PEN America 1: Classics
This piece was originally published in "The Common Reader, Second Series," in 1926.
How Should One Read a Book?
In the first place, I want to emphasize the note of interrogation at
the end of my title. Even if I could answer the question for myself,
the answer would apply only to me and not to you. The only advice,
indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no
advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come
to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at
liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not
allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important
quality that a reader can possess. After all, what laws can be laid
down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a
certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say.
Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities,
however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell
us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is
to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those
sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and
conventions—there we have none.
But to enjoy freedom, if the platitude is pardonable, we have of course
to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and
ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single
rose-bush; we must train them, exactly and powerfully, here on the very
spot. This, it may be, is one of the first difficulties that faces us
in a library. What is “the very spot?” There may well seem to be
nothing but a conglomeration and huddle of confusion. Poems and novels,
histories and memories, dictionaries and blue-books; books written in
all languages by men and women of all tempers, races, and ages jostle
each other on the shelf. And outside the donkey brays, the women gossip
at the pump, the colts gallop across the fields. Where are we to begin?
How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the
deepest and widest pleasure from what we read?
It is simple enough to say that since books have classes—fiction,
biography, poetry—we should separate them and take from each what it is
right that each should give us. Yet few people ask from books what
books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and
divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that
it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history
that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such
preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. Do
not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and
accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticize at first, you
are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from
what you read. But if you open your mind as widely as possible, then
signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from the twist and
turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence of a
human being unlike any other. Steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself
with this, and soon you will find that your author is giving you, or
attempting to give you, something far more definite. The
thirty-chapters of a novel—if we consider how to read a novel first—are
an attempt to make something as formed and controlled as a building:
but words are more impalpable than bricks; reading is a longer and more
complicated process than seeing. Perhaps the quickest way to understand
the elements of what a novelist is doing is not to read, but to write;
to make your own experiment with the dangers and difficulties of words.
Recall, then, some event that has left a distinct impression on you—
how at the corner of the street, perhaps, you passed two people
talking. A tree shook; an electric light danced; the tone of the talk
was comic, but also tragic; a whole vision, an entire conception,
seemed contained in that moment.
But when you attempt to reconstruct it in words, you will find that it
breaks into a thousand conflicting impressions. Some must be subdued;
others emphasized; in the process you will lose, probably, all grasp
upon the emotion itself. Then turn from your blurred and littered pages
to the opening pages of some great novelist—Defoe, Jane Austen, Hardy.
Now you will be better able to appreciate their mastery. It is not
merely that we are in the presence of a different person—Defoe, Jane
Austen, or Thomas Hardy—but that we are living in a different world.
Here, in Robinson Crusoe, we are trudging a plain high road; one thing
happens after another; the fact and the order of the fact is enough.
But if the open air and adventure mean everything to Defoe they mean
nothing to Jane Austen. Hers is the drawing-room, and people talking,
and by the many mirrors of their talk revealing their characters. And
if, when we have accustomed ourselves to the drawing-room and its
reflections, we turn to Hardy, we are once more spun round. The moors
are round us and the stars are above our heads. The other side of the
mind is now exposed—the dark side that comes uppermost in solitude, not
the light side that shows in company. Our relations are not towards
people, but towards Nature and destiny. Yet different as these worlds
are, each is consistent with itself. The maker of each is careful to
observe the laws of his own perspective, and however great a strain
they may put upon us they will never confuse us, as lesser writers so
frequently do, by introducing two different kinds of reality into the
same book. Thus to go from one great novelist to another—from Jane
Austen to Hardy, from Peacock to Trollope, from Scott to Meredith—is to
be wrenched and uprooted; to be thrown this way and then that. To read
a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must be capable not only of
great fineness of perception, but of great boldness of imagination if
you are going to make use of all that the novelist—the great
artist—gives you.
But a glance at the heterogeneous company on the shelf will show you
that writers are very seldom “great artists;” far more often a book
makes no claim to be a work of art at all. These biographies and
autobiographies, for example, lives of great men, of men long dead and
forgotten, that stand cheek by jowl with the novels and poems, are we
to refuse to read them because they are not “art?” Or shall we read
them, but read them in a different way, with a different aim? Shall we
read them in the first place to satisfy that curiosity which possesses
us sometimes when in the evening we linger in front of a house where
the lights are lit and the blinds not yet drawn, and each floor of the
house shows us a different section of human life in being? Then we are
consumed with curiosity about the lives of these people—the servants
gossiping, the gentlemen dining, the girl dressing for a party, the old
woman at the window with her knitting. Who are they, what are they,
what are their names, their occupations, their thoughts, and adventures?
