a century, is valuable. But an old French sentence says, “God works
in moments,”--“_En peu d’heure Dieu labeure_.” We ask for long life,
but ’tis deep life, or grand moments, that signify. Let the measure of
time be spiritual, not mechanical. Life is unnecessarily long. Moments
of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance,--what ample
borrowers of eternity they are! Life culminates and concentrates; and
Homer said, “The gods ever give to mortals their apportioned share of
reason only on one day.”
I am of the opinion of the poet Wordsworth, “that there is no real
happiness in this life, but in intellect and virtue.” I am of the
opinion of Pliny, “that, whilst we are musing on these things, we are
adding to the length of our lives.” I am of the opinion of Glauco, who
said, “The measure of life, O Socrates, is, with the wise, the speaking
and hearing such discourses as yours.”
He only can enrich me who can recommend to me the space between sun
and sun. ’Tis the measure of a man,--his apprehension of a day. For
we do not listen with the best regard to the verses of a man who is
only a poet, nor to his problems, if he is only an algebraist; but if
a man is at once acquainted with the geometric foundations of things
and with their festal splendor, his poetry is exact and his arithmetic
musical. And him I reckon the most learned scholar, not who can unearth
for me the buried dynasties of Sesostris and Ptolemy, the Sothiac era,
the Olympiads and consulships, but who can unfold the theory of this
particular Wednesday. Can he uncover the ligaments concealed from
all but piety, which attach the dull men and things we know to the
First Cause? These passing fifteen minutes, men think, are time, not
eternity; are low and subaltern, are but hope or memory, that is, the
way _to_ or the way _from_ welfare, but not welfare. Can he show their
tie? That interpreter shall guide us from a menial and eleemosynary
existence into riches and stability. He dignifies the place where he
is. This mendicant America, this curious, peering, itinerant, imitative
America, studious of Greece and Rome, of England and Germany, will
take off its dusty shoes, will take off its glazed traveller’s-cap,
and sit at home with repose and deep joy on its face. The world has no
such landscape, the aeons of history no such hour, the future no equal
second opportunity. Now let poets sing! now let arts unfold!
One more view remains. But life is good only when it is magical and
musical, a perfect timing and consent, and when we do not anatomize
it. You must treat the days respectfully, you must be a day yourself,
and not interrogate it like a college professor. The world is
enigmatical,--everything said, and everything known or done,--and must
not be taken literally, but genially. We must be at the top of our
condition to understand anything rightly. You must hear the bird’s
song without attempting to render it into nouns and verbs. Cannot we be
a little abstemious and obedient? Cannot we let the morning be?
Everything in the universe goes by indirection. There are no straight
lines. I remember well the foreign scholar who made a week of my youth
happy by his visit. “The savages in the islands,” he said, “delight to
play with the surf, coming in on the top of the rollers, then swimming
out again, and repeat the delicious manœuvre for hours. Well, human
life is made up of such transits. There can be no greatness without
abandonment. But here your very astronomy is an espionage. I dare not
go out of doors and see the moon and stars, but they seem to measure
my tasks, to ask how many lines or pages are finished since I saw them
last. Not so, as I told you, was it in Belleisle. The days at Belleisle
were all different, and only joined by a perfect love of the same
object. Just to fill the hour,--that is happiness. Fill my hour, ye
gods, so that I shall not say, whilst I have done this, ‘Behold, also,
an hour of my life is gone,’--but rather, ‘I have lived an hour.’”
We do not want factitious men, who can do any literary or professional
feat, as, to write poems, or advocate a cause, or carry a measure, for
money; or turn their ability indifferently in any particular direction
by the strong effort of will. No, what has been best done in the
world,--the works of genius,--cost nothing. There is no painful effort,
but it is the spontaneous flowing of the thought. Shakspeare made his
Hamlet as a bird weaves its nest. Poems have been written between
sleeping and waking, irresponsibly. Fancy defines herself:
“Forms that men spy
With the half-shut eye
In the beams of the setting sun, am I.”
