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VHAT T© READ
ggestions for the Better Utilisation of
Publio Libraries
a
Substance of an
address delivered before the
TYNESIDE SUNDAY LECTURE SOCIETY
JOHN M. ROBERTSON
[issued for the rationalist press
association, limited]
WATTS & CO.,
JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, LONDON, E.C.
'
1904
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NATIONALSECULARSOCIETY
WHAT TO READ
SUGGESTIONS FOR THE BETTER UTILISATION
OF PUBLIC LIBRARIES
THE SUBSTANCE OF AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE
TYNESIDE SUNDAY LECTURE SOCIETY
BY
JOHN AL ROBERTSON
[issued for the rationalist press
association, limited]
WATTS & CO.,
17, JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, LONDON, E.C.
1904
��WHAT TO READ:
SUGGESTIONS FOR THE BETTER UTILISATION OF PUBLIC
LIBRARIES
I.
A good many years ago I was one of a band of
amateur assistants to the librarians of the People’s
Palace in East London, upon one Sunday afternoon,
when there was tried the experiment of throwing open
the reading-room to the general public, with miscella
neous lots of books placed on all the tables. The
business of the assistants was to try to gather from the
visitors their preferences as to reading, and to supply
them with something to their taste. As was to be
expected, most comers wanted stories, and of these the
supply was abundant. At my table a few read steadily
for an hour or two, but no one, I think, the whole after
noon; and the majority kept their places for only a
short time. To have a book was- one thing, to read it
was another.
How the plan thus started has fared since I know not;
but I then received a strong impression of the need for
some more systematic and continuous guidance to the
great majority of the readers. A rich treasury lay at
their disposal; but they needed some steady help to
enable them to develop a sufficiently enduring desire to
•enjoy it. For the most part they were as sheep without
a shepherd.
Many librarians, I do not doubt, give much of the
needed assistance day by day to many readers; and in
populations less restless than those of East London
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public libraries are probably better used than by those
in the ordinary course of things ; but my conviction
remains that in general they are not nearly as much
utilised as they might be, and it is on that view that I
want to offer some suggestions, on the one hand to any
young people who may care to listen, and on the other
hand to those elders who may accept my view and be
desirous of giving guidance to the young people of
their circle.
I would begin by planning for a boy or girl who has
just left school, about thirteen or fourteen, and who may
have, as all ought to have, some hours of leisure every
day—leisure that is apt to be either wasted or devoted
too exclusively to amusement. To all such, with access
to a public library, there is open in some degree the
possibility of becoming fairly well informed, and no less
cultured (as the phrase goes) than the majority of
middle-class people, whose schooling usually lasts a
good deal longer than that of working folks. Young
people of the working-class must not suppose that,
because they do not get a college education, they can
never be well educated. It is only too easy for a youth
to go through an English public school and university
without being well educated. Not only do the majority
never really learn the dead languages on which they
spend so much time ; they do not have their minds
well opened to the knowledge and the entertainment
that is possible to them in their own language. And
what they miss may in large measure be attained by
poorer people outside of universities.
Remember the saying of Carlyle : “ The true univer
sity of these days is a library of printed books.” Carlyle
said that what his own university did for him was to
teach him to read in various languages; and as a
matter of fact the languages through which he did most
of his work (French and German) were not in his univer
sity curriculum. You will not suppose me to deny that a.
�WHAT TO READ
5
good university—-or even a faulty university such as
Oxford or Cambridge—may do a great deal for a youth
who takes an interest in his studies. And you will not
suppose me, on the other hand, to be satisfied with the
education given in our ordinary popular schools, or with
the social state of things in which young people have to
begin (as I began) to work for a living at thirteen, or
with the amount of leisure that is thus far possible to the
mass of the workers at any age. I am far from being
content on any of these points. But what I seek to do
now is to help some to make more use of the limited
possibilities that do exist, even for working folks’
children.
II.
Taking the ordinary boy or girl of thirteen, then, and
assuming only an ordinary degree of intelligence, I
would try to set up a habit of reading by offering stories.
