Pace in Reading

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

A COMMON and trivial excuse given by those who read little is that they have no time for reading. One may have no time for eating or sleeping, but hardly no time to make love or to read. It is good will, concentration, and the habit of dispatch, not leisure or unlimited opportunity, which have always performed the greatest wonders in both of these useful pursuits. Many persons in mature life are conscious of a gentle and luxurious sentiment in favor of reading, which comes to nothing because they do not know how to read. With all the good will in the world, they lack concentration and the habit of dispatch. The good will was not applied early enough, or not applied at all to any other end than the lazy diversion of a moment. This naturally resulted in the formation of the newspaper habit, by which I do not mean simply the habit of reading newspapers, but the habit of mind which makes it possible for men to spend an evening in going through motions. There is no more reason for spending two hours in reading the newspaper than in having one’s boots blacked. Some people never make their way into the great Establishment of Letters farther than the vestibule, where they spend their lives contentedly playing marbles with the hall-boys. Of course we do not call the newspaper worthless simply because some other things are worth more. The best reading is both intensive and extensive ; one reads a little of everything, and a great deal of some things. The good reader takes all reading to be his province. Newspapers, periodicals, books old and new, all present themselves to him in their proper perspective ; they are all grist to his mill, but they do not go into the same hopper or require the same process. On the contrary, one of the main distinctions of the clever reader is that without varying as to intensity, he varies almost indefinitely as to pace. This power of reading flexibly comes mainly, of course, with practice. For those who have lacked an early experience of books, the manipulation of them is never likely to become the perfect and instinctive process of adjustment which it should be. People often achieve a certain degree of education and refinement late in life, but seldom, I think, the power of the accomplished reading man. It is simply not to be expected. An adult who takes up the violin may get much amusement and profit from his instrument, but he cannot hope to master it. A certain increase of facility, however, the belated reader may surely expect to gain from some sort of observance of this simple principle of adjustment.

This anxious but unskilled reader is too likely to have a set gait, so many words to the minute or lines to the hour. An essay, an editorial, a chapter in a novel or in the Bible, a scientific article, a short story, if they contain the same number of words, take up just the same amount of this misguided person’s time. No wonder reading becomes an incubus to him, with the appalling monotony of its procession of printed words filing endlessly before him. He really has time enough, if he knew how to make use of it. Eben Holden keeps him busy for a week or more ; it should be read in a few hours. He plods methodically through Sir Walter, and finds him slow ; the happy reader who can get Quentin and his Isabelle satisfactorily married in six hours does not. The trained reader readjusts his focus for each objective. Milton may be read in words or lines, Macaulay in sentences, Thackeray in paragraphs, Conan Doyle in pages. The eye, that is, readily gains the power of taking in words in groups instead of separately. How large a group the glance can manage varies with the seriousness of the subject. With the same degree of concentration, eye and mind will take care of a page of the Prisoner of Zenda as easily as they can absorb a line of Macbeth, or one of Fitzgerald’s quatrains.

Of course this disposes of the indolent lolling style of reading, — or rather makes a rare indulgence of it. When one occasionally comes upon the novel of his heart, or the poem he has waited for, he may well afford to consider it at his luxurious leisure, minimizing labor by dilatoriness. But as a rule the widely reading man is not an indolent person. Not that he is to be always keeping his nose in a book. By regulating his pace, he not only covers an astonishing amount of ground in reading, but makes room for other things. He knows how to get the most for his time, that is all. The bee does not eat the flower to get the honey out of it. The eye of the skilled reader acts like a sixth sense, directing him to the gist of the matter, in whatever form it may appear. Twenty minutes yields all that there is for him in the book which his neighbor, knowing that it would mean a week’s spare hours, is careful to avoid.

This, it may be said, sounds very much like an advocacy of skimming. Skimming and rapid reading are different processes, but skimming is at times a good thing, too ; even skipping becomes, on occasion, a sacred duty. We may go a step farther, for skimming implies cream, and skipping, a foothold somewhere ; and many books deserve neither of these less and least complimentary modes of treatment. The eye brushes a page or two, and the mind is hardly called in to assist in a damnatory verdict which is informal, but summary. The experienced reader, in short, is an artist, and, like other artists, attains his highest powers only when he has learned what to subordinate, to slight, even to omit. The poor fellow whose conscience will not let him refuse an equally deliberate consideration to every six inches of black and white which comes in his way may be an excellent husband and father, a meritorious lawyer or merchant, and a model citizen ; he is certainly not a good reader.