The masters painted for joy, and knew not that virtue had gone out
of them. They could not paint the like in cold blood. The masters of
English lyric wrote their songs so. It was a fine efflorescence of fine
powers; as was said of the letters of the Frenchwomen,--“the charming
accident of their more charming existence.” Then the poet is never the
poorer for his song. A song is no song unless the circumstance is free
and fine. If the singer sing from a sense of duty or from seeing no
way of escape, I had rather have none. Those only can sleep who do not
care to sleep; and those only write or speak best who do not too much
respect the writing or the speaking.
The same rule holds in science. The savant is often an amateur. His
performance is a memoir to the Academy on fish-worms, tadpoles, or
spiders’ legs; he observes as other academicians observe; he is
on stilts at a microscope, and,--his memoir finished and read and
printed,--he retreats into his routinary existence, which is quite
separate from his scientific. But in Newton, science was as easy as
breathing; he used the same wit to weigh the moon that he used to
buckle his shoes; and all his life was simple, wise, and majestic. So
was it in Archimedes,--always self-same, like the sky. In Linnæus, in
Franklin, the like sweetness and equality,--no stilts, no tiptoe;--and
their results are wholesome and memorable to all men.
In stripping time of its illusions, in seeking to find what is the
heart of the day, we come to the quality of the moment, and drop the
duration altogether. It is the depth at which we live, and not at all
the surface extension, that imports. We pierce to the eternity, of
which time is the flitting surface; and, really, the least acceleration
of thought, and the least increase of power of thought, make life
to seem and to be of vast duration. We call it time; but when that
acceleration and that deepening take effect, it acquires another and a
higher name.
There are people who do not need much experimenting; who, after years
of activity, say, we knew all this before; who love at first sight
and hate at first sight; discern the affinities and repulsions; who
do not care so much for conditions as others, for they are always in
one condition, and enjoy themselves; who dictate to others, and are
not dictated to; who in their consciousness of deserving success
constantly slight the ordinary means of attaining it; who have
self-existence and self-help; who are suffered to be themselves in
society; who are great in the present; who have no talents, or care not
to have them,--being that which was before talent, and shall be after
it, and of which talent seems only a tool;--this is character, the
highest name at which philosophy has arrived.
’Tis not important how the hero does this or this, but what he is. What
he is will appear in every gesture and syllable. In this way the moment
and the character are one.
’Tis a fine fable for the advantage of character over talent, the Greek
legend of the strife of Jove and Phœbus. Phœbus challenged the gods,
and said, “Who will outshoot the far-darting Apollo?” Zeus said, “I
will.” Mars shook the lots in his helmet, and that of Apollo leaped out
first. Apollo stretched his bow and shot his arrow into the extreme
west. Then Zeus arose, and with one stride cleared the whole distance,
and said, “Where shall I shoot? there is no space left.” So the
bowman’s prize was adjudged to him who drew no bow.
And this is the progress of every earnest mind; from the works of man
and the activity of the hands to a delight in the faculties which rule
them; from a respect to the works to a wise wonder at this mystic
element of time in which he is conditioned; from local skills and the
economy which reckons the amount of production _per_ hour to the finer
economy which respects the quality of what is done, and the right we
have to the work, or the fidelity with which it flows from ourselves;
then to the depth of thought it betrays, looking to its universality,
or, that its roots are in eternity, not in time. Then it flows from
character, that sublime health which values one moment as another, and
makes us great in all conditions, and is the only definition we have of
freedom and power.
BOOKS.
BOOKS.
It is easy to accuse books, and bad ones are easily found; and the best
are but records, and not the things recorded; and certainly there is
dilettanteism enough, and books that are merely neutral and do nothing
for us. In Plato’s “Gorgias,” Socrates says: “The shipmaster walks in
a modest garb near the sea, after bringing his passengers from Ægina
or from Pontus, not thinking he has done anything extraordinary, and
certainly knowing that his passengers are the same, and in no respect
better than when he took them on board.” So is it with books, for
the most part: they work no redemption in us. The bookseller might
certainly know that his customers are in no respect better for the
purchase and consumption of his wares. The volume is dear at a dollar,
and, after reading to weariness the lettered backs, we leave the shop
with a sigh, and learn, as I did, without surprise, of a surly bank
director, that in bank parlors they estimate all stocks of this kind as
rubbish.