That is the natural way for ninety-nine out of a hundred:
you must operate on curiosity, and you must first take it
as you find it. The great thing is to set up the simple
sense of pleasure in reading. Let the stories be as
juvenile as you please ; let them even be school-boy
serials, so long as they are not mere romances of high
way robbery, such as some traders are not ashamed to
put in the way of poor boys. I do not know much
about present-day literature for the young ; but in my
own early boyhood I spent many happy hours in
reading the books of the late R. M. Ballantyne, and I
should think these cannot yet be superseded. They are
for many reasons much to be preferred to some later
literature in which the young idea is in a disastrously
literal sense taught to shoot, and to think of bloodshed
as the most admirable of human activities. Ballantyne’s
books have for young people both interest and informa
tion : they recount both adventures and facts, giving
them a fairly true idea of some aspects of actual life—the
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WHAT TO READ
life of explorers, hunters, firemen, railway-men, and so
forth—with enough of episode and excitement to keep
them enthralled. I still keep an affectionate recollection,
too, of a certain work of the last century entitled The
Swiss Family Robinson. It tells how a Swiss pastor
and his family were wrecked on an island—one much
better stocked than that of Robinson Crusoe ; and the life
they lived, as I recollect it, came as near the level of
Paradise as a healthy boy or girl wants to reach. They
found everything they wanted, in the light of the father’s
amazing knowledge—meat and drink, sago in a fallen
sago-palm, natural lemonade in the green cocoanuts
(which they tempted the monkeys to throw down at
them), turtles, bread fruit, material for clothing, for
housing, for luxury ; every day brought a new dis
covery ; and when, after years of this boundless happi
ness, the eldest son of that family discovered a neigh
bouring island on which there was a shipwrecked
young lady, and left his Paradise to go and get married
and settle down in Europe, no words could express my
juvenile contempt for his bad taste.
Well, after a boy has read such a book as that he is
better fitted to appreciate our own Robinson Crusoe,
which is really a much greater book, going deeper into
human character, and, what is very important, written
in finer English than the other, which is an ordinary
translation.
I doubt whether this sense of literary quality can be
too soon appealed to in young people—at least, after
thirteen. As soon as the boy reader can be got away
from stories like Fenimore Cooper’s and W. G. Kingston’s
and Mayne Reed’s and Henty’s, and the girl reader
from her equivalent pleasures, let them try, or try them
with, the works of Dickens—first the more amusing, later
the more serious. I admit—though I am not at all a.
Dickens-worshipper—that a boy or girl of fifteen cannot
properly appreciate the power of Dickens ; but I do say
�WHAT TO READ
7
that when they can be brought under his spell they
have begun to taste of the fountains of the higher litera
ture ; they begin to undergo a strictly literary effect; they
begin to be concerned with character rather than with
incident, to brood on life, to realise to some extent what
society is. I can remember comparing notes, about the
age of fifteen, with a fellow clerk, on the subject of
Dickens. Our verdict was: “He makes you think”;
and we used to quote his phrases, appreciating their
dexterity, their humour, their quaintness. And if a boy
does not take to Dickens, he may take to Kingsley ; and
that will serve.
But above all, the sense of style, which is the choicest
of all the joys of reading, is to be cultivated through the
reading of poetry. Here, again, we must begin with the
simple, the easy. Let it be stories in verse—always
rhyme for the beginner—ballads, patriotic songs, any
thing that will take the youthful palate. But a boy or girl
of fourteen or fifteen can appreciate the clear charm of a
great deal of Longfellow, or the vigorous tramp of verse
like Scott’s Mannion, or his Lady of the Lake, or Lay of
the Last Minstrel; and gradually, when the ear has come
to delight habitually in cadence, a higher order of
pleasure will be found in the greater poets. Tennyson
and Mrs. Browning are perhaps more readily enjoyed
—at least as regards their rhymed verse—than Shelley ;
but any young taster of poetry will soon take delight in
such a poem as Shelley’s Cloud; and if you thereafter
get him or her to perceive the mastery and the glamour
of Keats and Coleridge, you have made a lover of poetry
who is not likely to be unfaithful.
After that, give the young reader his head in poetry :
set him at Milton, Spenser, Chaucer, Shakespeare,
Browning, Wordsworth, Arnold : so long as you start
with modern verse, and enlist the natural appetite, you
are nearly safe.
And though some people fear to
interest young readers much in poetry, you will in all
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WHAT TO READ
likelihood find that it makes them not less but more con
cerned for education of a more utilitarian kind.
