BOOKS AXD CRITICS. 



165 



and recreated themselves with TOO grand massa- 

 cres. The longest single poem, I believe, extant, 

 is an Italian poem, the " Adone " of Marini, who 

 lived in the time of our James I. It contains 45,000 

 lines. As for Spain, one single author of the 

 seventeenth century, Lope de Vega, wrote 1,800 

 plays ; his works altogether fill forty-seven quarto 

 volumes. Alonso Tostado, a Spanish bishop of 

 the fifteenth century, wrote nearly forty folios, 

 having covered with print three times as many 

 leaves as he had lived days. To come to Eng- 

 land. Our William Prynne wrote 200 different 

 works. Chalmers's collected edition of the Eng- 

 lish poets only comes down to Cowper, who died 

 in 1800, and it fills twenty-one volumes royal 

 8vo, double columns, small type. The volumes 

 average 700 pages. This gives a total of 14,- 

 700 pages, or 29,400 columns. Now it takes — 

 I have made the experiment — four minutes to 

 read a column with fair attention. Here is a 

 good year's work in reading over, only once, 

 a selection from the English poets. The amount 

 of reading which a student can get through in 

 a given time hardly admits of being measured by 

 the ell. The rate of reading varies with the sub- 

 ject, the rapid glance with which we skim the 

 columns of a newspaper being at one end of the 

 scale, and the slow sap which is required for a 

 page of, say, Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason " be- 

 ing at the other. Still, just to get something to go 

 upon, make a calculation in this way : Suppose a 

 man to be able to read eight hours a day. No 

 one can really sustain receptive or critical atten- 

 tion to written matter for eight hours. But take 

 eight hours as the outside possibility. Thirty 

 pages 8vo is an average hour's read, taking one 

 book with another. This would make 240 pages 

 per day, 1,680 per week, and 87,360 pages in the 

 year. Taking the average thickness of an 8vo 

 volume as 400 pages only, the quantity of reading 

 which a diligent student can get over in a year is 

 no more than an amount equal to about 220 vol- 

 umes Svo. Of course, this is a merely mechani- 

 cal computation, by which we cannot pretend to 

 gauge mental processes. But it may be worth 

 while knowing that the merely mechanical limit 

 of study is some 220 volumes 8vo per annum. 



It would be clearly impossible even for an 

 industrious reader to read, even once, every line 

 of the world's stock of poetry, much less every 

 line of all that can be called literature. In no 

 branch of study is mere mechanical application 

 of much avail. In the study of literature, as in 

 art, mechanical attention, the mere perusal of the 

 printed page, is wholly useless. The student, 



therefore, has to overcome the brute mass of the 

 material on which he works by artificial expedi- 

 ents. Of these expedients the most helpful is that 

 of selection. As he cannot look into every book, 

 he must select the best. And selection must not 

 be arbitrary. In the literary creations of the 

 ideal world, as in the living organisms of the 

 material world, natural selection has saved us the 

 difficulty of choice. The best books are already 

 found and determined for us by the verdict of 

 time. Life of books is as life of nations. In the 

 battle for existence the best survive, the weaker 

 sink below the surface, and are heard of no more. 

 In each generation since the invention of printing 

 many thousand works have issued from the press. 

 Out of all this mass of print a few hundred are 

 read by the generation which succeeds ; at the 

 end of the century a score or so may be still 

 in vogue. Every language has its classics, and 

 it is by this process of natural selection that 

 the classics of any given country are distin- 

 guished from the weltering mass of abandoned 

 books. 



It is a great assistance to the student that the 

 classics of each language are already found for 

 him by the hand of time. But our accomplished 

 critic cannot confine his reading to the classics 

 in each language ; his education is not complete 

 till he has in his mind a conception of the succes- 

 sive phases of thought and feeling from the be- 

 ginning of letters. Though he need not read 

 every book, he must have surveyed literature in 

 its totality. Partial knowledge of literature is 

 no knowledge. It is only by the comparative 

 method that a founded judgment can be reached. 

 And the comparative method implies a complete 

 survey of the phenomena. It is recorded of Au- 

 guste Comte that, after he had acquired what he 

 considered a sufficient stock of material, he ab- 

 stained scrupulously from all reading, except two 

 or three poets (of whom one was Dante) and the 

 " Imitatio Christi " of Thomas a Kempis. This ab- 

 stinence from reading Comte called his hygiene 

 cerebrale," healthy treatment of his brain. The 

 citizens of his Utopia are to be prohibited from 

 reading any books but those which had happened 

 to fall in Comte's way before he gave up reading. 

 It is, I think, the case that our student has now 

 to read more than is compatible with perfect 

 equilibrium of faculty. On the other hand, the 

 consequences of cutting off contact with the 

 thoughts of others, as Comte resolutely did, may 

 be seen in the unhealthy egotism and puerile self- 

 complacency which deform his writings, his per- 

 petual " mistake as to the relative value of his 



