A Book for All Readers Part 11

The habit of reading which I have outlined, and which may be termed the intuitive method, or, if you prefer it, the short-hand method, will more than double the working power of the reader. It is not difficult to practice, especially to a busy man, who does with all his might what he has got to do. But it should be learned early in life, when the faculties are fresh, the mind full of zeal for knowledge, and the mental habits are ductile, not fixed. With it one's capacity for acquiring knowledge, and consequently his accomplishment, whether as writer, teacher, librarian, or private student, will be immeasureably increased.

Doubtless it is true that some native or intuitive gifts must be conjoined with much mental discipline and perseverance, in order to reach the highest result, in this method of reading, as in any other study.

"_Non omnia possumus omnes_," Virgil says; and there are intellects who could no more master such a method, than they could understand the binomial theorem, or calculate the orbit of Ura.n.u.s. If it be true, as has been epigramatically said, that "a great book is a great evil," let it be reduced to a small one by the skilful use of the art of skipping. Then, "he that runs may read" as he runs--while, without this refuge, he that reads will often a.s.suredly be tempted to run.

What I said, just now, in deprecation of set courses of reading, was designed for private students only, who so often find a stereotyped sequence of books barren or uninteresting. It was not intended to discourage the pursuit of a special course of study in the school, or the society, or the reading cla.s.s. This is, in fact, one of the best means of intellectual progress. Here, there is the opportunity to discuss the style, the merits, and the characteristics of the author in hand, and by the attrition of mind with mind, to inform and entertain the whole circle of readers. In an a.s.sociation of this kind, embracing one or two acute minds, the excellent practice of reading aloud finds its best results.

Here, too, the art of expression becomes important, how to adapt the sound to the sense, by a just emphasis, intonation, and modulation of the voice. In short, the value of a book thus read and discussed, in an appreciative circle, may be more than doubled to each reader.

It is almost literally true that no book, undertaken merely as task work, ever helped the reader to knowledge of permanent or material value. How many persons, struck by Mr. Emerson's exalted praise of the writings of Plato, have undertaken to go through the Dialogues. Alas! for the vain ambition to be or to seem learned! After trying to understand the Phaedo, or falling asleep over the Gorgias, the book has been dropped as hastily as it was taken up. It was not perceived that in order to enjoy or comprehend a philosopher, one must have a capacity for ideas. It requires almost as much intelligence to appreciate an idea as to conceive one. One will bring nothing home from the most persistent cruise after knowledge, unless he carries something out. In the realm of learning, we recognize the full meaning of that Scripture, that to him that hath, shall be given; and he that hath not, though never so anxious to read and understand Plato, will quickly return to the perusal of his daily newspaper.

It were easier, perhaps, in one sense, to tell what not to read, than to recommend what is best worth reading. In the publishing world, this is the age of compilation, not of creation. If we seek for great original works, if we must go to the wholesale merchants to buy knowledge, since retail geniuses are worth but little, one must go back many years for his main selection of books. It would not be a bad rule for those who can read but little, to read no book until it has been published at least a year or two. This fever for the newest books is not a wholesome condition of the mind. And since a selection must indispensably be made, and that selection must be, for the great ma.s.s of readers, so rigid and so small, why should precious time be wasted upon the ephemeral productions of the hour? What business, for example, has one to be reading Rider Haggard, or Amelie Rives, or Ian Maclaren, who has never read Homer, or Dante, or even so much as half-a-dozen plays of Shakespeare?

One hears with dismay that about three-fourths of the books drawn from our popular libraries are novels. Now, while such aimless reading, merely to be amused, is doubtless better than no reading at all, it is unquestionably true that over-much reading of fiction, especially at an early age, enervates the mind, weakens the will, makes dreamers instead of thinkers and workers, and fills the imagination with morbid and unreal views of life. Yet the vast consumption of novels is due more to the cheapness and wide diffusion of such works, and the want of wise direction in other fields, than to any original tendency on the part of the young. People will always read the most, that which is most put before them, if only the style be attractive. The mischief that is done by improper books is literally immeasureable. The superabundance of cheap fictions in the markets creates and supplies an appet.i.te which should be directed by wise guidance into more improving fields. A two-fold evil follows upon the reading of every unworthy book; in the first place, it absorbs the time which should be bestowed upon a worthy one; and secondly, it leaves the mind and heart unimproved, instead of conducing to the benefit of both. As there are few books more elevating than a really good novel, so there are none more fruitful of evil than a bad one.

