ancient Thebes, the soul is a city having gates on every side. There
is the eye gate, and through it pass friends, a multitude of
strangers, the forests, the fields, the marching clouds. There is the
ear gate, and therein go trooping all sweet songs, all conversation
and eloquence, all laughter with Niobe's woe and grief. There is
conversation, and thereby we cross the threshold of another's mind,
and wander through the halls of memory and the chambers of
imagination. But these faculties are limited. The ear was made for one
sweet song, not for a thousand. Conversation is with one friend
living, not with Pliny and Pericles. The vision stays upon yonder
horizon; but beyond the line where earth and sky do meet are distant
lands and historic scenes; beyond are battle-fields all stained with
blood; beyond are the Parthenon and the pyramids. So books come in to
increase the power of vision. Books cause the arctics and the tropics,
the mountains and hills, all the generations with their woes and wars,
their achievements for liberty and religion, to pass before the mind
for instruction and delight. And when books have made men
contemporaneous with Socrates and Cicero, with Emerson and Lowell,
when they have made man a citizen of every clime and country, they go
on to add advantages still more signal. When the royal messenger
brought Newton the announcement of the honor bestowed upon him by the
Queen, the astronomer was so busy with his studies relating to the
"Principia" that he begrudged his visitor even an hour of his time.
The great man was too busy writing for thousands to talk long with a
single individual about his discoveries of light and color and his
proofs of the moon ever falling toward the earth. Not even to his best
friends could the astronomer unfold through conversation what he gives
us in his "Principia." When an American author called upon Carlyle he
found him in a very peevish mood. Through two hours he listened to
this student of heroes and heroism pour forth a savage tirade against
all men and things. Never again was the American poet able to
associate with Carlyle that fine poise, sanity, and reserve power that
belong to the greatest. In his books Carlyle gives his friends, not
the peevishness of an evening, but the best moods of all his life,
winnowing his intellectual harvests.
Recently an author has given the world reminiscences called "Evenings"
with Browning and Tennyson, with Bright and Gladstone. Yet an evening
avails only for a few pleasantries, a few anecdotes, a few
reminiscences. As well speak of spending an afternoon with Egypt or
making an evening call upon Rome. Yet a volume of "In Memoriam" or
"The Idylls of the King" enables one to overhear the richest and most
masterly thoughts that occupied Tennyson through the best creative
years in his career. So striking are the advantages books have over
conversation that the brief biography of the Carpenter's Son makes us
better acquainted with Jesus Christ than the citizens of Samaria or
Bethlehem could possibly have been. To some Nicodemus it was given to
hear Him discourse on the new heart; some lawyer heard His story of
the good Samaritan; others midst the press and throng caught a part of
the tale of the prodigal son. But the momentary glimpse, the
fragmentary word, the rumors strange and contradictory, yielded only
confusion and mental unrest. But this brief biography exhibits to us
His entire career, sets each eager listener down beside Christ while
He unrolls each glowing parable, each glorious precept, each call to
inspiration and the higher life. Thus books acquaint us with the best
men in their best moods.
Books have two advantages. Chiefly they are tools for the mind. The
foot's step is short, but the engine lengthens the stride and hastens
it. The smith's blow is weak, but the trip-hammer multiplies the might
of man's hand. Thus books are mental machines, enabling the mind of
man to reap in many harvest fields and multiply the mental treasures.
It takes years for Humboldt to search out the wonders of the Andes
Mountains and other years for Livingstone to thread his way through
the jungles of Africa. But a book, during two or three evenings by the
fireside, enables man to journey through the Dark Continent without
the dangers of fever, without experiencing the pain from the lion
leaping out of the thicket to mutilate the arm of Livingstone. With a
book we tramp over the mountains of two continents without once
suffering the heavy fall over the precipice that weakened Humboldt.
Books enable us to visit climes, cities, civilizations ancient and
modern, that without them could never be seen during man's years, so
few, and by man's strength, so insufficient. Great men and rich
increase their influence by surrounding themselves by servants who
fulfill their commands.
Each president and prime minister strengthens himself by a cabinet.
