edward 
 Gibbon, the graduation of quality is 
 beyond exact marking by any critical 
 science. How shall we draw lines to dis- 
 tinguish the negatively from the posi- 
 tively good in letters ? We simply can- 
 not. We can only lay down loose lines 
 and put behind them the never relaxing 
 spring of one elastic and always prac- 
 ticable rule : Strive unceasingly for the 
 best. Give all the opportunities to the 
 best literature of every class. Give front 
 places on all possible occasions to the 
 
MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 1 1 1 
 
 great writers, the wise writers, the learned 
 writers, the wholesome writers ; keep 
 them always in evidence ; contrive in- 
 troductions for them ; make readers fa- 
 miliar with their standing and rank. 
 There is little else to be done. The pub- 
 lic library would be false to its mission 
 if it did not exclude books that are posi- 
 tively bad, either through vice or vul- 
 garity ; but much beyond that it cannot 
 easily go. Happily, it cannot force the 
 best literature upon its public ; for if it 
 could, the effect would be lost. But it 
 can recommend the best, with an insist- 
 ing urgency that will prevail in the 
 end. 
 
 I am by nature an optimist. Things as 
 they are in the world look extremely 
 disheartening to me, but I think I can 
 see forces at work which will powerfully 
 change them before many generations 
 have passed. Among such forces, the 
 most potent in my expectation is that 
 which acts from the free public library. 
 
ii2 THE MISSION AND THE 
 
 Through its agency, in my belief, there 
 will come a day — it may be a distant 
 day, but it will come — when the large 
 knowledge, the wise thinking, the fine 
 feeling, the amplitude of spirit that are in 
 the greater literatures, will have passed 
 into so many minds that they will rule 
 society democratically, by right of num- 
 bers. I see no encouragement to hope 
 that the culture which lifts men from gen- 
 eration to generation, little by little, to 
 higher levels and larger visions of things, 
 will ever be made universal. Under the 
 best circumstances which men can bring 
 about, nature seems likely to deny to a 
 considerable class of unfortunates the 
 capacity, either mentally, or morally, or 
 both, for refinement and elevation. But 
 if that be true at all, it cannot be true of 
 any formidable number. Among the pro- 
 gressive races, the majority of men and 
 women are unquestionably of the stuff 
 and temper out of which anything fine 
 in soul and strong in intellect can be 
 
MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 1 13 
 
 made, if not in one generation, then in 
 two, or three, or ten, by the continual 
 play upon them of influences from the 
 finer souls and greater minds of their own 
 times and of the past. It is not by nature 
 but by circumstance, heredity itself being 
 an offspring of circumstance, that light is 
 shut from the greater part of those who 
 walk the earth with darkened minds. 
 Man is so far the master of circumstance 
 that he can turn and diffuse the light 
 almost as he will, and his will to make 
 the illumination of the few common to the 
 many is now beyond dispute. All the 
 movements that I have reviewed are 
 marks of its progressive working. It 
 translates into active energy that desire 
 for others of the good most precious to 
 one's self, which is the finest and noblest 
 feeling possible to human nature. All 
 the forces of selfishness that race men 
 against one another, from goal to goal 
 of a simply scientific civilization, would 
 fail to bring about this supreme end of 
 
ii 4 MISSION OF THE BOOK 
 
 a common culture for the race. Nothing 
 but the missionary inspiration could 
 give a reasonable promise of it. Let 
 us thank God for the souls He has put 
 into men, having that capability of help- 
 fulness to one another. 
 
V 
 
 GOOD AND EVIL FROM THE 
 PRINTING PRESS 
 
GOOD AND EVIL FROM THE 
 PRINTING PRESS 1 
 
 From the first movement of its lever, the 
 Press brought an immeasurable new 
 force into modern civilization. Its earli- 
 est service was rendered mainly to schol- 
 arship, in the diffusion of the classic writ- 
 ings of antiquity, but very quickly it was 
 drawn into a more popular arena, and 
 gave a voice to the appeals of religion, 
 a weapon to theological dispute. The 
 rapidity of its work at that early period 
 is shown by the rapidity of the spread of 
 the ideas of the Reformation, for which 
 it was a vehicle that could not have been 
 spared. Between Gutenberg's death and 
 Luther's birth there were only fifteen 
 
 1 From an address at the meeting of the Ameri- 
 can Library Association, 1896. 
 
n8 GOOD AND EVIL FROM 
 
 years ; but the reformer found already an 
 extensive public prepared to be reached 
 and acted on by the printed tract and 
 book. That the intellectual horizons of 
 life were widened from that day is one of 
 the plainest historical facts. Its skies, 
 too, were lifted to a loftier arch, and it 
 was made larger in all ways, by energies 
 which the new instrument of knowledge 
 set free. For then, and long afterward, 
 there was earnestness in the splendid 
 work of type and press. Some kind of 
 purpose — not always good, or wise, or 
 true, or wholesome, but something that 
 had thought behind it, or fact, or im- 
 agination, or emotion, — was in most 
 things that received the printer's stamp. 
 Through the sixteenth, seventeenth, and 
 eighteenth centuries there are not many 
 shallows in the stream of print. 
 
 At the opening of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury the book and the tract remained still 
 the principal products of the Press, and 
 the custody or conveyance of ideas was 
 
THE PRINTING PRESS 119 
 
 still its chief employ. It had engaged 
 itself already in a lighter service, as the 
 messenger of news ; but that was a mere 
 apprenticeship, not yet promising of 
 much effect. So long as the gathering 
 of news depended on the vehicles of the 
 olden time, it was too slow and too 
 limited a work to stir the world. But 
 when the energy of steam and the speed 
 of lightning were offered to the News- 
 paper Press, that passed suddenly to the 
 front of all the influences acting on man- 
 kind. School, pulpit, and platform were 
 left behind it. The mastery of our later 
 civilization, in the moral moulding of it, 
 if not more, was soon seen to have been 
 grasped by adventurers in a new com- 
 merce, which made merchandise of pass- 
 ing history and marketed the tidings of 
 the day. 
 
 Meantime, the common school had 
 been doing its work far and wide, and 
 most men and women of the leading 
 races had learned to read. That is to say, 
 
120 GOOD AND EVIL FROM 
 
 they had learned to decipher language 
 put into print, or had learned reading as 
 a simple art ; but the educational use — 
 the culture use — of the art was some- 
 thing which no majority of them had yet 
 acquired. To make readers of them 
 practically as well as potentially, another 
 agency was wanted beyond that of the 
 school, and the newspaper came appar- 
 ently to supply it. Books and libraries 
 of books were not equal to the service 
 required. Perhaps it will always be im- 
 possible for book literature of any kind 
 to push its way or to be pushed into the 
 hands of the people with the penetrating 
 energy that carries newspapers to all 
 homes. At all events, the common school, 
 making possible readers, and the news- 
 paper inviting them to read, arrived 
 together, at a conjunction which might 
 have seemed to be a happy miracle for 
 the universalizing of culture in the 
 Western world. The opportunity that 
 came then into the hands of the conductors 
 
THE PRINTING PRESS 121 
 
 of the news press, with the new powers 
 that had been given them, has never been 
 paralleled in human history. They might 
 have been gardeners of Eden and planters 
 of a new paradise on the earth ; for its 
 civilization was put into their hands to 
 be made what they would have it to be. 
 If it could have been possible then to deal 
 with newspapers as other educational 
 agencies are dealt with ; to invest them 
 with definite moral responsibilities to the 
 public ; to take away from them their 
 commercial origin and their mercenary 
 motive ; to inspire them with disinterested 
 aims ; to endow them as colleges are 
 endowed ; to man them for their work as 
 colleges are manned, with learning and 
 tried capacity in the editorial chairs ; — ■ 
 if that could have been possible, what im- 
 aginable degree of common culture might 
 not Europe and America be approaching 
 to-day ? As it is, we are trying to explain 
 to ourselves a condition of society which 
 alarms and shames all who think of it 
 
122 GOOD AND EVIL FROM 
 
 Nevertheless, during the first few dec- 
 ades of the modern news market, — as 
 it took shape, we will say, early in the 
 eighteen-forties, — the influence of the 
 newspapers was generally more whole- 
 some than otherwise. Readers of them 
 were made acquainted with things worth 
 the knowing. The world and their life 
 in it, as parts of a great whole, were 
 widened to them wholesomely and genu- 
 inely, and by much more than the larger 
 knowledge of it which they gathered 
 from day to day. The widening of the 
 sympathetic life of mankind, meaning 
 thereby an increment and expansion of 
 all the feelings which press men into 
 closer and warmer relations, and prepare 
 them for truer understandings of each 
 other, was the supreme effect upon them 
 of the daily world-history that began to 
 be reported to them in the period named. 
 
