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Page 14
Nothing is humdrum.
The tremendous, changeful picturesqueness of life is marvellously
shown in an estate agent's office. What! There was a block of
traffic in Oxford Street; to avoid the block people actually began
to travel under the cellars and drains, and the result was a rise of
rents in Shepherd's Bush! And you say that isn't picturesque!
Suppose you were to study, in this spirit, the property question in
London for an hour and a half every other evening. Would it not give
zest to your business, and transform your whole life?
You would arrive at more difficult problems. And you would be able
to tell us why, as the natural result of cause and effect, the
longest straight street in London is about a yard and a half in
length, while the longest absolutely straight street in Paris
extends for miles. I think you will admit that in an estate agent's
clerk I have not chosen an example that specially favours my
theories.
You are a bank clerk, and you have not read that breathless romance
(disguised as a scientific study), Walter Bagehot's "Lombard
Street"? Ah, my dear sir, if you had begun with that, and followed
it up for ninety minutes every other evening, how enthralling your
business would be to you, and how much more clearly you would
understand human nature.
You are "penned in town," but you love excursions to the country and
the observation of wild life-certainly a heart-enlarging diversion.
Why don't you walk out of your house door, in your slippers, to the
nearest gas lamp of a night with a butterfly net, and observe the
wild life of common and rare moths that is beating about it, and
co-ordinate the knowledge thus obtained and build a superstructure
on it, and at last get to know something about something?
You need not be devoted to the arts, not to literature, in order to
live fully.
The whole field of daily habit and scene is waiting to satisfy that
curiosity which means life, and the satisfaction of which means an
understanding heart.
I promised to deal with your case, O man who hates art and
literature, and I have dealt with it. I now come to the case of the
person, happily very common, who does "like reading."
XI
SERIOUS READING
Novels are excluded from "serious reading," so that the man who,
bent on self-improvement, has been deciding to devote ninety minutes
three times a week to a complete study of the works of Charles
Dickens will be well advised to alter his plans. The reason is not
that novels are not serious--some of the great literature of the
world is in the form of prose fiction--the reason is that bad
novels ought not to be read, and that good novels never demand any
appreciable mental application on the part of the reader. It is only
the bad parts of Meredith's novels that are difficult. A good novel
rushes you forward like a skiff down a stream, and you arrive at the
end, perhaps breathless, but unexhausted. The best novels involve
the least strain. Now in the cultivation of the mind one of the
most important factors is precisely the feeling of strain, of
difficulty, of a task which one part of you is anxious to achieve
and another part of you is anxious to shirk; and that feeling
cannot be got in facing a novel. You do not set your teeth in order
to read "Anna Karenina." Therefore, though you should read novels,
you should not read them in those ninety minutes.
Imaginative poetry produces a far greater mental strain than novels.
It produces probably the severest strain of any form of literature.
It is the highest form of literature. It yields the highest form of
pleasure, and teaches the highest form of wisdom. In a word, there
is nothing to compare with it. I say this with sad consciousness of
the fact that the majority of people do not read poetry.
I am persuaded that many excellent persons, if they were confronted
with the alternatives of reading "Paradise Lost" and going round
Trafalgar Square at noonday on their knees in sack-cloth, would
choose the ordeal of public ridicule. Still, I will never cease
advising my friends and enemies to read poetry before anything.
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