All
fine poetry promotes at once imagination and thought;
and the sense of the delightfulness of beautiful speech is
sure to extend itself to fine prose. Certainly we must
guard against limiting culture to the aesthetic side, to the
elements of form, style, cadence, and vocabulary ; on this
I shall have something to say later ; but let us first and
foremost insist on the need to cultivate imagination, even
for the purpose of training the critical and scientific
intelligence. So practical a thinker as Buckle has gone
so far as to say that the poets are among the best trainers
of the scientific intelligence ; and you will remember that
so distinguished a man of science as Tyndall has to a
great extent corroborated him.
Even that, however, is not the final “defence of
poetry.” Its great vindication is that for all of us it
may be a life-long ministry of refined enjoyment, an
inward music that can transfigure jarring circumstance
and lighten sombre hours as nothing else can ; a music
that the poor man can command when he has no access
to the other joy of actual sound. I believe that, if you
were to ask Mr. Thomas Burt—-whose whole life does
honour to the countryside to which he belongs—what it
is in books that he has valued most since he began to
read them, he would tell you that it is poetry. And I
leave you to judge whether his love of poetry has made
him unpractical, or inexact, or careless about the
working side of life. He could get pleasure from
remembered poetry in the coal-pit, and through taking
such pleasure he was the sooner qualified to leave the
coal-pit and to work with his brain for his fellows in the
council-chamber of his country.
�WHAT TO READ
9
III.
Even then, on the side of pure enjoyment, books can
be highly and truly educative ; and if the young reader
be so hard worked that he or she does not readily take to
what we call dry reading, let not the elders be dis
couraged. To mothers in particular I would say, do
not fret if your daughter in her spare hours shows a
passion for novels. If you can only lead her taste
upwards on that path—and the best plan is always to
travel that way yourself—she will grow wiser and better,
not more flighty and indolent. A great novel is a piece
of education ; and even some that are hardly great, such
as the Little Women of Louisa Alcott, can do much to
stimulate the intellect of young people. But those who
have read Mrs. Oliphant and Charlotte Bronte and Jane
Austen and George Eliot, have gained some real serious
insight into life, and are better fitted to live it. And when
readers of either sex are able to appreciate the work of
the greatest masters of fiction—Thackeray or Hawthorne
or Meredith in England, Balzac in France, or any of
the great Russians (and they are perhaps the greatest of
all) in translation, they have acquired some really vital
culture—the kind of culture that deepens character and
adds new meaning to all experience.
But there are some people, we know, who go on
reading little else than novels all their lives—reading
them indiscriminately, of course, for no one with a good
taste can read new novels all the time ; and even if our
taste be not very good, it is well to be warned against
that sort of thing. It is a finding of delight in mere
dissipation. Let the ingenuous young reader, then, be
warned to mix “serious” reading with his literary
pleasures as often as he can bring his mind to the effort.
If he have a spontaneous taste for science, so much the
better; such a taste is a rich possession, making rela
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tively easy the attainment of kinds of knowledge that to
most people is hard of acquirement. But let not the
grown-up guide be distressed if the youngster does not
readily take to science. I can remember my father
reproaching me, when I was about twelve, for not
reading such a book as Hugh Miller’s Old Red Sand
stone in the time I was spending on Robinson Crusoe. I
am not at all sure that he was very deep in the Old Red
Sandstone himself, and the title certainly did not allure
me to geology. In a great many minds, as in mine, the
scientific interest is late to awaken.
A common and easy way of advance, however, is to
pass from literature, as such, to history. A mind that
has been interested by the novel is open to the historical
novel—Dumas, say, to begin with, or Scott, or Dickens’s
Tale of Two Cities, or George Eliot’s Romola—and from
the historical novel to the history is an easy step. At
first the young reader will care chiefly for the romance
of history—I remember being intensely interested as a
boy by Prescott’s Conqzcest of Mexico and Conquest of
Peru—and from such beginnings a boy may read history
till he begins to realise that conquest is not the noblest
side of it. Every boy, of course, should be taught the
history of his own country ; and as the ordinary school
books do little in that direction, set him as soon as may
be to read John Richard Green’s Short History of the
English People. It is not so very short, but it is none
the worse for being as long as two big novels ; and
though it has plenty of faults from a scientific point of
view, it is still the most alive history of England that
you can put in a young reader’s hands. After that, let
him try, with Freeman’s General Sketch for a finger
post—or better, if he can follow it, Mr. Bryce’s Holy
Roman Empire—to get an idea of the historical develop
ment of Europe ; and thereafter let him read all he can
of the history of the great nations, extending his know
ledge of later British history through Macaulay, whose
�WHAT TO READ
11
Essays, further, will be found among the best appetisers
for European history in general. If he have a strong
historic taste, he will turn with pleasure to Hallam for
English constitutional history, and for his general
Fzhw of Europe in the Middle Ages; but not all will
take to the subject so kindly. The essential thing is
that the reader be interested. If he is not concerned
about history on a larger scale, try him with Carlyle’s
French Revolution. It will not exactly make him under
stand the Revolution, but it will set his mind and
imagination to work ; and political comprehension can
come later.
