| Week-Day Religion |
Chapter 22 |
Page 3 |
If we can read in our brief, busy years but a very limited number of books of any kind, should not those few be the very best, richest, most substantial and useful that we can find in the whole range of literature? If one hundred books lie before me and I have time to read but on of them, if I am wise will I not select that one which will bring to me the largest amount of information, which will start in my mind the grandest thoughts, the purest emotions, or which sets before me the truest ideals of manly virtue and heroic character?
But how do most persons read? On what principle do they decide what to read or what not to read? Is there one in a hundred who ever give a serious thought to the question or makes any intelligent choice whatever? With many it is “the last novel,” utterly regardless of what it is. With others it is anything that is talked about or extensively advertised. We live in a time when the trivial is glorified and magnified and held up in the blaze of sensation, so as to attract the gaze of the multitude and sell. That is all many books are made for – to sell. They are written for money, they are set up in type, stereotyped, printed, illustrated, bound, ornamented, titled, simply for money. There is no soul in them. There was no high motive, no thought all along their history of doing good to any one, of starting a new impulse, of adding to the fund of the world’s joy or comfort or knowledge. They were wrought out of mercenary brains. They were made to sell, and to sell they must appeal to the desire for sensation, excitement, romance, or diversion. So it comes to pass that the country is flooded with utterly worthless publications, whilst really good and valuable books are left unsold and unread. The multitude goes into ecstasies over ephemeral tales, weekly literary papers, new, sentimental poems, magazines, and a thousand trivial works that please or excite for a day and are then old and forgotten in the intense and thrilling plot of the story that is newest and latest tomorrow, whilst books every way admirable are passed by unnoticed.
Hence, while everybody reads, few read the grand masters. Modern culture knows all about the auroral literature that flashes up and dies out again, but knows nothing of history or true poetry or really great fiction. Many people who have not the courage to confess ignorance of the last novel regard it as no shame to be utterly ignorant of the majestic old classics. In the floods of ephemeral literature the great books are buried away. It is pretty safe to say that not one in a hundred now reads Milton’s Paradise Lost, and that not one in a thousand has ever read a translation of Homer’s Iliad. Every one goes into raptures over some sentimental song writer of a day, but how many read even the great masterpieces of Shakespeare? The Pilgrim’s Progress is only known from being referred to so often, while the thousand summer volumes on sentimental religion are eagerly devoured by pious people.
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