MENTAL STOCKTAKING
Great books do not spring from something accidental in the great
men who wrote them. They are the effluence of their very core, the
expression of the life itself of the authors. And literature cannot be
said to have served its true purpose until it has been translated into
the actual life of him who reads. It does not succeed until it becomes
the vehicle of the vital. Progress is the gradual result of the
unending battle between human reason and human instinct, in which the
former slowly but surely wins. The most powerful engine in this
battle is literature. It is the vast reservoir of true ideas and high
emotions--and life is constituted of ideas and emotions. In a world
deprived of literature, the intellectual and emotional activity of all
but a few exceptionally gifted men would quickly sink and retract to
a narrow circle. The broad, the noble, the generous would tend
to disappear for want of accessible storage. And life would be
correspondingly degraded, because the fallacious idea and the petty
emotion would never feel the upward pull of the ideas and emotions
of genius. Only by conceiving a society without literature can it be
clearly realised that the function of literature is to raise the plain
towards the top level of the peaks. Literature exists so that where
one man has lived finely ten thousand may afterwards live finely. It
is a means of life; it concerns the living essence.
Of course, literature has a minor function, that of passing the
time in an agreeable and harmless fashion, by giving momentary faint
pleasure. Vast multitudes of people (among whom may be numbered not a
few habitual readers) utilise only this minor function of literature;
by implication they class it with golf, bridge, or soporifics.
Literary genius, however, had no intention of competing with these
devices for fleeting the empty hours; and all such use of literature
may be left out of account.
You, O serious student of many volumes, believe that you have a
sincere passion for reading. You hold literature in honour, and your
last wish would be to debase it to a paltry end. You are not of those
who read because the clock has just struck nine and one can't go
to bed till eleven. You are animated by a real desire to get out of
literature all that literature will give. And in that aim you keep on
reading, year after year, and the grey hairs come. But amid all this
steady tapping of the reservoir, do you ever take stock of what you
have acquired? Do you ever pause to make a valuation, in terms of your
own life, of that which you are daily absorbing, or imagine you
are absorbing? Do you ever satisfy yourself by proof that you
are absorbing anything at all, that the living waters, instead of
vitalising you, are not running off you as though you were a duck in a
storm? Because, if you omit this mere business precaution, it may well
be that you, too, without knowing it, are little by little joining
the triflers who read only because eternity is so long. It may well be
that even your alleged sacred passion is, after all, simply a sort of
drug-habit. The suggestion disturbs and worries you. You dismiss it
impatiently; but it returns.
How (you ask, unwillingly) can a man perform a mental stocktaking? How
can he put a value on what he gets from books? How can he effectively
test, in cold blood, whether he is receiving from literature all that
literature has to give him?
The test is not so vague, nor so difficult, as might appear.
If a man is not thrilled by intimate contact with nature: with the
sun, with the earth, which is his origin and the arouser of his
acutest emotions--
If he is not troubled by the sight of beauty in many forms--
If he is devoid of curiosity concerning his fellow-men and his
fellow-animals--
If he does not have glimpses of the nuity of all things in an orderly
progress--
If he is chronically "querulous, dejected, and envious"--
If he is pessimistic--
If he is of those who talk about "this age of shams," "this age without
ideals," "this hysterical age," and this heaven-knows-what-age--
Then that man, though he reads undisputed classics for twenty hours
a day, though he has a memory of steel, though he rivals Porson
in scholarship and Sainte Beuve in judgment, is not receiving from
literature what literature has to give. Indeed, he is chiefly wasting
his time. Unless he can read differently, it were better for him if
he sold all his books, gave to the poor, and played croquet. He fails
because he has not assimilated into his existence the vital essences
which genius put into the books that have merely passed before his
eyes; because genius has offered him faith, courage, vision, noble
passion, curiosity, love, a thirst for beauty, and he has not taken
the gift; because genius has offered him the chance of living fully,
and he is only half alive, for it is only in the stress of fine ideas
and emotions that a man may be truly said to live. This is not a moral
invention, but a simple fact, which will be attested by all who know
what that stress is.
What! You talk learnedly about Shakespeare's sonnets! Have you heard
Shakespeare's terrific shout:
Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy.
And yet, can you see the sun over the viaduct at Loughborough Junction
of a morning, and catch its rays in the Thames off Dewar's whisky
monument, and not shake with the joy of life? If so, you and
Shakespeare are not yet in communication. What! You pride yourself on
your beautiful edition of Casaubon's translation of _Marcus Aurelius_,
and you savour the cadences of the famous:
This day I shall have to do with an idle, curious man, with an
unthankful man, a railer, a crafty, false, or an envious
man. All these ill qualities have happened unto him, through
ignorance of that which is truly good and truly bad. But I
that understand the nature of that which is good, that it only
is to be desired, and of that which is bad, that it only
is truly odious and shameful: who know, moreover, that this
transgressor, whosoever he be, is my kinsman, not by the same
blood and seed, but by participation of the same reason and of
the same divine particle--how can I be hurt?...