And what of the newspaper? it may be asked. When I consider for how much really good literature we are beholden to the daily and weekly press, how indispensable is its function as purveyor of the news of the world, how widely it has been improved in recent years, I cannot advise quarreling with the bridge that brings so many across the gulf of ignorance. Yet the newspaper, like the book, is to be read sparingly, and with judgment. It is to be used, not abused. I call that an abuse which squanders the precious and unreturning hours over long chronicles of depravity. The murders, the suicides, the executions, the divorces, the criminal trials, are each and all so like one another that it is only a wanton waste of time to read them. The morbid style in which social disorders of all kinds are written up in the sensational press, with staring headlines to attract attention, ought to warn off every healthy mind from their perusal. Every scandal in society that can be brought to the surface is eagerly caught up and paraded, while the millions of people who lead blameless lives of course go unnoticed and unchronicled. Such journals thus inculcate the vilest pessimism, instead of a wholesome and honest belief in the average decency of human nature. The prolixity of the narrative, too, is always in monstrous disproportion to its importance.

"Does not the burning of a metropolitan theatre," says a great writer, "take above a million times as much telling as the creation of a world?"

Here is where the art of skipping is to be rigorously applied. Read the newspaper by headlines only,--skipping all the murders, all the fires, all the executions, all the crimes, all the news, except the most important and immediately interesting,--and you will spend perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes upon what would otherwise occupy hours. It is no exaggeration to say that most persons have spent time enough over the newspapers, to have given them a liberal education.

As all readers cannot have the same gifts, so all cannot enjoy the same books. There are those who can see no greatness in Shakespeare, but who think Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy sublime. Some will eagerly devour every novel of Miss Braddon's, or "The d.u.c.h.ess," or the woman calling herself "Ouida," but they cannot appreciate the masterly fictions of Thackeray. I have known very good people who could not, for the life of them, find any humor in d.i.c.kens, but who actually enjoyed the strained wit of Mrs. Partington and Bill Nye. Readers who could not get through a volume of Gibbon will read with admiration a so-called History of Napoleon by Abbott. And I fear that you will find many a young lady of to-day, who is content to be ignorant of Homer and Shakespeare, but who is ravished by the charms of "Trilby" or the "Heavenly Twins." But taste in literature, as in art, or in anything else, can be cultivated. Lay down the rule, and adhere to it, to read none but the best books, and you will soon lose all relish for the poor ones. You can educate readers into good judges, in no long time, by feeding them on the masterpieces of English prose and poetry. Surely, we all have cause to deprecate the remorseless flood of fict.i.tious literature in which better books are drowned.

Be not dismayed at the vast mult.i.tude of books, nor fear that, with your small leisure, you will never be able to master any appreciable share of them. Few and far between are the great books of the world. The works which it is necessary to know, may be comprised in a comparatively small compa.s.s. The rest are to be preserved in the great literary conservatories, some as records of the past, others as chronicles of the times, and not a few as models to be avoided. The Congressional Library at Washington is our great National conservatory of books. As the library of the government--that is, of the whole people,--it is inclusive of all the literature which the country produces, while all the other libraries are and must be more or less exclusive. No National Library can ever be too large. In order that the completeness of the collection shall not fail, and to preserve the whole of our literature, it is put into the Statute of Copyright, as a condition precedent of the exclusive right to multiply copies of any book, that it shall be deposited in the Library of Congress. Apprehension is sometimes expressed that our National Library will become overloaded with trash, and so fail of its usefulness. 'Tis a lost fear. There is no act of Congress requiring all the books to be read. The public sense is continually winnowing and sifting the literature of every period, and to books and their authors, every day is the day of judgment. Nowhere in the world is the inexorable law of the survival of the fittest more rigidly applied than in the world of books.

