as though he were dead, and the Church and the School operate upon him.
They remove as many of his natural organs as they can, put in
Presbyterian ones perhaps, or School-Board ones instead. Those that
cannot be removed are numbed. When the time is fulfilled and the youth
is cured of enough life at last to like living with the dead, and when
it is thought he is enough like every one else to do, he is given his
degree and sewed up.
After the sewing up his history is better imagined than described. Not
being interesting to himself, he is not apt to be very interesting to
any one else, and because of his lack of interest in himself he is
called the average man.[1]
[1] A Typical Case: "The brain was cut away neatly and dressed.
A healthy yearling calf was tied down, her skull cut away,
and a lobe of brain removed and fitted into the cavity in
L's head. The wound was dressed and trephined, and the
results awaited. The calf's head was fixed up with half a
brain in it. Both the man and the calf have progressed
satisfactorily, and the man is nearly as well as before the
operation."--Daily Paper.
The main distinction of every greater or more extraordinary book is that
it has been written by an extraordinary man--a natural or wild man, a
man of genius, who has never been operated on. The main distinction of
the man of talent is that he has somehow managed to escape a complete
operation. It is a matter of common observation in reading biography
that in proportion as men have had lasting power in the world there has
been something irregular in their education. These irregularities,
whether they happen to be due to overwhelming circumstance or to
overwhelming temperament, seem to sum themselves up in one fundamental
and comprehensive irregularity that penetrates them all--namely, every
powerful mind, in proportion to its power, either in school or out of it
or in spite of it, has educated itself. The ability that many men have
used to avoid being educated is exactly the same ability they have used
afterward to move the world with. In proportion as they have moved the
world, they are found to have kept the lead in their education from
their earliest years, to have had a habit of initiative as well as
hospitality, to have maintained a creative, selective, active attitude
toward all persons and toward all books that have been brought within
range of their lives.
II
The Top of the Bureau Principle
The experience of being robbed of a story we are about to read, by the
good friend who cannot help telling how it comes out, is an occasional
experience in the lives of older people, but it sums up the main
sensation of life in the career of a child. The whole existence of a boy
may be said to be a daily--almost hourly--struggle to escape from being
told things.
It has been found that the best way to emphasise a fact in the mind of a
bright boy is to discover some way of not saying anything about it. And
this is not because human nature is obstinate, but because facts have
been intended from the beginning of the world to speak for themselves,
and to speak better than anyone can speak for them. When a fact speaks,
God speaks. Considering the way that most persons who are talking about
the truth see fit to rush in and interrupt Him, the wonder is not that
children grow less and less interested in truth as they grow older, but
that they are interested in truth at all--even lies about the truth.
The real trouble with most men and women as parents is, that they have
had to begin life with parents of their own. When the child's first
memory of God is a father or mother interrupting Him, he is apt to be
under the impression, when he grows up, that God can only be introduced
to his own children by never being allowed to get a word in. If we as
much as see a Fact coming toward a child--most of us--we either run out
where the child is, and bring him into the house and cry over him, or we
rush to his side and look anxious and stand in front of the Fact, and
talk to him about it.
And yet it is doubtful if there has ever been a boy as yet worth
mentioning, who did not wish we would stand a little more one side--let
him have it out with things. He is very weary--if he really amounts to
anything--of having everything about him prepared for him. There has
never been a live boy who would not throw a store-plaything away in two
or three hours for a comparatively imperfect plaything he had made
himself. He is equally indifferent to a store Fact, and a boy who does
not see through a store-God, or a store-book, or a store-education
sooner than ninety-nine parents out of a hundred and sooner than most
synods, is not worth bringing up.
No just or comprehensive principle can be found to govern the reading of
books that cannot be made to apply, by one who really believes it
(though in varying degrees), to the genius and to the dolt. It is a
matter of history that a boy of fine creative powers can only be taught
a true relation to books through an appeal to his own discoveries; but
what is being especially contended for, and what most needs to be
emphasised in current education, is the fact that the boy of ordinary
creative powers can only be taught to read in the same way--by a slower,
broader, and more patient appeal to his own discoveries. The boy of no
creative powers whatever, if he is ever born, should not be taught to
read at all. Creation is the essence of knowing, and teaching him to
read merely teaches him more ways of not knowing. It gives him a wider
range of places to be a nobody in--takes away his last opportunity for
thinking of anything--that is, getting the meaning of anything for
himself. If a man's heart does not beat for him, why substitute a
hot-water bottle? The less a mind is able to do, the less it can afford
to have anything done for it. It will be a great day for education when
we all have learned that the genius and the dolt can only be
educated--at different rates of speed--in exactly the same way. The
trouble with our education now is, that many of us do not see that a boy
who has been presented with an imitation brain is a deal worse off than
a boy who, in spite of his teachers, has managed to save his real one,
and has not used it yet.
It is dangerous to give a program for a principle to those who do not
believe in the principle, and who do not believe in it instinctively,
but if a program were to be given it would be something like this: It
would assume that the best way to do with an uncreative mind is to put
the owner of it where his mind will be obliged to create.
First. Decide what the owner of the mind most wants in the world.
Second. Put this thing, whatever it may be where the owner of the mind
cannot get it unless he uses his mind. Take pains to put it where he can
get it, if he does use his mind.
Third. Lure him on. It is education.
If this principle is properly applied to books, there is not a human
being living on the earth who will not find himself capable of reading
books--as far as he goes--with his whole mind and his whole body. He
will read a printed page as eagerly as he lives, and he will read it in
exactly the same way that he lives--with his imagination. A boy lives
with his imagination every hour of His life--except in school. The
moment he discovers, or is allowed to discover, that reading a book and
living a day are very much alike, that they are both parts of the same
act, and that they are both properly done in the same way, he will drink
up knowledge as Job did scorning, like water.
But it is objected that many children are entirely imitative, and that
the imagination cannot be appealed to with them and that they cut
themselves off from creativeness at every point.
While it is inevitable in the nature of things that many children should
be largely imitative, there is not a child that does not do some of his
imitating in a creative way, give the hint to his teachers even in his
imitations, of where his creativeness would come if it were allowed to.
His very blunders in imitating, point to desires that would make him
creative of themselves, if followed up. Some children have many desires
in behalf of which they become creative. Others are creative only in
behalf of a few. But there is always a single desire in a child's nature
through which his creativeness can be called out.
A boy learns to live, to command his body, through the desires which
make him creative with it--hunger, and movement, and sleep--desires the
very vegetables are stirred with, and the boy who does not find himself
responding to them, who can help responding to them, does not exist.
There may be times when a boy has no desire to fill himself with food,
and when he has no desire to think, but if he is kept hungry he is soon
found doing both--thinking things into his stomach. A stomach, in the
average boy, will all but take the part of a brain itself, for the time
being, to avoid being empty. If a human being is alive at all, there is
always at least one desire he can be educated with, prodded into
creativeness, until he learns the habit and the pleasure of it. The best
qualification for a nurse for a child whose creativeness turns on his
stomach, is a natural gift for keeping food on the tops of bureaus and
shelves just out of reach. The best qualification for a teacher is
infinite contrivance in high bureaus. The applying of the Top of the
High Bureau to all knowledge and to all books is what true education is
for.
