How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day
Page: 30

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 f
eeling 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.

If poetry is what is called "a sealed book" to you, begin by reading