 But a time came when one arose 
 among the brokers of the news market 
 who made a discovery which proved 
 
THE PRINTING PRESS 123 
 
 nearly fatal to the character and dignity 
 of journalism. He discerned, that is, with 
 low shrewdness, an unbounded possi- 
 bility of degradation in human curiosity 
 and vanity, as opening a great, vulgar, 
 and profitable field for unscrupulous ex- 
 ploitations of the newspaper press. He 
 was not long alone in the enjoyment of 
 his ignoble discovery. One by one, the 
 traffickers in news yielded to the cor- 
 rupting example, or were driven by less 
 scrupulous competitors into the ranks of 
 the new journalism ; till, to-day, we can 
 count on the fingers of not many hands 
 the important newspapers (in America, 
 at least) that will give us real and 
 clean news, and not force us to strain 
 some meagre pickings of it out of a 
 sickening mixture of trivialities, mor- 
 bidities, vulgarities, impertinences, and 
 worse. 
 
 Here and there we may still bow with 
 respect before a newspaper over which 
 the responsible editor has kept his sov- 
 
124 GOOD AND EVIL FROM 
 
 ereignty. In most instances he has been 
 deposed, and the irresponsible reporter 
 reigns in his place, — master of the awful 
 power of the Press, — chief educator of 
 his generation, — pervading genius of 
 the civilization of his time. Trained to 
 look at all things, in heaven above or 
 in the earth beneath, with an eye single 
 to the glory of big type, he sees them 
 in one aspect. The great and the little, 
 the good and the bad, the sweet and the 
 foul, the momentous and the trivial, 
 the tragic and the comic, the public and 
 the sacredly private, are of one stuff in 
 his eyes, — mere colorings of a fabric of 
 life which Time weaves for him to slit 
 and to slash with his merciless, indiffer- 
 ent shears. And so, with little prejudice 
 and small partiality between things high 
 and low, he makes the daily literature on 
 which most of us feed and tincture our 
 minds. It is a monotoned literature, and 
 its one note is flippancy : the flippant 
 headline, the flippant paragraph, the flip- 
 
THE PRINTING PRESS 125 
 
 pant narrative, the flippant comment. To 
 jest at calamity, to be jocular with crime, 
 to sting personal misfortune with a smart 
 impertinence or cap it with a slang 
 phrase ; to be respectful and serious to- 
 ward nothing else so much as toward the 
 gayeties of the world of fashion and the 
 gaming of the world of sport, appear to 
 be the perfections of the art to which he 
 is trained. 
 
 And no careful observer can fail to see 
 that the degradation of the newspaper 
 press is degrading most of the voices of 
 the time. The shallow flippancy which 
 began in journalism is affecting litera- 
 ture in every popular form. More and 
 more the air is filled with thin strains 
 of wordy song ; but the deep-toned mel- 
 odies of thoughtful poetry are dying 
 out of it fast. Rhymers multiply apace, 
 and the reporter inspires them. They 
 worship the god Novelty with him, and 
 Apollo is forgotten. They exercise a 
 nimble fancy on tight-ropes and trapezes 
 
126 GOOD AND EVIL FROM 
 
 of metrical invention, in performances 
 that are curious to behold. 
 
 The art- world, too, is infected with the 
 irresponsible levity which had its genesis 
 in the newspaper. Half of the men and 
 women who paint pictures are doing so 
 with scornful denials of any thoughtful 
 purpose in their work. "Art for Art's 
 sake" is the senseless formula of their 
 contempt for the reverent service of im- 
 agination and reason which Art could 
 command from them if Art knew them 
 at all. 
 
 On all the commoner sides of its life 
 there is singularly and lamentably a 
 shallowness, a flippancy, a vulgarity, in 
 the present age. Who can dispute the 
 fact ? And what is plainer than the causes 
 we can find, in that precipitate, enormous 
 expansion and acceleration of communi- 
 cation in the world which has occurred 
 within our time, acting on civilized so- 
 ciety, and most powerfully in America, 
 in three modes, namely : (i) an increas- 
 
THE PRINTING PRESS 127 
 
 ing excitement of commerce, following 
 closely upon the loss from it of all its 
 older incidents of discovery and adven- 
 ture, producing, for the time, a vulgariz- 
 ing mercenary nakedness ; (2) an abrupt 
 plunge for the freer peoples from theo- 
 retical into practical democracy, conse- 
 quent on the sudden creation of tremen- 
 dous new agencies of combination and 
 organization, and the generating of a 
 public opinion that is a new and untrained 
 force in the world ; (3) the evolution of 
 the modern newspaper and its speedy 
 corruption, from the mighty servant of 
 civilization that it ought to be into the 
 busy pander of every vulgarity that the 
 new conditions can feed. 
 
 But this is not the end of the story. 
 These are but early effects, — effects in 
 their beginning, from great enduring 
 causes, the operation of which they can- 
 not exhaust. If the common mind of the 
 age is trivialized and vulgarized by its 
 newspapers and its commerce, it is being 
 
128 GOOD AND EVIL FROM 
 
 pricked, at the same time, to a new 
 alertness, even by the worst journalism 
 and the fiercest money-making, and 
 faculties are being wakened in it that will 
 some day answer the call to higher uses. 
 The influences which will bear on it to 
 that result are gathering volume and 
 weight. For powerful forces are working 
 even now in the world to broaden life 
 for those who will have it so, not super- 
 ficially, but profoundly, and not in mere 
 sense and circumstance, but in conscious- 
 ness and power. 
 
 There are some ideas which, when 
 they have got a setting in the mind, are 
 like magnifying lenses to the eye of 
 reason, clearing and enlarging its whole 
 vision of things. The Copernican idea of 
 the structure of the universe was such an 
 one. By dispelling the human egotism of 
 the view which put man and his habita- 
 tion at the centre of creation, it opened 
 new vistas to thinking in a hundred 
 directions. The idea which Newton 
 
THE PRINTING PRESS 129 
 
 brought to light, of a unity of law in 
 the universe, was another. The completer 
 development of that idea in the doctrine 
 of the correlation of forces, or the present 
 notion of energy, is another. But of all 
 the emancipating conceptions which, one 
 by one, have entered and possessed the 
 mind of man, there was never one before 
 that brought such liberations with it as 
 came in Darwin's message to our own 
 time. It is hardly too much to say that 
 the full, free exercise of human reason 
 on all the greater problems of life and 
 destiny, whether personal or social, really 
 began with the perception and apprehen- 
 sion of evolutionary processes in God's 
 work. That has raised the thinking 
 minds of our day to a summit of obser- 
 vation which was never attainable before, 
 while eager science brings daily new helps 
 to them for the expansion of their view. 
 It is true that this intellectual expan- 
 sion of life is known nowhere to all men. 
 Even so much of it as goes with vague 
 
130 GOOD AND EVIL FROM 
 
 glimpses of the working of universal law 
 is still no common experience ; while 
 those who know it in its fullness are every- 
 where a few. But something from it is 
 diffusing itself in the whole atmosphere 
 of the age; something penetrating, 
 stimulating, virile ; something which 
 most men are compelled to feel whether 
 they comprehend it or not, and to which 
 the finer elements in them must respond 
 by some sort of rally and growth. Of 
 hopeful phenomena in the world, that one 
 is the greatest of all. It indexes a new 
 state of the common mind, now cleared 
 for the most part of old superstitions, and 
 thus prepared for the receiving of light 
 to dispel its old ignorances. 
 