But it is not less true that there are books which are of that
importance in a man’s private experience, as to verify for him the
fables of Cornelius Agrippa, of Michael Scott, or of the old Orpheus of
Thrace,--books which take rank in our life with parents and lovers and
passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary,
so authoritative,--books which are the work and the proof of faculties
so comprehensive, so nearly equal to the world which they paint, that,
though one shuts them with meaner ones, he feels his exclusion from
them to accuse his way of living.
Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of
the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil
countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results
of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and
inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette;
but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is
here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another
age.
We owe to books those general benefits which come from high
intellectual action. Thus, I think, we often owe to them the perception
of immortality. They impart sympathetic activity to the moral power.
Go with mean people, and you think life is mean. Then read Plutarch,
and the world is a proud place, peopled with men of positive quality,
with heroes and demigods standing around us, who will not let us sleep.
Then, they address the imagination: only poetry inspires poetry.
They become the organic culture of the time. College education is the
reading of certain books which the common sense of all scholars agrees
will represent the science already accumulated. If you know that,--for
instance in geometry, if you have read Euclid and Laplace,--your
opinion has some value; if you do not know these, you are not entitled
to give any opinion on the subject. Whenever any sceptic or bigot
claims to be heard on the questions of intellect and morals, we ask if
he is familiar with the books of Plato, where all his pert objections
have once for all been disposed of. If not, he has no right to our
time. Let him go and find himself answered there.
Meantime the colleges, whilst they provide us with libraries, furnish
no professor of books; and, I think, no chair is so much wanted. In a
library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends, but they
are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and leathern boxes;
and though they know us, and have been waiting two, ten, or twenty
centuries for us,--some of them,--and are eager to give us a sign, and
unbosom themselves, it is the law of their limbo that they must not
speak until spoken to; and as the enchanter has dressed them, like
battalions of infantry, in coat and jacket of one cut, by the thousand
and ten thousand, your chance of hitting on the right one is to be
computed by the arithmetical rule of Permutation and Combination,--not
a choice out of three caskets, but out of half a million caskets all
alike. But it happens in our experience, that in this lottery there
are at least fifty or a hundred blanks to a prize. It seems, then,
as if some charitable soul, after losing a great deal of time among
the false books, and alighting upon a few true ones which made him
happy and wise, would do a right act in naming those which have been
bridges or ships to carry him safely over dark morasses and barren
oceans, into the heart of sacred cities, into palaces and temples.
This would be best done by those great masters of books who from time
to time appear,--the Fabricii, the Seldens, Magliabecchis, Scaligers,
Mirandolas, Bayles, Johnsons, whose eyes sweep the whole horizon of
learning. But private readers, reading purely for love of the book,
would serve us by leaving each the shortest note of what he found.
There are books; and it is practicable to read them, because they are
so few. We look over with a sigh the monumental libraries of Paris, of
the Vatican, and the British Museum. In 1858, the number of printed
books in the Imperial Library at Paris was estimated at eight hundred
thousand volumes, with an annual increase of twelve thousand volumes;
so that the number of printed books extant to-day may easily exceed
a million. It is easy to count the number of pages which a diligent
man can read in a day, and the number of years which human life in
favorable circumstances allows to reading; and to demonstrate, that,
though he should read from dawn till dark, for sixty years, he must
die in the first alcoves. But nothing can be more deceptive than this
arithmetic, where none but a natural method is really pertinent. I
visit occasionally the Cambridge Library, and I can seldom go there
without renewing the conviction that the best of it all is already
within the four walls of my study at home. The inspection of the
catalogue brings me continually back to the few standard writers who
are on every private shelf; and to these it can afford only the most
slight and casual additions. The crowds and centuries of books are only
commentary and elucidation, echoes and weakeners of these few great
voices of Time.