It is generally considered a dangerous thing to do, to turn a child
loose in a library. It might fairly be called a dangerous thing to do if
it were not much more dangerous not to. The same forces that wrought
themselves into the books when they were being made can be trusted to
gather and play across them on the shelves. These forces are the
self-propelling and self-healing forces of the creative mood. The
creative mood protects the books, and it protects all who come near the
books. It protects from the inside. It toughens and makes supple.
Parents who cannot trust a boy to face the weather in a library should
never let him outdoors.
Trusting a boy to the weather in a library may have its momentary
embarrassments, but it is immeasurably the shortest and most natural way
to bring him into a vital connection with books. The first condition of
a vital connection with books is that he shall make the connection for
himself. The relation will be vital in proportion as he makes it
himself.
The fact that he will begin to use his five reading senses by trying to
connect in the wrong way, or by connecting with the wrong books or parts
of books, is a reason, not for action on the part of parents and
teachers, but for inspired waiting. As a vital relation to books is the
most immeasurable outfit for living and the most perfect protection
against the dangers of life, a boy can have, the one point to be borne
in mind is not the book but the boy--the instinct of curiosity in the
boy.
A boy who has all his good discoveries in books made for him--spoiled
for him, if he has any good material in him--will proceed to make bad
ones. The vices would be nearly as safe from interference as the
virtues, if they were faithfully cultivated in Sunday-schools or by
average teachers in day-schools. Sin itself is uninteresting when one
knows all about it. The interest of the average young man in many a more
important sin to-day is only kept up by the fact that no one stands by
with a book teaching him how to do it. Whatever the expression "original
sin" may have meant in the first place, it means now that we are full of
original sin because we are not given a chance to be original in
anything else. A virtue may be defined as an act so good that a
religiously trained youth cannot possibly learn anything more about it.
A classic is a pleasure hurried into a responsibility, a book read by
every man before he has anything to read it with. A classical author is
a man who, if he could look ahead--could see the generations standing in
rows to read his book, toeing the line to love it--would not read it
himself.
Any training in the use of books that does not base its whole method of
rousing the instinct of curiosity, and keeping it aroused, is a
wholesale slaughter, not only of the minds that might live in the books,
but of the books themselves. To ignore the central curiosity of a
child's life, his natural power of self-discovery in books, is to
dispense with the force of gravity in books, instead of taking advantage
of it.
The Third Interference: The Unpopularity of the First Person Singular
I
The First Person a Necessary Evil
Great emphasis is being laid at the present time upon the tools that
readers ought to have to do their reading with. We seem to be living in
a reference-book age. Whatever else may be claimed for our own special
generation it stands out as having one inspiration that is quite its
own--the inspiration of conveniences. That these conveniences have their
place, that one ought to have the best of them there can be no doubt,
but it is very important to bear in mind, particularly in the present
public mood, that if one cannot have all of these conveniences, or even
the best of them, the one absolutely necessary reference book in reading
the masters of literature is one that every man has.
It is something of a commonplace--a rather modest volume with most of
us, summed up on a tombstone generally, easily enough, but we are bound
to believe after all is said and done that the great masterpiece among
reference books, for every man,--the one originally intended by the
Creator for every man to use,--is the reference book of his own life. We
believe that the one direct and necessary thing for a man to do, if he
is going to be a good reader, is to make, this reference book--his own
private edition of it--as large and complete as possible. Everything
refers to it, whatever his reading is. Shakespeare and the New York
_World_, Homer and _Harper's Bazar_, Victor Hugo and _The Forum_,
_Babyhood_ and the Bible all refer to it,--are all alike in making their
references (when they are really looked up) to private editions. Other
editions do not work. In proportion as they are powerful in modern life,
all the books and papers that we have are engaged in the business of
going about the world discovering people to themselves, unroofing first
person singulars in it, getting people to use their own reference books
on all life. Literature is a kind of vast international industry of
comparing life. We read to look up references in our own souls. The
immortality of Homer and the circulation of the _Ladies' Home Journal_
both conform to this fact, and it is equally the secret of the last page
of _Harper's Bazar_ and of Hamlet and of the grave and monthly lunge of
_The Forum_ at passing events. The difference of appeal may be as wide
as the east and the west, but the east and the west are in human nature
and not in the nature of the appeal. The larger selves look themselves
up in the greater writers and the smaller selves spell themselves out in
the smaller ones. It is here we all behold as in some vast reflection or
mirage of the reading world our own souls crowding and jostling, little
and great, against the walls of their years, seeking to be let out, to
look out, to look over, to look up--that they may find their possible
selves.
When men are allowed to follow what might be called the forces of nature
in the reading world they are seen to read:
1st. About themselves.
2nd. About people they know.
3rd. About people they want to know.
4th. God.
Next to their interest in persons is their interest in things:
1st. Things that they have themselves.
2nd. Things that people they know, have.
3rd. Things they want to have.
4th. Things they ought to want to have.
5th. Other things.
6th. The universe--things God has.
7th. God.
A scale like this may not be very complimentary to human nature. Some
of us feel that it is appropriate and possibly a little religious to
think that it is not. But the scale is here. It is mere
psychological-matter-of-fact. It is the way things are made, and while
it may not be quite complimentary to human nature, it seems to be more
complimentary to God to believe, in spite of appearances, that this
scale from I to God is made right and should be used as it stands. It
seems to have been in general use among our more considerable men in the
world and among all our great men and among all who have made others
great. They do not seem to have been ashamed of it. They have climbed up
frankly on it--most of them, in full sight of all men--from I to God.
They have claimed that everybody (including themselves) was identified
with God, and they have made people believe it. It is the few in every
generation who have dared to believe in this scale, and who have used
it, who have been the leaders of the rest. The measure of a man's being
seems to be the swiftness with which his nature runs from the bottom of
this scale to the top, the swiftness with which he identifies himself,
says "I" in all of it. The measure of his ability to read on any
particular subject is the swiftness with which he runs the scale from
the bottom to the top on that subject, makes the trip with his soul from
his own little I to God. When he has mastered the subject, he makes the
run almost without knowing it, sees it as it is, _i. e._, identifies
himself with God on it. The principle is one which reaches under all
mastery in the world, from the art of prophecy even to the art of
politeness. Tho man who makes the trip on any subject from the first
person out through the second person to the farthest bounds of the third
person,--that is, who identifies himself with all men's lives, is called
the poet or seer, the master-lover of persons. The man who makes the
trip most swiftly from his own things to other men's things and to God's
things--the Universe--is called the scientist, the master-lover of
things. The God is he who identifies his own personal life, with all
lives and his own things with all men's things--who says "I" forever
everywhere.
