OCR Text |
Show HAP ID KEADItiQ. Few Hooks Have More Than One Mm That is Worth finding Out. Kate Field's Washington. The Increasing mass of matter which a person of any pretentions to culture must ut lcat skim over makes It very necessary that the liirhtcr part of our rending should be systematized as far as is practicable. A great many periodicals have sprung up' which aspire to do this work for an over-crowded over-crowded public of distracted readers, ami It must be confessed thai they fullill their functions admirably until you are rash enough to take two of them. A vicarious selection of reuilitig matter cannot be wholly successful (or the same reason that ready-uiadu clolhinc can never he supremely elegant There must be some allowance made tor the variation of the individual. in-dividual. If you read In the wake of the professional critic, Ihe best you can do is to Undone who differs from jou the least In taste and mental constitution. The mind in which would thrive on a diet prescribed by Mr. Andrew Lang would starve on one selected se-lected by Mr. Howulls and, possibly vice versa. There is one comfort that Is, the more one rends of Contemporary literature the less he has to read. Very few of our clever people peo-ple have more than an idea or two a year, and when the seasoned reader picks up it fresh book or article by a familiar anther, it will not take him long to get at the gist of the mailer, and see which is the annual new idea, and which are the old ones warmed over. This implies no reproach to the writer wri-ter he Is very fortunate to have a whole. Idea a year would that all of us had! It only shows that the great mass of current literature, litera-ture, need not frighten us too much. It ii like the tail of a comet Immense In extend hut if necessary we can dash through it at u tremendous rate of speed. Baton's classification of books into those w hich arc to be lasted, those which are to be swallowed and those which are to be chewed and digested, is still truer than when he made It, except that in the. liyhl of modern medical science we would leave out that middle class of things to be swallowed and not digested- The hints of dysucpsia are too harrowing; and, moreover, the figure is belter without It, If it is to be applied to the needs of us moderns. Willi books, as with wines and cheeses and many oilier things, we do well to taste the silimilcnt and nutritive nutri-tive value. If an old boo is worth reading at all it is worth ruadlng well. Hut it takes lots of courage to read an old book in these days, when It is in such bad taste to talk about it after it is read. Perhaps the happiest reader is the one who reads new books as a huciticss and depends for his pleasure upon those which have been new for years with the frcshnons of eternal youth. It Implies a very marked talent for skimmins; if one would have any time left for that sort of literature which is so pre-eminently its own reward, but this remnant of leisure is not impossible even in these days when the yearly catalogue of the publishers are formidable volumes. The entire lack of the faculty for reading light literature lightly is a punishment w hich the (rods might have invented for some obdurate mortal of literary liter-ary taste; for what could be worse- than to bd doomed forever to the perpetual reading of platitude? . A . |