The works which are the most frequently re-printed in successive ages are the ones which it is safe to stand by.

Books may be divided into three cla.s.ses: 1st, acquaintances; 2d, friends; and 3d, intimates.

It is well enough to have an acquaintance with a mult.i.tude of books, as with many people; though in either case much time should not be given to merely pleasant intercourse, that leads to no result. With our literary friends, we can spend more time, for they awaken keen interest, and are to be read with zest, and consequently with profit. But for our chosen intimates, our heart-companions, we reserve our highest regard, and our best hours. Choice and sacred is the book that makes an era in the life of the reader; the book which first rouses his higher nature, and awakens the reason or the imagination. Such a volume will many a one remember; the book which first excited his own thought, made him conscious of untried powers, and opened to his charmed vision a new world.

Such a book has Carlyle's Sartor Resartus been to many; or the play of Hamlet, read for the first time; or the Faust of Goethe; or the Confessions of St. Augustine; or an essay of Emerson; or John Ruskin; or the Divine Comedy of Dante; or even an exquisite work of fiction, like John Halifax, or Henry Esmond. What the book is that works such miracles is never of so much importance as the epoch in the mind of the reader which it signalizes. It were vain to single out any one writer, and say to all readers--"Here is the book that must indispensably be read;" for the same book will have totally different effects upon different minds, or even upon the same mind, at different stages of development.

When I have been asked to contribute to the once popular _symposia_ upon "Books which have helped me,"--I have declined, for such catalogues of intellectual aids are liable to be very misleading. Thus, if I were to name the book which did more than most others for my own mind, I should say that it was the Emile of Rousseau, read at about the age of seventeen. This work, written with that marvellous eloquence which characterises all the best productions of Jean Jacques, first brought me acquainted with those advanced ideas of education which have penetrated the whole modern world. Yet the Emile would probably appear to most of my readers trite and common-place, as it would now to me, for the reason that we have long pa.s.sed the period of development when its ideas were new to us.

But the formative power of books can never be over-rated: their subtle mastery to stimulate all the germs of intellectual and moral life that lie enfolded in the mind. As the poet sings--

"Books are not seldom talismans and spells."

Why should they not be so? They furnish us the means, and the only means, whereby we may hold communion with the master-spirits of all ages.

They bring us acquainted with the best thoughts which the human mind has produced, expressed in the n.o.blest language. Books create for us the many-sided world, carry us abroad, out of our narrow provincial horizons, and reveal to us new scenery, new men, new languages, and new modes of life. As we read, the mind expands with the horizon, and becomes broad as the blue heaven above us. With Homer, we breathe the fresh air of the pristine world, when the light of poetry gilded every mountain top, and peopled the earth with heroes and demiG.o.ds. With Plutarch, we walk in company with sages, warriors, and statesmen, and kindle with admiration of their virtues, or are roused to indignation at their crimes. With Sophocles, we sound the depths of human pa.s.sion, and learn the sublime lesson of endurance. We are charmed with an ode of Horace, perfect in rhythm, perfect in sentiment, perfect in diction, and perfect in moral; the condensed essence of volumes in a single page. We walk with Dante through the nether world, awed by the tremendous power with which he depicts for us the secrets of the prison house. With Milton, we mount heaven-ward, and in the immortal verse of his minor poems, finer even than the stately march of Paradise Lost, we hear celestial music, and breathe diviner air. With that sovereign artist, Shakespeare, full equally of delight and of majesty, we sweep the horizon of this complex human life, and become comprehensive scholars and citizens of the world.

The masters of fiction enthrall us with their fascinating pages, one moment shaking us with uncontrollable laughter, and the next, dissolving us in tears. In the presence of all these emanations of genius, the wise reader may feed on nectar and ambrosia, and forget the petty cares and vexations of to-day.

There are some books that charm us by their wit or their sweetness, others that surprise and captivate us by their strength: books that refresh us when weary: books that comfort us when afflicted: books that stimulate us by their robust health: books that exalt and refine our natures, as it were, to a finer mould: books that rouse us like the sound of a trumpet: books that illumine the darkest hours, and fill all our day with delight.