The best rule of reading will be a method from nature, and not a
mechanical one of hours and pages. It holds each student to a pursuit
of his native aim, instead of a desultory miscellany. Let him read what
is proper to him, and not waste his memory on a crowd of mediocrities.
As whole nations have derived their culture from a single book,--as the
Bible has been the literature as well as the religion of large portions
of Europe,--as Hafiz was the eminent genius of the Persians, Confucius
of the Chinese, Cervantes of the Spaniards; so, perhaps, the human mind
would be a gainer, if all the secondary writers were lost,--say, in
England, all but Shakspeare, Milton, and Bacon,--through the profounder
study so drawn to those wonderful minds. With this pilot of his own
genius, let the student read one, or let him read many, he will read
advantageously. Dr. Johnson said: “Whilst you stand deliberating
which book your son shall read first, another boy has read both: read
anything five hours a day, and you will soon be learned.”
Nature is much our friend in this matter. Nature is always clarifying
her water and her wine. No filtration can be so perfect. She does the
same thing by books as by her gases and plants. There is always a
selection in writers, and then a selection from the selection. In the
first place, all books that get fairly into the vital air of the world
were written by the successful class, by the affirming and advancing
class, who utter what tens of thousands feel though they cannot say.
There has already been a scrutiny and choice from many hundreds of
young pens, before the pamphlet or political chapter which you read in
a fugitive journal comes to your eye. All these are young adventurers,
who produce their performance to the wise ear of Time, who sits and
weighs, and, ten years hence, out of a million of pages reprints
one. Again it is judged, it is winnowed by all the winds of opinion,
and what terrific selection has not passed on it before it can be
reprinted after twenty years,--and reprinted after a century!--it is as
if Minos and Rhadamanthus had indorsed the writing. ’Tis therefore an
economy of time to read old and famed books. Nothing can be preserved
which is not good; and I know beforehand that Pindar, Martial, Terence,
Galen, Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Erasmus, More, will be superior to the
average intellect. In contemporaries, it is not so easy to distinguish
betwixt notoriety and fame.
Be sure, then, to read no mean books. Shun the spawn of the press on
the gossip of the hour. Do not read what you shall learn, without
asking, in the street and the train. Dr. Johnson said, “he always went
into stately shops”; and good travellers stop at the best hotels; for,
though they cost more, they do not cost much more, and there is the
good company and the best information. In like manner, the scholar
knows that the famed books contain, first and last, the best thoughts
and facts. Now and then, by rarest luck, in some foolish Grub Street
is the gem we want. But in the best circles is the best information.
If you should transfer the amount of your reading day by day from the
newspaper to the standard authors---- But who dare speak of such a
thing?
The three practical rules, then, which I have to offer, are,--1. Never
read any book that is not a year old. 2. Never read any but famed
books. 3. Never read any but what you like; or, in Shakspeare’s phrase
“No profit goes where is no pleasure ta’en:
In brief, sir, study what you most affect.”
Montaigne says, “Books are a languid pleasure”; but I find certain
books vital and spermatic, not leaving the reader what he was: he shuts
the book a richer man. I would never willingly read any others than
such. And I will venture, at the risk of inditing a list of old primers
and grammars, to count the few books which a superficial reader must
thankfully use.
Of the old Greek books, I think there are five which we cannot spare:
1. Homer, who in spite of Pope and all the learned uproar of centuries,
has really the true fire, and is good for simple minds, is the true
and adequate germ of Greece, and occupies that place as history,
which nothing can supply. It holds through all literature, that our
best history is still poetry. It is so in Hebrew, in Sanskrit, and
in Greek. English history is best known through Shakspeare; how much
through Merlin, Robin Hood, and the Scottish ballads!--the German,
through the Nibelungenlied;--the Spanish, through the Cid. Of Homer,
George Chapman’s is the heroic translation, though the most literal
prose version is the best of all. 2. Herodotus, whose history contains
inestimable anecdotes, which brought it with the learned into a sort
of disesteem; but in these days, when it is found that what is most
memorable of history is a few anecdotes, and that we need not be
alarmed though we should find it not dull, it is regaining credit.