If interest be once thus roused, history may be made
a much more interesting thing than it usually is by
taking large views of it. When you have got past the
stage of reading it for its romance, you are not neces
sarily prepared to read with close attention the ordinary
chronological narrative, in which kings and queens and
generals and statesmen still count for so much, and the
masses of men and women for so little. If you feel like
this, let me counsel you to go to my early master,
Buckle, for the most rousing stimulus that is yet avail
able to the beginner in historical studies. From his
Introduction to the History of Civilisation in England
you will learn that there are large meanings in history ;
that the broad movement of civilisation can become as
fascinating as any story of conquest ; that the welter of
historic events, which looks like a great chaos or
measureless sea, has its laws, its intelligible sequences,
as truly as any department of nature ; and that as you
begin to understand these laws the events themselves
become newly interesting, even as all plants or forms of
life or landscapes do when once you have got a grasp of
botany, or biology, or geology.
And Buckle has this further merit, that he interests
you in the natural sciences in the act of interesting you
in the science of human affairs, were it only because he
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WI-IAT TO READ
is himself so intensely interested in them all. For him
history is not a mere series of battles and conquests,
of kings and dynasties, and religious or political
quarrels ; it is also a series of advances in knowledge,
of appearances of wise men, of thrilling discoveries,
great inventions, aye, and of great books. And when
once he has held you with his glittering eye, his glitter
ing rhetoric, it is only lack of time that will withhold
you from trying to follow him on all the paths he has so
eagerly trodden. He is steeped in literature as such ;
he delights in poetry ; he cannot contain himself when
he writes of Shakespeare ; and all the while he is closely
intent on the progress of the sciences, which he follows
in every detail.
IV.
Let us not count too hopefully, however, on the
deepening of our young reader’s tastes ; or, rather, let
us allow reasonable time for his growth in seriousness.
After all, the young mind, as a rule, turns more
spontaneously to the artistic than to the scientific side of
things ; and our concern should be not to have things
otherwise, but to see to it that the normal line of move
ment is followed in a progressive fashion. If the young
reader cares specially for the charm of literature, for
poetry, for drama, for romance, for style, let him be
helped to get the best from all these. Show him,
to begin with, that they can be studied critically,
and with exactitude. What marks the scholarly study
of any subject is just painstaking, the making sure of
understanding all the details ; and to that end the young
reader, after first getting his enjoyment from the poetry
as such, should read his Shakespeare, his Milton, his
Chaucer, in the annotated editions that are now
common, mastering the obscure allusions, the peculiar
idioms, the special uses of words, the archaisms. In
this fashion he can give himself, with no great strain, a
v
�what to read
13
good deal of the kind of discipline that is undergone by
careful students at the universities.
If, further, he is to get the best from literature, he will
do well to read the good critics. Quite young readers
can get much stimulus from the essays of Hazlitt.
Later, they will get an abundance of both stimulus and
guidance from the essays of James Russell Lowell, from
those of Matthew Arnold, from the Hours in a Library
of Sir Leslie Stephen, from the volumes of the late
Professor Minto, and last, but not least, from the
History of English Literature by the distinguished
Frenchman Taine. I rather think that Taine and the
American Lowell make English literature more vividly
interesting than do any of our own critics and his
torians. And as all good criticism is a criticism of life
as well as of books and styles, the young reader is in
this way also led to the deeper meanings of things. He
will go to Emerson as literature, and he will find bracing
counsel for life : seeking fine writing he will get great
precepts, and the atmosphere of a noble spirit—the best
thinking that has yet been yielded by the life of the New
World. It is not exactly a coherent philosophy, but it
is something nearly as great—an example in consistent
magnanimity, incomparably stimulating to young minds.
And Emerson gives a kind of introduction to literature
that no one else supplies—an introduction to its spirit
rather than to its forms, which leaves a sense of special
intimacy of appreciation.
No man, of course, is an efficient guide on all paths ;
and in some directions Emerson is a little narrow, so that
you would not learn from him to value Goethe or Gibbon
or some other great masters.
