Chapter I

You, Gentlemen, who so far have followed with patience this course of lectures, advertised, maybe too ambitiously, as 'On the Art of Reading,' will recall to your memory, when I challenge it across the intervals of Vacation, that three propositions have been pretty steadily held before you.

The _first_: (bear me out) that, man's life being of the length it is, and his activities multifarious as they are, out of the mass of printed matter already loaded and still being shot upon this planet, he _must_ make selection. There is no other way.

The _second_: that--the time and opportunity being so brief, the mass so enormous, and the selection therefore so difficult--he should select the books that are best for him, and take them _absolutely,_ not frittering his time upon books written about and around the best: that--in their order, of course--the primary masterpieces shall come first, and the secondary second, and so on; and mere chat about any of them last of all.

My _third_ proposition (perhaps more discutable) has been that, the human soul's activities being separated, so far as we can separate them, into _What Does, What Knows, What Is_--to _be_ such-and-such a man ranks higher than either _knowing_ or _doing_ this, that, or the other: that it transcends all man's activity upon phenomena, even a Napoleon's: all his housed store of knowledge, though it be a Casaubon's or a Mark Pattison's: that only by learning to _be_ can we understand or reach, as we have an instinct to reach, to our right place in the scheme of things: and that, any way, all the greatest literature commands this instinct. To be Hamlet--to feel yourself Hamlet--is more important than killing a king or even knowing all there is to be known about a text. Now most of us have been Hamlet, more or less: while few of us, I trust, have ever murdered a monarch: and still fewer, perhaps, can hope to know all that is to be known of the text of the play. But for value, Gentlemen, let us not rank these three achievements by order of their rarity. Shakespeare means us to feel--to _be_--Hamlet. That is all: and from the play it is the best we can get.