The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858

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Be sure, then, to read no mean books. Shun the spawn of the press on
the gossip of the hour. Do not read what you shall learn without
asking, in the street and the train. Dr. Johnson said, "he always
went into stately shops"; and good travellers stop at the best hotels;
for, though they cost more, they do not cost much more, and there is
the good company and the best information. In like manner, the
scholar knows that the famed books contain, first and last, the best
thoughts and facts. Now and then, by rarest luck, in some foolish
Grub Street is the gem we want. But in the best circles is the best
information. If you should transfer the amount of your reading day
by day in the newspaper to the standard authors,--but who dare speak
of such a thing?

The three practical rules, then, which I have to offer, are,

1. Never read any book that is not a year old.
2. Never read any but famed books.
3. Never read any but what you like; or, in Shakespeare's phrase,

"No profit goes where is no pleasure ta'en;
In brief, Sir, study what you most affect."

Montaigne says, "Books are a languid pleasure"; but I find certain
books vital and spermatic, not leaving the reader what he was; he
shuts the book a richer man. I would never willingly read any others
than such. And I will venture, at the risk of inditing a list of old
primers and grammars, to count the few books which a superficial
reader must thankfully use.

Of the old Greek books, I think there are five which we cannot spare:--
1. Homer, who, in spite of Pope, and all the learned uproar of
centuries, has really the true fire, and is good for simple minds,
is the true and adequate germ of Greece, and occupies that place as
history, which nothing can supply. It holds through all literature,
that our best history is still poetry. It is so in Hebrew, in
Sanscrit, and in Greek. English history is best known through
Shakspeare; how much through Merlin, Robin Hood, and the Scottish
ballads! the German, through the Nibelungen Lied; the Spanish,
through the Cid. Of Homer, George Chapman's is the heroic translation,
though the most literal prose version is the best of all.--2.
Herodotus, whose history contains inestimable anecdotes, which
brought it with the learned into a sort of disesteem; but in these
days, when it is found that what is most memorable of history is a
few anecdotes, and that we need not be alarmed, though we should
find it not dull, it is regaining credit.--3. Aeschylus, the
grandest of the three tragedians, who has given us under a thin veil
the first plantation of Europe. The "Prometheus" is a poem of the
like dignity and scope as the book of Job, or the Norse "Edda."--4.
Of Plato I hesitate to speak, lest there should be no end. You find
in him that which you have already found in Homer, now ripened to
thought,--the poet converted to a philosopher, with loftier strains
of musical wisdom than Homer reached, as if Homer were the youth,
and Plato the finished man; yet with no less security of bold and
perfect song, when he cares to use it, and with some harpstrings
fetched from a higher heaven. He contains the future, as he came out
of the past. In Plato, you explore modern Europe in its causes and
seed,--all that in thought, which the history of Europe embodies or
has yet to embody. The well-informed man finds himself anticipated.
Plato is up with him, too. Nothing has escaped him. Every new crop
in the fertile harvest of reform, every fresh suggestion of modern
humanity is there. If the student wish to see both sides, and
justice done to the man of the world, pitiless exposure of pedants,
and the supremacy of truth and the religious sentiment, he shall be
contented also. Why should not young men be educated on this book?
It would suffice for the tuition of the race,--to test their
understanding, and to express their reason. Here is that which is so
attractive to all men,--the literature of aristocracy shall I call it?--
the picture of the best persons, sentiments, and manners, by the
first master, in the best times,--portraits of Pericles, Alcibiades,
Crito, Prodicus, Protagoras, Anaxagoras, and Socrates, with the
lovely background of the Athenian and suburban landscape. Or who can
overestimate the images with which he has enriched the minds of men,
and which pass like bullion in the currency of all nations? Read the
"Phaedo," the "Protagoras," the "Phaedrus," the "Timaeus," the
"Republic," and the "Apology of Socrates." 5. Plutarch cannot be
spared from the smallest library: first, because he is so readable,
which is much; then, that he is medicinal and invigorating. The
Lives of Cimon, Lycurgus, Alexander, Demosthenes, Phocion, Marcellus
and the rest, are what history has of best. But this book has taken
care of itself, and the opinion of the world is expressed in the
innumerable cheap editions, which make it as accessible as a
newspaper. But Plutarch's "Morals" is less known, and seldom
reprinted. Yet such a reader as I am writing to can as ill spare it
as the "Lives." He will read in it the essays "On the Daemon of
Socrates," "On Isis and Osiris," "On Progress in Virtue," "On
Garrulity," "On Love," and thank anew the art of printing, and the
cheerful domain of ancient thinking. Plutarch charms by the facility
of his associations; so that it signifies little where you open his
book, you find yourself at the Olympian tables. His memory is like
the Isthmian Games, where all that was excellent in Greece was
assembled, and you are stimulated and recruited by lyric verses, by
philosophic sentiments, by the forms and behavior of heroes, by the
worship of the gods, and by the passing of fillets, parsley and
laurel wreaths, chariots, armor, sacred cups, and utensils of
sacrifice. An inestimable trilogy of ancient social pictures are the
three "Banquets" respectively of Plato, Xenophon, and Plutarch.
Plutarch's has the least claim to historical accuracy; but the
meeting of the Seven Wise Masters is a charming portraiture of
ancient manners and discourse, and is as dear as the voice of a fife,
and entertaining as a French novel. Xenophon's delineation of
Athenian manners is an accessory to Plato, and supplies traits of
Socrates; whilst Plato's has merits of every kind,--being a
repertory of the wisdom of the ancients on the subject of love,--a
picture of a feast of wits, not less descriptive than Aristophanes,--
and, lastly, containing that ironical eulogy of Socrates which is
the source from which all the portraits of that head current in
Europe have been drawn.