 And what a wakening of moral no less 
 than intellectual energies there is in our 
 time, for work directed to that end ! A 
 little while ago the steam engine, the 
 factory, the forge, the mine, the mart, 
 represented about all the human energy 
 that made itself conspicuous in the civil- 
 
THE PRINTING PRESS 131 
 
 ized world, excepting some occasional 
 explosions of it in movements of religious 
 and political enthusiasm and in raging 
 outbursts of war. To-day it is not so. 
 No little part of the interest, the ardor, 
 the force, the ingenuity which spent 
 themselves on those objects before are 
 going over into a very different field. 
 We are seeing the rise of an enterprise 
 in education which almost rivals the en- 
 terprise of mechanic industry and trade. 
 Invention is half as busy in the improv- 
 ing of schools, in the perfecting of in- 
 struction, in the circulating of books, in 
 the stimulating of reading and study, as 
 it used to be busy in the making of 
 machines. The diffusion of literature is 
 left no longer to depend, like the diffusion 
 of cotton fabrics or tea, on the mercenary 
 agencies of trade. Half a century ago 
 the free public library was created. For 
 thirty years past it has been worked over 
 by one set of people, just as the steam 
 engine has been worked over by another 
 
132 GOOD AND EVIL FROM 
 
 set, and the electric dynamo by a third. 
 Its powers have been learned, its effi- 
 ciency developed, in the same scientific 
 way. Cunning variations of form are 
 being wrought in it, to fit all circum- 
 stances and to do its civilizing work in 
 all places. It becomes a Traveling Li- 
 brary to make its way into villages and 
 rural corners of the land. It becomes 
 a Home Library to reach the tenement- 
 houses and purlieus of the city. It 
 spreads itself in branches and delivery 
 stations. It distributes choice reading 
 in the schools, to broaden the teacher's 
 work. It drums and advertises its un- 
 priced wares like a shop-keeper, avari- 
 cious of gain. It is taking up the eager, 
 laborious, strenuous spirit of the present 
 age, and wresting some large part of it 
 away from the sordid activities of life, to 
 give it unmercenary aims. 
 
 So books are being made to do con- 
 siderably alone what books and newspa- 
 pers ought rightly to be doing together. 
 
THE PRINTING PRESS 133 
 
 As a carrier in the spiritual commerce of 
 the world, the book is not nearly so agile, 
 so lightly winged, so Mercury-like as the 
 newspaper can be ; but when each is at 
 the best, how much nobler is the freight- 
 age of books ! 
 
 I rest my faith in a future of finer 
 culture for mankind on the energy of 
 free public libraries in distributing good 
 books, far more than on any other agency 
 that is working in the world. So far they 
 have but opened gates into the field of 
 influence that is before them ; but the 
 gates are really swung wide, and the 
 length and breadth of the field is fully 
 seen, and the spirit that will possess it 
 and work in it is eagerly alive. I speak 
 soberly when I say that the greatest an- 
 tagonism to be met and overcome is that 
 of the vulgarized part of the newspaper 
 press. I say this with persisting iteration, 
 because I am convinced that it is the fact 
 which needs most at the present day to 
 be understood. How to win readers of 
 
134 THE PRINTING PRESS 
 
 the general mass from unwholesome 
 newspapers to wholesome books, or how 
 to change the spirit of the common news- 
 papers of the day from flippancy to so- 
 briety, — from the tone of the worst in 
 social manners and morals to the tone of 
 the best, — is one of the gravest pending 
 problems of civilization, if not the gravest 
 of all. The zeal and energy of free schools 
 and free libraries can achieve the solu- 
 tion of it, and I see nothing else that can. 
 
VI 
 
 PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND 
 PUBLIC EDUCATION 
 
PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND 
 PUBLIC EDUCATION 1 
 
 The function of our free circulating libra- 
 ries is diffusion, which is a function of 
 active responsibility. The prime purpose 
 of their institution is to bring to bear 
 upon the greatest possible number of 
 people the profitable influences that are 
 found in books. That object restricts 
 them to no narrow range. It takes in 
 whatever can be tributary to all that has 
 excellence and value in men. It embraces 
 the wholesome literature of imagination 
 and emotion, no less than the literature of 
 knowledge and thought. The graces and 
 harmonies of education, and the sweet- 
 enings and colorings of life, are compre- 
 
 1 From a paper read before the American Social 
 Science Association, in 1883. 
 
138 PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND 
 
 hended equally with the ethics and the 
 practical powers. There is no narrow- 
 ness in the range, as I have said ; but it 
 has a well-marked bound. It is bounded 
 by all the lines in literature which sepa- 
 rate purity from grossness, art from rub- 
 bish, good from bad. It is so bounded by 
 its purpose, which I think I have stated 
 with precision when I say that the sole 
 reason for the existence of a popular 
 library is the endeavor made through it 
 to bring to bear on the greatest possible 
 number of people the profitable influ- 
 ences that are in books ; and it has no 
 excuse for being if it cannot discriminate 
 with some success between the profitable 
 and the unprofitable quality of books. 
 
 Of course this involves a selective crit- 
 icism, or a censorship of books, if one 
 chooses to call it so, in the government 
 of popular libraries ; but what then ? Is 
 not the same kind of selective criticism, 
 — the same kind of discriminative judg- 
 ment, — the same censorial assumption, 
 
PUBLIC EDUCATION 139 
 
 — involved in all public services, from 
 legislation down ? To what public insti- 
 tution will it be denied ? If a gallery of 
 art is founded, for the finer teaching of 
 the eyes of the people, and for kindling 
 the light of the love of beauty in their 
 souls, does any one claim a place in it 
 for the pictorial advertisements of the cir- 
 cus, or for the popular sculpture of the 
 cemeteries, on the ground that there is 
 a public which finds pleasure in them ? 
 Yet something comparable with that de- 
 mand is found in the frequent expecta- 
 tion that public libraries shall descend to 
 levels of taste in literature which all cul- 
 tivated taste condemns. It is assumed 
 quite naturally that somewhere in the 
 control of a public art-collection there 
 shall be an instructed criticism at work, 
 to distinguish, with what care and capa- 
 bility it can, the true productions of art 
 from its counterfeits, and to set up cer- 
 tain standards of taste which it is desir- 
 able to have urged upon the public for 
 
140 PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND 
 
 common recognition. Wherein are the 
 considerations which bear on the popu- 
 larizing of literature and the teaching of 
 books, by means of public libraries, dif- 
 ferent from those that bear on the popu- 
 larizing of art by public museums of 
 painting, sculpture, and design ? If they 
 differ at all it is by reason of the greater 
 power and greater importance of the 
 educating influence in books. 
 
 I am not thinking altogether of ques- 
 tions touching fiction in public libraries, 
 which have been much discussed ; though 
 that, in the treatment of this subject, 
 takes, of course, the foremost place. It 
 is a question much discussed, but not 
 always on broad grounds. Here is a form 
 of literature that we have seen, almost in 
 our own generation, rise from a modest 
 rank in the realm of letters to undisputed 
 ascendency. It has introduced a new 
 Muse to our Olympus and has throned 
 her royally in the highest seat, where the 
 crown and the sceptre, the honors and 
 
PUBLIC EDUCATION 141 
 
 the powers of the pen, are alike given up 
 to her. For my part, I am submissive to 
 the revolution that has brought us under 
 this new reign in literature ; I have no 
 discontent with it. I recognize the mod- 
 ern Romance, or Novel, as the true heir 
 and natural successor of the Epic and 
 the Drama, which held anciently, in their 
 turn, the regal place in literature. I look 
 upon it as representing no mere literary 
 fashion of the day, but distinctly a de- 
 velopment in literary art — the plastic 
 shaping by organic growth of a new, 
 perfected form of epic and dramatic ex- 
 pression moulded in one ; fitting itself to 
 new conditions of general culture, with 
 more versatile capabilities and powers. 
 It is not alone approved by the suffrages 
 of the multitude, it is preferred by the 
 bards and " makers " themselves. More 
 and more we can see that the dramatic 
 genius of the age turns lovingly to this 
 new form of art and expends itself upon 
 it. If Shakspere were living in these 
 
142 PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND 
 
 days, I doubt not we should have more 
 novels than plays from his pen. 
 
