most foolish of men are indisposed to be guided by the experience and counsel of others. "Everything," writes Goethe, "in which man engages himself seriously is interminable" (Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre. Book III, Cp. III); and the possibility of progress in knowledge and proficiency certainly has no bounds; so it may not be out of place to observe here, before quitting the subject of equipment in general, that authors sometimes concern themselves little about adding anything to the knowledge acquired either before they began writing or during the earlier years of their literary work. The consequences of the mistake are foregone certainties. No spring can continue to flow which is not being perpetually fed with rain from on high.

CHAPTER VI

READING

GOETHE, in his autobiography (Aus meinem Leben. Book VIII) mentions that in his student days at Leipzic he watched the painting by Oeser, of the curtain for the new theatre. The subject was the approach to the Temple of Fame. In the foreground were groups of Muses and of the tutelary goddesses of the various arts. Statues of Sophocles and Aristophanes adorned the forecourt of the Temple; and around them were gathered the modern dramatic poets. The temple itself stood in the background. A solitary figure, a man clad in a light jerkin, utterly regardless of the different groups on either side of him, was making straight for its portals - William Shakespeare.

A Shakespearean student might feel disposed to dispute Shakespeare's entire disregard of everything that had been done by his predecessors; might even have something to say about genius evinced by the

magnificent results obtained from such materials as lay at Shakespeare's command. Oeser's meaning is, however, plain — that this one man alone secured himself immortality by his own unassisted genius.

The writer who is modest enough to be persuaded that his genius is less than that of Shakespeare, may, while falling back upon the less independent policy of trying to gather from the examples of his predecessors all that he can, console himself with the reflection that this has been the practice of authors of no mean repute. Eschylus asserted that his tragedies were only "fragments of the great feast of Homer " (Athenaeus, VIII, 49. p. 347. e).

The judicious writer will be, therefore, a student of the examples of the great. His reading, when regarded from this point of view, is a subject so large that any adequate treatment of it, with due attention to its many various aspects, would demand the whole of a volume of considerable dimensions. This being impossible in a few pages that admit only of the barest outlines, it must suffice to recommend to the individual consideration of every man of letters a very thoughtful, and, so far as that is possible, thorough consideration of what the charac

ter and the aims of his own reading are, or ought to be. To read everything, or even all that has been written about anything is impossible. A deliberate selection of this and neglect of that is imperative. The neglect must be regretted, because its result is inevitable ignorance of many things; but it must be so decided, because any other policy involves a dissipation of time and energy in a fruitless mass of indefinite reading. To say that almost everything in the shape of benefit derived from reading depends upon prudence in the choice of books is hardly necessary. Scarcely less important than the actual selection of the works that shall be read is, however, the possession on the reader's part of a perfectly definite apprehension of the purpose with which he is reading. An author may, indeed, feel himself as much at liberty as any one else to while away a leisure hour with a book; and will be more likely than any one else to find highly pleasurable entertainment in that most innocent and cultivated pastime; but reading of this sort alone can never lead to such an acquaintance with literature as it becomes a man of letters to possess. A great deal of an author's reading is necessarily studious. At the same time an oppo

site mistake will be made by the writer the whole of whose reading is limited to the acquisition of such definite knowledge as may happen to be indispensable for the accomplishment of some immediate purpose. Reading of that kind is, indeed, often necessary; it is also often of an extremely laborious and highly improving kind: but the man who, on account of haste, or of idleness, or for any other reason, limits his reading to indispensable studies, in the end provides himself with a mind that resembles a book of reference crammed with accurate and valuable information, but essentially arid. The reading that is to make "the full man" mentioned by Bacon in his essay on Studies" (with which every author should be familiar) implies a combination of the elements of definite accurate study with a due proportion of reading of a much more general and "humane" kind. This sort of reading alone can give an author's work the charm of literary flavour.

66

An author's reading, therefore, will be of two sorts, often crossing or melting into each other; of which the one will have for its aim the mastery of some definite subject, whilst the other will imply, in the widest sense possible for the individual, such a fa