The young student,
accordingly, must learn to give his attention to different
prompters, and to care as much as he can for all
literatures. If he will learn a foreign language or two,
so much the better ; it is no very hard undertaking, and
in all large towns there are facilities for it. It is a much
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simpler thing to learn French or German, or even Latin
or Greek, than to become a master of the violin or the
piano ; and many men spend on billiards an amount of
attention and effort that would in a year or two give
them fluency in Sanskrit. I might add that a command
of foreign languages ought to be, in our country, a
means of commercial advancement, for we are nationally
deficient in that matter, though we have special need to
be proficient. But I limit my appeal, at present, to the
interests of the intellectual life, urging simply that the
power to read in other languages is an opening of new
windows upon life, and a means to mental pleasures that
are otherwise hardly attainable. Poetry, in particular,
hardly bears translation ; there is a fragrance that
evaporates, a beauty that vanishes ; they must be found
in the original tongue, if at all. Many excellent books,
besides, do not get translated ; it is well worth while, in
such a case, to be independent of help. But whether you
are so or not, make it a part of your aspiration to know
something of other literatures than your own ; and
whether or not you master the classic dead languages,
make it a point to know something of the classics, and to
realise how men thought and felt in other ages, with
other beliefs and sanctities, under other skies.
There is no great danger, I think, that the ordinary
unscholarly man who rises above mere novel-reading will
in this way be led to care unduly for what we call belleslettres, fine letters, and to see culture solely in the
knowledge of that. Such miscalculation is the mistake,
mainly, of literary men and university dons ; the
ordinary citizen is usually withheld from such one
sidedness.
If, however, our young reader should
chance to be specially biassed to the purely literary
view of things, let him be warned that even that is,
after all, an ignorant view ; and that literary men who
know only poetry and artistic or entertaining prose, or
at most the literature of unscientific human experience,
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r5
are simply ill-educated men. There can be no sound
culture in these days without some connected knowledge
of the subject-matter of the natural sciences ; just as, on
the other hand, there can be no truly scientific thinking
on social and political matters without a good knowledge
of “ humane letters ”—the lore of feeling and aspiration
—as well as of history. In both directions we see many
men miscarry. Some, versed only in poetry and fiction,
the literature of taste and feeling, passionately seek to
impose their essentially ignorant ideals upon the world of
politics, where they are only more refined specimens of
the average man of passion. A poet who, by force of
natural nobleness, transcends that average, is a great
aider of civilisation ; a poet who merely turns into song
the passions of commonplace men is but a blind guide
of the blind. But when a cultivator of the physical
sciences in turn thinks to rank as a guide in problems of
public conduct on the mere strength of his knowledge of
physics, he is no better accredited. There is far more of
true political wisdom in a Shelley, with all his vagaries,
than in a Tyndall, with all his science. The science of
civic life is to be mastered only from the side of civics ;
though every science may indeed help to the mastery of
every other.
It is by bringing to bear on civic problems the
temper, the patience, and above all the veracity which
builds up the natural sciences, that the gains of modern
“ science ” in general are to be socially reaped. Human
society, the crown or flower of animal life, is to be
understood not by interpreting it in terms of the special
laws of the lower grades of evolution, but by learning to
see it as a further evolution, for every step of which the
laws have to be newly generalised. Sociology is not
simple “Darwinism”; and Darwin is only partially a
sociologist. He even miscarried through assuming
that his generalisation of the conditions of formation of
species yielded a final prescription for the control of the
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human species. But if our politicians, who are by way
of being the specialists of social science, would but
bring to their problems a moiety of the vigilant patience
with which Darwin surveyed his own field, to say
nothing of the benign temper in which he worked, they
would be on the way to a signal betterment of public
action. And towards such progress the disinterested
study of science is potentially a precious discipline.
V.
Nor is this all.