Of course, a certain outline should be obtained of Greek history, in
which the important moments and persons can be rightly set down; but
the shortest is the best, and, if one lacks stomach for Mr. Grote's
voluminous annals, the old slight and popular summary of Goldsmith
or Gillies will serve. The valuable part is the age of Pericles, and
the next generation. And here we must read the "Clouds" of
Aristophanes, and what more of that master we gain appetite for, to
learn our way in the streets of Athens, and to know the tyranny of
Aristophanes, requiring more genius and sometimes not less cruelty
than belonged to the official commanders. Aristophanes is now very
accessible, with much valuable commentary, through the labors of
Mitchell and Cartwright. An excellent popular book is J. A. St.
John's "Ancient Greece"; the "Life and Letters" of Niebuhr, even
more than his Lectures, furnish leading views; and Winckelmann, a
Greek born out of due time, has become essential to an intimate
knowledge of the Attic genius. The secret of the recent histories in
German and in English is the discovery, owed first to Wolff, and
later to Boeckh, that the sincere Greek history of that period must
be drawn from Demosthenes, specially from the business orations, and
from the comic poets.

If we come down a little by natural steps from the master to the
disciples, we have, six or seven centuries later, the Platonists,--
who also cannot be skipped,--Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, Synesius,
Jamblichus. Of Jamblichus the Emperor Julian said, "that he was
posterior to Plato in time, not in genius." Of Plotinus, we have
eulogies by Porphyry and Longinus, and the favor of the Emperor
Gallienus,--indicating the respect he inspired among his
contemporaries. If any one who had read with interest the "Isis and
Osiris" of Plutarch should then read a chapter called "Providence,"
by Synesius, translated into English by Thomas Taylor, he will find
it one of the majestic remains of literature, and, like one walking
in the noblest of temples, will conceive new gratitude to his
fellowmen, and a new estimate of their nobility. The imaginative
scholar will find few stimulants to his brain like these writers. He
has entered the Elysian Fields; and the grand and pleasing figures
of gods and daemons and demoniacal men, of the "azonic" and the
"aquatic gods," daemons with fulgid eyes, and all the rest of the
Platonic rhetoric, exalted a little under the African sun, sail
before his eyes. The acolyte has mounted the tripod over the cave at
Delphi; his heart dances, his sight is quickened. These guides speak
of the gods with such depth and with such pictorial details, as if
they had been bodily present at the Olympian feasts. The reader of
these books makes new acquaintance with his own mind; new regions of
thought are opened. Jamblichus's "Life of Pythagoras" works more
directly on the will than the others; since Pythagoras was eminently
a practical person, the founder of a school of ascetics and
socialists, a planter of colonies, and nowise a man of abstract
studies alone.