The reason that the Hebrew Bible has had more influence in history than
all other literatures combined, is that there are fewer emasculated men
in it. The one really fundamental and astonishing thing about the Bible
is the way that people have of talking about themselves in it. No other
nation that has ever existed on the earth would ever have thought of
daring to publish a book like the Bible. So far as the plot is
concerned, the fundamental literary conception, it is all the Bible
comes to practically--two or three thousand years of it--a long row of
people talking about themselves. The Hebrew nation has been the leading
power in history because the Hebrew man, in spite of all his faults has
always had the feeling that God sympathised with him, in being
interested in himself. He has dared to feel identified with God. It is
the same in all ages--not an age but one sees a Hebrew in it, out under
his lonely heaven standing and crying "God and I." It is the one great
spectacle of the Soul this little world has seen. Are not the mightiest
faces that come to us flickering out of the dark, their faces? Who can
look at the past who does not see--who does not always see--some mighty
Hebrew in it singing and struggling with God? What is it--what else
could it possibly be but the Hebrew soul, like a kind of pageantry down
the years between us and God, that would ever have made us guess--men of
the other nations--that a God belonged to us, or that a God could belong
to us and be a God at all? Have not all the other races, each in their
turn spawning in the sun and lost in the night, vanished because they
could not say "I" before God? The nations that are left, the great
nations of the modern world, are but the moral passengers of the
Hebrews, hangers-on to the race that can say "I"--I to the _n^th_
power,--the race that has dared to identify itself with God. The fact
that the Hebrew, instead of saying God and I, has turned it around
sometimes and said I and God is neither here nor there in the end. It is
because the Hebrew has kept to the main point, has felt related to God
(the main point a God cares about), that he has been the most heroic and
athletic figure in human history--comes nearer to the God-size. The rest
of the nations sitting about and wondering in the dark, have called this
thing in the Hebrew "religious genius." If one were to try to sum up
what religious genius is, in the Hebrew, or to account for the spiritual
and material supremacy of the Hebrew in history, in a single fact, it
would be the fact that Moses, their first great leader, when he wanted
to say "It seems to me," said "The Lord said unto Moses."
The Hebrews may have written a book that teaches, of all others,
self-renunciation, but the way they taught it was self-assertion. The
Bible begins with a meek Moses who teaches by saying "The Lord said unto
Moses," and it comes to its climax in a lowly and radiant man who dies
on a cross to say "I and the Father are one." The man Jesus seems to
have called himself God because he had a divine habit of identifying
himself, because he had kept on identifying himself with others until
the first person and the second person and the third person were as one
to him. The distinction of the New Testament is that it is the one book
the world has seen, which dispenses with pronouns. It is a book that
sums up pronouns and numbers, singular and plural, first person, second
and third person, and all, in the one great central pronoun of the
universe. The very stars speak it--WE.
We is a developed I.
The first person may not be what it ought to be either as a philosophy
or an experience, but it has been considered good enough to make Bibles
out of, and it does seem as if a good word might occasionally be said
for it in modern times, as if some one ought to be born before long, who
will give it a certain standing, a certain moral respectability once
more in human life and in the education of human life.
It would not seem to be an overstatement that the best possible book to
give a child to read at any time is the one that makes the most cross
references at that time to his undeveloped We.
II
The Art of Being Anonymous
The main difficulty in getting a child to live in the whole of his
nature, to run the scale from the bottom to the top, from "I" to God, is
to persuade his parents and teachers, and the people who crowd around
him to educate him, that he must begin at the bottom.
The Unpopularity of the First Person Singular in current education
naturally follows from The Disgrace of the Imagination in it. Our
typical school is not satisfied with cutting off a boy's imagination
about the outer world that lies around him. It amputates his imagination
at its tap root. It stops a boy's imagination about himself, and the
issues, connections, and possibilities of his own life.
Inasmuch as the education of a child--his relation to books--must be
conducted either with reference to evading personality, or accumulating
it, the issue is one that must be squarely drawn from the first.
Beginning at the bottom is found by society at large to be such an
inconvenient and painstaking process, that the children who are allowed
to lay a foundation for personality--to say "I" in its disagreeable
stages--seem to be confined, for the most part, to either one or the
other of two classes--the Incurable or the Callous. The more thorough a
child's nature is, the more real his processes are, the more incurable
he is bound to be--secretly if he is sensitive, and offensively if he is
callous. In either case the fact is the same. The child unconsciously
acts on the principle that self-assertion is self-preservation. One of
the first things that he discovers is that self-preservation is the last
thing polite parents desire in a child. If he is to be preserved, they
will preserve him themselves.
The conspiracy begins in the earliest days. The world rolls over him.
The home and the church and the school and the printed book roll over
him. The story is the same in all. Education--originally conceived as
drawing a boy out--becomes a huge, elaborate, overwhelming scheme for
squeezing him in--for keeping him squeezed in. He is mobbed on every
side. At school the teachers crowd round him and say "I" for him. At
home his parents say "I" for him. At church the preacher says "I" for
him. And when he retreats into the privacy of his own soul and betakes
himself to a book, the book is a classic and the book says "I" for him.
When he says "I" himself after a few appropriate years, he says it in
disguised quotation marks. If he cannot always avoid it--if in some
unguarded moment he is particularly alive about something and the "I"
comes out on it, society expects him to be ashamed of it, at least to
avoid the appearance of not being ashamed of it. If he writes he is
desired to say "we." Sometimes he shades himself off into "the present
writer." Sometimes he capitulates in bare initials.
There are very few people who do not live in quotation marks most of
their lives. They would die in them and go to heaven in them, if they
could. Nine times out of ten it is some one else's heaven they want to
go to. The number of people who would know what to do or how to act in
this world or the next, without their quotation marks on, is getting
more limited every year.
And yet one could not very well imagine a world more prostrate that this
one is, before a man without quotation marks. It dotes on personality.
It spends hundreds of years at a time in yearning for a great man. But
it wants its great man finished. It is never willing to pay what he
costs. It is particularly unwilling to pay what he costs as it goes
along. The great man as a boy has had to pay for himself. The bare feat
of keeping out of quotation marks has cost him generally more than he
thought he was worth--and has had to be paid in advance.
There is a certain sense in which it is true that every boy, at least at
the point where he is especially alive, is a kind of great man in
miniature--has the same experience, that is, in growing. Many a boy who
has been regularly represented to himself as a monster, a curiosity of
selfishness (and who has believed it), has had occasion to observe when
he grew up that some of his selfishness was real selfishness and that
some of it was life. The things he was selfish with, he finds as he
grows older, are the things he has been making a man out of. As a boy,
however, he does not get much inkling of this. He finds he is being
brought up in a world where boys who so little know how to play with
their things that they give them away, are pointed out to him as
generous, and where boys who are so bored with their own minds that they
prefer other people's, are considered modest. If he knew in the days
when models are being pointed out to him, that the time would soon come
in the world for boys like these when it would make little difference
either to the boys themselves, or to any one else, whether they were
generous or modest or not, it would make his education happier. In the
meantime, in his disgrace, he does not guess what a good example to
models he is. Very few other people guess it.
The general truth, that when a man has nothing to be generous with, and
nothing to be modest about, even his virtues are superfluous, is
realised by society at large in a pleasant helpless fashion in its
bearing on the man, but its bearing on the next man, on education, on
the problem of human development, is almost totally overlooked.
The youth who grasps at everything in sight to have his experience with
it, who cares more for the thing than he does for the person it comes
from, and more for his experience with the thing than he does for the
thing, is by no means an inspiring spectacle while this process is going
on, and he is naturally in perpetual disgrace, but in proportion as they
are wise, our best educators are aware that in all probability this same
youth will wield more spiritual power in the world, and do more good in
it, than nine or ten pleasantly smoothed and adjustable persons. His
boy-faults are his man-virtues wrongside out.
