YOU have done me the honour of asking me to read a paper to your society this evening. Before I begin, I may as well confess that this is the first time I have ever read a paper in school since I was a member of the Natural History Society at my old school, when, for reasons which I need not explain to you, I had to read a paper whether I liked it or not.

It is one thing to write and quite another thing to read. And that brings me directly to what I wanted to speak about — which is the use and value of a little reading.

There is, or there was, an idea that reading in itself is a virtuous and holy deed. I can’t quite agree with this, because it seems to me that the mere fact of a man’s being fond of reading proves nothing one way or the other. He may be constitutionally lazy; or he may be overstrained, and so take refuge in a book to rest himself. He may be full of curiosity and wonder about the life on which he is just entering; and for that reason may plunge into any and every book he can lay hands on, in order to get information about things that are puzzling him, or frightening him, or interesting him.

Now, I am a very long way from saying that literature ought to be a chief or a leading interest in most men’s lives, or even in the life of a nation. But a man who goes into life with no knowledge of the literature of his own country and without a certain acquaintance with the classics and the value of words, is as heavily handicapped as a man who takes up sports or games without knowing what has been done in these particular sports or games, before he came on the scene. He doesn’t know the records and so he can’t have any standards. I have a book at home that gives a summary with diagrams, of practically every attempt at perpetual-motion machines that have ever been invented for the last two hundred years. It was compiled for the purpose of saving inventors trouble; and the compiler says in his preface: “One of the grossest fallacies of the mind is that of taking for granted that ideas of mechanical construction, apparently the result of accident, must of necessity be quite original. The most doubtful originality is that which the inventor attributes to his ignorance of all previous plans coupled with his isolated position in life.”

There you have precisely the position of the man who has no knowledge of literature — ignorant that is, of all previous plans. Such a man is more likely than not to waste his own time and the patience of his friends — perhaps even to endanger the safety of the community — by inventing schemes for the conduct of his own, or his neighbours’ affairs, which have been tried, found wanting, and laid aside any time these thousand years; and the record of which — the diagram and specification, so to say, of which — he could turn to if he had only taken the trouble to read.

One of the hardest things to realise, specially for a young man, is that our forefathers were living men who really knew something, I would go further and say they knew a very great deal. Indeed, I should not be surprised if they knew quite as much as we do about the things that really concern men. What each generation forgets is that while the words which it uses to describe ideas are always changing, the ideas themselves do not change so quickly, nor are those ideas in any sense new.

If we pay no attention to words whatever, we may become like the isolated gentleman who invents a new perpetual-motion machine on old lines in ignorance of all previous plans, and then is surprised that it doesn’t work. If we confine our attention entirely to the slang of the day — that is to say, if we devote ourselves exclusively to modern literature — we get to think the world is progressing when it is only repeating itself. In both cases we are likely to be deceived, and what is more important, to deceive others. Therefore, it is advisable for us in our own interests, quite apart from considerations of personal amusement, to concern ourselves occasionally with a certain amount of our national literature drawn from all ages. I say from all ages, because it is only when one reads what men wrote long ago that one realises how absolutely modern the best of the old things are.

About fifteen hundred years ago some early Anglo-Saxon writer saw, or heard about (I imagine in those days men had generally seen what they wrote about) the ruins of an old Roman city half buried and going to pieces in the jungle somewhere in the south of England; with its walls split and falling; its roofs stripped of its tiles; its towers fallen, and all its, luxurious baths and heating arrangements open to the air. The man begins to wonder about the people who built all this magnificence and he says:

Earth’s grasp holdeth

The mighty workmen

Worn away; lorn away [geworen forloren]

In the grip of the grave.

Then he thinks of the strong man who commanded the place when it was first built — most likely it was a Roman prefect — and he describes him:

Gorgeous and gold-bright,

Gaudily jewelled,

Haughty and wine-hot,

Shining in armour.

And as the poem goes on, we can almost see the band of Anglo-Saxon hunters or raiders, who have scrambled through the bushes, and stand, picking the thorns out of their legs, in the presence of this great, mysterious dead city. There is one touch which is exactly what hot and dirty men would think, when they saw all the paraphernalia of the old Roman baths:

There stood courts of stone.

The steam hotly rushed,

With a wide eddy,

Between shut walls.

There were the baths

Hot to bathe in.

That was a boon indeed!

The whole thing is as modern as to-day’s evening paper — but with a freshness and a directness and a simplicity that isn’t common in modern work.

I’ll take another instance. About five hundred years ago, Chaucer wrote a poem on how a man ought to manage his life. The last verse of it — it is only three verses long — runs:

That thee is sent receive in buxomnesse [be thankful for what you get]

The wrestling of this world asketh a fall.

Here is no home — here is but wildernesse:

Forth pilgrime — forth beast from out thy stall!

Look up on high and thanke the God of all.

Weive thy lusts and let thy ghost thee lead [That means, keep yourself in hand and trust your spirit]

And truth shall thee deliver, it is no drede.

The whole thing absolutely covers the few facts in life that really matter.