The respectable and sometimes excellent translations of Bohn's
Library have done for literature what railroads have done for
internal intercourse. I do not hesitate to read all the books I have
named, and all good books, in translations. What is really best in
any book is translatable,--any real insight or broad human sentiment.
Nay, I observe, that, in our Bible, and other books of lofty moral
tone, it seems easy and inevitable to render the rhythm and music of
the original into phrases of equal melody. The Italians have a fling
at translators, _i traditori traduttori_, but I thank them. I rarely
read any Latin, Greek, German, Italian, sometimes not a French book
in the original, which I can procure in a good version. I like to be
beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which
receives tributaries from every region under heaven. I should as
soon think of swimming across Charles River, when I wish to go to
Boston, as of reading all my books in originals, when I have them
rendered for me in my mother tongue.

For history, there is great choice of ways to bring the student
through early Rome. If he can read Livy, he has a good book; but one
of the short English compends, some Goldsmith or Ferguson, should be
used, that will place in the cycle the bright stars of Plutarch. The
poet Horace is the eye of the Augustan age; Tacitus, the wisest of
historians; and Martial will give him Roman manners, and some very
bad ones, in the early days of the Empire: but Martial must be read,
if read at all, in his own tongue. These will bring him to Gibbon,
who will take him in charge, and convey him with abundant
entertainment down--with notice of all remarkable objects on the way--
through fourteen hundred years of time. He cannot spare Gibbon, with
his vast reading, with such wit and continuity of mind, that, though
never profound, his book is one of the conveniences of civilization,
like the proposed railroad from New York to the Pacific,--and, I
think, will be sure to send the reader to his "Memoirs of Himself,"
and the "Extracts from my Journal," and "Abstracts of my Readings,"
which will spur the laziest scholar to emulation of his prodigious
performance.

Now having our idler safe down as far as the fall of Constantinople
in 1453, he is in very good courses; for here are trusty hands
waiting for him. The cardinal facts of European history are soon
learned. There is Dante's poem, to open the Italian Republics of the
Middle Age; Dante's "Vita Nuova," to explain Dante and Beatrice; and
Boccaccio's "Life of Dante,"--a great man to describe a greater. To
help us, perhaps a volume or two of M. Sismondi's "Italian Republics"
will be as good as the entire sixteen. When we come to Michel Angelo,
his Sonnets and Letters must be read, with his Life by Vasari, or,
in our day, by Mr. Duppa. For the Church, and the Feudal Institution,
Mr. Hallam's "Middle Ages" will furnish, if superficial, yet
readable and conceivable outlines.

The "Life of the Emperor Charles V.," by the useful Robertson, is
still the key of the following age. Ximenes, Columbus, Loyola, Luther,
Erasmus, Melancthon, Francis I., Henry VIII., Elizabeth, and Henry IV.
of France, are his contemporaries. It is a time of seeds and
expansions, whereof our recent civilization is the fruit.