3. Æschylus, the grandest of the three tragedians, who has given us
under a thin veil the first plantation of Europe. The “Prometheus”
is a poem of the like dignity and scope as the Book of Job, or the
Norse Edda. 4. Of Plato I hesitate to speak, lest there should be no
end. You find in him that which you have already found in Homer, now
ripened to thought,--the poet converted to a philosopher, with loftier
strains of musical wisdom than Homer reached; as if Homer were the
youth, and Plato the finished man; yet with no less security of bold
and perfect song, when he cares to use it, and with some harp-strings
fetched from a higher heaven. He contains the future, as he came out
of the past. In Plato, you explore modern Europe in its causes and
seed,--all that in thought, which the history of Europe embodies or
has yet to embody. The well-informed man finds himself anticipated.
Plato is up with him too. Nothing has escaped him. Every new crop
in the fertile harvest of reform, every fresh suggestion of modern
humanity, is there. If the student wish to see both sides, and justice
done to the man of the world, pitiless exposure of pedants, and the
supremacy of truth and the religious sentiment, he shall be contented
also. Why should not young men be educated on this book? It would
suffice for the tuition of the race,--to test their understanding,
and to express their reason. Here is that which is so attractive to
all men,--the literature of aristocracy shall I call it?--the picture
of the best persons, sentiments, and manners, by the first master, in
the best times,--portraits of Pericles, Alcibiades, Crito, Prodicus,
Protagoras, Anaxagoras, and Socrates, with the lovely background of
the Athenian and suburban landscape. Or who can overestimate the
images with which Plato has enriched the minds of men, and which pass
like bullion in the currency of all nations? Read the “Phædo,” the
“Protagoras,” the “Phædrus,” the “Timæus,” the “Republic,” and the
“Apology of Socrates.” 5. Plutarch cannot be spared from the smallest
library; first, because he is so readable, which is much; then, that he
is medicinal and invigorating. The lives of Cimon, Lycurgus, Alexander,
Demosthenes, Phocion, Marcellus, and the rest, are what history has of
best. But this book has taken care of itself, and the opinion of the
world is expressed in the innumerable cheap editions, which make it
as accessible as a newspaper. But Plutarch’s “Morals” is less known,
and seldom reprinted. Yet such a reader as I am writing to can as ill
spare it as the “Lives.” He will read in it the essays “On the Dæmon
of Socrates,” “On Isis and Osiris,” “On Progress in Virtue,” “On
Garrulity,” “On Love,” and thank anew the art of printing, and the
cheerful domain of ancient thinking. Plutarch charms by the facility
of his associations; so that it signifies little where you open
his book, you find yourself at the Olympian tables. His memory is
like the Isthmian Games, where all that was excellent in Greece was
assembled, and you are stimulated and recruited by lyric verses, by
philosophic sentiments, by the forms and behavior of heroes, by the
worship of the gods, and by the passing of fillets, parsley and laurel
wreaths, chariots, armor, sacred cups, and utensils of sacrifice. An
inestimable trilogy of ancient social pictures are the three “Banquets”
respectively of Plato, Xenophon, and Plutarch. Plutarch’s has the least
approach to historical accuracy; but the meeting of the Seven Wise
Masters is a charming portraiture of ancient manners and discourse, and
is as clear as the voice of a fife, and entertaining as a French novel.
Xenophon’s delineation of Athenian manners is an accessory to Plato,
and supplies traits of Socrates; whilst Plato’s has merits of every
kind,--being a repertory of the wisdom of the ancients on the subject
of love,--a picture of a feast of wits, not less descriptive than
Aristophanes,--and, lastly, containing that ironical eulogy of Socrates
which is the source from which all the portraits of that philosopher
current in Europe have been drawn.