And with these cadences in your ears you go and quarrel with a cabman!
You would be ashamed of your literary self to be caught in ignorance
of Whitman, who wrote:
Now understand me well--it is provided in the essence of
things that from any fruition of success, no matter what,
shall come forth something to make a greater struggle
necessary.
And yet, having achieved a motor-car, you lose your temper when it
breaks down half-way up a hill!
You know your Wordsworth, who has been trying to teach you about:
The Upholder of the tranquil soul
That tolerates the indignities of Time
And, from the centre of Eternity
All finite motions over-ruling, lives
In glory immutable.
But you are capable of being seriously unhappy when your suburban
train selects a tunnel for its repose!
And the A.V. of the Bible, which you now read, not as your forefathers
read it, but with an æsthetic delight, especially in the Apocrypha!
You remember:
Whatsoever is brought upon thee, take cheerfully, and be
patient when thou art changed to a low estate. For gold
is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of
adversity.
And yet you are ready to lie down and die because a woman has scorned
you! Go to!
You think some of my instances approach the ludicrous? They do. They
are meant to do so. But they are no more ludicrous than life itself.
And they illustrate in the most workaday fashion how you can test
whether your literature fulfils its function of informing and
transforming your existence.
I say that if daily events and scenes do not constantly recall and
utilise the ideas and emotions contained in the books which you have
read or are reading; if the memory of these books does not quicken the
perception of beauty, wherever you happen to be, does not help you to
correlate the particular trifle with the universal, does not smooth
out irritation and give dignity to sorrow--then you are, consciously
or not, unworthy of your high vocation as a bookman. You may say that
I am preaching a sermon. The fact is, I am. My mood is a severely
moral mood. For when I reflect upon the difference between what
books have to offer and what even relatively earnest readers take the
trouble to accept from them, I am appalled (or should be appalled, did
I not know that the world is moving) by the sheer inefficiency, the
bland, complacent failure of the earnest reader. I am like yourself,
the spectacle of inefficiency rouses my holy ire.
Before you begin upon another masterpiece, set out in a row the
masterpieces which you are proud of having read during the past year.
Take the first on the list, that book which you perused in all the
zeal of your New Year resolutions for systematic study. Examine the
compartments of your mind. Search for the ideas and emotions which you
have garnered from that book. Think, and recollect when last something
from that book recurred to your memory apropos of your own daily
commerce with humanity. Is it history--when did it throw a light for
you on modern politics? Is it science--when did it show you order in
apparent disorder, and help you to put two and two together into an
inseparable four? Is it ethics--when did it influence your conduct in
a twopenny-halfpenny affair between man and man? Is it a novel--when
did it help you to "understand all and forgive all"? Is it
poetry--when was it a magnifying glass to disclose beauty to you, or
a fire to warm your cooling faith? If you can answer these questions
satisfactorily, your stocktaking as regards the fruit of your traffic
with that book may be reckoned satisfactory. If you cannot answer
them satisfactorily, then either you chose the book badly or your
impression that you _read_ it is a mistaken one.
When the result of this stocktaking forces you to the conclusion that
your riches are not so vast as you thought them to be, it is necessary
to look about for the causes of the misfortune. The causes may be
several. You may have been reading worthless books. This, however,
I should say at once, is extremely unlikely. Habitual and confirmed
readers, unless they happen to be reviewers, seldom read worthless
books. In the first place, they are so busy with books of proved value
that they have only a small margin of leisure left for very modern
works, and generally, before they can catch up with the age, Time or
the critic has definitely threshed for them the wheat from the
chaff. No! Mediocrity has not much chance of hood-winking the serious
student.
It is less improbable that the serious student has been choosing his
books badly. He may do this in two ways--absolutely and relatively.
Every reader of long standing has been through the singular experience
of suddenly _seeing_ a book with which his eyes have been familiar for
years. He reads a book with a reputation and thinks: "Yes, this is a
good book. This book gives me pleasure." And then after an interval,
perhaps after half a lifetime, something mysterious happens to his
mental sight. He picks up the book again, and sees a new and profound
significance in every sentence, and he says: "I was perfectly blind
to this book before." Yet he is no cleverer than he used to be. Only
something has happened to him. Let a gold watch be discovered by a
supposititious man who has never heard of watches. He has a sense of
beauty. He admires the watch, and takes pleasure in it. He says:
"This is a beautiful piece of bric-à-brac; I fully appreciate this
delightful trinket." Then imagine his feelings when someone comes
along with the key; imagine the light flooding his brain. Similar
incidents occur in the eventful life of the constant reader. He has no
key, and never suspects that there exists such a thing as a key. That
is what I call a choice absolutely bad.
The choice is relatively bad when, spreading over a number of books,
it pursues no order, and thus results in a muddle of faint impressions
each blurring the rest. Books must be allowed to help one another;
they must be skilfully called in to each other's aid. And that this
may be accomplished some guiding principle is necessary. "And what,"
you demand, "should that guiding principle be?" How do I know? Nobody,
fortunately, can make your principles for you. You have to make them
for yourself. But I will venture upon this general observation: that
in the mental world what counts is not numbers but co-ordination.