But what if the peasant or workman could surround himself with a group
of counselors and advisers that included a hundred of the greatest
intellects of his generation? What if some Herschel should approach
the youth to say, "You need your night's rest for sleep; but for you I
will give the years for studying the stars and their movements?" What
if some Dana should say, "For you I will decipher the handwriting upon
the rocks, trace the movement of the ice plows, search out the
influence of the flames as they turn rocks into soil for vineyards?"
What if some Audubon should say, "For you I will go through all the
forests to find out the life and history of the winged creatures, from
the humming-bird to hawk and eagle?" What if Niebuhr should say, "For
you I will decipher the monuments, all ruins and obelisks, all man's
parchments and manuscripts for setting forth man's upward progress
through the centuries?" But this is precisely what books do for us.
Saving man's time and strength, books also increase his manhood and
multiply his brain forces. With them, a man of fourscore years ends
his career wiser than, without them, he could have been, though he had
lived and wrought through ten thousand summers and winters. This is
what Emerson means when he says, "Give me a book, health and a June
day, and I will make the pomp of kings ridiculous." When the Athenian
youth, beloved of the gods, went forth upon his journey, one friend
brought him a wondrous armor, proof against arrows; another brought a
horse of marvelous swiftness; another brought a bow of great size and
strength. Thus armed, the youth conquered his enemies. But when books
have armed man against his foes, they go on to change his enemies into
friends; they shield him against ignorance; they free him from
superstition; they clothe him with gratitude. Thank God for books,
cheering our solitude, soothing our sickness, refining our passions,
out of defeat leading us to victory! That youth can scarcely fail of
character, happiness and success who, day by day, goes to school to
sages and seers; who by night hears Dante and Milton discourse upon
Paradise; who has for his mentors in office and counting-room some
Franklin or Solomon. Experience, supplemented by books, teaches youth
more in one year than experience alone will teach him in twenty.
Books also preserve for us the spirit of earth's great ones, just as
the cellar of the king holds wines growing more precious with the
lapse of years. From time to time God sends to earth some man with a
supreme gift called genius. Passing through our life and world, he
sees wondrous sights not beholden of our eyes, hears melodies too fine
for our dulled hearing. What other men behold as bits of coal, his
genius transmutes into diamonds. In the darkness he sleeps to see some
"Midsummer Night's Dream;" in the day he wakens to behold the tragedy
or comedy in his friend's career. While he muses, the fires of
inspiration burn within him. When the time comes, the inner forces
burst out in book or song or poem, just as the tulip bulb when April
comes publishes its heart of fire and gold. The book he writes is the
choicest wine in life, "the gold made fine in the fires of his
genius." Seldom come these elect ones, just as the bush burned only
once during Moses' many years in the desert. Many foot hills must be
united to produce one vast mountain. Only one range of Rockies is
needed to support many states. One Mississippi also can drain a
continent.
Thinking of these great ones, Milton said: "The book is the life-blood
of the master spirit." Just as the wisdom spoken into the phonograph
makes marks there to be reproduced at will, so books preserve and
repeat the eloquence of the greatest. Through his "Excursion," when
Wordsworth says, "I go to the fields to-day," the youth may whisper,
"and I go with thee." He may also accompany Layard, going forth to
study the old tablets and the monuments; with Scott he may ride with
Ivanhoe to castle and tournament; with Virgil and Dante he may shiver
at the brink of the inky river or exult over the first glimpse of
Paradise.
Well did Charles Lamb suggest that men should say grace--not only over
the Christmas festival, but also over the table spread with good
books. For man has no truer friends, Earth offers no richer banquet.
When Southey grew old and dim of vision, he was seen to totter into
his library. Moving about from shelf to shelf the aged scholar laid
his hand upon one favorite book and then upon another, while a rare
sweet smile passed over his face, just as we lay hand tenderly upon
the shoulder of some dear friend. Through their books his old friends,
the heroes of the past, had told Southey of their innermost dreams,
their passions, their aspirations, what braced them in hours of
battle, how they endured when death robbed them of their best. Poor
and lonely, full oft the poet had talked with these volumes as with
familiar friends. So before he died Southey said to his books "Good
night," ere in that bright beyond he said "Good morning" to their
authors.
