To pass now to the matters canvassed in the following essay. The
whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help
out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total
perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most
concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world,
and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free
thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow
staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue
in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of
following them mechanically. This, and this alone, is the scope of
the following essay. I say again here, what I have said in the pages
which follow, that from the faults and weaknesses of bookmen a notion
of something bookish, pedantic, and futile has got itself more or
less connected with the word culture, and that it is a pity we cannot
use a word more perfectly free from all shadow of reproach. And yet,
futile as are many bookmen, and helpless as books and reading often
prove for bringing nearer to perfection those who [ix] use them, one
must, I think, be struck more and more, the longer one lives, to find
how much, in our present society, a man's life of each day depends
for its solidity and value on whether he reads during that day, and,
far more still, on what he reads during it. More and more he who
examines himself will find the difference it makes to him, at the end
of any given day, whether or no he has pursued his avocations
throughout it without reading at all; and whether or no, having read
something, he has read the newspapers only. This, however, is a
matter for each man's private conscience and experience. If a man
without books or reading, or reading nothing but his letters and the
newspapers, gets nevertheless a fresh and free play of the best
thoughts upon his stock notions and habits, he has got culture. He