Biographies and memoirs answer such questions, light up innumerable
such houses; they show us people going about their daily affairs,
toiling, failing, succeeding, eating, hating, loving, until they die.
And sometimes as we watch, the house fades and the iron railings vanish
and we are out at sea; we are hunting, sailing, fighting; we are among
savages and soldiers; we are taking part in great campaigns. Or if we
like to stay here in England, in London, still the scene changes; the
street narrows; the house becomes small, cramped, diamond-paned, and
malodorous. We see a poet, Donne, driven from such a house because the
walls were so thin that when the children cried their voices cut
through them. We can follow him, through the paths that lie in the
pages of books, to Twickenham; to Lady Bedford’s Park, a famous
meeting-ground for nobles and poets; and then turn our steps to Wilton,
the great house under the downs, and hear Sidney read the Arcadia to
his sister; and ramble among the very marshes and see the very herons
that figure in that famous romance; and then again travel north with
that other Lady Pembroke, Anne Clifford, to her wild moors, or plunge
into the city and control our merriment at the sight of Gabriel Harvey
in his black velvet suit arguing about poetry with Spenser. Nothing is
more fascinating than to grope and stumble in the alternate darkness
and splendor of Elizabethan London. But there is no staying there. The
Temples and the Swifts, the Harleys and the St Johns beckon us on; hour
upon hour can be spent disentangling their quarrels and deciphering
their characters; and when we tire of them we can stroll on, past a
lady in black wearing diamonds, to Samuel Johnson and Goldsmith and
Garrick; or cross the channel, if we like, and meet Voltaire and
Diderot, Madame du Deffand; and so back to England and Twickenham—how
certain places repeat themselves and certain names!—where Lady Bedford
had her Park once and Pope lived later, to Walpole’s home at Strawberry
Hill. But Walpole introduces us to such a swarm of new acquaintances,
there are so many houses to visit and bells to ring that we may well
hesitate for a moment, on the Miss Berrys’ doorstep, for example, when
behold, up comes Thackeray; he is the friend of the woman whom Walpole
loved; so that merely by going from friend to friend, from garden to
garden, from house to house, we have passed from one end of English
literature to another and wake to find ourselves here again in the
present, if we can so differentiate this moment from all that have gone
before. This, then, is one of the ways in which we can read these lives
and letters; we can make them light up the many windows of the past; we
can watch the famous dead in their familiar habits and fancy sometimes
that we are very close and can surprise their secrets, and sometimes we
may pull out a play or a poem that they have written and see whether it
reads differently in the presence of the author. But this again rouses
other questions. How far, we must ask ourselves, is a book influenced
by its writer’s life—how far is it safe to let the man interpret the
writer? How far shall we resist or give way to the sympathies and
antipathies that the man himself rouses in us—so sensitive are words,
so receptive of the character of the author? These are questions that
press upon us when we read lives and letters, and we must answer them
for ourselves, for nothing can be more fatal than to be guided by the
preferences of others in a matter so personal.
But also we can read such books with another aim, not to throw light on
literature, not to become familiar with famous people, but to refresh
and exercise our own creative powers. Is there not an open window on
the right hand of the bookcase? How delightful to stop reading and look
out! How stimulating the scene is, in its unconsciousness, its
irrelevance, its perpetual movement—the colts galloping round the
field, the woman filling her pail at the well, the donkey throwing back
his head and emitting his long, acrid moan. The greater part of any
library is nothing but the record of such fleeting moments in the lives
of men, women, and donkeys. Every literature, as it grows old, has its
rubbish-heap, its record of vanished moments and forgotten lives told
in faltering and feeble accents that have perished. But if you give
yourself up to the delight of rubbish-reading you will be surprised,
indeed you will be overcome, by the relics of human life that have been
cast out to molder. It may be one letter—but what a vision it gives! It
may be a few sentences—but what vistas they suggest! Sometimes a whole
story will come together with such beautiful humor and pathos and
completeness that it seems as if a great novelist had been at work, yet
it is only an old actor, Tate Wilkinson, remembering the strange story
of Captain Jones; it is only a young subaltern serving under Arthur
Wellesley and falling in love with a pretty girl at Lisbon; it is only
Maria Allen letting fall her sewing in the empty drawing-room and
sighing how she wishes she had taken Dr Burney’s good advice and had
never eloped with her Rishy. None of this has any value; it is
negligible in the extreme; yet how absorbing it is now and again to go
through the rubbish-heaps and find rings and scissors and broken noses
buried in the huge past and try to piece them together while the colt
gallops round the field, the woman fills her pail at the well, and the
donkey brays.