 At all events the chief power in litera- 
 ture for our generation belongs to the 
 novel, and if we will recognize and deal 
 with it broadly in that view there is 
 nothing lamentable in the fact. Let us 
 freely concede to it the great domain it 
 has won for itself on the art-side of litera- 
 ture, and pay to it the respect we give 
 to all art — no less, no more. We can 
 hardly claim to have done that yet. 
 There is something half disdainful, half 
 shamed and apologetic, in the very hom- 
 age conceded to this new-comer among 
 the Muses. Her devotees do not seem to 
 be quite assured of her Olympian repu- 
 tability, and find, perhaps, a little pleas- 
 ure in the suspicion that she and Folly are 
 near kin. So we all continue to speak of 
 the realm of " light literature ; " as though 
 the literature that is weighted with the 
 fruits of the genius of George Eliot, 
 Thackeray, Dickens, Balzac, Hawthorne, 
 
PUBLIC EDUCATION 143 
 
 Scott, De Foe, can justly be called " light." 
 The lightness which it has is the lightness 
 of the spirit of art — the lightness which 
 art takes from the up-bearing wings on 
 which it is exalted, and whereby it has 
 the power to transport us high and far, 
 and make us travelers beyond the swim- 
 ming of ships or the rolling of wheels. 
 
 Whatever it may be that acts on men 
 with that kind of power is a factor in 
 education as important as science or his- 
 tory. It is like the wine and sweetness 
 of the fruits which are the wholesome 
 peptic trifles of our bodily food, and 
 it contributes quite as much as the 
 strong meats of learning to a vigorous 
 and symmetrical growth of human char- 
 acter. In the novel, these potencies of 
 art are universalized more than in any 
 preceding form ; it brings a larger mass 
 of mankind within their range, to be 
 quickened in spirit by them and to be 
 wrought upon by an inward leaven which 
 human beings are sodden without. As 
 
144 PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND 
 
 a true product of art in literature, the novel 
 seems to me to be a great instrument of 
 education, in the large sense of the word 
 — not for all men and women, perhaps, 
 but for most, and especially for those 
 whose lives are narrow and constrained. 
 There are not many of us who do not 
 owe to it some reaches and happy vistas 
 of the intellectual landscape in which we 
 live, and the compass of our thoughts, 
 feelings, sympathies, tolerances, would 
 shrink sadly if they were taken away. 
 It is only a little region of actual things 
 that we can include in our personal hori- 
 zons — a few individual people, a few 
 communities, a few groups and growths 
 of society, a few places, a few situations 
 and arrangements of circumstance, a few 
 movements of events, that we can know 
 and be familiar with by any intimacy and 
 experience of our own. But how easily 
 our neighborhoods and acquaintances 
 are multiplied for us by the hospitable 
 genius of the novelist ! To be put in 
 
PUBLIC EDUCATION 145 
 
 companionship with Caleb Garth and 
 Adam Bede, with Colonel Newcome and 
 Henry Esmond ; to meet Mrs. Poyser 
 and Mr. Weller ; to visit in Barsetshire 
 with Mr. Trollope and loiter through 
 Alsace with the Messrs. Erckmann and 
 Chatrian ; to look on Saxon England 
 with the imagination of Kingsley, on 
 Eighteenth-century England with the 
 sympathetic understanding of Thack- 
 eray, on Puritan Massachusetts with the 
 clairvoyance of Hawthorne — how large 
 and many-sided a life must be to em- 
 brace in its actualities so much of a ripen- 
 ing education as this ! 
 
 But, if there is no other form in which 
 the broadening influences of art can be 
 exercised more powerfully than in the 
 novel, there is no other form that lends 
 itself to base counterfeiting so easily. 
 And the vulgar product is vulgar beyond 
 comparison with any other. More than 
 vulgar; for the travesty of life which 
 these romances of book-smithing exhibit 
 
146 PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND 
 
 is mischievous in its whole effect. Every 
 feeling that they act upon, every senti- 
 ment that they stimulate, every idea that 
 they produce, is infected with the falsity 
 that is in them. Neither virtue nor piety 
 in the intention with which they are com- 
 posed can better very much the evil 
 influence they exert ; for clean as they 
 may be of all other vice, there is wick- 
 edness in their misrepresentations and 
 depravity in their untruth. I see nothing 
 for my own part but malarial unwhole- 
 someness, breeding moral distempers and 
 intellectual debility, in the trash of fiction 
 with which the world is being flooded, 
 whether it emanates from the " Satanic " 
 or the Sunday-School press. 
 
 No agency is available for resisting this 
 flood so effectively and so responsibly 
 as the public library. I do not know that 
 its right to exercise upon literature the 
 criticism which discriminates art from 
 rubbish is ever disclaimed formally, but 
 it seems often to stand in some doubt. 
 
PUBLIC EDUCATION 147 
 
 Perhaps the criticism demanded in this 
 case is not distinguished clearly from the 
 presuming and very different censorship 
 that would inspect opinions, and under- 
 take to judge for the public between true 
 and false teaching in religion, or politics, 
 or social economy ; but the two have no 
 principle in common. They differ as the 
 insolence of sumptuary laws differs from 
 the sound reasonableness of laws for the 
 suppression of counterfeits and adultera- 
 tions. If there could be an institution for 
 the purveying of food, or drugs, or any 
 kind of material provision, that should 
 stand in a relation to the public like that 
 of the free library, we would certainly 
 deny its right to a jurisdiction over the 
 demands of the people so far as concerned 
 the kinds and varieties of commodities 
 to be supplied ; but just as certainly we 
 would hold it responsible for the quality 
 of the things it had been instituted to 
 provide. We would reasonably require 
 the institution to be so organized as to 
 
148 PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND 
 
 embrace within its management the 
 capability to distinguish competent from 
 incompetent work, and genuine from 
 counterfeited products. That is precisely 
 the kind of discrimination to be exercised 
 in public libraries in the matter of this 
 romance literature, which is worth so 
 much as a product of literary art and is 
 so worthless when wanting the touches 
 of art. The question concerning it is al- 
 most purely a question of quality. Where 
 a subtler question arises, — a debatable 
 question of taste, within the range of 
 uncertain canons in which questions of 
 taste are open, — I would not ask to 
 have it arbitrated in a public library. But 
 the great mass of the trash of fiction is 
 not touched by such questions. The dis- 
 cernment of its worthlessness depends on 
 nothing but some familiar acquaintance 
 with good literature, and on the sense 
 of quality which that acquaintance will 
 develop. 
 
 If public libraries do no more than 
 
PUBLIC EDUCATION 149 
 
 administer those common verdicts of the 
 literary world that are of authority and 
 weight, they will sweep a mountain of 
 rubbish from their shelves ; they will 
 command from the public a hearing for 
 criticism that will never be secured other- 
 wise, and they will be exercising in a 
 most important particular the educational 
 responsibility that belongs to them. The 
 safe rule under which I should like to 
 see them placed in their dealing with 
 romance is the rule of conservatism — of 
 slowness — of waiting for the judgments 
 and verdicts by which literary work is 
 proved. They are not speculators in the 
 book market ; their interest in literature 
 is not a commercial one, like Mudie's ; 
 they are instituted for a missionary pur- 
 pose, and their business, as I have said, 
 is to bring to bear on the greatest 
 number of people the profitable influences 
 that are in books. Why should they be 
 in haste to catch up the novelties of the 
 romance press, like merchants eager for 
 
150 PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND 
 
 custom ? Why should they not keep all 
 this doubtful literature waiting at their 
 doors till it has been weighed and pro- 
 nounced upon, not by the public opinion 
 of Tom, Dick and Harry, and the school- 
 girls, and the idle and raw-minded body 
 of readers, but by the instructed public 
 opinion which is the court of last resort 
 for all books, and which determines the 
 ultimate fate of all ? 
 