It is books that record the advance and the decline of nations, the experience of the world, the achievements and the possibilities of mankind. It is books that reveal to us ideas and images almost above ourselves, and go far to open for us the gates of the invisible. "A river of thought," says Emerson, "is continually flowing out of the invisible world into the mind of man:" and we may add that books contain the most fruitful and permanent of the currents of that mighty river.

I am not disposed to celebrate the praises of all books, nor to recommend to readers of any age a habit of indiscriminate reading: but for the books which are true helpers and teachers, the thoughts of the best poets, historians, publicists, philosophers, orators,--if their value is not real, then there are no realities in the world.

Very true is it, nevertheless, that the many-sided man cannot be cultivated by books alone. One may learn by heart whole libraries, and yet be profoundly unacquainted with the face of nature, or the life of man. The pale student who gives himself wholly to books pays the penalty by losing that robust energy of character, that sympathy with his kind, that keen sense of the charms of earth and sky, that are essential to complete development. "The world's great men," says Oliver Wendell Holmes, "have not commonly been great scholars, nor its scholars great men." To know what other men have said about things is not always the most important part of knowledge. There is nothing that can dispense us from the independent use of our own faculties. Meditation and observation are more valuable than mere absorption; and knowledge itself is not wisdom. The true way to use books is to make them our servants--not our masters. Very helpful, cheering, and profitable will they become, when they fall naturally into our daily life and growth--when they tally with the moods of the mind.

The habits and methods of readers are as various as those of authors.

Thus, there are some readers who gobble a book, as Boswell tells us Dr.

Johnson used to gobble his dinner--eagerly, and with a furious appet.i.te, suggestive of dyspepsia, and the non-a.s.similation of food. Then there are slow readers, who plod along through a book, sentence by sentence, putting in a mark conscientiously where they left off to-day, so as to begin at the self-same spot to-morrow; fast readers, who gallop through a book, as you would ride a flying bicycle on a race; drowsy readers, to whom a book is only a covert apology for a nap, and who pretend to be reading Macaulay or Herbert Spencer only to dream between the leaves; sensitive readers, who cannot abide the least noise or interruption when reading, and to whose nerves a foot-fall or a conversation is an exquisite torture; absorbed readers, who are so pre-occupied with their pursuit that they forget all their surroundings--the time of day, the presence or the voices of others, the hour for dinner, and even their own existence; credulous readers, who believe everything they read because it is printed in a book, and swallow without winking the most colossal lying; critical and captious readers, who quarrel with the blunders or the beliefs of their author, and who cannot refrain from calling him an idiot or an a.s.s--and perhaps even writing him down so on his own pages; admiring and receptive readers, who find fresh beauties in a favorite author every time they peruse him, and even discover beautiful swans in the stupidest geese that ever cackled along the flowery meads of literature; reverent readers, who treat a book as they would treat a great and good man, considerately and politely, carefully brushing the dust from a beloved volume with the sleeve, or tenderly lifting a book fallen to the floor, as if they thought it suffered, or felt harm; careless and rough readers, who will turn down books on their faces to keep the place, tumble them over in heaps, cram them into shelves never meant for them, scribble upon the margins, dogs-ear the leaves, or even cut them with their fingers--all brutal and intolerable practices, totally unworthy of any one pretending to civilization.