But we tire of rubbish-reading in the long run. We tire of searching
for what is needed to complete the half-truth which is all that the
Wilkinsons, the Bunburys and the Maria Allens are able to offer us.
They had not the artist’s power of mastering and eliminating; they
could not tell the whole truth even about their own lives; they have
disfigured the story that might have been so shapely. Facts are all
that they can offer us, and facts are a very inferior form of fiction.
Thus the desire grows upon us to have done with half-statements and
approximations; to cease from searching out the minute shades of human
character, to enjoy the greater abstractness, the purer truth of
fiction. Thus we create the mood, intense and generalized, unaware of
detail, but stressed by some regular, recurrent beat, whose natural
expression is poetry; and that is the time to read poetry when we are
almost able to write it.
Western wind, when wilt thou blow?
The small rain down can rain.
Christ, if my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again!
The impact of poetry is so hard and direct that for the moment there is
no other sensation except that of the poem itself. What profound depths
we visit then—how sudden and complete is our immersion! There is
nothing here to catch hold of; nothing to stay us in our flight. The
illusion of fiction is gradual; its effects are prepared; but who when
they read these four lines stops to ask who wrote them, or conjures up
the thought of Donne’s house or Sidney’s secretary; or enmeshes them in
the intricacy of the past and the succession of generations? The poet
is always our contemporary. Our being for the moment is centered and
constricted, as in any violent shock of personal emotion. Afterwards,
it is true, the sensation begins to spread in wider rings through our
minds; remoter senses are reached; these begin to sound and to comment
and we are aware of echoes and reflections. The intensity of poetry
covers an immense range of emotion. We have only to compare the force
and directness of
I shall fall like a tree, and find my grave,
Only remembering that I grieve,
with the wavering modulation of
Minutes are numbered by the fall of sands,
As by an hour glass; the span of time
Doth waste us to our graves, and we look on it;
An age of pleasure, revelled out, comes home
At last, and ends in sorrow; but the life,
Weary of riot, numbers every sand,
Wailing in sighs, until the last drop down,
So to conclude calamity in rest
or place the meditative calm of
whether we be young or old,
Our destiny, our being’s heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And effort evermore about to be,
beside the complete and inexhaustible loveliness of
The moving Moon went up the sky,
And nowhere did abide:
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside—
or the splendid fantasy of
And the woodland haunter
Shall not cease to saunter
When, far down some glade,
Of the great world’s burning,
One soft flame upturning
Seems to his discerning,
Crocus in the shade,
to bethink us of the varied art of the poet; his power to make us at
once actors and spectators; his power to run his hand into characters
as if it were a glove, and be Falstaff or Lear; his power to condense,
to widen, to state, once and for ever.
“We have only to compare”—with those words the cat is out of the bag,
and the true complexity of reading is admitted. The first process, to
receive impressions with the utmost understanding, is only half the
process of reading; it must be completed, if we are to get the whole
pleasure from a book, by another. We must pass judgment upon these
multitudinous impressions; we must make of these fleeting shapes one
that is hard and lasting. But not directly. Wait for the dust of
reading to settle; for the conflict and the questioning to die down;
walk, talk, pull the dead petals from a rose, or fall asleep. Then
suddenly without our willing it, for it is thus that Nature undertakes
these transitions, the book will return, but differently. It will float
to the top of the mind as a whole. And the book as a whole is different
from the book received currently in separate phrases. Details now fit
themselves into their places. We see the shape from start to finish; it
is a barn, a pig-sty, or a cathedral. Now then we can compare book with
book as we compare building with building. But this act of comparison
means that our attitude has changed; we are no longer the friends of
the writer, but his judges; and just as we cannot be too sympathetic as
friends, so as judges we cannot be too severe. Are they not criminals,
books that have wasted our time and sympathy; are they not the most
insidious enemies of society, corrupters, defilers, the writers of
false books, faked books, books that fill the air with decay and
disease? Let us then be severe in our judgments; let us compare each
book with the greatest of its kind. There they hang in the mind the
shapes of the books we have read solidified by the judgments we have
passed on them—Robinson Crusoe, Emma The Return of the Native. Compare
the novels with these—even the latest and least of novels has a right
to be judged with the best. And so with poetry when the intoxication of
rhythm has died down and the splendor of words has faded, a visionary
shape will return to us and this must be compared with Lear, with
Phèdre, with The Prelude; or if not with these, with whatever is the
best or seems to us to be the best in its own kind. And we may be sure
that the newness of new poetry and fiction is its most superficial
quality and that we have only to alter slightly, not to recast, the
standards by which we have judged the old.