If now the relations of England to European affairs bring him to
British ground, he is arrived at the very moment when modern history
takes new proportions. He can look back for the legends and
mythology to the "Younger Edda" and the "Heimrskringla" of Snorro
Sturleson, to Mallet's "Northern Antiquities," to Ellis's "Metrical
Romances," to Asser's "Life of Alfred," and Venerable Bede, and to
the researches of Sharon Turner and Palgrave. Hume will serve him
for an intelligent guide, and in the Elizabethan era he is at the
richest period of the English mind, with the chief men of action and
of thought which that nation has produced, and with a pregnant
future before him. Here he has Shakspeare, Spenser, Sidney, Raleigh,
Bacon, Chapman, Jonson, Ford, Beaumont and Fletcher, Herbert, Donne,
Herrick; and Milton, Marvell, and Dryden, not long after.

In reading history, he is to prefer the history of individuals. He
will not repent the time he gives to Bacon,--not if he read the
"Advancement of Learning," the "Essays," the "Novum Organon," the
"History of Henry VII.," and then all the "Letters," (especially
those to the Earl of Devonshire, explaining the Essex business,) and
all but his "Apophthegms."

The task is aided by the strong mutual light which these men shed on
each other. Thus, the Works of Ben Jonson are a sort of hoop to bind
all these fine persons together, and to the land to which they belong.
He has written verses to or on all his notable contemporaries; and
what with so many occasional poems, and the portrait sketches in his
"Discoveries," and the gossiping record of his opinions in his
conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden, has really illustrated
the England of his time, if not to the same extent, yet much in the
same way, as Walter Scott has celebrated the persons and places of
Scotland. Walton, Chapman, Herrick, and Sir Henry Wotton write also
to the times.

Among the best books are certain _Autobiographies_: as, St.
Augustine's Confessions; Benvenuto Cellini's Life; Montaigne's Essays;
Lord Herbert of Cherbury's Memoirs; Memoirs of the Cardinal de Retz;
Rousseau's Confessions; Linnaeus's Diary; Gibbon's, Hume's, Franklin's,
Burns's, Alfieri's, Goethe's, and Haydon's Autobiographies.

Another class of books closely allied to these, and of like interest,
are those which may be called _Table-Talks_; of which the best are
Saadi's Gulistan; Luther's Table-Talk; Aubrey's Lives; Spence's
Anecdotes; Selden's Table-Talk; Boswell's Life of Johnson;
Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe; Coleridge's Table-Talk; and
Hazlitt's Life of Northcote.

There is a class whose value I should designate as favorites; such
as Froissart's Chronicles; Southey's Chronicle of the Cid; Cervantes;
Sully's Memoirs; Rabelais; Montaigne; Izaak Walton; Evelyn; Sir
Thomas Browne; Aubrey; Sterne; Horace Walpole; Lord Clarendon;
Doctor Johnson; Burke, shedding floods of light on his times; Lamb;
Landor; and De Quincey;--a list, of course, that may easily be
swelled, as dependent on individual caprice. Many men are as tender
and irritable as lovers in reference to these predilections. Indeed,
a man's library is a sort of harem, and I observe that tender
readers have a great prudencey in showing their books to a stranger.

The annals of bibliography afford many examples of the delirious
extent to which book-fancying can go, when the legitimate delight in
a book is transferred to a rare edition or to a manuscript. This
mania reached its height about the beginning of the present century.
For an autograph of Shakspeare one hundred and fifty-five guineas
were given. In May, 1812, the library of the Duke of Roxburgh was
sold. The sale lasted forty-two days,--we abridge the story from
Dibdin,--and among the many curiosities was a copy of Boccaccio
published by Valdarfer, at Venice, in 1471; the only perfect copy of
this edition. Among the distinguished company which attended the
sale were the Duke of Devonshire, Earl Spencer, and the Duke of
Marlborough, then Marquis of Blandford. The bid stood at five hundred
guineas. "A thousand guineas," said Earl Spencer: "And ten," added
the Marquis. You might hear a pin drop. All eyes were bent on the
bidders. Now they talked apart, now ate a biscuit, now made a bet,
but without the least thought of yielding one to the other.
"Two thousand pounds," said the Marquis. The Earl Spencer bethought
him like a prudent general of useless bloodshed and waste of powder,
and had paused a quarter of a minute, when Lord Althorp with long
steps came to his side, as if to bring his father a fresh lance to
renew the fight. Father and son whispered together, and Earl Spencer
exclaimed, "Two thousand two hundred and fifty pounds!" An electric
shock went through the assembly. "And ten," quietly added the Marquis.
There ended the strife. Ere Evans let the hammer fall, he paused;
the ivory instrument swept the air; the spectators stood dumb, when
the hammer fell. The stroke of its fall sounded on the farthest
shores of Italy. The tap of that hammer was heard in the libraries
of Rome, Milan, and Venice. Boccaccio stirred in his sleep of five
hundred years, and M. Van Praet groped in vain amidst the royal
alcoves in Paris, to detect a copy of the famed Valdarfer Boccaccio.