This divine injunction as to the companionship of books bids us search
out the use and purpose of reading. Primarily, books are to be read
for information and mental strength. The hunger of the body for bread
and fruit is not more real than the hunger of the intellect for facts
and principles. Knowledge stands in as vital relation to the growth of
reason as iron and phosphate to the enrichment of the blood. Ignorance
is weakness. Success is knowing how. Ours is a world in which the last
fact conquers. In addition to his own experience and reflection, the
young artist must stand in some gallery that brings together all the
best masters. Standing beside the Elgin marbles in the British Museum,
the sculptor must bathe and soak himself in the Greek ideal and
spirit, until the Greek thought throbs in his brain, and he feels the
Greek enthusiasm for strength in round, lithe arms, and limbs made
ready for the race.
But in a large, deep sense, books are the galleries in which spirits
are caught and fastened upon the pages. Books are storehouses into
which facts and principles have been harvested. Just as a bit of coal
tells us what ferns and flowers grew in the far-off era, so the book
gives us the very quintessence of man's thoughts about life and duty
and death. Nor is there any other way of gaining these vital
knowledges. Life is too short to obtain them through conversation or
travel. Nor is any youth ready for his task until he has traced the
rise and growth of houses, tools, governments, schools, industries,
religions. He must also compare race with race, land with land, and
star with star. Asked about his ideas of the value of education, a man
distinguished in railway circles answered: "I have learned that each
new fact has its money value. Other things being equal, the judgment
of the man who knows the most must always prevail." But books alone
can supplement experience, and give the information that makes man
ready against his day of battle.
It has been said, "For a thousand men who can speak, there is only one
who can think; for a thousand men who can think, there is only one who
can see." Since, then, the greatest thing in life is to have an open
vision, we need to ask the authors to teach us how to see. Each
Kingsley approaches a stone as a jeweler approaches a casket to unlock
the hidden gems. Geikie causes the bit of hard coal to unroll the
juicy bud, the thick odorous leaves, the pungent boughs, until the bit
of carbon enlarges into the beauty of a tropic forest. That little
book of Grant Allen's called "How Plants Grow" exhibits trees and
shrubs as eating, drinking and marrying. We see certain date groves in
Palestine, and other date groves in the desert a hundred miles away,
and the pollen of the one carried upon the trade winds to the branches
of the other. We see the tree with its strange system of water-works,
pumping the sap up through pipes and mains; we see the chemical
laboratory in the branches mixing flavor for the orange in one bough,
mixing the juices of the pineapple in another; we behold the tree as
a mother, making each infant acorn ready against the long winter,
rolling it in swaths soft and warm as wool blankets, wrapping it
around with garments impervious to the rain, and finally slipping the
infant acorn into a sleeping bag, like those the Esquimos gave Dr.
Kane.
At length we come to feel that the Greeks were not far wrong in
thinking each tree had a Dryad in it, animating it, protecting it
against destruction, dying when the tree withered. Some Faraday shows
us that each drop of water is a sheath for electric forces sufficient
to charge 800,000 Leyden jars, or drive an engine from Liverpool to
London. Some Sir William Thomson tells us how hydrogen gas will chew
up a large iron spike as a child's molars will chew off the end of a
stick of candy. Thus each new book opens up some new and hitherto
unexplored realm of nature. Thus books fulfill for us the legend of
the wondrous glass that showed its owner all things distant and all
things hidden. Through books our world becomes as "a bud from the
bower of God's beauty; the sun as a spark from the light of His
wisdom; the sky as a bubble on the sea of His Power." Therefore Mrs.
Browning's words, "No child can be called fatherless who has God and
his mother; no youth can be called friendless who has God and the
companionship of good books."
Books also advantage us in that they exhibit the unity of progress,
the solidarity of the race, and the continuity of history. Authors
lead us back along the pathway of law, of liberty or religion, and set
us down in front of the great man in whose brain the principle had its
rise. As the discoverer leads us from the mouth of the Nile back to
the headwaters of Nyanza, so books exhibit great ideas and
institutions, as they move forward, ever widening and deepening, like
some Nile feeding many civilizations. For all the reforms of to-day go
back to some reform of yesterday. Man's art goes back to Athens and
Thebes. Man's laws go back to Blackstone and Justinian. Man's reapers
and plows go back to the savage scratching the ground with his forked
stick, drawn by the wild bullock. The heroes of liberty march forward
in a solid column. Lincoln grasps the hand of Washington. Washington
received his weapons at the hands of Hampden and Cromwell. The great
Puritans lock hands with Luther and Savonarola.