To those who have well learned the art of reading, what inexhaustible delights does the world of books contain! With Milton, "to behold the bright countenance of truth, in the quiet and still air of delightful studies;" to journey through far countries with Marco Polo; to steer across an unknown sea with Columbus, or to brave the dangers of the frozen ocean with Nansen or Dr. Kane; to study the manners of ancient nations with Herodotus; to live over again the life of Greece and Rome with Plutarch's heroes; to trace the decline of empires with Gibbon and Mommsen; to pursue the story of the modern world in the pages of Hume, Macaulay, Thiers and Sismondi, and our own Prescott, Motley, and Bancroft; to enjoy afresh the eloquence of Demosthenes, and the polished and splendid diction of Cicero; to drink in the wisdom of philosophers, and to walk with Socrates, Plato and the stoics through the groves of Academia; to be kindled by the saintly utterances of prophets and apostles, St. Paul's high reasoning of immortality, or the seraphic visions of St. John; to study the laws that govern communities with the great publicists, or the economy of nations with Adam Smith and Stuart Mill; with the naturalists, to sound the depths of the argument as to the origin of species and the genesis of man; with the astronomers, to leave the narrow bounds of earth, and explore the illimitable s.p.a.ces of the universe, in which our solar system is but a speck; with the mathematicians, to quit the uncertain realm of speculation and a.s.sumption, and plant our feet firmly on the rock of exact science:--to come back anon to lighter themes, and to revel in the grotesque humor of d.i.c.kens, the philosophic page of Bulwer, the chivalric romances of Walter Scott, the ideal creations of Hawthorne, the finished life-pictures of George Eliot, the powerful imagination of Victor Hugo, and the masterly delineations of Thackeray; to hang over the absorbing biographies of Dr.

Franklin, Walter Scott and Dr. Johnson; to peruse with fresh delight the masterpieces of Irving and Goldsmith, and the best essays of Hazlitt, De Quincey, Charles Lamb, and Montaigne; to feel the inspiration of the great poets of all ages, from Homer down to Tennyson; to read Shakespeare--a book that is in itself almost a university:--is not all this satisfaction enough for human appet.i.te, however craving, solace enough for trouble, however bitter, occupation enough for life, however long?

There are pleasures that perish in the using; but the pleasure which the art of reading carries with it is perennial. He who can feast on the intellectual spoils of centuries need fear neither poverty nor hunger. In the society of those immortals who still rule our spirits from their urns, we become a.s.sured that though heaven and earth may pa.s.s away, no true thought shall ever pa.s.s away.

The great orator, on whose lips once hung mult.i.tudes, dies and is forgotten; the great actor pa.s.ses swiftly off the stage, and is seen no more; the great singer, whose voice charmed listening crowds by its melody, is hushed in the grave; the great preacher survives but a single generation in the memory of men; all we who now live and act must be, in a little while, with yesterday's seven thousand years:--but the book of the great writer lives on and on, inspiring age after age of readers, and has in it more of the seeds of immortality than anything upon earth.

CHAPTER 10.

AIDS TO READERS.

There is one venerable Latin proverb which deserves a wider recognition than it has yet received. It is to the effect that "the best part of learning is to know where to find things." From lack of this knowledge, an unskilled reader will often spend hours in vainly searching for what a skilled reader can find in less than five minutes. Now, librarians are presumed to be skilled readers, although it would not be quite safe to apply this designation to all of that profession, since there are those among librarians, or their a.s.sistants, who are mere novices in the art of reading to advantage. Manifestly, one cannot teach what he does not know: and so the librarian who has not previously travelled the same road, will not be able to guide the inquiring reader who asks him to point out the way. But if the way has once been found, the librarian, with only a fairly good memory, kept in constant exercise by his vocation, can find it again. Still more surely, if he has been through it many times, will he know it intuitively, the moment any question is asked about it.

It is true of the great majority of readers resorting to a library, that they have a most imperfect idea, both of what they want, and of the proper way to find it. The world of knowledge, they know, is vast, and they are quite bewildered by the many paths that lead to some part or other of it, crossing each other in all directions. And among the would-be readers may be found every shade of intelligence, and every degree of ignorance. There is the timid variety, too modest or diffident to ask for any help at all, and so feeling about among the catalogues or other reference-books in a baffled search for information. There is the sciolist variety, who knows it all, or imagines that he does, and who asks for proof of impossible facts, with an a.s.surance born of the profoundest ignorance. Then, too, there is the half-informed reader, who is in search of a book he once read, but has clean forgotten, which had a remarkable description of a tornado in the West, or a storm and ship-wreck at sea, or a wonderful tropical garden, or a thrilling escape from prison, or a descent into the bowels of the earth, or a tremendous snow-storm, or a swarming flight of migratory birds, or a mausoleum of departed kings, or a haunted chamber hung with tapestry, or the fatal caving-in of a coal-mine, or a widely destructive flood, or a hair-breadth escape from cannibals, or a race for life, pursued by wolves, or a wondrous sub-marine grotto, or a terrible forest fire, or any one of a hundred scenes or descriptions, all of which the librarian is presumed, not only to have read, but to have retained in his memory the author, the t.i.tle, and the very chapter of the book which contained it.

