Part 2 (2/2)

Consult your doctor, therefore. Be careful of medicines he does not prescribe. The most innocent drug is a veiled force, a compound of hidden powers--the system a delicate intricacy whose condition may be different every day. The neurosis of our American life is seducing too many of our best and busiest men to the use of chemicals, mixtures, nostrums, pick-me-ups, etc., which make nerves and brain utter brave falsehoods of a strength that is not theirs.

Your doctor won't let you do this--he will stay your unconsciously suicidal hand. If your machinery is out of order, he will tell you so, and do what is necessary to repair it. He will comfort and rea.s.sure you, too, and administer to the mind a medicine as potent as powder or liquid. But you will get no false sympathy from him. If you have nothing the matter with you, yet think you have, your doctor will take you by the collar of your coat, stand you on your feet, and bid you be a man. So don't dose yourself. Be a faithful guardian of the treasures Nature gave you.

Returning now to reading: You are not to neglect books. They must be read. If you are a professional man they must be more than read; they must be studied, absorbed, made a part of your intellectual being. I am not despising the acc.u.mulated learning of the past. Matthew Arnold, in his ”Literature and Dogma,” quite makes this point. What I am speaking of is miscellaneous reading.

After a while one wearies of the endless repet.i.tion, the ”d.a.m.nable iteration” contained in the great ma.s.s of books. You will finally come to care greatly for the Bible, Shakespeare, and Burns. Compared with these most others are ”twice-told tales” indeed. Of course one must read the great scientific productions. They are an addition to positive knowledge, and are a thing quite apart from ordinary literature.

My recommendation of the Bible is not alone because of its spiritual or religious influences; I am advising it from the material and even the business view-point. By far the keenest wisdom in literature is in the Bible, and is put in terms so apt and condensed, too, that their very brevity proves its inspiration--_is_ an inspiration to you.

Carry the Bible with you, if for nothing else than as a matter of literary relaxation. The tellers of the Bible stories tell the stories and stop. ”He builded him a city”--”he smote the Philistines”--”he took her to his mother's tent.” You are not wearied to death by the details. Go into any audience addressed by a public speaker, and you will perceive that his hearers' interest depends on whether he is getting to the point. ”Well, why doesn't he get to the point,” is the common expression in public a.s.semblages. The Bible ”gets to the point.”

And it has something for everybody. If you are a politician, or even a statesman, no matter how astute you are, you can read with profit several times a year the career of David, one of the cleverest politicians and greatest statesmen who ever lived. If you are a business man, the proverbs of Solomon will tone you up like mountain-air.

A young woman should read Ruth. A man of practical life, a great man, but purely a man of the world, once said to me: ”If I could enact one statute for all the young women of America, it would be that each of them should read the book of Ruth once a month.” But the limits and purpose of this paper do not permit a dissertation on the Bible.

Shakespeare, of course, you cannot get along without. I shall say no more about him here; for if anything at all is said about Shakespeare (or the Bible), it ought to take up an entire paper at least. ”Don't read anybody's commentaries on Shakespeare--don't read mine; read _Shakespeare_,” was the final advice of Richard Grant White, one of the ripest of the world's commentators on this universal poet.

From the Bible and Shakespeare roads lead down among books but little lower in elevation and outlook. Of these the essays of Emerson furnish a n.o.ble example; and the poems of the Concord philosopher are the wisdom of the ancients stated in terms of Americanism. I would have every young man spend half an hour over each page of our American Thinker's essays on Character, Manners, Power, and Self-reliance.

Indeed, wherever you turn, among the pages of our Sage, you find no desert place, but always a very forest of thought, tumultuous and vibrant with fancy and suggestion, sweet and wholesome with living truth and all helpfulness. You can form no better habit than to read a page or two of Emerson every night.

Take Emerson as an example; read books of that sort--books that are kin to the Bible and Shakespeare. There is no excuse for your poisoning your time with idle books or low books or transient books--moth volumes that flutter an instant in the light and in an instant die. For the great books are entertaining. If you want excitement, Plutarch's Lives furnish you thrilling-narrative fiction cannot surpa.s.s--and undying inspiration besides.

The great novels, too, have in them all the blood and battle-ax the stoutest nerve can crave, all the incidents of love, self-sacrifice, and gentle invention the tenderest heart can need. Yes, certainly: Read books that come to stay--the kind of books you would like to be as a man.

The Rubaiyat would deserve mention but for the danger of misunderstanding its message. Rightly read Omar Khayyam's lesson is serenity and poise and that power and happiness which come from these.

The disciple of the tent-maker is not apt to lose his bearings. He no longer regards to-day as eternity, no longer looks at the world and the universe from himself as a center. Reject the Persian poet's apotheosis of wine, absorb his philosophy of calmness, and you will do your duty regardless of consequences. And that is the chief thing, is it not?

Do your duty, have the courage of your thought, and walk off with the old fatalist's verse soothing your soul and brain, and let the disturbed ones clamor. The clamor will cease in time and turn to applause. And whether it does or not is a matter of absolutely no importance if you have done right.

There is nothing which will more conserve the nervous forces of any serious-minded young man, nothing which will give him so much of that composure of mind and necessary concentration of powers, as the resolution to do his best and let it go at that, whether the world applaud, or laugh, or rage. Be true to your deed, whatever it may have been, and if the deed was true, the end must necessarily be satisfactory.

Burns, of course, we must read. We must have him to keep the milk of human kindness flowing in our veins--to keep sweet and sincere and loving. The good that you get from Burns cannot be a.n.a.lyzed. You cannot say, ”I have read Burns, and find in him of wisdom so many grains, of humor so many grains, of beauty of expression so many grains,” and so forth and so on to the end.

It is the general effect of Burns that is so valuable, so indispensable. Read a little bit of Burns every day, and you will find it very hard to be unkind; you are conscious that you are more human.

A mellow and delightful sympathy for your fellow man--aye, and for all living things--warms your heart. And this human quality is more valuable than all the riches of all the lords of wealth.

At all cost keep your capacity for human sympathy.

The sharp, hard processes of our strictly business civilization tend to regulate even our sympathies into a system. It is as if we should say each day, ”I have time to-day for five minutes of human sympathy,”

and promptly push the b.u.t.ton of our stop-watch when the second-hand shows that the time has expired. Burns is the best corrective of this that I know--the best, that is, outside of the Bible itself.

Indeed the more one thinks about it the clearer it is that we might throw away all other books but the Bible, and still have all our mental and moral needs ministered to by those who through all time have thought and felt most highly; for the Bible is the record of the loftiest of all human expression, not to mention its divine origin.

Put your Bible, your Shakespeare, your Burns in your bundle when you go for a journey, and you are intellectually and spiritually equipped.

Let a man have the courage of his thought--I repeat it. Courage is where we fail, not intellect. We hear much about intellect, about ”brains,” as the rather coa.r.s.e expression is. It is not that which is needed; it is courage.

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