G. S. of M. read a paper in our club the other day which he
called "Reading for Results." It was followed by a somewhat warm
discussion, in the course of which so many things were said that were
not so that the entire club (before any one knew it) had waked up and
learned something.

The P. G. S. of M. took the general ground that most of the men one
knows nowadays had never learned to read. They read wastefully. Our
common schools and colleges, he thought, ought to teach a young man to
read with a purpose. "When an educated young man takes up a book," he
said, "he should feel that he has some business in it, and attend to
it."

I said I thought young men nowadays read with purposes too much.
Purposes were all they had to read with. "When a man feels that he needs
a purpose in front of him, to go through a book with, when he goes about
in a book looking over the edge of a purpose at everything, the chances
are that he is missing nine tenths of what the book has to give."

The P. G. S. of M. thought that one tenth was enough. He didn't read a
book to get nine tenths of an author. He read it to get the one tenth he
wanted--to find out which it was.

I asked him which tenth of Shakespeare he wanted. He said that sometimes
he wanted one tenth and sometimes another.

"That is just it," I said. "Everybody does. It is at the bottom and has
been at the bottom of the whole Shakespeare nuisance for three hundred
years. Every literary man we have or have had seems to feel obliged
somehow to read Shakespeare in tenths. Generally he thinks he ought to
publish his tenth--make a streak across Shakespeare with his
soul--before he feels literary or satisfied or feels that he has a place
in the world. One hardly knows a man who calls himself really literary,
who reads Shakespeare nowadays except with a purpose, with some little
side-show of his own mind. It is true that there are still some
people--not very many perhaps--but we all know some people who can be
said to understand Shakespeare, who never get so low in their minds as
to have to read him with a purpose; but they are not prominent.

"And yet there is hardly any man who would deny that at best his reading
with a purpose is almost always his more anaemic, official,
unresourceful, reading. It is like putting a small tool to a book and
whittling on it, instead of putting one's whole self to it. One might as
well try to read most of Shakespeare's plays with a screw-driver or w