To give some idea of the extent and variety of information which a librarian is supposed to possess, I have been asked, almost at the same time, to refer a reader to the origin of Candlemas day, to define the Pragmatic Sanction, to give, out of hand, the aggregate wealth of Great Britain, compared with that of half-a-dozen other nations, to define the limits of neutrality or belligerent rights, to explain what is meant by the Gresham law, to tell what ship has made the quickest voyage to Europe, when she made it, and what the time was, to elucidate the meaning of the Carolina doctrine, to explain the character and objects of the Knights of the Golden Circle, to tell how large are the endowments of the British Universities, to give the origin of the custom of egg-rolling, to tell the meaning of the cipher dispatches, to explain who was "Extra Billy Smith," to tell the aggregate number killed on all sides during the Napoleonic wars, to certify who wrote the "Vestiges of Creation," or, finally, to give the author of one of those innumerable ancient proverbs, which float about the world without a father.

The great number and variety of such inquiries as are propounded by readers should not appal one. Nor should one too readily take refuge from a troublesome reader by the plea, however convenient, that the library contains nothing on that subject. While this may unquestionably be true, especially as regards a small public library, it should never be put forward as a certainty, until one has looked. Most inquiring readers are very patient, and being fully sensible how much they owe to the free enjoyment of the library treasures, and to the aid of the superintendent of them, they are willing to wait for information. However busy you may be at the moment, the reader can be asked to wait, or to call at a less busy time, when you will be prepared with a more satisfactory answer than can be given on the spur of the moment. What cannot be done to-day, may often be done to-morrow. Remember always, that readers are ent.i.tled to the best and most careful service, for a librarian is not only the keeper, but the interpreter of the intellectual stores of the library. It is a good and a safe rule to let no opportunity of aiding a reader escape. One should be particularly careful to volunteer help to those who are too new or too timid to ask: and it is they who will be most grateful for any a.s.sistance. The librarian has only to put himself in their place--(the golden rule for a librarian, as for all the world besides), and to consider how often, in his own searches in libraries, in the continual, never-ending quest of knowledge, he would have been thankful for a hint from some one who knew, or had been over the ground of his search before; and then he will feel the full value to the novice, of such knowledge as he can impart.

He is not to forget that his superior opportunities for learning all about things, with a whole library at command, and within elbow-reach every hour of the day, should impose upon him a higher standard of attainment than most readers are supposed to have reached. In the intervals of library work, I am accustomed to consider the looking up of subjects or authorities as one of my very best recreations. It is as interesting as a game of whist, and much more profitable. It is more welcome than routine labor, for it rests or diverts the mind, by its very variety, while, to note the different views or expressions of writers on the same subject, affords almost endless entertainment. In tracing down a quotation also, or the half-remembered line of some verse in poetry, you encounter a host of parallel poetic images or expressions, which contribute to aid the memory, or to feed the imagination. Or, in pursuing a sought-for fact in history, through many volumes, you learn collaterally much that may never have met your eye before. Full, as all libraries are, of what we call trash, there is almost no book which will not give us something,--even though it be only the negative virtue of a model to be avoided. One may not, indeed, always find what he seeks, because it may not exist at all, or it may not be found in the limited range of his small library, but he is almost sure to find something which gives food for thought, or for memory to note. And this is one of the foremost attractions, let me add, of the librarian's calling; it is more full of intellectual variety, of wide-open avenues to knowledge, than any other vocation whatever. His daily quests in pursuit of information to lay before others, bring him acquainted with pa.s.sages that are full of endless suggestion for himself. He may not be able to pursue any of these avenues at the moment; but he should make a mental or a written note of them, for future benefit. His daily business being learning, why should he not in time, become learned? There are, of course, among the infinitude of questions, that come before the librarian, some that are really insoluble problems. One of these is to be found among the topics of inquiry I just now suggested; namely: what is the aggregate wealth of Great Britain, or that of other nations? This is a question frequently asked by inquiring Congressmen, who imagine that an answer may readily be had from one of those gifted librarians who is invested with that apocryphal attribute, commonly called omniscience. But the inquirer is suddenly confronted by the fact (and a very stubborn fact it is) that not a single foreign nation has ever taken any census of wealth whatever. In Great Britain (about which country inquiry as to the national resources more largely centres) the government wisely lets alone the attempt to tabulate the value of private wealth, knowing that such an object is utterly impracticable.