There are very few lives of powerful men in modern times that do not
illustrate this. The men who do not believe it--who do not approve of
illustrating it, have illustrated it the most--devoted their lives to
it. It would be hard to find a man of any special importance in modern
biography who has not been indebted to the sins of his youth. "It is the
things I ought not to have done--see page 93, 179, 321," says the
average autobiography, "which have been the making of me." "They were
all good things for me to do (see page 526, 632, 720), but I did not
think so when I did them. Neither did any one else." "Studying
Shakespeare and the theatre in the theological seminary, and taking
walks instead of examinations in college," says the biography of Beecher
(between the lines), "meant definite moral degeneration to me. I did
habitually what I could not justify at the time, either to myself or to
others, and I have had to make up since for all the moral degeneration,
item by item, but the things I got with the degeneration when I got
it--habits of imagination, and expression, headway of personality--are
the things that have given me all my inspirations for being moral
since." "What love of liberty I have," Wendell Phillips seems to say, "I
got from loving my own." It is the boy who loves his liberty so much
that he insists on having it to do wrong with, as well as right, who in
the long run gets the most right done. The basis of character is moral
experiment and almost all the men who have discovered different or
beautiful or right habits of life for men, have discovered them by doing
wrong long enough. (The ice is thin at this point, Gentle Reader, for
many of us, perhaps, but it has held up our betters.) The fact of the
matter seems to be that a man's conscience in this world, especially if
it is an educated one, or borrowed from his parents, can get as much in
his way as anything else. There is no doubt that The Great Spirit
prefers to lead a man by his conscience, but if it cannot be done, if a
man's conscience has no conveniences for being led, He leads him against
his conscience. The doctrine runs along the edge of a precipice (like
all the best ones), but if there is one gift rather than another to be
prayed for in this world it is the ability to recognise the crucial
moment that sometimes comes in a human life--the moment when The
Almighty Himself gets a man--against his conscience--to do right. It
seems to be the way that some consciences are meant to grow, by trying
wrong things on a little. Thousands of inferior people can be seen every
day stumbling over their sins to heaven, while the rest of us are
holding back with our virtues. It has been intimated from time to time
in this world that all men are sinners. Inasmuch as things are arranged
so that men can sin in doing right things, and sin in doing wrong ones
both, they can hardly miss it. The real religion of every age seems to
have looked a little askance at perfection, even at purity, has gone its
way in a kind of fine straightforwardness, has spent itself in an
inspired blundering, in progressive noble culminating moral experiment.
The basis for a great character seems to be the capacity for intense
experience with the character one already has. So far as most of us can
judge, experience, in proportion as it has been conclusive and
economical, has had to be (literally or with one's imagination) in the
first person. The world has never really wanted yet (in spite of
appearances) its own way with a man. It wants the man. It is what he is
that concerns it. All that it asks of him, and all that he has to give,
is the surplus of himself. The trouble with our modern fashion of
substituting the second person or the third person for the first, in a
man's education, is that it takes his capacity for intense experience of
himself, his chance for having a surplus of himself, entirely away.
III
Egoism and Society
That the unpopularity of the first person singular is honestly acquired
and heartily deserved, it would be useless to deny. Every one who has
ever had a first person singular for a longer or shorter period in his
life knows that it is a disagreeable thing and that every one else knows
it, in nine cases out of ten, at least, and about nine tenths of the
time during its development. The fundamental question does not concern
itself with the first person singular being agreeable or disagreeable,
but with what to do with it, it being the necessary evil that it is.
It seems to be a reasonable position that what should be objected to in
the interests of society, is not egoism, a man's being interested in
himself, but the lack of egoism, a man's having a self that does not
include others. The trouble would seem to be--not that people use their
own private special monosyllable overmuch, but that there is not enough
of it, that nine times out of ten, when they write "I" it should be
written "i."
In the face of the political objection, the objection of the State to
the first person singular, the egoist defends every man's reading for
himself as follows. Any book that is allowed to come between a man and
himself is doing him and all who know him a public injury. The most
important and interesting fact about a man, to other people, is his
attitude toward himself. It determines his attitude toward every one
else. The most fundamental question of every State is: "What is each
man's attitude in this State toward himself? What can it be?" A man's
expectancy toward himself, so far as the State is concerned, is the
moral centre of citizenship. It determines how much of what he expects
he will expect of himself, and how much he will expect of others and how
much of books. The man who expects too much of himself develops into the
headlong and dangerous citizen who threatens society with his
strength--goes elbowing about in it--insisting upon living other
people's lives for them as well as his own. The man who expects too much
of others threatens society with weariness. He is always expecting other
people to do his living for him. The man who expects too much of books
lives neither in himself nor in any one else. The career of the Paper
Doll is open to him. History seems to be always taking turns with these
three temperaments whether in art or religion or public affairs,--the
over-manned, the under-manned, and the over-read--the Tyrant, the Tramp,
and the Paper Doll. Between the man who keeps things in his own hands,
and the man who does not care to, and the man who has no hands, the
State has a hard time. Nothing could be more important to the existence
of the State than that every man in it shall expect just enough of
himself and just enough of others and just enough of the world of books.
Living is adjusting these worlds to one another. The central fact about
society is the way it helps a man with himself. The society which cuts a
man off from himself cuts him still farther off from every one else. A
man's reading in the first person--enough to have a first person--enough
to be identified with himself, is one of the defences of society.
IV
i + I = We
The most natural course for a human being, who is going to identify
himself with other people, is to begin by practising on himself. If he
has not succeeded in identifying himself with himself, he makes very
trying work of the rest of us. A man who has not learned to say "I" and
mean something very real by it, has it not in his power, without dulness
or impertinence, to say "you" to any living creature. If a man has not
learned to say "you," if he has not taken hold of himself, interpreted
and adjusted himself to those who are face to face with him, the wider
and more general privilege of saying "they," of judging any part of
mankind or any temperament in it, should be kept away from him. It is
only as one has experienced a temperament, has in some mood of one's
life said "I" in that temperament, that one has the outfit for passing
an opinion on it, or the outfit for living with it, or for being in the
same world with it.
There are times, it must be confessed, when Christ's command, that every
man shall love his neighbour as himself, seems inconsiderate. There are
some of us who cannot help feeling, when we see a man coming along
toward us proposing to love us a little while the way he loves himself,
that our permission might have been asked. If there is one inconvenience
rather than another in our modern Christian society, it is the general
unprotected sense one has in it, the number of people there are about in
it (let loose by Sunday-school teachers and others) who are allowed to
go around loving other people the way they love themselves. A codicil or
at least an explanatory footnote to the Golden Rule, in the general
interest of neighbours, would be widely appreciated. How shall a man
dare to love his neighbour as himself, until he loves himself, has a
self that he really loves, a self he can really love, and loves it?
There is no more sad or constant spectacle that this modern world has to
face than the spectacle of the man who has overlooked himself, bustling
about in it, trying to give honour to other people,--the man who has
never been able to help himself, hurrying anxious to and fro as if he
could help some one else.
It is not too much to say "Charity begins at home." Everything does. The
one person who has the necessary training for being an altruist is the
alert egoist who does not know he is an altruist. His service to society
is a more intense and comprehensive selfishness. He would be cutting
acquaintance with himself not to render it. When he says "I" he means
"we," and the second and third persons are grown dim to him.