No man of fair intelligence and
strength of character can reach manhood without spend
ing some thought on the ultimate problems of life—
those which are stated on the one hand through religion
and on the other hand through philosophy. To be
indifferent on the great issues of life and death is to be
wanting in the essential seriousness which is needed to
make a human being either good or wise ; and some of
the special force of the words “ religion ” and “reli
gious ” in the past has come from the feeling that mere
indifference on these matters implies shallowness. Now,
if there is anything made clear by the discussions of the
past century, it is that the standing debate on religious
questions can be efficiently entered on only on a basis of
knowledge of the generalisations of the sciences—the
“ human,” that is, as well as the natural. To this con
clusion all the capable disputants come. Orthodox
religion is latterly being defended, not by rejecting the
sciences, but by seeking to found on them ; and that
lately evolved science in particular which we broadly
term Anthropology is being included in the orthodox
purview no less than the sciences of Biology and
Physics. To know something of Tylor and Lubbock
and Spencer and Frazer, or of what they have estab
lished, is becoming an acknowledged need on all hands,
�WHAT TO READ
17
even as it has long been an acknowledged need to know
the drift of Darwinism.
To have religious or philosophical opinions worth
mentioning, then, we must found on some scientific
knowledge of those aspects of life and nature which first
moved men to frame religions and philosophies. Begin
ning in this way, the young student will haply stick to
the true path of inquiry, which is the historical; that is
to say, he will look always to the historical evolution of
beliefs in order to shape aright his assent or dissent.
And in that way, there is cause to hope, he will best
learn the great lesson of tolerance. One thing becomes,
I think, quite certain to all students who in any degree
proceed upon critical reason—that on each side in every
great intellectual strife there has been some error.
Whichever side may be relatively right, it has some
“blind spot,” some misbelief; and sometimes, looking
back, it is much easier to see error on both sides than
truth on either.
To realise this is to feel, surely, that absolute rightness
is no more attainable than absolute happiness, and that
the working ideal for thoughtful men is simply that
of loyalty to reason, which means constant concern to
avoid the snares of prejudice that beset us all, and
willingness to admit that, as the best general is said to
be merely the one who makes fewest blunders, so the
truest thinker is the one who takes most precaution
against error. He who has learned this lesson will not
readily become a persecutor; and to abstain steadfastly
from persecution is a great part of civic wisdom and
virtue.
VI.
In getting knowledge and broadening his mind, then,
•our young reader is preparing not only to make the
best of life for himself, but to better it somewhat for
others. For no culture is truly sound, scientifically
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speaking, that does not tend to make men and women
better citizens. Of what ultimate avail are individual
culture and book knowledge if they do not save or
further civilisation ? What profits it men in general
if they gain their own souls, so to speak, and lose their
world ?
As I put it before, the problem of civic or corporate
well-being is as truly matter of science as any subject
matter commonly so-called. The trouble is that this,,
the very science of sciences, the ultimate practical
problem for men, is so seldom studiously approached.
You must spend tedious years in exact study, and give
proof of having learned something in them, before you
are permitted by law to prescribe medicines for the
troubles of the mere individual body. But for the
immensely complicated “body politic,” so hard to
anatomise and understand, every elector is as it were a
chartered physician. How many men ever doubt their
own fitness to doctor it? How many men take any pains
to know scientifically the nature of the frame they pre
scribe for? In any one of the principal political disputes
of the day, how many deem it necessary to make a
careful study before they form an opinion and cast a
vote ? To take the principal issue of the present moment,
how many on either side of the fiscal controversy have
felt the necessity of carefully studying economics before
coming to their conclusions ? I fear they are but a small
percentage.
Yet for an industrial State such as ours, economics,
‘‘ political economy,” is plainly the key science. Every
elector should try to get some grasp of it. I am not.
going in this case to prescribe manuals : it it well to
read more than one, comparing one with another; and
if you should begin with the splendid rhetoric of Ruskin,
who teaches rather as a prophet than as a man of
science, there is no harm, provided you remember that
eloquence is not necessarily truth, and that it is well to-
�WHAT TO READ
I9'
take further counsel. As to the different economic
schools, guidance can best be given otherwise ; but I
will offer the suggestion, which I have in some measure
tested in teaching, that the young reader should try to
take up his economics with his history. Here Buckle
will help him. Let him remember that economics is the
science of how things actually happen in industry and
commerce, in the production and the distribution of
wealth, in the creation of riches and poverty. To’
understand these things is a main part of the interest of
history ; and the true understanding of them works out
as economics. Political economy, in fact, to be worthy
of its name, should be a comprehension of some of the
main forces which are shaping the history of our own
day. And to do this all round, I need hardly say, is the
practical end of the science which we call Sociology—
that which I have already called the science of sciences—on the practical or human side, even as philosophy
is the science of all the sciences on the cosmic side.