 I have not touched the question of 
 morals as affecting this literature, because 
 that is included substantially in the ques- 
 tion of literary quality. In America and 
 England (I say nothing of other coun- 
 tries) the literary taste which prevails and 
 has authority is moral enough, because 
 healthy enough, to be trusted fairly with 
 the whole adjudication. I know of no 
 vicious or unwholesome novel, poem, 
 play, or other imaginative work belong- 
 ing to contemporary literature, that has 
 standing enough in the English-speaking 
 literary world to commend it to a public 
 
PUBLIC EDUCATION 151 
 
 library, if nothing is considered but the 
 view of it from literary standpoints. 
 Generally, I think, among the Teutonic 
 peoples, the conception of art is essen- 
 tially a moral conception, — the concep- 
 tion of a fundamental purity, — and the 
 more highly the art-sense of these peoples 
 is cultivated the more clear-sighted it be- 
 comes as to the falsity in art of all moral 
 falsity. And so I should feel safe in 
 making it the rule for public libraries of 
 the popular class, that they should admit 
 freely whatever wins a good standing in 
 the literary public opinion of the time, 
 and admit nothing till that standing is 
 assured to it. 
 
 There is a large body of older litera- 
 ture which requires some different rule. 
 It comes to us from coarse or corrupted 
 periods of the past, when the ethics of 
 literary art were slightly perceived, little 
 felt. In some of it there are all the ad- 
 mirable qualities that imaginative litera- 
 ture produced without moral sensitive- 
 
152 PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND 
 
 ness can have. It is vigorous, brilliant, 
 graceful. It gained in its own day a lit- 
 erary standing which it could not win in 
 ours ; but we are disposed, and perhaps 
 rightly, to let it stand at the original 
 rating. Historically, as representative 
 literature, it has great importance and 
 interest to those who will use it in that 
 character, as students of literature and 
 history in the thorough-going sense. But 
 I can see no good purpose it can serve 
 in popular libraries, and no reason for its 
 having a place in them. The drama of 
 the Restoration, a great part of the more 
 famous novels of the eighteenth century, 
 with much of the older romance, are 
 examples of what I mean. On what 
 reasonable ground is acquaintance with 
 them popularized at the present day ? Of 
 the kindred literature from other lan- 
 guages that has been imported into the 
 English by translation, I can only ask the 
 same question with more emphasis. 
 I leave large ranges of literature, in 
 
PUBLIC EDUCATION 153 
 
 which nothing I have said will offer a 
 hint of the bounds I am asking to have 
 set for our popular libraries ; and I am 
 ready to confess with frankness that I do 
 not know where to set the bounds, nor 
 how. Perhaps it is not a practicable 
 thing to do. And yet I am sure the at- 
 tempt should be made to mark out, in all 
 literature, with some rough consistency, 
 the provinces of the popular library, 
 as distinguished from the library of re- 
 search and history, or the museum of 
 books. Not, I say again, to set narrow 
 or parsimonious limitations upon them. 
 It is no petty conception of the popular 
 library that I have formed. For popu- 
 lar uses I want it as great as it can be 
 made. Not for uses of common reading 
 only, but for all uses. I should have 
 looked but a little way into the influence 
 of these libraries if I took account of no 
 more than the set " reading" that they 
 encourage and supply. They have a 
 greater office than that. It is to induce 
 
154 PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND 
 
 a habit among people of following up 
 the chance topics and questions in which 
 their interest happens from time to time 
 to be stirred by casual circumstances and 
 hints. A school exercise, a newspaper 
 paragraph, an allusion from the pulpit,, 
 a picture, a quotation, a play, will often 
 supply an impulse that carries itself long 
 and far into the intellectual life and 
 growth of our library students, but which, 
 without the help of the public library, 
 would come to naught. Making it com- 
 mon and habitual, in some wide circle 
 of people, to say on such occasions, " I 
 will go to the library and pursue this mat- 
 ter," or " put this statement to the proof,' ' 
 or " learn more of this man " or "of 
 these writings,' ' the public library brings 
 into action more energies of education 
 than can be organized in any college or 
 school. And so, for its greatest efficiency, 
 it needs to be equipped largely, liberally, 
 with resources for every kind of common 
 investigation ; for every kind of investi- 
 
PUBLIC EDUCATION 155 
 
 gation, I mean, that is not elaborated in 
 professional study, or special scientific 
 research, or minute erudition. For such 
 special quests and profounder pursuits of 
 learning I do not think that the popular 
 library should undertake the providing 
 of books. All the resources it can com- 
 mand will seldom be too great for em- 
 ployment in its own great office, which 
 is to popularize the profitable influence 
 of books. 
 
 Before everything else it should have 
 these two aims : First, to be abounding 
 in its supply of good literature, within 
 the range of popular use ; second, to be 
 perfect in arrangements for exhibiting its 
 stores and making them accessible, and 
 to be fertile and persistent in devices for 
 winning students and for helping them 
 with all encouraging aids. If the library 
 is stinted anywhere, let it not be in the 
 better books for which there is most of 
 a popular call. Better fifty copies of one 
 book that will get so many readers, than 
 
156 PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND 
 
 fifty various books which few will use. I 
 am disposed to believe that a popular 
 library should expend its means very 
 grudgingly upon wider acquisitions until 
 it has so multiplied on its shelves the few 
 best books most wanted by its general 
 readers that it will seldom disappoint a 
 call for one of them. I put that forward 
 as the first claim upon its funds ; and next 
 to that I put the employment of adequate 
 methods for exhibiting and advertising 
 its books and their contents and charac- 
 ter to the public. Classification, annota- 
 tion, analysis, in catalogues and bulle- 
 tins, with indexes, reference-lists, helpful 
 hand-books, and bibliographical guides, 
 — these are objects of expenditure more 
 important than the gathering of numer- 
 ous books. A small, well-chosen library, 
 in systematic order, opening every ave- 
 nue to its contents that can be cleared 
 and lighted up by judicious labor, — in- 
 spiring, leading, and helping its studious 
 readers by all the methods which the 
 
PUBLIC EDUCATION 157 
 
 earnest library workers of this country 
 are learning to employ, — is an agent of 
 education more powerful than the great- 
 est collection can ever become, if the 
 ambition in the latter to have books out- 
 runs the ambition to spread the influ- 
 ence of its books. Both of these ambitions 
 are working, more or less, in the popular 
 libraries of this country ; but the spirit of 
 the time and the race is on the side of 
 the wiser purpose, and it is wonderful to 
 see with what contagion of zeal the dif- 
 fusive work of our public libraries has 
 been animated in late years. It is be- 
 cause I honor so highly the conscience 
 that has been awakened in the work of 
 these libraries, and the power they are 
 acquiring among the institutions of de- 
 mocracy, that I wish to see no waste in 
 their energies. 
 