The unbroken procession brings us at length to Him whose Sermon on the
Mount was the very charter of liberty. It puts us under a divine
spell to perceive that we are all coworkers with the great men, and
yet single threads in the warp and woof of civilization. And when
books have related us to our own age, and related all the epochs to
God, whose providence is the gulf stream of history, these teachers go
on to stimulate us to new and greater achievements. Alone, man is an
unlighted candle. The mind needs some book to kindle its faculties.
Before Byron began to write he used to give half an hour to reading
some favorite passage. The thought of some great writer never failed
to kindle Byron into a creative glow, even as a match lights the
kindlings upon the grate. In these burning, luminous moods Byron's
mind did its best work. The true book stimulates the mind as no wine
can ever quicken the blood. It is reading that brings us to our best,
and rouses each faculty to its most vigorous life.
Remembering, then, that it is as dangerous to read the first book one
chances upon as for a stranger in the city to make friends with the
first person passing by, let us consider the selection and the
friendship of books. Frederic Harrison tells us that there are now
2,000,000 volumes in the libraries, and that every few years the press
issues enough new volumes to make a pyramid equal to St. Paul's
Cathedral. Lamenting the number of books of poor quality now being
published, this author questions whether or not the printing press may
not be one of the scourges of mankind. He tells that he reads but few
books, and those the great ones, and describes his shipwreck on the
infinite sea of printer's ink, and his rescue as of one escaping by
mercy from a region where there was water, water everywhere but not a
drop to drink. Let us confess that books by their very multitude
bewilder, and that careless and purposeless reading destroys the mind.
Let us admit, too, that books no more mean culture than laws mean
virtues.
Doubtless, individuality is threatened by the vast cataract of
literature. As children, we trembled needlessly when the nurse told us
that skies rained pitchforks, but as men we have a right to fear when
the skies rain not pitchforks but pamphlets. Multitudes are in the
condition of the schoolboy who, when asked what he was thinking about,
answered that he had no thoughts, because he was so busy reading he
had no time to think. Like that boy, multitudes to-day cannot see the
wood for the trees. Many stand before the vast abyss of literature as
Bunyan's pilgrim stood before the Slough of Despond, crying: "What
shall I do?" The necessity of severe selection is upon us, but certain
things all must read.
First of all, every year each young man and woman should take a fresh
look about the world house in which all live. When Ivanhoe waked to
find himself a prisoner in a strange castle he straightway explored
the mansion, passing from chamber to banquet hall, and from tower to
moat, and the high walls that shut him in. If, indeed, God did so
dearly love this star as to use its very dust for making man in His
own image, we ought to love and study well this world house, wherein
is enacted the drama of man's life and death. Longfellow thought of
our earth as a granite-sheathed ship sailing through air, with plate
of mail bolted and clamped by the Almighty mechanism, the throbbings
of Vesuvius hinting at the deep furnaces that help to drive her
forward upon the voyage through space. But God's name for this earth
house was Paradise. And a veritable paradise it is, with its vegetable
carpet, soft and embroidered, beneath man's feet; with its valleys
covered with corn until they laugh and sing; with its noble
architecture of the mountains covered with mighty carvings and painted
legends. Verily, it would be an ungracious thing for us to go on
living here without taking the trouble to look upon this earth's
floor, so firm and solid, or study the beauteous ceiling lighted with
star lamps by night. And the evenings of one week with Geikie or Dana
will tell us by what furnaces of fire the granite was melted, by what
teeth of glaciers and weight of sea-waves the earth's surface was
smoothed for the plow and the trowel. How long it has been since the
glacier was a mile thick upon the very spot where we stand, how long
since the waters of Lake Michigan, now flowing over Niagara, ceased
flowing into the Mississippi.