A last instance. In the course of his wonderful career, Sir Walter Raleigh had occasion to write his opinion, as you may have to some day, on the value of forts for coast and harbour defence. Well, his practical experience showed him, what we forgot and only realised a few years ago, that mere forts on the land aren’t enough to maintain an effective defence or blockade, unless they are supported by ships. And he says so. But he doesn’t say it as you and I would. For some inscrutable reason Elizabethans, apparently, could not put pen to paper without producing uncommonly good prose. So he gives his reasons and his experiences thus: “In this age a valiant and judicious man-of-war will not fear to pass by the best appointed fort of Europe, with the help of a good tide and a leading gale of wind; no, though forty pieces of great artillery open their mouths against him, and threaten to tear him in pieces. It was not long since, that the Duke of Parma, besieging Antwerp and finding no possibility to master it otherwise than by famine, laid his cannon on the bank of the river so well to purpose that he thought it impossible for the least boat to pass. Yet the Hollanders and Zeelanders, not blown up by any wind of glory, but coming to find a good market for their butter and cheese — even the poor men attending their profit, when all things were extreme dear at Antwerp — passed in boats of ten or twelve tun, by the mouth of the duke’s cannon in despight of them, when a strong westerly wind and flood favoured them. As also with a contrary wind and ebbing tide they returned back again. So he was forced in the end to build his stockade overthwart the river, to his marvellous trouble and charge. It is true, that where a fort is so set that there is no passing along beside it, or that ships are driven to turn upon a bow-line towards it, wanting all help of wind and tide; there, and in such places, it is of great use and fearful. Otherwise not.”

Here I have given you three specimens of not exactly modern literature in three different keys; the first dealing with a concrete thing seen and brought home to a man’s mind; the second describing a man’s thoughts on the conduct of his own soul; and the third a practical man’s plans for dealing with an actual situation — a piece, that is, of pure intellect.

But it is very possible that when you come to read them, these three specimens may not appeal to you. No matter. That is just a question of temperament; and a man is no more to be blamed for not caring for certain forms of literature than he is for not thriving on certain forms of food.

But your choice is practically illimitable; for the literature of our England is strewn from end to end with a prodigality that almost frightens one — strewn with gems and jewels and glories and beauties fitted to every conceivable need that can arise in the course of any human being’s life. But we make very little use of them. That again is quite natural. If we could buy knowledge, prudence, forethought and all the elementary virtues out of sevenpenny editions of standard authors, we should long ago have become a race of unbearably perfect archangels. And we are still quite a little lower than the angels. None the less, it is possible that our reading, if so be we read wisely, may save us to a certain extent from some of the serious forms of trouble; or if we get into trouble, as we most certainly shall, may teach us how to come out of it decently.

Here is an instance, which has nothing to do directly with written words, that shows the extraordinary value of getting at another man’s experience and using it. I was talking some time ago with our greatest General and he told me that when he went out first to India as a subaltern of Artillery, about seventeen years old, he was posted to his father’s Command in Peshawur. A short time before that, his father had commanded a brigade in one of the big Frontier wars, which war, to put it gently, hadn’t been a success. The general in charge of those operations had occupied a town and had put his guns in one place, his forage and his provisions in another, and had tried to hold more ground than he could with the troops at his disposal. Then the country rose round him and there was a series of regrettable incidents. (That was a campaign which, I have always thought, helped to bring on the Indian Mutiny.) Well, you can imagine how the young subaltern, sitting at the bottom of his father’s table at Peshawur, must have heard the failure of the campaign discussed from every possible point of view by his father’s comrades who had taken part in it — majors and colonels of the old hooka-smoking times of the early ’50’s. And you can think of ’em throwing him a word here and there in the middle of their talk and saying: “Look here, youngster, if you’re ever caught in such and such a position, you do so-and-so”.

Then, years later, this young subaltern of Artillery became a general commanding an army and, by the luck of war, he found himself on the identical ground and in the identical city under practically the same conditions that he had heard discussed in his youth, by the men who had taken part in the old war. He said, telling me the tale: “It all came back to me. I put my guns and my forage and my rations where I could lay my hands on ’em; and I took very good care not to try and hold more ground than I had troops for; and I settled in quite comfortably. I sent a wire to the Indian Government telling them exactly how long I could hold out for — and — that was all there was to it.” Of course there was a lot more to it — there was his own genius — but you can see the tremendous advantage he had in having got his knowledge in his youth. True, it was hereditary knowledge — more sound, more adhesive than anything he was likely to have got out of a book.

But the main idea is in line with what I’ve been talking about.

If a man brings a good mind to what he reads he may become, as it were, the spiritual descendant to some extent of great men, and this link, this spiritual hereditary tie, may help to just kick the beam in the right direction at a vital crisis; or may keep him from drifting through the long slack times when, so to speak, we are only fielding and no balls are coming our way.

You know those curious half-waking dreams that one dreams, about one’s future — a sort of story without words of the things we mean to do later on? They shade off into a vision of a gloriously successful career in our chosen line with all the world at our feet, recognising at last what splendid fellows we were. Then we forgive all our enemies, after we’ve got our feet on their necks; take our seat either as a Viceroy or a legislator or a Field-Marshal or some insignificant trifle of that kind — and then we wake! Sometimes the dreams have a knack of coming true. A man does achieve something out of the ordinary; finds himself saddled with tremendous responsibilities and expected to play up to a new part. Well, that is the time that he should have provided himself with all the knowledge and strength that can be drawn from noble books, so that whatever has happened to him may not be overwhelming nor unexpected. And to do that, to keep his soul fit for all chances, a man should associate at certain times in his soul (there is no need to tell everyone about it) with the best, the most balanced, the largest, finest, and most honourable and capable minds of the past. It may be a snobbish way of putting it, but a man should know “the right people” in the great world of books, and they’ll help to show him what the world really means. Men will tell you that the days are over when one can suddenly be called to power and glory. Don’t you believe it! A chance may open suddenly in front of one at a minute’s notice. A man’s superior may die and leave him in temporary charge of a district half the size of France with ten million people in it. A flood, a storm, an outbreak of sickness may change a man’s position and outlook and re............