VII 
 SCHOOL-READING 
 
 VERSUS 
 
 SCHOOL-TEACHING OF 
 HISTORY 
 
SCHOOL-READING 
 
 VERSUS 
 
 SCHOOL-TEACHING OF 
 HISTORY 1 
 
 If I did not know the fact to be other- 
 wise, I should suppose that a desire for 
 some satisfying knowledge of the past 
 life of mankind, and especially within the 
 range of direct ancestries and inherit- 
 ances, would be one of the keenest crav- 
 ings of every active mind. That it is 
 not so is too obvious to need proof ; and 
 I think that, on reflection, we can under- 
 stand the fact. That which lies near to 
 us and in sunlight will naturally, always, 
 engage our attention more easily and 
 hold it more strongly than that which 
 
 1 Read at a meeting of the Buffalo Historical 
 Society, to which teachers of history were invited, 
 May, 1906. 
 
162 SCHOOL-READING 
 
 is shadowed and remote. The bit of re- 
 cently past time which we call the Present 
 is our sunlighted portion of time, and 
 its subjects and objects of interest are 
 pressed most insistently upon us. To 
 a great extent we are compelled to give 
 them the first place in our thoughts; 
 because our means of subsistence, and 
 therefore our lives, are dependent on 
 things and conditions, not as they have 
 been, but as they are. Our social rela- 
 tions, moreover, our ambitions, our activ- 
 ities of all kinds, are under the same 
 control. Those things and conditions, to 
 be sure, have their roots in the past and 
 their growth out of it ; but the fruits that 
 are ripening from them now are what we 
 have to gather, for the daily provisioning 
 of daily life, and they busy us so that we 
 can easily lose thought of the historic 
 soils and saps from which they came. 
 
 It is thus, by a thousand imperative 
 needs and interests, that the Present, or 
 what we call so, wins a natural domina- 
 
OF HISTORY 163 
 
 tion, and may even take the nearly full 
 possession, of our minds. I can under- 
 stand, therefore, how and why the ma- 
 jority of people feel no apparent want of 
 any knowledge beyond that which the 
 morning newspaper supplies, of men and 
 things in the world of the passing day : 
 the practical knowledge that suffices for 
 traffic, speculation, partisan politics, so- 
 cial conversation, and other immediate 
 interests in life. I can understand, too, 
 how and why it is that so many, among 
 the people whose appetite of the brain 
 calls for meats which the reporters of the 
 daily press cannot serve to them, prefer 
 other kinds of knowledge before that of 
 human history, caring more to know how 
 the earth got its structure, or how beasts, 
 birds, and insects acquired their varia- 
 tions, or how plants are best classified, 
 or how the forces in nature are related 
 to each other, than to know something 
 of the experience that the generations 
 of mankind have gone through, in their 
 
i6 4 SCHOOL-READING 
 
 long procession down the ages of the 
 dead ; something of the influences that 
 have played upon them, — the changes 
 in outward circumstance and inward 
 state that they have undergone, — the 
 successions of their tasks, their achieve- 
 ments, their struggles, — out of which 
 have come Humanity as we know it, 
 Life as we live it, Society as we make 
 part of it, the Earth as we, the latest heirs 
 to that human-family estate, find it fitted 
 and furnished for our habitation. I can 
 see all such preference of Science before 
 History to be natural, because it is con- 
 sequent on the overpowering pressure 
 with which present objects and present in- 
 terests are forced upon the attention of our 
 minds. Science in general is a study for 
 the most part of things as the student 
 sees them with his own eyes, — the phe- 
 nomena of his own day, — and it tends, 
 as commerce and society and newspa- 
 pers do, to cultivate habits of mental 
 seclusion within some limited region of 
 
OF HISTORY 165 
 
 passing time. There is no fault to be 
 found with the preference of that study, 
 choosing the good knowledge of Science 
 before the good knowledge of History ; 
 nor need we blame the more prac- 
 tical choice which rates a necessary 
 knowledge of the existing conditions of 
 life above the interesting knowledge of 
 how those conditions came to be what 
 they are. There is no fault, I say, to 
 be found with such preferences, except 
 where they put History quite out of 
 consideration, as they often seem to do. 
 That goes beyond my understanding; 
 for it is no natural consequence of any- 
 thing that the obtrusive and exacting 
 Present imposes upon us. 
 
 In saying that the prevalent disposition 
 to put History behind other more obtru- 
 sive matters of knowledge is natural and 
 explainable, I do not mean to imply that 
 it is reasonable, or that Science is of 
 more importance than History, or that 
 the Present holds more of the valuables 
 
166 SCHOOL-READING 
 
 of life than are stored for us in the re- 
 membered Past. There are no such com- 
 parisons to be made. Present and Past, 
 from the same spinning of time, into the 
 same never-broken thread, woven into 
 the same continuous fabric of human life, 
 have no divisible value to us. Neither 
 can be to us nor signify to us anything 
 independently of the other. The Past 
 has its explanations in the Present, the 
 Present in the Past. Whatever real sub- 
 stance of knowledge we get into our 
 minds, and whatever real substance of 
 satisfaction we get into our lives, must 
 come from both. 
 
 Mr. Rhodes, the historian, in an excel- 
 lent address which he made on taking the 
 chair of the presidency of the American 
 Historical Association, in 1899, conceded 
 too much, I think, on this point. " The 
 Present," he said, "is more important 
 than the Past, and those sciences which 
 contribute to our comfort, place within 
 reach of the laborer and mechanic as 
 
OF HISTORY 167 
 
 common necessaries what would have 
 been the highest luxury to the Roman 
 emperor or to the king of the Middle 
 Ages, contribute to health and the pre- 
 servation of life, and, by the develop- 
 ment of railroads, make possible such 
 a gathering as this, — these agencies, we 
 cheerfully admit, outrank our modest 
 enterprise, which, in the words of Herod- 
 otus, is 'to preserve the remembrance of 
 what men have done.' " I cannot agree 
 with this view. I would say, on the con- 
 trary, that History has an underlying and 
 upholding relation to every science and 
 every industry, and cannot, therefore, be 
 outranked by any. We could not even 
 choose our foods for to-day's dinner if 
 we had nothing from the Past of mankind 
 to instruct us concerning the gifts of 
 nature that are eatable and those that 
 are not. That is History, on its simplest 
 side. No man of to-day could even form 
 the conception of a railroad locomotive, 
 and far less construct one, if History had 
 
168 SCHOOL-READING 
 
 not brought to him the ideas of Watt 
 and Stephenson from a century ago. It 
 is so with everything in the passing day 
 that we do or wish to do, that we obtain 
 or wish to obtain, that we know or wish 
 to know : there is something of History 
 behind it all which we must understand 
 if the doing or obtaining or knowing is 
 to be a possible thing. 
 
 And it is not alone in those outward 
 ways that the Past comes historically into 
 every present moment. It has more 
 entrance than we are apt to suspect into 
 all the chambers and all the processes 
 of our minds. We do no thinking, we 
 exercise no imagination, we have no 
 emotion, without it. For what is memory 
 but the private historical collection which 
 each man makes for himself ? It may be 
 limited very closely to the annals of his 
 own life, — to the little region of his own 
 doings and experiences ; but even at the 
 narrowest, there will always be some- 
 thing from a larger history that has 
 
OF HISTORY 169 
 
 crept into it, and which has some kind 
 of vague participation in his feelings and 
 thoughts. Names, at least, that carry 
 some historical meaning, will have got 
 a lodgment in his brain. Washington, 
 Shakspere, Columbus, Caesar, Mara- 
 thon, Magna Charta, the Declaration of 
 Independence, the French Revolution, 
 and other men, movements, and docu- 
 ments of the Past, will figure, in some 
 dim way, in his beliefs, and in the general 
 notions that run through all the workings 
 of his mind. Try to conceive, if you can, 
 the state of a human consciousness in 
 which absolutely nothing of such histor- 
 ical idea-stuff is contained ; then, perhaps, 
 you can realize how much the more or 
 less of it has to do with the measure and 
 quality of our lives. The historical 
 memory, in fact, is like an atmosphere in 
 our mental world, making it spatial, put- 
 ting distance, perspective, scenery into 
 it, by refractions and diffusions of our con- 
 sciousness, which otherwise would be like 
 
170 SCHOOL-READING 
 
 the flash on flash of straight sun-rays to 
 an eye looking out from the airless moon, 
 which could never see aught but the sun 
 itself. Without its importation of some- 
 thing from the long Past into the sensa- 
 tions of the momentary present, our lives 
 would be like the journey of a traveler 
 through dark tunnels underground. 
 