Another class I distinguish by the term _Vocabularies_. Burton's
"Anatomy of Melancholy" is a book of great learning. To read it is
like reading in a dictionary. 'Tis an inventory to remind us how
many classes and species of facts exist, and, in observing into what
strange and multiplex by-ways learning has strayed, to infer our
opulence. Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no
cant in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestion,--
the raw material of possible poems and histories. Nothing is wanting
but a little shuffling, sorting, ligature, and cartilage. Out of a
hundred examples, Cornelius Agrippa "On the Vanity of Arts and
Sciences" is a specimen of that scribatious-ness which grew to be
the habit of the gluttonous readers of his time. Like the modern
Germans, they read a literature, whilst other mortals read a few
books. They read voraciously, and must disburden themselves; so they
take any general topic, as, Melancholy, or Praise of Science, or
Praise of Folly, and write and quote without method or end. Now and
then out of that affluence of their learning comes a fine sentence
from Theophrastus, or Seneca, or Boethius, but no high method, no
inspiring efflux. But one cannot afford to read for a few sentences;
they are good only as strings of suggestive words.

There is another class more needful to the present age, because the
currents of custom run now in another direction, and leave us dry on
this side;--I mean the _Imaginative_. A right metaphysics should do
justice to the cooerdinate powers of Imagination, Insight,
Understanding, and Will. Poetry, with its aids of Mythology and
Romance, must be well allowed for an imaginative creature. Men are
ever lapsing into a beggarly habit, wherein everything that is not
ciphering, that is, which does not serve the tyrannical animal, is
hustled out of sight. Our orators and writers are of the same poverty,
and, in this rag-fair, neither the Imagination, the great awakening
power, nor the Morals, creative of genius and of men, are addressed.
But though orator and poet are of this hunger party, the capacities
remain. We must have symbols. The child asks you for a story, and is
thankful for the poorest. It is not poor to him, but radiant with
meaning. The man asks for a novel,--that is, asks leave, for a few
hours, to be a poet, and to paint things as they ought to be. The
youth asks for a poem. The very dunces wish to go to the theatre.
What private heavens can we not open, by yielding to all the
suggestion of rich music! We must have idolatries, mythologies, some
swing and verge for the creative power lying coiled and cramped here,
driving ardent natures to insanity and crime, if it do not find vent.
Without the great and beautiful arts which speak to the sense of
beauty, a man seems to me a poor, naked, shivering creature. These
are his becoming draperies, which warm and adorn him. Whilst the
prudential and economical tone of society starves the imagination,
affronted Nature gets such indemnity as she may. The novel is that
allowance and frolic the imagination finds. Everything else pins it
down, and men flee for redress to Byron, Scott, Disraeli, Dumas, Sand,
Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, and Reade. Their education is neglected;
but the circulating library and the theatre, as well as the
trout-fishing, the Notch Mountains, the Adirondac country, the tour
to Mont Blanc, to the White Hills, and the Ghauts, make such amends
as they can.

