(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Harrison was an English jurist, historian, and Positivist.
He saw great importance in ordering and making accessible and useful “the vast realm of printed material which four centuries have swept across our path” (Harrison 1893, 31). He wanted to organise knowledge and systematise reading so that out of this vast swathe of material, the “immortal thoughts of the greatest” could be saved (ibid.).
This “remorseless cataract of daily literature” presents the reader with a number of difficulties (pp. 26–7). It can lead to indiscriminate reading whereby we are open to anything that we encounter. Yet, to be this open ensures we’ll gain little from them: “To turn over the pages of ten thousand volumes is to be practically indifferent to all that is good” (pp. 31–2). With a surfeit of choice we become less discriminating in our selection. Every book we read without a purpose has an opportunity cost, and what we learn without purpose and sense of its importance, crowds out useful information from our minds. In this way, the habit of desultory, idle reading “debilitates and corrupts the mind for all wholesome reading” (p. 9). We are forever in danger of “being drawn off by what is stimulating rather than solid”: led to “wander, like unclassed spirits, round the outskirts only of those Elysian fields where the great dead dwell and hold high converse” (p. 160). Taking up books because they’re available and easy to read means we risk wasting our time with titles which are diverting but not substantive.
Another source of this “literary dandyism” is that there are so many authors, it can seem that anybody can become an author, and so there’s an equality between authors and readers (pp. 13, 154–5). The fame of the classic authors has made them seem familiar to us, leaving us indifferent. They represent what you are supposed to have read—the dreary, assigned text—which we resist by being attracted to their opposite: the idiosyncratic, eccentric title merely because it’s unfamiliar to us (p. 18). This unquenchable thirst for the new leads us to ignore the classic authors “just because they are immortal poets, and not scribblers of today” (p. 41).
Reading wisely is not a natural gift, but one of the hardest habits to form (p. 9). It requires “a strong character and a resolute system”, “infinite pains”, and is “as long and difficult to learn as the art of right living” (pp. 9, 18). A lesson we can learn more easily is what not to read (p. 5). In addition to avoiding the reading the new merely because it’s new, we must remember that books cannot exceed the character, the intellect, of their authors (pp. 17, 50). We should require texts to prove their value, remaining cognisant that reading “little books” and those written by people of bad or undistinguished character can be injurious to us, even poisonous to our minds (pp. 1–3).
Another lesson is that we should aim “to know for the sake of living, not to live for the sake of knowing” (pp. 34–5). One of the most common and unwholesome habits is reading as an end in itself rather than for the benefit we gain from reading well (p. 9). We need to know in order that we may feel rightly and act wisely, but seeking truth for itself may be indulged to the point where our sympathies are enfeebled and our action unnerved (p. 34).
Healthy reading is holistic, aiming to better our whole nature and character, and regarding “life as a whole, not mental curiosities” (p. 35). It appeals equally to our imagination, through poetry, our memory, through history and science, and reflection, through philosophy (ibid.). Our education will be one-sided despite much reading if this “runs wholly into”pockets,” and exhausts itself in the literature of one age, one country, one type” (pp. 34–6). This will tend to narrow our mind (p. 36).
Further, reading into pockets can deepen our belief that our country is “the hub of the universe” and that our century is “the only age worth notice” (p. 37). Books read in this way confirm and harden our unconscious prejudices (ibid.). Harrison suggests “a useful maxim that, if our reading be utterly closed to the great poems of the world, there is something amiss with our reading” (p. 39).
Their poets are “the great creators in prose or in verse” (p. 126). To understand a great national poet”, such as Dante, Calderon, Corneille, or Goethe, is “to know other types of human civilisation in ways which a library of histories does not sufficiently teach” (p. 43). Reading outside our milieu is necessary to avoid becoming hidebound and overly prejudiced, and Harrison exemplified this cosmopolitan, liberal ideal in his support of trade unions, democratic reform, and universal education—quite radical positions for his time.
In “the voice of all mankind as matchless and immortal, there is a complete library at hand for every man, in his every mood, whatever his tastes or his acquirements” (p. 142). Its treasure is discovered only when its contents are read devoutly (pp. 138–9):
One may be a devourer of books, and be actually incapable of reading a hundred lines of the wisest and the most beautiful. To read one of such books comes only by habit, as prayer is impossible to one who habitually dreads to be alone.