 To think of this is to recognize the 
 absolute emptiness of those current in- 
 stants of time which we call the Present, 
 except as we bring furniture to them by 
 importation from the Past, in private 
 stores that are Memory or in public stores 
 that are History. We not only borrow 
 from the days that are gone every power 
 that enables us to extort the practical 
 necessities of life from this present day, 
 but we go to them for everything that 
 lends interest to the passing days of our 
 lives. This is the great fact which puts 
 historical knowledge, in my esteem, 
 above all other matters of knowledge 
 that man can seek. By enrichment 
 
OF HISTORY 171 
 
 of his consciousness it enriches every- 
 thing that is interesting in his life. The 
 realm of his mind is narrow or large in 
 its resources of interest, according to the 
 radius of its historical horizon and its 
 scenic vision of general human life. His- 
 torical knowledge is needed, therefore, 
 for all minds, as the indispensable furni- 1/ 
 ture of a satisfying mental life. The man 
 of science and the man of business can 
 give room to it, not only with no detriment 
 to the specialized occupations of their 
 thought, but with gains of animation and 
 enlargement that could come, I am sure, 
 from nothing else. It is the one kind of 
 knowledge which, more than any other, 
 is expansive in its whole effect ; which 
 resists the monotonizing of interests 
 and the narrowing of views. " Histo- 
 ries," says Bacon, in his pregnant essay 
 on "Studies," — "histories make men 
 wise," and he gave them the first place 
 in all that he commends. 
 
 These, to me, are the all-sufficient 
 
1 72 SCHOOL-READING 
 
 reasons for an early and long and large 
 use of History in educational work. The 
 more specific pleas for it, urged com- 
 monly : that it exercises the judgment 
 and the imagination, — that it is full of 
 ethical lessons and instructive examples 
 of character, — that it will cultivate pa- 
 triotism, and the like, — are not so strong. 
 They are all true ; there is sound argu- 
 ment in them all ; but they are all tran- 
 scended by the fact that, in the nature 
 of the human mind, its very capacity for 
 any knowledge, and its pleasure in any, 
 are dependent on the spatial and per- 
 spective conditions imparted to it by its 
 own historian, the Memory. More or less 
 of History it must carry among its con- 
 tents, in order to be at all an intelligent 
 mind. For its richest and best endow- 
 ment of power to do and to enjoy, in 
 any field of human endeavor, it cannot 
 be freighted with too much. 
 
 What, then, can be more important 
 in education than the use of means and 
 
OF HISTORY 173 
 
 efforts to overcome those strenuous pres- 
 sures and influences which tend naturally 
 to hold the attention of people too closely 
 to things of the passing day, blinding 
 them to the wonderful landscapes of the 
 historic Past, and depriving them of its 
 immeasurable enrichment of the life of 
 the mind? Until recent years History 
 had no well-recognized place in common 
 or general schemes of education. Now 
 it is winning a fairly acknowledged foot- 
 ing in our elementary and secondary 
 schools, but only by hard contention and 
 competition with studies that offer, as it 
 seems to me, no comparable gifts of cul- 
 ture or power. The claims for it are still 
 too low. Its place should not be in the 
 ruck of an overcrowded curriculum, but 
 clear in the van of preferred subjects, 
 through all grades from the middle, at 
 least, of every elementary course. I ven- 
 ture to predict that the consideration it 
 is beginning to receive will soon give it 
 an unquestioned title to that place. Fur- 
 
 u- 
 
174 SCHOOL-READING 
 
 thermore, I shall venture to submit 
 some speculations of thought that I have 
 indulged myself in, concerning a school 
 treatment of History which might pos- 
 sibly be more effectual than the modes 
 of treatment now pursued. I am not a 
 teacher ; I have done no teaching at any 
 time of my life ; and I should be guilty 
 of great presumption if I spoke with dog- 
 matism on the subject ; but I think there 
 can be no impropriety in a plain state- 
 ment of my thought to those who can 
 give it consideration from the teacher's 
 point of view. 
 
 I assume that the general purpose and 
 aim of the work done in our school-rooms 
 is not to stock the minds of the young 
 with a provision of knowledge, in any 
 department, that will suffice them for 
 their lives ; but rather to introduce them 
 to knowledge, — prepare them to be re- 
 ceptive of it, — acquaint them with its 
 attractions and its uses, — put them in 
 the way of pursuing the acquisition of it 
 
OF HISTORY 175 
 
 through later life, and familiarize them 
 with the paths of that pursuit. This must 
 be so in the matter of History, if in 
 nothing else. No intelligent teachers of 
 History will think that they have given 
 as much of it to their classes as can be 
 for the pupils' good. On the other hand, 
 no teachers will work with an eye to the 
 turning out of whole classes of profes- 
 sional historians, trained for exhaustive 
 research, and destined to devote their 
 lives to the study and original construc- 
 tion of history from its sources in public 
 and private depositories of important 
 fact. For one in a thousand, perhaps, the 
 instruction fitted to that end might be 
 given profitably ; but it would not be of 
 profit to the remaining nine hundred and 
 ninety-nine. The service of the school to 
 them in this matter must simply be such 
 as to make them lovers of the literature 
 of History, — lovers, that is, of History 
 as a finished product of trained research 
 and judgment and literary art. In a word, 
 
176 SCHOOL-READING 
 
 I would say that the office of the school 
 in its educational use of History is to 
 evoke the appetite for historical reading, 
 and to prepare judgment and taste for 
 a right choice of writers and books. 
 
 Is this office performed in the best 
 possible way by any method of teaching 
 History now employed in our schools ? 
 I have been led to serious doubts on that 
 point ; and my doubts have gone so far 
 as to question whether the results I have 
 indicated can be attained satisfactorily 
 by any treatment of History that would 
 be describable as " teaching," in the cus- 
 tomary use of the word. I have read 
 many excellent papers on such methods, 
 written by wise and earnest teachers, of 
 great experience ; and the fine thought 
 and spirit in most of them have impressed 
 me very much ; but at the base of them 
 all, I find more or less of a catechising 
 requirement which cannot, as I would 
 judge, be favorable to the reading-inter- 
 est and habit that we wish to create. It 
 
OF HISTORY 177 
 
 involves a piece-meal treatment of the 
 details in an historical narrative, which 
 breaks the continuity of impression from 
 them on the pupil's mind. But most 
 of that allured and prolonged attention 
 which we call "interest" depends on 
 this very continuity of impressions which 
 such treatment breaks up. For History 
 is, essentially, a story, and my feeling is 
 that it must not be spoiled as a story by 
 anything done to it in the schools. What- 
 ever it carries, of political, moral, and 
 other meanings and teachings, is carried 
 in the current of its story, not, I am sure, 
 to be fished out with question-hooks, but 
 to be borne fluently into the mind, with 
 the stream, which will create for it a wel- 
 coming thirst. 
 
 What I wish to argue for, therefore, is 
 the simple reading of History in schools, 
 with no analytical teaching, questioning, 
 or periodical examination, to break the 
 thread of the tale which the school or 
 the class pursues. Of course it should be 
 
178 SCHOOL-READING 
 
 systematic reading, under the lead of a 
 capable teacher, whose accompanying 
 comments may emphasize, explain, illu- 
 minate, and illustrate, here and there, 
 ^ according to need ; but, as nearly as 
 possible, it ought, I think, to preserve 
 the effect which a mind experiences in 
 taking information to itself, by its own 
 volition and its own absorption, from a 
 printed page. Leave the matter of the 
 reading to have what fate it will in various 
 minds ! Trust all immediate results to 
 the ultimate result! What if the daily 
 leakage from young minds is large, 
 provided we are opening inlets to them 
 from springs in later years that will never 
 run dry ! Let us remember the stream- 
 likeness of this story of the Past, and 
 allow it to trickle its course through such 
 irrigating brain-channels as it finds, with 
 no incessant casting of lead-lines to test 
 its depth ! It is not in this matter as it is 
 with the little cisterns of Arithmetic and 
 Grammar and Geography that we try to 
 
OF HISTORY 179 
 
 fill, once for all, in the brain. There the 
 quizzing plummet and the examination 
 dredge have their proper use. Here we 
 are introducing something very different, 
 for a very different action and agency ; 
 something to be for a general diffusion, 
 expansion, refreshment, and stimulation 
 of all consciousness, all feeling, all im- 
 agination, all thought. Then why not 
 give it free play, meddling as little as 
 possible with its natural flow and with 
 the natural deposits it will leave ? 
 
