Far be it from me to gainsay the
inestimable value of good books, or to discourage any man from reading
the best; but I often think that we forget that other side to this
glorious view of literature--the misuse of books, the debilitating waste
of brain in aimless, promiscuous, vapid reading, or even, it may be, in
the poisonous inhalation of mere literary garbage and bad men's worst
thoughts.
For what can a book be more than the man who wrote it? The brightest
genius seldom puts the best of his own soul into his printed page; and
some famous men have certainly put the worst of theirs. Yet are all men
desirable companions, much less teachers, able to give us advice, even
of those who get reputation and command a hearing? To put out of the
question that writing which is positively bad, are we not, amidst the
multiplicity of books and of writers, in continual danger of being drawn
off by what is stimulating rather than solid, by curiosity after
something accidentally notorious, by what has no intelligible thing to
recommend it, except that it is new? Now, to stuff our minds with what
is simply trivial, simply curious, or that which at best has but a low
nutritive power, this is to close our minds to what is solid and
enlarging, and spiritually sustaining.
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