An absolutely perfect virtue is the conveying of a man's self, with a
truth, to others. The virtues that do not convey anything are cheap and
common enough. Favours can be had almost any day from anybody, if one is
not too particular, and so can blank staring self-sacrifices. One feels
like putting up a sign over the door of one's life, with some people:
"Let no man do me a favour except he do it as a self-indulgence." Even
kindness wears out, shows through, becomes impertinent, if it is not a
part of selfishness. It may be that there are certain rudimentary
virtues the outer form of which had better be maintained in the world,
whether they can be maintained spiritually--that is, thoroughly and
egotistically, or not. If my enemy who lives under the hill will
continue to not-murder me, I desire him to continue whether he enjoys
not-murdering me or not. But it is no credit to him. Except in some
baldly negative fashion as this, however, it is literally true that a
man's virtues are of little account to others except as they are of
account to him, and except he enjoys them as much as his vices. The
first really important shock that comes to a young man's religious
sentiment in this world is the number of bored-looking people around,
doing right. An absolutely substantial and perfect love is transfigured
selfishness. It is no mere playing with words to say this, nor is it
substituting a comfortable and pleasant doctrine for a strenuous
altruism. If it were as light and graceful an undertaking to have enough
selfishness to go around, to live in the whole of a universe like this,
as it is to slip out of even living in one's self in it, like a mere
shadow or altruist, egoism were superficial enough. As it is, egoism
being terribly or beautifully alive, so far as it goes, is now and
always has been, and always must be the running gear of the spiritual
world--egoism socialised. The first person is what the second and third
persons are made out of. Altruism, as opposed to egoism, except in a
temporary sense, is a contradiction in terms. Unless a man has a life to
identify other lives, with a self which is the symbol through which he
loves all other selves and all other experiences, he is selfish in the
true sense.
With all our Galileos, Agassizes, and Shakespeares, the universe has not
grown in its countless centuries. It has not been getting higher and
wider over us since the human race began. It is not a larger universe.
It is lived in by larger men, more all-absorbing, all-identifying, and
selfish men. It is a universe in which a human being is duly born, given
place with such a self as he happens to have, and he is expected to grow
up to it. Barring a certain amount of wear and tear and a few minor
rearrangements on the outside, it is the same universe that it was in
the beginning, and is now and always will be quite the same universe,
whether a man grows up to it or not. The larger universe is not one that
comes with the telescope. It comes with the larger self, the self that
by reaching farther and farther in, reaches farther and farther out. It
is as if the sky were a splendour that grew by night out of his own
heart, the tent of his love of God spreading its roof over the nature of
things. The greater distance knowledge reaches, the more it has to be
personal, because it has to be spiritual.
The one thing that it is necessary to do in any part of the world to
make any branch of knowledge or deed of mercy, a living and eager thing,
is to get men to see how direct its bearing is upon themselves. The man
who does not feel concerned when the Armenians are massacred, thousands
of miles away, because there is a sea between, is not a different man in
kind from the man who does feel concerned. The difference is one of
degree. It is a matter of area in living. The man who does feel
concerned has a larger self. He sees further, feels the cry as the cry
of his own children. He has learned the oneness and is touched with the
closeness, of the great family of the world.
V
The Autobiography of Beauty
But the brunt of the penalty of the unpopularity of the first person
singular in modern society falls upon the individual. The hard part of
it, for a man who has not the daily habit of being a companion to
himself, is his own personal private sense of emptiness--of missing
things. All the universe gets itself addressed to some one else--a great
showy heartless pantomime it rolls over him, beckoning with its nights
and days and winds and faces--always beckoning, but to some one else.
All that seems to be left to him in a universe is a kind of keeping up
appearances in it--a looking as if he lived--a hurrying, dishonest
trying to forget. He dare not sit down and think. He spends his strength
in racing with himself to get away from himself, and those greatest days
of all in human life--the days when men grow old, world-gentle, and
still and deep before their God, are the days he dreads the most. He can
only look forward to old age as the time when a man sits down with his
lie at last, and day after day and night after night faces infinite and
eternal loneliness in his own heart.
It is the man who cuts acquaintance with himself, who dares to be lonely
with himself, who dares the supreme daring in this world. He and his
loneliness are hermetically sealed up together in infinite Time,
infinite Space,--not a great man of all that have been, not a star or
flower, not even a great book that can get at him.
It is the nature of a great book that in proportion as it is beautiful
it makes itself helpless before a human soul. Like music or poetry or
painting it lays itself radiant and open before all that lies before
it--to everything or to nothing, whatever it may be. It makes the direct
appeal. Before the days and years of a man's life it stands. "Is not
this so?" it says. It never says less than this. It does not know how to
say more.
A bare and trivial book stops with what it says itself. A great book
depends now and forever upon what it makes a man say back, and if he
does not say anything, if he does not bring anything to it to say,
nothing out of his own observation, passion, experience, to be called
out by the passing words upon the page, the most living book, in its
board and paper prison, is a dead and helpless thing before a Dead Soul.
The helplessness of the Dead Soul lies upon it.
Perhaps there is no more important distinction between a great book and
a little book than this--that the great book is always a listener before
a human life, and the little book takes nothing for granted of a reader.
It does not expect anything of him. The littler it is, the less it
expects and the more it explains. Nothing that is really great and
living explains. Living is enough. If greatness does not explain by
being great, nothing smaller can explain it. God never explains. He
merely appeals to every man's first person singular. Religion is not
what He has told to men. It is what He has made men wonder about until
they have been determined to find out. The stars have never been
published with footnotes. The sun, with its huge, soft shining on
people, kept on with the shining even when the people thought it was
doing so trivial and undignified and provincial a thing as to spend its
whole time going around them, and around their little earth, that they
might have light on it perchance, and be kept warm. The moon has never
gone out of its way to prove that it is not made of green cheese. And
this present planet we are allowed the use of from year to year, which
was so little observed for thousands of generations that all the people
on it supposed it was flat, made no answer through the centuries. It
kept on burying them one by one, and waited--like a work of genius or a
masterpiece.
In proportion as a thing is beautiful, whether of man or God, it has
this heroic helplessness about it with the passing soul or generation of
souls. If people are foolish, it can but appeal from one dear, pitiful
fool to another until enough of us have died to make it time for a wise
man again. History is a series of crises like this, in which once in so
often men who say "I" have crossed the lives of mortals--have puzzled
the world enough to be remembered in it, like Socrates, or been abused
by it enough to make it love them forever, like Christ.
The greatest revelation of history is the patience of the beauty in it,
and truth can always be known by the fact that it is the only thing in
the wide world that can afford to wait. A true book does not go about
advertising itself, huckstering for souls, arranging its greatness small
enough. It waits. Sometimes for twenty years it waits for us, sometimes
for forty, sometimes sixty, and then when the time is fulfilled and we
come at length and lay before it the burden of the blind and blundering
years we have tried to live, it does little with us, after all, but to
bring these same years singing and crying and struggling back to us,
that through their shadowy doors we may enter at last the confessional
of the human heart, and cry out there, or stammer or whisper or sing
there, the prophecy of our own lives. Dead words out of dead
dictionaries the book brings to us. It is a great book because it is a
listening book, because it makes the unspoken to speak and the dead to
live in it. To the vanished pen and the yellowed paper of the man who
writes to us, thy soul and mine, Gentle Reader, shall call back, "This
is the truth."
If a book has force in it, whatever its literary form may be, or however
disguised, it is biography appealing to biography. If a book has great
force in it, it is autobiography appealing to autobiography. The great
book is always a confession--a moral adventure with its reader, an
incredible confidence.