 In my thought of this treatment of 
 History, in elementary and secondary 
 schools, the scheme of it would be some- 
 thing like this : 
 
 1. An underlying use of such readable 
 text-books of abbreviated History as can 
 be found ; such text-books as are not 
 mere packages of assorted fact, but which 
 give a fluent showing of the main move- 
 ments of events, with a moderate amount 
 of detail. These to be carriers, as it were, 
 of the historical narrative through its 
 
180 SCHOOL-READING 
 
 less important parts, where they suffice 
 to keep interest alive or to make the 
 connection with coming incidents under- 
 stood. 
 
 2. The bringing in of passages and 
 chapters from the classic and standard 
 works of historical literature at all points 
 in the narrative where a broader and 
 more vivid treatment can be introduced 
 with marked effect. 
 
 3. A judicious accompaniment of com- 
 ment and explanation by the directing 
 teacher, restrained carefully to avoid 
 much diversion of mind from the reading 
 itself. 
 
 For example, if I planned an experiment 
 in this treatment of History with a class of 
 young people, I would take such a book 
 as might easily be made out of Freeman's 
 " General Sketch of European History" 
 and use it for the threading of careful 
 selections from the best historical litera- 
 ture within its field. It is a book that 
 needs revision of its first two chapters, 
 
OF HISTORY 181 
 
 to bring into it later views and revelations 
 in ethnology and Greek archaeology ; 
 otherwise it seems to me to be excellent 
 in its adaptation to such a use. It could 
 introduce bits of reading, in the first in- 
 stance, from the Iliad and from some of 
 the Greek hero-myths, in connection with 
 extracts from popular accounts of the 
 explorations at Troy, Mycenae, and in 
 Crete, which throw light on their sources 
 in historical fact. For a first reading in 
 Greek history, Freeman's sketch gives 
 enough of the origin and general course 
 of the Persian wars ; but the stories of 
 Marathon, Thermopylae, and Salamis 
 should be read in Herodotus, or in 
 Plutarch's Miltiades or Themistocles, 
 or in both. Then I would carry the read- 
 ing to those short sections of the first 
 book of Thucydides (89 to 99) in which 
 he tells in his plain way " how the Athe- 
 nians attained the positions in which they 
 rose to greatness " after the destruction 
 of their city in the last of the Persian 
 
182 SCHOOL-READING 
 
 wars ; how they formed the Confederacy 
 of Delos and took the leadership of it ; 
 how they abused their domination, made 
 subjects of their allies, and so aroused 
 the hostilities and jealousies that brought 
 ruin upon them in the ensuing Pelopon- 
 nesian War. To this I would add the 
 later part of Plutarch's life of Aristides, 
 which tells of the strengthening of de- 
 mocracy at Athens at the end of the Per- 
 sian wars and gives further particulars 
 of the formation of the Delian Confeder- 
 acy ; and I would draw yet more from 
 Plutarch by liberal extracts from his lives 
 of Themistocles and Pericles. To deepen 
 and widen the impression from this, the 
 great period in Greek history, I know of 
 nothing better to be brought to a young 
 class than may be found in chapters XVI 
 and XVII of Evelyn Abbott's book -on 
 " Pericles and the Golden Age of Athens." 
 I am not sure that Freeman's slight 
 sketch of the Peloponnesian War would 
 need any enlargement; but something 
 
OF HISTORY 183 
 
 from Thucydides and Xenophon, and 
 from Plutarch's Alcibiades and Lysander, 
 might supplement it interestingly and 
 with profit. As for the period between 
 the Peloponnesian War and the intrusion 
 of Philip of Macedon into Greek affairs, 
 there seems to be little call for going 
 beyond Freeman's brief account. 
 
 On coming to the Macedonian epoch 
 it would undoubtedly be desirable to in- 
 terest our young readers somewhat more, 
 not only in the extraordinary conquests of 
 Alexander, but in the preparatory work 
 of Philip, his father, who was the abler 
 and greater man of the two. My sug- 
 gestion would be to take something in 
 the first instance, for that purpose, from 
 Plutarch's Demosthenes, and a few pages 
 from the 66th and 67th of Niebuhr's 
 " Lectures on Ancient History," where 
 both Philip and his great Athenian op- 
 ponent are estimated with much fairness 
 of view. Concerning the immeasurable 
 importance of Alexander's heroic career, 
 
184 SCHOOL-READING 
 
 in its effects upon subsequent history, 
 there is no room for two opinions ; but 
 historians have differed so widely in their 
 estimates of the hero that young readers 
 should be acquainted, I think, with the 
 opposing views. Thirlwall admires him 
 and credits him largely with the great 
 results that came from what he did. 
 Grote does not. Perhaps there could be 
 selections from each. After the death of 
 Alexander, I judge that Freeman has told 
 all that can be made interesting or in- 
 structive to the average school-boy or 
 school-girl, down to the time when Greek 
 history is merged in that of Rome. 
 
 Turning, then, to the latter, I would 
 plan a similar course, in which Freeman 
 should furnish the links of connection 
 between readings from Livy, Plutarch, 
 Polybius, Caesar, Tacitus, Mommsen, 
 Merivale, Gibbon, and many more. 
 
 If half an hour daily could be given 
 to such readings, during seven or eight 
 years of the period spent by a pupil 
 
OF HISTORY 185 
 
 in graded school and high school, they 
 would not only carry him, I judge, over 
 very wide ranges of general history, and 
 into familiarizing and appetizing touch 
 with its best literature, but ample time 
 would remain, I am sure, for repetitions 
 and enlargements of the more important 
 parts of the tour. Possibly in such repe- 
 titions, traversing English and American 
 history for the second time, more leisurely 
 and with more nearly ripened minds, 
 there might be something of the step-by- 
 step " teaching " introduced with advan- 
 tage. It might then be possible to scru- 
 tinize, analyze, correlate, and otherwise 
 discuss events and incidents one by one, 
 without destroying interest in the his- 
 torical movement to which they belong ; 
 but I cannot believe that a first reading 
 of history should be broken in any such 
 way. I cannot believe that a tape-meas- 
 urement of " lessons " in it, with a halt 
 for quizzing at each mark on the tape, is 
 as educational in this matter as a free 
 
186 SCHOOL-READING 
 
 excursion would be. I cannot believe that 
 History will waken the feeling that it 
 ought to excite in the mind of a young 
 student, if it is thrust upon him in a dry 
 compend, which he must glue his un- 
 willing eyes to, while remembering al- 
 ways that the trigger of an examination 
 trap may be lurking in every name, date, 
 and circumstance that it holds. For His- 
 tory, if for nothing else that the school 
 gives him, I would ease him of that 
 dread, and make him free to experience 
 pleasure and desire. I would make him 
 his own examiner, by requiring him, at 
 intervals, to write a summary in his own 
 language of what he has gathered from 
 the last week or fortnight of the readings. 
 There is no other process of durable 
 memorizing that equals that ; and I be- 
 lieve it could be trusted, in connection 
 with such readings as I suggest, to yield 
 better results than are coming from the 
 catechized "study" of History now pur- 
 sued in our schools. 
 
OF HISTORY 187 
 
 I know the hazard of my venture in 
 theorizing without practical experience, 
 and I am prepared to have it shown to 
 me that my suggestions are impracti- 
 cable, or that, if practicable, they would 
 not answer my expectations in the result. 
 If experience so adjudges them, I only 
 ask to be told why. 
 
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