Books Which Have Influenced Me - Page 2

influence of nature; they mould by contact; we
drink them up like water, and are bettered, yet know not how. It is in
books more specifically didactic that we can follow out the effect,
and distinguish and weigh and compare. A book which has been very
influential upon me fell early into my hands, and so may stand first,
though I think its influence was only sensible later on, and perhaps
still keeps growing, for it is a book not easily outlived: the
_Essais_ of Montaigne.[8] That temperate and genial picture of life is
a great gift to place in the hands of persons of to-day; they will
find in these smiling pages a magazine of heroism and wisdom, all of
an antique strain; they will have their "linen decencies"[9] and
excited orthodoxies fluttered, and will (if they have any gift of
reading) perceive that these have not been fluttered without some
excuse and ground of reason; and (again if they have any gift of
reading) they will end by seeing that this old gentleman was in a
dozen ways a finer fellow, and held in a dozen ways a nobler view of
life, than they or their contemporaries.

The next book, in order of time, to influence me, was the New
Testament, and in particular the Gospel according to St. Matthew. I
believe it would startle and move any one if they could make a certain
effort of imagination and read it freshly like a book, not droningly
and dully like a portion of the Bible. Any one would then be able to
see in it those truths which we are all courteously supposed to know
and all modestly refrain from applying. But upon this subject it is
perhaps better to be silent.

I come next to Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_,[10] a book of singular
service, a book which tumbled the world upside down for me, blew into
space a thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion, and, having
thus shaken my tabernacle of lies, set me back again upon a strong
foundation of all the original and manly virtues. But it is, once
more, only a book for those who have the gift of reading.[11] I will
be very frank--I believe it is so with all good books except, perhaps,
fiction. The average man lives, and must live, so wholly in
convention, that gun-powder charges of the truth are more apt to
discompose than to invigorate his creed. Either he cries out upon
blasphemy and indecency, and crouches the closer round that little
idol of part-truths and part-conveniences which is the contemporary
deity, or he is convinced by what is new, forgets what is old, and
becomes truly blasphemous and indecent himself. New truth is only
useful to supplement the old; rough truth is only wanted to expand,
not to destroy, our civil and often elegant conventions. He who cannot
judge had better stick to fiction and the daily papers.