The Fourth Interference: The Habit of Not Letting One's Self Go
I
The Country Boy in Literature
"Let not any Parliament Member," says Carlyle, "ask of the Present
Editor 'What is to be done?' Editors are not here to say, 'How.'"
"Which is both ungracious and tantalisingly elusive," suggests a
Professor of Literature, who has been recently criticising the
Nineteenth Century.
This criticism, as a part of an estimate of Thomas Carlyle, is not only
a criticism on itself and an autobiography besides, but it sums up, in a
more or less characteristic fashion perhaps, what might be called the
ultra-academic attitude in reading. The ultra-academic attitude may be
defined as the attitude of sitting down and being told things, and of
expecting all other persons to sit down and be told things, and of
judging all authors, principles, men, and methods accordingly.
If the universe were what in most libraries and clubs to-day it is made
to seem, a kind of infinite Institution of Learning, a Lecture Room on a
larger scale, and if all the men in it, instead of doing and singing in
it, had spent their days in delivering lectures to it, there would be
every reason, in a universe arranged for lectures, why we should exact
of those who give them, that they should make the truth plain to us--so
plain that there would be nothing left for us to do, with truth, but to
read it in the printed book, and then analyse the best analysis of
it--and die.
It seems to be quite generally true of those who have been the great
masters of literature, however, that in proportion as they have been
great they have proved to be as ungracious and as tantalisingly elusive
as the universe itself. They have refused, without exception, to bear
down on the word "how." They have almost never told men what to do, and
have confined themselves to saying something that would make them do it,
and make them find a way to do it. This something that they have said,
like the something that they have lived, has come to them they know not
how, and it has gone from them they know not how, sometimes not even
when. It has been incommunicable, incalculable, infinite, the
subconscious self of each of them, the voice beneath the voice, calling
down the corridors of the world.
If a boy from the country were to stand in a city street before the
window of a shop, gazing into it with open mouth, he would do more in
five or six minutes to measure the power and calibre of the passing men
and women than almost any device that could be arranged. Ninety-five out
of a hundred of them, probably, would smile a superior smile at him and
hurry on. Out of the remaining five, four would look again and pity him.
One, perhaps, would honour and envy him.
The boy who, in a day like the present one, is still vital enough to
forget how he looks in enjoying something, is not only a rare and
refreshing spectacle, but he is master of the most important
intellectual and moral superiority a boy can be master of, and if, in
spite of teachers and surroundings, he can keep this superiority long
enough, or until he comes to be a man, he shall be the kind of man whose
very faults shall be remembered better and cherished more by a doting
world than the virtues of the rest of us.
The most important fact--perhaps the only important fact--about James
Boswell--the country boy of literature--is that, whatever may have been
his limitations, he had the most important gift that life can give to a
man--the gift of forgetting himself in it. In the Fleet Street of
letters, smiling at him and jeering by him, who does not always see
James Boswell, completely lost to the street, gaping at the soul of
Samuel Johnson as if it were the show window of the world, as if to be
allowed to look at a soul like this were almost to have a soul one's
self?
Boswell's _Life of Johnson_ is a classic because James Boswell had the
classic power in him of unconsciousness. To book-labourers, college
employees, analysis-hands of whatever kind, his book is a standing
notice that the prerogative of being immortal is granted by men, even to
a fool, if he has the grace not to know it. For that matter, even if the
fool knows he is a fool, if he cares more about his subject than he
cares about not letting any one else know it, he is never forgotten. The
world cannot afford to leave such a fool out. Is it not a world in which
there is not a man living of us who does not cherish in his heart a
little secret like this of his own? We are bound to admit that the main
difference between James Boswell and the rest, consists in the fact that
James Boswell found something in the world so much more worth living
for, than not letting the common secret out, that he lived for it, and
like all the other great naives he will never get over living for it.
Even allowing that Boswell's consistent and unfailing motive in
cultivating Samuel Johnson was vanity, this very vanity of Boswell's has
more genius in it than Johnson's vocabulary, and the important and
inspiring fact remains, that James Boswell, a flagrantly commonplace man
in every single respect, by the law of letting himself go, has taken his
stand forever in English literature, as the one commonplace man in it
who has produced a work of genius. The main quality of a man of genius,
his power of sacrificing everything to his main purpose, belonged to
him. He was not only willing to seem the kind of fool he was, but he did
not hesitate to seem several kinds that he was not, to fulfil his main
purpose. That Samuel Johnson might be given the ponderous and gigantic
and looming look that a Samuel Johnson ought to have, Boswell painted
himself into his picture with more relentlessness than any other author
that can be called to mind, except three or four similarly commonplace
and similarly inspired and self-forgetful persons in the New Testament.
There has never been any other biography in England with the single
exception of Pepys, in which the author has so completely lost himself
in his subject. If the author of Johnson's life had written his book
with the inspiration of not being laughed at (which is the inspiration
that nine out of ten who love to laugh are likely to write with), James
Boswell would never have been heard of, and the burly figure of Samuel
Johnson would be a blur behind a dictionary.
It may be set down as one of the necessary principles of the reading
habit that no true and vital reading is possible except as the reader
possesses and employs the gift of letting himself go. It is a gift that
William Shakespeare and James Boswell and Elijah and Charles Lamb and a
great many other happy but unimportant people have had in common. No man
of genius--a man who puts his best and his most unconscious self into
his utterance--can be read or listened to or interpreted for one moment
without it. Except from those who bring to him the greeting of their own
unconscious selves, he hides himself. He gives himself only to those
with whom unconsciousness is a daily habit, with whom the joy of letting
one's self go is one of the great resources of life. This joy is back of
every great act and every deep appreciation in the world, and it is the
charm and delight of the smaller ones. On its higher levels, it is
called genius and inspiration. In religion it is called faith. It is the
primal energy both of art and religion.
Probably only the man who has very little would be able to tell what
faith is, as a basis of art or religion, but we have learned some things
that it is not. We know that faith is not a dead-lift of the brain, a
supreme effort either for God or for ourselves. It is the soul giving
itself up, finding itself, feeling itself drawn to its own, into
infinite space, face to face with strength. It is the supreme
swinging-free of the spirit, the becoming a part of the running-gear of
things. Faith is not an act of the imagination--to the man who knows it.
It is infinite fact, the infinite crowding of facts, the drawing of the
man-self upward and outward, where he is surrounded with the infinite
man-self. Perhaps a man can make himself not believe. He can not make
himself believe. He can only believe by letting himself go, by trusting
the force of gravity and the law of space around him. Faith is the
universe flowing silently, implacably, through his soul. He has given
himself up to it. In the tiniest, noisiest noon his spirit is flooded
with the stars. He is let out to the boundaries of heaven and the
night-sky bears him up in the heat of the day.
In the presence of a great work of art--a work of inspiration or faith,
there is no such thing as appreciation, without letting one's self go.
II
The Subconscious Self
The criticism of Carlyle's remark, "Editors are not here to say
'How,'"--that it is "ungracious and tantalisingly elusive," is a fair
illustration of the mood to which the habit of analysis leads its
victims. The explainer cannot let himself go. The puttering love of
explaining and the need of explaining dog his soul at every turn of
thought or thought of having a thought. He not only puts a microscope to
his eyes to know with, but his eyes have ingrown microscopes. The
microscope has become a part of his eyes. He cannot see anything without
putting it on a slide, and when his microscope will not focus it, and it
cannot be reduced and explained, he explains that it is not there.