The evenings of another week with Professor Gray or Grant Allen will
tell us how all the trees and plants live and breathe and wax great;
how the lily sucks whiteness out of the slough, and how the red rose
untwists the sunbeam and pulls out the scarlet threads. The evenings
of another week with Ball or Proctor or Langley will exhibit the sun
pulling the harvests out of our planet, even as the blazing log pulls
the juices out of the apples roasting before the hot coals; how large
a house on the moon must be in order to be seen by the new telescope
at Lake Geneva; whether or not the spots on the sun represent great
chunks of unburned material, some of which are a full thousand miles
across, materials thrown up by gaseous explosions. While Maury will
take us during another week, in a glass boat that is water-tight,
upon a long cruise more than three thousand leagues under the sea,
showing us those graveyards called sea shells, those cities called
coral reefs, those strange animals that have roots instead of feet,
called sponges.
Having journeyed around the earth house, each should study himself;
his body as an engine of mental thought, an instrument of conduct and
character; the number and nature and uses of the forty and more
faculties of mind and heart with which he is endowed. From the study
of the soul the mind moves easily to the upward movement of the race,
as man journeys from hut to house, from tent to temple, from force to
self-government and education and literature, from his flaming altar
to the rising hymn and aspiring prayer. This tells us what
contribution each race, Hebrew and Greek, Roman and Teuton, has made
to civilization. Then come the books of life, wherein the qualities to
be emulated are capitalized in the lives of the great, for biography
is one of man's best teachers. Therein we see how the hero bore up
against his wrongs, his sorrows and defeats, and how he sustained
himself in times of triumph. Phillips Brooks thought that the basis of
every library should be biography, memoirs, portraits and letters. Nor
should we forget the books of art, wherein the facts of life are
idealized and carried up to beauty. Witness the dramas, poems, or the
several great novels.
But apart from and above all others is the book, the Bible. Alone it
has civilized whole nations. Be our theories of inspiration what they
may, this book deals with the deepest things in man's heart and life.
Ruskin and Carlyle tell us that they owe more to it in the way of
refinement and culture than to all the other books, _plus_ all the
influence of colleges and universities. Therein the greatest geniuses
of time tell us of the things they caught fresh from the skies, "the
things that stormed upon them, and surged through their souls in
mighty tides, entrancing them with matchless music"; things so
precious for man's heart and conscience as to be endured and died for.
It is the one book that can fully lead forth the richest and deepest
and sweetest things in man's nature. Read all other books, philosophy,
poetry, history, fiction; but if you would refine the judgment,
fertilize the reason, wing the imagination, attain unto the finest
womanhood or the sturdiest manhood, read this book, reverently and
prayerfully, until its truths have dissolved like iron into the blood.
Read, indeed, the hundred great books. If you have no time, make time
and read. Read as toil the slaves in Golconda, casting away the
rubbish and keeping the gems. Read to transmute facts into life, but
read daily the book of conduct and character--the Bible. For the book
Daniel Webster placed under his pillow when dying is the book all
should carry in the hand while living.
THE SCIENCE OF LIVING WITH MEN
"There is an art of right living."--_Arthur Helps._
"The supreme art life above all other arts is the art of
living together justly and charitably. There is no other
thing that is so taxing, requiring so much education, so
much wisdom, so much practice, as the how to live with
our fellow-men. In importance this art exceeds all
productive industries which we teach our children. All
skill and knowledge aside from that is as nothing. The
business of life is to know how to get along with our
fellow-men."--_H.W. Beecher._
"As all the stars are pervaded by one law, in one law
live and move and have their being, so all minds that
reason and all hearts that beat, act in one empire of one
king; and of that vast kingdom, the law the most
sweeping, the most eternal, is the law of loving
kindness."--_Swing._
"The nations have turned their places of art treasure
into battle-fields. Fancy what Europe would be now if the
delicate statues and temples of the Greeks--if the broad
and massive walls of the Romans, if the noble and
pathetic architecture of the Middle Ages, had not been
ground to dust by mere human rage. You talk of the scythe
of time and the tooth of time; I tell you time is
scytheless and toothless; it is we who gnaw like the
worm, we who smite like the scythe. All these lost
treasures of human intellect have been wholly destroyed
by human industry of destruction; the marble would have
stood its 2,000 years as well in the polished statue as
in the Parian cliff; but we men have ground it to powder
and mixed it with our own ashes."--_Ruskin._
XII
THE SCIENCE OF LIVING WITH MEN