, as one's brain hardens or softens, is what
the object of reading is. It is not, I venture to think, what used to
be called the pursuit of knowledge. Of course, if a man is a
professional teacher or a professional writer, he must read for
professional purposes, just as a coral insect must eat to enable it to
secrete the substances out of which it builds its branching house. But
I am not here speaking of professional studies, but of general reading.
I suppose that there are three motives for reading--the first, purely
pleasurable; the second, intellectual; the third, what may be called
ethical. As to the first, a man who reads at all, reads just as he
eats, sleeps, and takes exercise, because he likes it; and that is
probably the best reason that can be given for the practice. It is an
innocent mode of passing the time, it takes one out of oneself, it is
amusing. Of course, it can be carried to an excess; and a man may
become a mere book-eater, as a man may become an opium-eater. I used at
one time to go and stay with an old friend, a clergyman in a remote
part of England. He was a bachelor and fairly well off. He did not care
about exercise or his garden, and he had no taste for general society.
He subscribed to the London Library and to a lending library in the
little town where he lived, and he bought too, a good many books. He
must have spent, I used to calculate, about ten hours of the
twenty-four in reading. He seemed to me to have read everything, old
and new books alike, and he had an astonishing memory; anything that he
put into his mind remained there exactly as fresh and clear as when he
laid it away, so that he never needed to read a book twice. If he had
lived at a University he would have been a useful man; if one wanted to
know what books to read in any line, one had only to pick his brains.
He could give one a list of authorities on almost every subject. But in
his country parish he was entirely thrown away. He had not the least
desire to make anything of his stores, or to write. He had not the art
of expression, and he was a distinctly tiresome talker. His idea of
conversation was to ask you whether you had read a number of modern
novels. If he found one that you had not read, he sketched the plot in
an intolerably prolix manner, so that it was practically impossible to
fix the mind on what he was saying. He seemed to have no preferences in
literature whatever; his one desire was to read everything that c