The imagination infuses a certain volatility and intoxication. It
has a flute which sets the atoms of our frame in a dance, like
planets, and, once so liberated, the whole man reeling drunk to the
music, they never quite subside to their old stony state. But what
is the Imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy;
only the precursor of the Reason. And books that treat the old
pedantries of the world, our times, places, professions, customs,
opinions, histories, with a certain freedom, and distribute things,
not after the usages of America and Europe, but after the laws of
right reason, and with as daring a freedom as we use in dreams, put
us on our feet again, enable us to form an original judgment of our
duties, and suggest new thoughts for to-morrow.

"Lucrezia Floriani," "Le Peche de M. Antoine," "Jeanne," of George
Sand, are great steps from the novel of one termination, which we
all read twenty years ago. Yet how far off from life and manners and
motives the novel still is! Life lies about us dumb; the day, as we
know it, has not yet found a tongue. These stories are to the plots
of real life what the figures in "La Belle Assemblee," which
represent the fashion of the month, are to portraits. But the novel
will find the way to our interiors one day, and will not always be
the novel of costume merely. I do not think them inoperative now. So
much novel-reading cannot leave the young men and maidens untouched;
and doubtless it gives some ideal dignity to the day. The young
study noble behavior; and as the player in "Consuelo" insists that
he and his colleagues on the boards have taught princes the fine
etiquette and strokes of grace and dignity which they practise with
so much effect in their villas and among their dependents, so I
often see traces of the Scotch or the French novel in the courtesy
and brilliancy of young midshipmen, collegians, and clerks. Indeed,
when one observes how ill and ugly people make their loves and
quarrels, 'tis pity they should not read novels a little more, to
import the fine generosities, and the clear, firm conduct, which are
as becoming in the unions and separations which love effects under
shingle roofs as in palaces and among illustrious personages.

In novels the most serious questions are really beginning to be
discussed. What made the popularity of "Jane Eyre," but that a
central question was answered in some sort? The question there
answered in regard to a vicious marriage will always be treated
according to the habit of the party. A person of commanding
individualism will answer it as Rochester does,--as Cleopatra, as
Milton, as George Sand do,--magnifying the exception into a rule,
dwarfing the world into an exception. A person of less courage, that
is, of less constitution, will answer as the heroine does,--giving
way to fate, to conventionalism, to the actual state and doings of
men and women.

For the most part, our novel-reading is a passion for results. We
admire parks, and high-born beauties, and the homage of drawing-rooms,
and parliaments. They make us skeptical, by giving prominence to
wealth and social position.

I remember when some peering eyes of boys discovered that the
oranges hanging on the boughs of an orange-tree in a gay piazza were
tied to the twigs by thread. I fear 'tis so with the novelist's
prosperities. Nature has a magic by which she fits the man to his
fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character. But the novelist
plucks this event here, and that fortune there, and ties them rashly
to his figures, to tickle the fancy of his readers with a cloying
success, or scare them with shocks of tragedy. And so, on the whole,
'tis a juggle. We are cheated into laughter or wonder by feats which
only oddly combine acts that we do every day. There is no new element,
no power, no furtherance. 'Tis only confectionery, not the raising
of new corn. Great is the poverty of their inventions. _She was
beautiful, and he fell in love_. Money, and killing, and the
Wandering Jew, and persuading the lover that his mistress is
betrothed to another,--these are the mainsprings; new names, but no
new qualities in the men and women. Hence the vain endeavor to keep
any bit of this fairy gold, which has rolled like a brook through
our hands. A thousand thoughts awoke; great rainbows seemed to span
the sky; a morning among the mountains;--but we close the book, and
not a ray remains in the memory of evening. But this passion for
romance, and this disappointment, show how much we need real
elevations and pure poetry; that which shall show us, in morning and
night, in stars and mountains, and in all the plight and
circumstance of men, the analogons of our own thoughts, and a like
impression made by a just book and by the face of Nature.

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