(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Morley was a British statesman and writer.
Literature is among the best instruments for systematically training our imagination, sympathies, and engendering a genial and varied moral disposition (Morley 1891, 226). It touches on these topics “with a certain largeness, sanity, and attraction of form” (p. 218). The student of literature uses books to explore the ways people have and do reason morally, the desires of their hearts, ideals of virtue and happiness, and how conceptions of truth and virtue shift over time (ibid.).
Such a reader does not aim to dip into every wise book (p. 211). Reading according to a list of a hundred great books provides us “a hundred parcels of heterogeneous scraps”. This will neither create nor satisfy a wise taste for books, but rather encourage priggishness (ibid.). Instead, we should study authors, subjects, and books in an orderly and connected fashion (p. 213). We may begin with an interest in a particular author or subject, but then proceed to survey outward the ideas and sentiments that arise by reading related books. The intellectual “fruit will be only half gathered” if we dispense with a book having no new ideas or insights on author and subject (ibid.). By surveying the field, however, we should arrive at an understanding of the “ideas, of tastes, of sentiments, of imagination, of humour, of invention, as they affect and as they are affected by the ever changing experiences of human nature, and the manifold variations that time and circumstances are incessantly working in human society” (pp. 219–220).
Reading in this connected fashion, we can get a good map of the territory—a general foundation, from which we can, if we desire to, read more desultorily (p. 215). By laying these foundations, developing a methodical and systematic schema of the topic, we will subsequently find new knowledge in unexpected places, yet relate it appropriately to what we already know (ibid.).
A book isn’t necessarily worth reading because it’s famous or historically-important (p. 211). Sometimes this “fame was due to their doing something that needed in their day to be done. The work done, the virtue of the book expires” (ibid.). However, in general, a book worth reading is worth reading again. (p. 209) The masterpieces are worth reading thousands of times and should be made “part of your daily life” (ibid.).
We are not born with “the habit and power of reading with reflection, comprehension, and memory all alert and awake” (p. 206). Acquiring knowledge from books requires both perseverance and self-denial, a price which many people regard as too dear (p. 207). Keeping a commonplace book into which we transcribe what interests and impresses on us from our reading helps to focus our concentration on the passage and make us “alive to its real point and significance” (pp. 209–210).
In fact, we should do most of our reading with a pen in hand. Making abstracts and summaries of what we read is a “useful toil” (p. 208). Morely describes the practice of, prior to reading a new book, the reader making a brief, rough analysis of the questions they expect it to answer—how they expect it to contribute to their knowledge (ibid.). Similarly, through intelligent underlining the book can be made an analysis of the topic suitable for reference (ibid.).
The student of literature should not excessively write for the sake of writing, however; Morley beseeches them to “not all turn to authorship” (p. 222). What is more important is precision in expression, which is achieved by careful, attentive study, with an open and vigilant mind, of the models of exemplary writing (p. 223). This furthers what for Morley is one of the most significant benefits of studying English literature: “helping to preserve the dignity and purity of the English language” (ibid.).
A literary education pursued in this way aims “to make a man and not a cyclopaedia, to make a citizen and not an album of elegant extracts” (p. 226).