It would be foolish, then, to pretend that the second part of reading,
to judge, to compare, is as simple as the first—to open the mind wide
to the fast flocking of innumerable impressions. To continue reading
without the book before you, to hold one shadow-shape against another,
to have read widely enough and with enough understanding to make such
comparisons alive and illuminating—that is difficult; it is still more
difficult to press further and to say, “Not only is the book of this
sort, but it is of this value; here it fails; here it succeeds; this is
bad; that is good.” To carry out this part of a reader’s duty needs
such imagination, insight, and learning that it is hard to conceive any
one mind sufficiently endowed; impossible for the most self-confident
to find more than the seeds of such powers in himself. Would it not be
wiser, then, to remit this part of reading and to allow the critics,
the gowned and furred authorities of the library, to decide the
question of the book’s absolute value for us? Yet how impossible! We
may stress the value of sympathy; we may try to sink our own identity
as we read. But we know that we cannot sympathize wholly or immerse
ourselves wholly; there is always a demon in us who whispers, “I hate,
I love,” and we cannot silence him. Indeed, it is precisely because we
hate and we love that our relation with the poets and novelists is so
intimate that we find the presence of another person intolerable. And
even if the results are abhorrent and our judgments are wrong, still
our taste, the nerve of sensation that sends shocks through us, is our
chief illuminant; we learn through feeling; we cannot suppress our own
idiosyncrasy without impoverishing it. But as time goes on perhaps we
can train our taste; perhaps we can make it submit to some control.
When it has fed greedily and lavishly upon books of all sorts—poetry,
fiction, history, biography—and has stopped reading and looked for long
spaces upon the variety, the incongruity of the living world, we shall
find that it is changing a little; it is not so greedy, it is more
reflective. It will begin to bring us not merely judgments on
particular books, but it will tell us that there is a quality common to
certain books. Listen, it will say, what shall we call this? And it
will read us perhaps Lear and then perhaps the Agamemnon in order to
bring out that common quality. Thus, with our taste to guide us, we
shall venture beyond the particular book in search of qualities that
group books together; we shall give them names and thus frame a rule
that brings order into our perceptions. We shall gain a further and a
rarer pleasure from that discrimination. But as a rule only lives when
it is perpetually broken by contact with the books themselves—nothing
is easier and more stultifying than to make rules which exists out of
touch with facts, in a vacuum—now at last, in order to steady ourselves
in this difficult attempt, it may be well to turn to the very rare
writers who are able to enlighten us upon literature as an art.
Coleridge and Dryden and Johnson, in their considered criticism, the
poets and novelists themselves in their unconsidered sayings, are often
surprisingly relevant; they light up and solidify the vague ideas that
have been tumbling in the misty depths of our minds. But they are only
able to help us if we come to them laden with questions and suggestions
won honestly in the course of our own reading. They can do nothing for
us if we herd ourselves under their authority and lie down like sheep
in the shade of a hedge. We can only understand their ruling when it
comes in conflict with our own and vanquishes it.
If this is so, if to read a book as it should be read calls for the
rarest qualities of imagination, insight, and judgment, and you may
perhaps conclude that literature is a very complex art and that it is
unlikely that we shall be able, even after a lifetime of reading, to
make any valuable contribution to its criticism. We must remain
readers; we shall not put on the further glory that belongs to those
rare beings who are also critics. But still we have our
responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we
raise and the judgments we pass steal into the air and become part of
the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work. An influence is
created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into
print. And that influence, if it were well instructed, vigorous and
individual and sincere, might be of great value now when criticism is
necessarily in abeyance; when books pass in review like the procession
of animals in a shooting gallery, and the critic has only one second in
which to load and aim and shoot and may well be pardoned if he mistakes
rabbits for tigers, eagles for barndoor fowls, or misses altogether and
wastes his shot upon some peaceful cow grazing in a further field. If
behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was
another kind of criticism, the opinion of people reading for the love
of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great
sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the
quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger,
richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching.
Yet who reads to bring about an end, however desirable? Are there not
some pursuits that we practice because they are good in themselves, and
some pleasures that are final? And is not this among them? I have
sometimes dreamt, at least that when the Day of judgment dawns and the
great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their
rewards—their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon
imperishable marble—the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not
without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our
arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here.
They have loved reading.”
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