The man of genius, on the other hand, with whom truth is an experience
instead of a specimen, has learned that the probabilities are that the
more impossible it is to explain a truth the more truth there is in it.
In so far as the truth is an experience to him, he is not looking for
slides. He will not mount it as a specimen and he is not interested in
seeing it explained or focussed. He lives with it in his own heart in so
far as he possesses it, and he looks at it with a telescope for that
greater part which he cannot possess. The microscope is perpetually
mislaid. He has the experience itself and the one thing he wants to do
with it is to convey it to others. He does this by giving himself up to
it. The truth having become a part of him by his thus giving himself up,
it becomes a part of his reader, by his reader's giving himself up.
Reading a work of genius is one man's unconsciousness greeting another
man's. No author of the higher class can possibly be read without this
mutual exchange of unconsciousness. He cannot be explained. He cannot
explain himself. And he cannot be enjoyed, appreciated, or criticised by
those who expect him to. Spiritual things are spiritually discerned,
that is, experienced things are discerned by experience. They are
"ungracious and tantalisingly elusive."
When the man who has a little talent tells a truth he tells the truth so
ill that he is obliged to tell how to do it. The artist, on the other
hand, having given himself up to the truth, almost always tells it as if
he were listening to it, as if he were being borne up by it, as by some
great delight, even while he speaks to us. It is the power of the
artist's truth when he writes like this that it shall haunt his reader
as it has haunted him. He lives with it and is haunted by it day after
day whether he wants to be or not, and when a human being is obliged to
live with a burning truth inside of him every day of his life, he will
find a how for it, he will find some way of saying it, of getting it
outside of him, of doing it, if only for the common and obvious reason
that it burns the heart out of a man who does not. If the truth is
really in a man--a truth to be done,--he finds out how to do it as a
matter of self-preservation.
The average man no doubt will continue now as always to consider
Carlyle's "Editors are not here to say 'How'" ungracious and
tantalisingly elusive. He demands of every writer not only that he shall
write the truth for every man but that he shall--practically--read it
for him--that is, tell him how to read it--the best part of reading it.
It is by this explaining the truth too much, by making it small enough
for small people that so many lies have been made out of it. The gist of
the matter seems to be that if the spirit of the truth does not inspire
a man to some more eager way of finding out how to do a truth than
asking some other man how to do it, it must be some other spirit. The
way out for the explotterating or weak man does not consist in the
scientist's or the commentator's how, or the artist's how, or in any
other strain of helping the ground to hold one up. It consists in the
power of letting one's self go.
To say nothing of appreciation of power, criticism of power is
impossible, without letting one's self go. Criticism which is not the
faithful remembering and reporting of an unconscious mood is not worthy
of being called criticism at all. A critic cannot find even the faults
of a book who does not let himself go in it, and there is not a man
living who can expect to write a criticism of a book until he has given
himself a chance to have an experience with it, to write his criticism
with. The larger part of the professional criticism of the ages that are
past has proved worthless to us, because the typical professional critic
has generally been a man who professes not to let himself go and who is
proud of it. If it were not for the occasional possibility of his being
stunned by a book--made unconscious by it,--the professional critic of
the lesser sort would never say anything of interest to us at all, and
even if he did, being a maimed and defective conscious person, the
evidence that he was stunned is likely to be of more significance than
anything he may say about the book that stunned him, or about the way he
felt when he was being stunned. Having had very little practice in being
unconscious, the bare fact is all that he can remember about it. The
unconsciousness of a person who has long lost the habit of
unconsciousness is apt to be a kind of groping stupor or deadness at its
best, and not, as with the artist, a state of being, a way of being
incalculably alive, and of letting in infinite life. It is a small joy
that is not unconscious. The man who knows he is reading when he has a
book in his hands, does not know very much about books.
People who always know what time it is, who always know exactly where
they are, and exactly how they look, have it not in their power to read
a great book. The book that comes to the reader as a great book is
always one that shares with him the infinite and the eternal in himself.
There is a time to know what time it is, and there is a time not to, and
there are many places small enough to know where they are. The book that
knows what time it is, in every sentence, will always be read by the
clock, but the great book, the book with infinite vistas in it, shall
not be read by men with a rim of time around it. The place of it is
unmeasured, and there is no sound that men can make which shall tick in
that place.
III
The Organic Principle of Inspiration
Letting one's self go is but a half-principle, however, to do one's
reading with. The other half consists in getting one's self together
again. In proportion as we truly appreciate what we read, we find
ourselves playing; at being Boswell to a book and being Johnson to it by
turns. The vital reader lets himself go and collects himself as the work
before him demands. There are some books, where it is necessary to let
one's self go from beginning to end. There are others where a man may
sit as he sits at a play, being himself between acts, or at proper
intervals when the author lets down the curtain, and being translated
the rest of the time.
Our richest moods are those in which, as we look back upon them, we seem
to have been impressing, impressionable, creative, and receptive at the
same time. The alternating currents of these moods are so swift that
they seem simultaneous, and the immeasurable swiftness with which they
pass from one to the other is the soul's instinctive method of kindling
itself--the very act of inspiration. Sometimes the subconscious self has
it all its own way with us except for a corner of dim, burning
consciousness keeping guard. Sometimes the conscious has it all its own
way with us and the subconscious self is crowded to the horizon's edge,
like Northern Lights still playing in the distance; but the result is
the same--the dim presence of one of these moods in the other, when
one's power is least effective, and the gradual alternating of the
currents of the moods as power grows more effective. In the higher
states of power, the moods are seen alternating with increasing heat and
swiftness until in the highest state of power of all, they are seen in
their mutual glow and splendour, working as one mood, creating miracles.
The orator and the listener, the writer and the reader, in proportion as
they become alive to one another, come into the same spirit--the spirit
of mutual listening and utterance. At the very best, and in the most
inspired mood, the reader reads as if he were a reader and writer both,
and the writer writes as if he were a writer and reader both.
While it is necessary in the use and development of power, that all
varieties and combinations of these moods should be familiar experiences
with the artist and with the reader of the artist, it remains as the
climax and ideal of all energy and beauty in the human soul that these
moods shall be found alternating very swiftly--to all appearances
together. The artist's command of this alternating current, the
swiftness with which he modulates these moods into one another, is the
measure of his power. The violinist who plays best is the one who sings
the most things together in his playing. He listens to his own bow, to
the heart of his audience, and to the soul of the composer all at once.
His instrument sings a singing that blends them together. The effect of
their being together is called art. The effect of their being together
is produced by the fact that they are together, that they are born and
living and dying together in the man himself while the strings are
singing to us. They are the spirit within the strings. His letting
himself go to them, his gathering himself out of them, his power to
receive and create at once, is the secret of the effect he produces. The
power to be receptive and creative by turns is only obtained by constant
and daily practice, and when the modulating of one of these moods into
the other becomes a swift and unconscious habit of life, what is called
"temperament" in an artist is attained at last and inspiration is a
daily occurrence. It is as hard for such a man to keep from being
inspired as it is for the rest of us to make ourselves inspired. He has
to go out of his way to avoid inspiration.
