heard the Waverley Novels
read aloud until he knew the plot, the motive, the ultimate lesson of
all those beautiful books. When he was fourteen years old, he read one
or two second-rate novels over and over again; and even this was good
training, in that it showed him the faults to be avoided. Before his
boyhood was over, he read his Byron with minute attention, and once
more he was introduced to a master of expression. Byron is a little
out of fashion now, alas! and yet what a thinker the man was! His
lightning eye pierced to the very heart of things, and his intense
grip on the facts of life makes his style seem alive. No wonder that
the young Ruskin learned to think daringly under such a master! Now
many people fancy that our great critic must be a man of universal
knowledge. What do they think of this narrow early training? The use
and purport of it all are plain enough to us, for we see that the
gentle student's intellect was kept clear of lumber; his thoughts were
not battened down under mountains of other men's, and, when he wanted
to fix an idea, he was not obliged to grope for it in a rubbish heap
of second-hand notions. Of course he read many other authors by slow
degrees; but, until his manhood came, his range was restricted. The
flawless perfection of his work is due mainly to his mother's sedulous
insistence on perfection within strict bounds. Again, and keeping
still to authors, Charles Dickens knew very little about books. His
keen business-like intellect perceived that the study of life and of
the world's forces is worth more than the study of letters, and he
also kept himself clear of scholarly lumber. He read Fielding,
Smollett, Gibbon, and, in his later life, he was passionately fond of
Tennyson's poetry; but his greatest charm as a writer and his success
as a social reformer were both gained through his simple power of
looking at things for himself without interposing the dimness that
falls like a darkening shadow on a mind that is crammed with the
conceptions of other folk. Look at the practical men! Nasmyth scarcely
read at all; Napoleon always spoke of literary persons as
"ideologists;" Stephenson was nineteen before he mastered his Bible;
Mahomet was totally uneducated; Gordon was content with the Bible,
"Pilgrim's Progress," and Thomas a Kempis; Hugh Miller became an
admirable editor without having read twoscore books in his lifetime.
Go right through the names on the roll of history, and it will