REASONS FOR READING.

rilHERE is a sense in which average society is better than the beat. A knowledge of the world is a better thing than an exclusive knowledge either of the intellectual or aristocratic beau monde. Even if we could imagine a person who chose his or her acquaintance solely upon moral grounds, the mental effect of his or her well-intentioned exclusiveness would be disastrous. The sole society of saints, even supposing the perspicacity to distinguish them from the average herd, would engender a pharisaical repul- sion for sinners. To be a man of the world a man must take the world more or less as he finds it, and leave the choice of his associates more or less to chance. If this is true among men and women, it is a thousand times more true among books. To be really well read a reader must go boldly into book society and make friends in all classes of book life. He must be on terms with the classics on the one hand, and with the book which hardly speaks the King's English on the other ; intimate with the great middle class of books, well written but making no claim to literature, and yet no stranger among the Bohemians and parvenus of print. Needless to say, this is the ideal for those who aim at being men of the world. Not many people attain to it, whether we speak of flesh and blood, or ink and paper. It is, however, easier of attainment among books than among human beings, for books disclose their innermost hearts to who- ever wants to see them ; and though a book may be a greater bore than a man, or even a woman, it is more easily shut up.

In talking of readers it must naturally not be forgotten that many of those who spend a certain amount of time in reading are not " readers " in the sense in which we are using the word. Those who open books simply to pass unoccupied time, exactly as they might play patience, or do a bit of unnecessary needlework, or play with a puzzle, are not what old-fashioned people call " fond of reading." They employ a book-cure to allay the fidgets, or to satisfy a con- science which will not allow them to do nothing, or as a " don't- worry " specific. Every man who takes an interest in his country's welfare " looks at " the papers, and many devout persons provoke devotion by meditation upon religious manuals. That is not "bookishness," or anything to do with it.. Again, those who read solely to gain information as a direct means to a particular end—as if a musician were to read every word that had ever been written upon musical " theory," or an engineer upon mechanics, or a doctor on pathology—have no entrance to the book world. The little working girl absorbed in a novelette or a volume of tenth-rate verse goes into that world before them, though it be by the back- door. She has tasted the delight of letters. Love of reading, like the love of music, is a gift. The critical faculty comes of training. Some- times when a man has got that training, or while he is getting it, his love of reading falls into abeyance. We heard a man of letters declare the other day that when he first went to Oxford he read no book voluntarily except for the sake of its style. The sheer artistry of composition appealed to him, and nothing else. He did not care what was said so long as it was well said In such a mood Louis Stevenson comes to be regarded as almost the subject of inspiration. The point of view is narrowing to the mind, but perhaps it is a good way to begin reading, and better than the boyish appetite for any and every sort of print which a few people keep through life. To be able to discriminate and classify, but not prone to do so, is the most desirable mental attitude for the man who wants to

lead a part of his life in the world of books. Perhaps it is the best attitude to take up in the social world also. If a man reads for sheer pleasure, merely to increase his happiness in life, even though he be a highly instructed and highly cultivated parson, even if he can produce books on the plane of literature himself, he will not be a well-read man, not exactly a man of the book world, but always in

a sense a provincial. With such a reader as this the present writer was well acquainted. Half his life was passed outside of his actual

surroundings, away from the physical world, which, by the by, he regarded as a very sad place. He led a subsidiary life of the imagina- tion in his books. He read amazingly fast, and he possessed an excellent memory. He regarded literature as the greatest of the arts, but he considered the highest function of all art to be, if one may say so, consolatory. He thought of it as the great and inspired mitigation of what he called " human misery." Consequently he

would not read a really painful work. " I have never," he would say, " finished reading Lear or The Bride of Lammermoor." All the same,

he encouraged young people to endure book-pain while still " human misery " appeared to them as idle talk. A certain vital part of literature was thus shut to him while he acknowledged its greatness.

Art which did not depiot life as better than it is, he regarded as

failing in its highest duty. On the same principle, he had no patience with obscurity because it darkened delight. Some great modern novelists he could not tolerate. " It is the duty of a book to

be readable," he would declare. This quality he found in many humble writers, whose works he always boasted that he enjoyed,

and often lent to literary aspirants to see whether or no they had

" airs " or could find pleasure in plain company. A Celt and by nature emotional, he had a fervent love of poetry, demanding from it, if possible in lyrical form, tears, philosophy, and passion. The tears, however, must not come from the wells of despair, but be such as relieved heartache. The philosophy must not be pessimist or the passion lustfuL He had Keats's thirst for sweet-heartache.

" The Waters of Mara " he dreaded, and could not bear to see even in a mirror. He could not make himself read. Certain of the greatest works were, for want of this self-control, imperfectly known

to him, for instance Dante and the Old Testament. Both, he always said, were—perhaps for his sins, and certainly to his loss-

" unreadable." A convinced Christian, he conned the Gospel with ever-increasing reverence, recollection, and positive awe ; but St. Paul he did not find " readable," and could not get through.

It is possible to have a good library nowadays which is worth little. The love of books and the love of brit-it-brae are almost inseparable. The man of whose taste we have been writing had an utter contempt for good editions, and no real respect for " the body " of any book. He broke their backs when they would not open widely enough, as a matter of course, and would set a cup of hot tea down upon the finest binding that ever was tooled.

Lacking neither opportunity nor knowledge to give him tho freedom of the literary city, his temperament forbade—though in his own work there was a strange universality. He was never in

reality a man of the book world. He was always a provincial in literature. Yet he made a reputation among the critics, and his

work was, of its kind, first class. Style, even grammar, he regarded

as a secondary consideration in criticizing any work. But his own English was described by a renowned critic as "matchless," and

his literary erudition was in most directions boundless. The truth is, perhaps, that neither among men nor books is it the men of the world who make or mar the world. They simply know it, and are at home in it as it is.