The young listener or reader may perhaps smile if I
call this a fascinating science ; and I do not expect him
to be allured to it all at once, though he will find such a
book as Spencer’s Study of Sociology surprisingly interest
ing ; but I promise him—and her—that the day comes
when it grows to be fascinating for all who really take
any happiness in thinking. And to take happiness in
thinking is the gain that comes to all who have been
concerned to make any worthy use of that great
heritage of books. You may attain it, of course, in
other ways as well—in looking on the face of Nature ;
in studying flower and rock and tree and cloud ; in
watching the pageant of the stars. All of these things,
however, you will see better with the help of books ; and
if you grow, as we all should, equally on the side of
thought and feeling, of heart and head, you will find in
the troublous drama of the human life around you your
most lasting practical concern. You will care more and
�.20
WHAT TO READ
more to mend matters, to succour the feeble and the
wretched, to bring it about that there shall be less of
wretchedness and more of joy. And the scientific way
of going about that task—the way of the trained
physician as against that of the ignorant amateur or the
■quack—lies in thoroughly understanding how the social
body is constituted, how civilisation grows, how States
•and races prosper or wane. Such knowledge is
sociology.
VII.
When all is said, however, the good of life to ourselves
is to be had in the living of it; and while the desire to
better the world for the sake of others is the most
sustaining of aspirations, it would hardly be so if in
cherishing it we did not find our own inner lives made
better for us by the effort. And here it is that the
attempt to grasp and master the science of human
affairs, the science of society, yields to us that personal
reward which is the peculiar ministry of all good
literature. It is one of the ways in which we can best
triumph over life’s frustrations. Of these there is an
abundant supply for all of us; but when you look
reflectively in the face of frustration, you realise that it
stands for the mere coincidence of things as well as for
your own miscalculation ; and against that blind and
purposeless face of fortune you have in yourselves the
resource of mind, which must prevail, if only you decline
to surrender. Thus, for him or her who will use it,
literature is a heritage which nothing can take away.
The great French writer Montesquieu, who in his
•chief works did so much towards the scientific interpre
tation of social development, has left to us the declara
tion that he never in his life had a chagrin which half an
hour’s reading would not put away. It is to be feared
that he was not a very sensitive soul ; he must have
been a good deal at his ease in Zion, and he can hardly
�WHAT TO READ
21
have been much given to caring about other people’s
sorrows. And, indeed, however insensitive he was, he
must have been exaggerating somewhat in that assertion:
we cannot go through life, any of us, on such easy terms.
But, after due deductions have been made, Montesquieu’s,
avowal remains for us the revelation of a precious secret.
He has pointed to one of the great anodynes for the
pains of the mind.
And this anodyne, remember, is not a thing purchas
able by wealth ; it is the treasure of the poor, if they will
steadfastly claim it. I have read that a distinguished
American millionaire has recently declared that he would
give a million dollars for a new stomach. Well, that
too is a point at which millions of poor men have the
better of him ; but possibly his million may buy him
relief. The doctors can do wonders with our stomachs
now ; lately, I read of their taking a man’s stomach out
and somehow mending it or making him develop a new
one ; and happily they can help us by less extreme
measures also. Of another American millionaire it is
told that, finding himself growing blind, he has offered a
million dollars to anyone who will save his eyesight for
him ; and here again, though the case is more nearly
desperate, wealth may one day buy what would now
seem a miracle, such astonishing advances do our
oculists make in their mastery of their mystery. But I
am very sure that, if a millionaire should offer all his
fortune for a new mind, there is no human skill that can
supply him ; for the making of a mind that is to be
worth having in old age must be the work of all our
preceding years. He might buy condensed information,
or an assortment of ready-made opinions ; but what he
cannot buy is the thinking and judging faculty, the
power to enjoy the stores of wisdom and beauty treasured
up in books.
It is only the perverse, or those who cannot appreciate
what they disparage, who make light of books ; either
�.22
WHAT TO READ
they are ungratefully ignoring what books have done for
themselves, or they have not the patience to compass the
boon they depreciate. Consider what a library is. It
contains so many thousand books, many written merely
to entertain, many merely to make money, many by dull
people, but also many written by the wise and the witty,
the good and the learned, with the purpose of making
permanent their best thoughts and their happiest fancies.
Sift down your store to these, and what do you possess ?