As regards facts and ideas, the great mistake made by the average
well-intentioned reader is that he is content with the names of things
instead of occupying himself with the causes of things. He seeks
answers to the question What? instead of to the question Why? He
studies history, and never guesses that all history is caused by the
facts of geography. He is a botanical expert, and can take you to
where the _Sibthorpia europæa_ grows, and never troubles to wonder
what the earth would be without its cloak of plants. He wanders
forth of starlit evenings and will name you with unction all the
constellations from Andromeda to the Scorpion; but if you ask him why
Venus can never be seen at midnight, he will tell you that he has not
bothered with the scientific details. He has not learned that names
are nothing, and the satisfaction of the lust of the eye a trifle
compared to the imaginative vision of which scientific "details" are
the indispensable basis.
Most reading, I am convinced, is unphilosophical; that is to say, it
lacks the element which more than anything else quickens the poetry of
life. Unless and until a man has formed a scheme of knowledge, be it
a mere skeleton, his reading must necessarily be unphilosophical.
He must have attained to some notion of the inter-relations of the
various branches of knowledge before he can properly comprehend the
branch in which he specialises. If he has not drawn an outline map
upon which he can fill in whatever knowledge comes to him, as it
comes, and on which he can trace the affinity of every part with every
other part, he is assuredly frittering away a large percentage of his
efforts. There are certain philosophical works which, once they are
mastered, seem to have performed an operation for cataract, so that
he who was blind, having read them, henceforward sees cause and effect
working in and out everywhere. To use another figure, they leave
stamped on the brain a chart of the entire province of knowledge.
Such a work is Spencer's _First Principles_. I know that it is
nearly useless to advise people to read _First Principles_. They are
intimidated by the sound of it; and it costs as much as a dress-circle
seat at the theatre. But if they would, what brilliant stocktakings
there might be in a few years! Why, if they would only read such
detached essays as that on "Manners and Fashion," or "The Genesis of
Science" (in a sixpenny volume of Spencer's _Essays_, published
by Watts and Co.), the magic illumination, the necessary power of
"synthetising" things, might be vouch-safed to them. In any case,
the lack of some such disciplinary, co-ordinating measure will amply
explain many disastrous stocktakings. The manner in which one single
ray of light, one single precious hint, will clarify and energise the
whole mental life of him who receives it, is among the most wonderful
and heavenly of intellectual phenomena. Some men search for that light
and never find it. But most men never search for it.
The superlative cause of disastrous stocktakings remains, and it
is much more simple than the one with which I have just dealt. It
consists in the absence of meditation. People read, and read, and
read, blandly unconscious of their effrontery in assuming that they
can assimilate without any further effort the vital essence which the
author has breathed into them. They cannot. And the proof that they do
not is shown all the time in their lives. I say that if a man does not
spend at least as much time in actively and definitely thinking about
what he has read as he has spent in reading, he is simply insulting
his author. If he does not submit himself to intellectual and
emotional fatigue in classifying the communicated ideas, and
in emphasising on his spirit the imprint of the communicated
emotions--then reading with him is a pleasant pastime and nothing
else. This is a distressing fact. But it is a fact. It is distressing,
for the reason that meditation is not a popular exercise. If a friend
asks you what you did last night, you may answer, "I was reading," and
he will be impressed and you will be proud. But if you answer, "I
was meditating," he will have a tendency to smile and you will have a
tendency to blush. I know this. I feel it myself. (I cannot offer any
explanation.) But it does not shake my conviction that the absence of
meditation is the main origin of disappointing stocktakings.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
NOVELS
A MAN FROM THE NORTH
ANNA OF THE FIVE TOWNS
LEONORA
A GREAT MAN
SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE
WHOM GOD HATH JOINED
BURIED ALIVE
THE OLD WIVES' TALE
THE GLIMPSE
HELEN WITH THE HIGH HAND
CLAYHANGER
THE CARD
FANTASIAS
THE GRAND BABYLON HOTEL
THE GATES OF WRATH
TERESA OF WATLING STREET
THE LOOT OF CITIES
HUGO
THE GHOST
THE CITY OF PLEASURE
SHORT STORIES
TALES OF THE FIVE TOWNS
THE GRIM SMILE OF THE FIVE TOWNS
BELLES-LETTRES
JOURNALISM FOR WOMEN
FAME AND FICTION
HOW TO BECOME AN AUTHOR
THE TRUTH ABOUT AN AUTHOR
THE REASONABLE LIFE
HOW TO LIVE ON TWENTY-FOUR HOURS A DAY
THE HUMAN MACHINE
LITERARY TASTE
MENTAL EFFICIENCY
DRAMA
POLITE FARCES
CUPID AND COMMONSENSE
WHAT THE PUBLIC WANTS
(IN COLLABORATION WITH EDEN PHILLPOTTS)
THE SINEWS OF WAR: A ROMANCE
THE STATUE: A ROMANCE