But, while the British census makes no attempt at estimating the property of the people, the independent estimates of statistical writers vary hopelessly and irreconcilably. Mr. J. R. McCulloch, one of the foremost accredited writers on economic science, lays it down as a dictum, that "sixty years is the shortest time in which the capital of an old and densely-peopled country can be expected to be doubled." Yet Joseph Lowe a.s.sumes the wealth of the United Kingdom to have doubled in eighteen years, from 1823 to 1841; while George R. Porter, in his widely-accredited book on the "Progress of the Nation," and Leoni Levi, a publicist of high reputation, make out, (by combining their estimates) that the private wealth of England increased fifty per cent. in seventeen years, at which rate it would double in about twenty-nine years, instead of sixty, as laid down by Mr. McCulloch. Mr. Levi calculates the aggregate private wealth of Great Britain in 1858, at $29,178,000,000, being a fraction less than the guesses of the census enumerators at the national wealth of the United States, twelve years later, in 1870. Can one guess be said to be any nearer the fact than the other? May we not be pardoned for treating all estimates as utterly fallacious that are not based upon known facts and figures? Why do we hear so much of the "approximate correctness" of so many statistical tables, when, in point of fact, the primary data are incapable of proof, and the averages and conclusions built upon them are all a.s.sumed? "Statisticians," says one of the fraternity, "are generally held to be eminently practical people; on the contrary, they are more given to theorizing than any other cla.s.s of writers; and are generally less expert in it."

In the presence of such gross discrepancies as these, by statisticians of the highest repute, and among such a practical people as the English, what value can be attached to the mere estimates of wealth which have been attempted in the census of the United States? The careful Superintendent of the Census of 1870 and 1880, the late Francis A.

Walker, writes concerning it:

"At the best, these figures represent but the opinion of one man, or of a body of men, in the collection of material, and in the calculation of the several elements of the public wealth." And in the last Census Report for 1890, the results of the so-called "census of wealth," are cautiously submitted, "as showing in a general way a continuous increase in the wealth of the nation, the exact proportions of which cannot be measured."

Now, what are we to conclude regarding the attempt to elevate to a rank in statistical science, mere estimates of private wealth, for a large portion of which, by the statements of those who make them, no actual statistical data exist? And when this is confessedly the case in our own country, the only one attempting the impossible task of tabulating the wealth of the people, what shall we say of the demand that is made upon our credulity of accepting the guesses of Mr. Giffen, or Mr. Mulhall, as to British wealth? Are we not justified in applying the old Latin maxim--"_De non apparentibus, et de non existentibus, eadem est ratio_,"

and replying to those who demand of us to know how much any nation is worth, that it is sometimes an important part of knowledge to know that nothing can be known?

Among the literally innumerable inquiries liable to be made of a librarian, here is one which may give him more than a moment's pause, unless he is uncommonly well versed in American political history--namely, "What was the Ostend Manifesto?" To a mind not previously instructed these two words "Ostend Manifesto", convey absolutely no meaning. You turn to the standard encyclopaedias, Appleton's, Johnson's Universal, and the Britannica, and you find an account of Ostend, a little Belgian city, its locality, commerce, and population, but absolutely nothing about an Ostend manifesto. But in J.