The best thinking and the most felicitous utterance of
the people best worth knowing ; living with them, you
live in “the best of all good company.” All that they
have is yours. Turning your back on the noise and
■emptiness which makes up so much of daily life, you can
■dwell with them in an enchanted air. While the storm
blows outside you can sit with the curtains drawn, and
be led by Gibbon, at your own will, through the tremen
dous drama of the ancient world, or by Darwin, through
the far vaster vistas of those dim ages in which the
human world took its rise. Shelley will sing for you ;
Keats will pipe on his Grecian flutes ; and Milton will
roll forth for you the strains of his great organ. If the
fancy take you, you can be in Mayfair with Thackeray ;
in the New England woods with Hawthorne ; or in the
mapless Europe of Shakspere, behind whose magic
•curtain there goes on forever a transfigured life, which
is that of humanity turned into poetry. You may chop
logic with Mill, and argue your fill with Herbert
Spencer ; and you have this comfort all round, that when
you dispute with the writer you read, whether you be
right or wrong, he will always leave you the last word.
Nay, believe me, it is no fairy tale I am telling you.
The fairy gold, in the stories, turns into dead leaves ;
but those dead leaves of books reverse the magic, and
pay you spiritual gold everytime you have faith to draw.
All you need is to care about it. It is given to few of us
to save much money ; but it is open to the poorest to
�WHAT TO READ
23
save a.great deal of time. You do it by turning time
into knowledge, a deposit of which no fraud or com
mercial disaster can deprive you. And if you still shake
your head, and say that fine words butter no parsnips,
let me ask you in final challenge how you expect the
world’s parsnips are ever to be buttered better than now
if men do not attain to a better comprehension of their
own existence ? And how are they to rise to that unless
they read more, remember more, and think more?
Whatever the nations of the world have too little of,
there is one thing they all have in superfluity : be their
population dense or thin, growing or dwindling, they all
have too many blockheads to the square mile. And I
notice that on one point the politicians of all our parties
are agreed. Whatever they advocate or oppose, what
ever they say of each other, they all admit that in high
places and in low we want more of what they call
“efficiency.” And whatever end they may have in
view, we may be certain of this, that higher efficiency
means more knowledge, more study, more comprehen
sion, more intelligence, more brains. Then let us all do
what we can, each for himself, to get some.
�PRINTED BY WATTS AND CO.,
17, Johnson’s court, fleet street, London, e.c-
��IN THE PRESS.
Courses of StudC
By J. M. ROBERTSON.
This work is expected to extend to between four and five huh J
pages. It is an attempt to provide some systematic guidance to pi '
students on all the main lines of book-knowledge. The scheme
originated over a dozen years ago from the frequent requests mat
the editor of the National Reformer—which post Mr. Robertson held
after Mr. Bradlaugh, until the cessation of the journal—for advi* a
lines of reading. Such requests seemed to show a commonly fev r. '
and it was partly met by a series of “ Courses ” published from tin *
time in the journal in question. About the same period this need
recognised by the publication of Messrs. Sargant & Whishaw
Book to Books and the first of Mr. Swan Sonnenschein’s
bibliographies; but it has been felt that the original plan of “ Cotu^M^gj
is worth reviving.. Those published have accordingly been Care^
revised, and expanded by inclusion of the latest literature of impoiand a much larger number of entirely new courses has been uAJS
completing the undertaking. The book does not claim to be a.
Wii3!
complete bibliographies for specialists, but by its aid any diligent.
who has access to a fair public library can so follow up his studifiM
the main branches of knowledge as to attain competence therein, -y
Courses, cover anthropology, mythology, hierology (with special cofirS^^^^
on Judaism and Christianity), mental and moral philosophy, psycholr
logic, philology, aesthetics, history (in a series of separate corn •
I
political economy, sociology, histories of literatures, and the n</’
sciences.
■;
fljl
w
III
w
ggg&_
AGENTS FOR THE RATIONALIST PRESS ASSOCIATION, LTD.:
WATTS & GO., 17,JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, LONDON^W
�
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Dublin Core
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Title
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What to read : suggestions for the better utilisation of public libraries
Creator
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Robertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon) [1856-1933]
Description
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 23 p. ; 22 cm.
Notes: Substance of an address delivered before the Tyneside Sunday Lecture Society. Issued for the Rationalist Press Association, Limited. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
Publisher
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Watts & Co.
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1904
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N564
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Libraries
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<img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br /><span>This work (What to read : suggestions for the better utilisation of public libraries), identified by </span><span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk">Humanist Library and Archives</a></span><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
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Text
Language
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English
Bibliography
Books and Reading
Libraries
NSS