THE ART OF READING

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XX, Issue 191, 2 August 1930, Page 9

THE ART OF READING

POST-SCHOLASTIC EDUCATION

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man: and writing an exact man. —Bacon.

pOR THOSE OF US whose formal schooling is over, education may at last begin. In particular, we may learn to read. Now that we have escaped the prescriptions of the schoolmaster and are no longer required to thumb the classics of literature with examinations staring us in the face and with serried ranks of notes and introductions and prefaces to damp our ardour and impede our progress, we are ready to find out whether literature has anything for us that we can thoroughly enjoy and deeply profit by. We may set forth now without further delay upon an endless voyage of discovery, each of us pulling at his own helm and trimming his own sail. So writes “LP.S.E.” in the “Christian Science Monitor.” DEFECTS OF SCHOOLING. For certainly it is one of the more serious errors that we make in thinking of school and college to suppose that they complete our experience with books, so that when once we have left the classroom we need never concern ourselves with literature again. Formal schooling leads 1 us, at best, only a little way into the world of letters, and often it discourages us from entering that world at all. Those who find the delight of books usually do so after the school years have passed. Books that they once read mechanically and as a task they learn to read with a surprised joy that glows and grows from page to page, setting the fancy on fire and lighting up wide stretches of mental country. Their reading becomes energetic, audacious, and a substitute for adventure. It extends, deepens, enriches all their experience. They do not merely learn; they enlarge. They do not merely win knowledge; they gain wisdom, gentleness, humour and charm, tenderness and comprehension.

They multiply themselves, increasing in stature not by arithmetical but by geometrical progression. To their allotted three score years and ten they add as many centuries, and they pass freely through the walls of time and space that hem all others in to mingle with great companions.

LEARNING TO READ.

All this is worth any effort it may cost. But what is the effort and the cost of learning to read ? How does one learn to master the printed page? In the first place, one must choose a book that will try his mettle—not one of the soft and soothing sweetmeats that are concocted nowadays by the thousands for the millions but something angular, masculine, and tough.

One must choose a writer whom one can constantly respect, look up to, strive toward. And emphatically this does not mean a writer who tells us only those things we already know, things we already believe. What struggle, what contention, and therefore what strength, are we likely to get from such a one? Are we reading to be flattered, or to learn, to be confirmed in our previous convictions, or to test them? Most of us can read any author with pleasure because his thought moves in the conventional grooves, and on nearly every page we find our own thoughts and feelings skilfully reflected; but can we read someone who affronts conventional feeling and thinking at every turn? Ah, there is a test, and there is training of certain highly valuable qualities. A long and steady go at such a one will teach us to be fair in estimating our opposite, to be patient with an antagonist who is never patient, to find honey in the lion’s mouth. Nine persons in ten of those who are brought up on “favourite authors” will fling down a book by a writer of a different type after reading a few pages, with a feeling compounded of bewilderment and anger and self-protective contempt.

The tenth person, refusing to judge before he understands, is the one who is learning to read. He is learning, also, to think.

MEANING OF WORDS.

Having chosen an author and a book, the next step is to accustom oneself to a rigorous scrutiny of individual words

such as verv few readers ever attain. One’s dealing with books has hitherto been lackadaisical, limp, sleepy, and the present effort is to make it vigorous. Hitherto we have been reading chiefly our own thoughts, moods, ideas, in the words of other men, but now we are determined to get our author’s sense, not our own. Do we know exactly and fullv what bis single words mean? Probably not, for words are devious and ancient and wonderful things, crammed with history each one, and a good writer uses them in more recondite senses than we have been aware of. We should read over again that brilliant passage in Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies in which the words alone of a

few lines from Milton’s Lycidas are considered with microscopic acumen, and then perhaps we shall realize how fumbling and haphazard our own way of reading words has been—how hasty, how shallow, how drowsy. In order to master a Printed page—if indeed it was a page worth printing—we must grapple with words tenaciously, determined not to let them go until they have rendered up their full meanings; we must no longer be content to let them slide over us. A DOUBLE PROCESS. Two processes, or at least two distinct attitudes of thought, are necessary to the mastery of any true book. The first is passive and the second active. In the former we are concerned entirely to find out what our author has to say, postponing meanwhile all .judgment upon him. We give him his full and fair chance at us. We do not say, whenever we find a passage or a sentence running counter to our own predilections: “This man is a fool, and I will have no more to do with f him.” We say. “This man evidently sees things in a way that I do not, and perhaps, therefore, I may learn something from him that I have not known before.” We do not try to judge before we understand. The second Process is no less and no more important. Having done our best to find out exactly what our author has

to say, submitting ourself to him with perfect docility for the time being as though we had no knowledge, no experience, no thoughts of our own. we then turn upon his book and ask: “Now what

does all this mean for me? What must I accept and what reject—not by mere prolongation of my previous prejudices and convictions, but in the light of all I know and in accordance with the laws of clear, fair thinking?” As many readers fail in this process as in the other. Some are quite incapable

of abstracting from their own .previous convictions, even though the book they have just read is a complete refutation of them. These people do not really read, and the time they spend over books might be more profitably spent at golf or knitting. Others focus all their attention upon single assertions, paragraphs, or sentences of a book, failing altogether to read these in the context of the whole book and so failing to understand them. Incapable of holding steadily in thought

a long and complicated argument, they grasp at isolated remarks which they think, mistakenly, that they comprehend, and base their total criticism of a book upon these alone.

Only those who can relate the whole of a book just read to something like tho whole of what they know and are, can properly be called readers.

THE COLDEN MEAN.

One may err in an excessive emphasis upon either the passive or the active process. Many readers are too receptive, too easily bowled over by any writing that is plausible or emphatic. Others seem incapable of entertaining impartially any opinion which they have not long held. Both fail in reading. A considerable skill is required, not very different from the social tact necessary in civilized conversation, to give an author his chance without subservience.

Truculence and truckling are two extremes to be avoided as much in our dealings with books as in our contacts with men and women.

A REAL TASK.

Evidently, it is no easy task that one sets to work upon when he determines to master the printed page. In one sense, we learn to read in childhood;, in another sense, very few of us ever learn to read. In our time, moreover, a dozen potent distractions that were unknown to the recent past are postponing for most of us even the beginning of this arduous task. Mechanism of many dazzling and dizzying sorts makes reading seem comparatively dull; and our tendency to think in masses, to receive our opinions readymade, has caused many of us to think of free and adventurous reading as almost an impiety. What would indeed be impious, however, would be the rejection, for any reason that could be imagined or devised, of the huge human treasure that has been gathered for us in books. Our wealth lies there if anywhere. In books rather than in banks or armies or even schools lies the

stability of the present and the hope of the future.

The supreme classics of literature are now our own, and we must deal with them according to our abilities. If we let them lapse they may never return to enlighten mankind, for their sway must be continuous, not intermittent. They, come before each succeeding generation for their trial, and they stand to-day before those few who have learned to read. But it would be nearer the full truth to say that we stand on trial before them. ,