N. Larned's "History for Ready Reference", a useful book in five volumes, arranged in alphabetical order, you get a clue. It refers you from Ostend, under letter O, to Cuba, where you learn that this formidable Ostend manifesto was nothing more nor less than a paper drawn up and signed by Messrs. Buchanan, Mason, and Slidell, Ministers of the United States to Great Britain, France, and Spain, respectively, when at the watering-place of Ostend, in 1854, importing that the island of Cuba ought to, and under certain circ.u.mstances, must belong to the United States. Looking a little farther, as the manifesto is not published in Larned, you find the text of the doc.u.ment itself in Cluskey's "Political Text-Book", of 1860, and in some of the American newspapers of 1854. This is a case of pursuing a once notorious, but more recently obscure topic, through many works of reference until found.

In many searches for names of persons, it becomes highly important to know before-hand where to look, and equally important where not to look, for certain biographies. Thus, if you seek for the name of any living character, it is necessary to know that it would be useless to look in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, because the rule of compilation of that work purposely confined its sketches of notable persons to those who were already deceased when its volumes appeared. So you save the time of hunting in at least one conspicuous work of reference, before you begin, by simply knowing its plan.

In like manner, you should know that it is useless to search for two cla.s.ses of names in the "Dictionary of National Biography," the most copious biographical dictionary of British personages ever published, begun in 1885, under Leslie Stephen, and reaching its sixty-first volume, and letter W in 1899, under the editorship of Sidney Lee. These two cla.s.ses of names are first, all persons not British, that is, not either English, Scottish or Irish; and secondly, names of British persons now living. This is because this great work, like the Britannica, purposely confines itself to the names of notables deceased; and, unlike the Britannica, it further limits its biographies to persons connected by birth or long residence with the British kingdom. Knowing this fact before-hand, will save any time wasted in searching the Dictionary of National Biography for any persons now living, or for any American or European names.

Another caveat may properly be interposed as regards searches for information in that most widely advertised and circulated of all works of reference,--the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The plan of that work was to furnish the reading public with the very best treatises upon leading topics in science, history, and literature, by eminent scholars and specialists in various fields. Pursuant to this general scheme, each great subject has a most elaborate, and sometimes almost exhaustive article--as, for example, chemistry, geology, etc., while the minor divisions of each topic do not appear in the alphabet at all, or appear only by cross-reference to the generic name under which they are treated.

It results, that while you find, for example, a most extensive article upon "Anatomy", filling a large part of a volume of the Britannica, you look in vain in the alphabet for such subjects as "blood, brain, cartilage, sinew, tissue," etc., which are described only in the article "Anatomy." This method has to be well comprehended in order for any reader to make use of this great Cyclopaedia understandingly. Even by the aid of the English index to the work, issued by its foreign publishers, the reader who is in hasty quest of information in the Britannica, will most frequently be baffled by not finding any minor subject in the index.

The English nation, judged by most of the productions of its literary and scientific men in that field, has small genius for indexing. It was reserved to an American to prepare and print a thorough index, at once alphabetical and a.n.a.lytical, to this great English thesaurus of information--an index ten times more copious, and therefore more useful to the student, than the meagre one issued in England. This index fills 3,900 closely printed columns, forming the whole of volume 25 of the Philadelphia edition of the work. By its aid, every name and every topic, treated anywhere in this vast repository of human knowledge can be traced out and appropriated; while without it, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, with all its great merits, must remain very much in the nature of a sealed book to the reader who stands in need of immediate use and reference. We have to take it for what it is--a collection of masterly treatises, rather than a handy dictionary of knowledge.

The usefulness and success of any library will depend very largely upon the sympathy, so to speak, between the readers and the librarian. When this is well established, the rest is very easy. The librarian should not seclude himself so as to be practically inaccessible to readers, nor trust wholly to a.s.sistants to answer their inquiries. This may be necessary in some large libraries, where great and diversified interests connected with the building up of the collection, the catalogue system, and the library management and administration are all concerned. In the British Museum Library, no one ever sees the Princ.i.p.al Librarian; even the next officer, who is called the keeper of the printed books, is not usually visible in the reading-room at all.

A librarian who is really desirous of doing the greatest good to the greatest number of people, will be not only willing, but anxious to answer inquiries, even though they may appear to him trivial and unimportant. Still, he should also economise time by cultivating the habit of putting his answers into the fewest and plainest words.