In proportion as this principle is recognised and allowed free play in
the habits that obtain amongst men who know books, their habits will be
inspired habits. Books will be read and lived in the same breath, and
books that have been lived will be written.
The most serious menace in the present epidemic of analysis in our
colleges is not that it is teaching men to analyse masterpieces until
they are dead to them, but that it is teaching men to analyse their own
lives until they are dead to themselves. When the process of education
is such that it narrows the area of unconscious thinking and feeling in
a man's life, it cuts him off from his kinship with the gods, from his
habit of being unconscious enough of what he has to enter into the joy
of what he has not.
The best that can be said of such an education is that it is a patient,
painstaking, laborious training in locking one's self up. It dooms a man
to himself, the smallest part of himself, and walls him out of the
universe. He comes to its doorways one by one. The shining of them falls
at first on him, as it falls on all of us. He sees the shining of them
and hastens to them. One by one they are shut in his face. His soul is
damned--is sentenced to perpetual consciousness of itself. What is there
that he can do next? Turning round and round inside himself, learning
how little worth while it is, there is but one fate left open to such a
man, a blind and desperate lunge into the roar of the life he cannot
see, for facts--the usual L.H.D., Ph.D. fate. If he piles around him the
huge hollow sounding outsides of things in the universe that have lived,
bones of soul, matter of bodies, skeletons of lives that men have lived,
who shall blame him? He wonders why they have lived, why any one lives;
and if, when he has wondered long enough why any one lives, we choose to
make him the teacher of the young, that the young also may wonder why
any one lives, why should we call him to account? He cannot but teach
what he has, what has been given him, and we have but ourselves to thank
that, as every radiant June comes round, diplomas for ennui are being
handed out--thousands of them--to specially favoured children through
all this broad and glorious land.
The Fifth Interference: The Habit of Analysis
I
If Shakespeare Came to Chicago
It is one of the supreme literary excellences of the Bible that, until
the other day almost, it had never occurred to any one that it is
literature at all. It has been read by men and women, and children and
priests and popes, and kings and slaves and the dying of all ages, and
it has come to them not as a book, but as if it were something happening
to them.
It has come to them as nights and mornings come, and sleep and death, as
one of the great, simple, infinite experiences of human life. It has
been the habit of the world to take the greatest works of art, like the
greatest works of God, in this simple and straightforward fashion, as
great experiences. If a masterpiece really is a masterpiece, and rains
and shines its instincts on us as masterpieces should, we do not think
whether it is literary or not, any more than we gaze on mountains and
stop to think how sublimely scientific, raptly geological, and logically
chemical they are. These things are true about mountains, and have their
place. But it is the nature of a mountain to insist upon its own
place--to be an experience first and to be as scientific and geological
and chemical as it pleases afterward. It is the nature of anything
powerful to be an experience first and to appeal to experience. When we
have time, or when the experience is over, a mountain or a masterpiece
can be analysed--the worst part of it; but we cannot make a masterpiece
by analysing it; and a mountain has never been appreciated by pounding
it into trap, quartz, and conglomerate; and it still holds good, as a
general principle, that making a man appreciate a mountain by pounding
it takes nearly as long as making the mountain, and is not nearly so
worth while.
Not many years ago, in one of our journals of the more literary sort,
there appeared a few directions from Chicago University to the late John
Keats on how to write an "Ode to a Nightingale." These directions were
from the Head of a Department, who, in a previous paper in the same
journal, had rewritten the "Ode to a Grecian Urn." The main point the
Head of the Department made, with regard to the nightingale, was that it
was not worth rewriting. "'The Ode to the Nightingale,'" says he,
"offers me no such temptation. There is almost nothing in it that
properly belongs to the subject treated. The faults of the Grecian Urn
are such as the poet himself, under wise criticism" (see catalogue of
Chicago University) "might easily have removed. The faults of the
Nightingale are such that they cannot be removed. They inhere in the
idea and structure." The Head of the Department dwells at length upon
"the hopeless fortune of the poem," expressing his regret that it can
never be retrieved. After duly analysing what he considers the poem's
leading thought, he regrets that a poet like John Keats should go so
far, apropos of a nightingale, as to sigh in his immortal stanzas, "for
something which, whatever it may be, is nothing short of a dead drunk."
One hears the soul of Keats from out its eternal Italy--
"Is there no one near to help me
... No fair dawn
Of life from charitable voice? No sweet saying
To set my dull and sadden'd spirit playing?"
The Head of the Department goes on, and the lines--
Still wouldst thou sing and I have ears in vain--
To thy high requiem become a sod--
are passed through analysis. "What the fitness is," he says, "or what
the poetic or other effectiveness of suggesting that the corpse of a
person who has ceased upon the midnight still has ears, only to add that
it has them in vain, I cannot pretend to understand"--one of a great
many other things that the Head of the Department does not pretend to
understand. It is probably with the same outfit of not pretending to
understand that--for the edification of the merely admiring mind--the
"Ode to a Grecian Urn" was rewritten. To Keats's lines--
Oh, Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayest,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty"--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know--
he makes various corrections, offering as a substitute-conclusion to the
poet's song the following outburst:
Preaching this wisdom with thy cheerful mien:
Possessing beauty thou possessest all;
Pause at that goal, nor farther push thy quest.
It would not be just to the present state of academic instruction in
literature to illustrate it by such an extreme instance as this of the
damage the educated mind--debauched with analysis--is capable of doing
to the reading habit. It is probable that a large proportion of the
teachers of literature in the United States, both out of their sense of
John Keats and out of respect to themselves, would have publicly
resented this astonishing exhibit of the extreme literary-academic mind
in a prominent journal, had they not suspected that its editor, having
discovered a literary-academic mind that could take itself as seriously
as this, had deliberately brought it out as a spectacle. It could do no
harm to Keats, certainly, or to any one else, and would afford an
infinite deal of amusement--the journal argued--to let a mind like this
clatter down a column to oblivion. So it did. It was taken by all
concerned, teachers, critics, and observers alike, as one of the more
interesting literary events of the season.
Unfortunately, however, entertainments of this kind have a very serious
side to them. It is one thing to smile at an individual when one knows
that standing where he does he stands by himself, and another to smile
at an individual when one knows that he is not standing by himself, that
he is a type, that there must be a great many others like him or he
would not be standing where he does at all. When a human being is seen
taking his stand over his own soul in public print, summing up its
emptiness there, and gloating over it, we are in the presence of a
disheartening fact. It can be covered up, however, and in what, on the
whole, is such a fine, true-ringing, hearty old world as this, it need
not be made much of; but when we find that a mind like this has been
placed at the head of a Department of Poetry in a great, representative
American university, the last thing that should be done with it is to
cover it up. The more people know where the analytical mind is
to-day--where it is getting to be--and the more they think what its
being there means, the better. The signs of the times, the destiny of
education, and the fate of literature are all involved in a fact like
this. The mere possibility of having the analysing-grinding mind engaged
in teaching a spontaneous art in a great educational institution would
be of great significance. The fact that it is actually there and that no
particular comment is excited by its being there, is significant. It
betrays not only what the general, national, academic attitude toward
literature is, but that that attitude has become habitual, that it is
taken for granted.
One would be inclined to suppose, looking at the matter abstractly, that
all students and teachers of literature would take it for granted that
the practice of making a dispassionate criticism of a passion would be a
dangerous practice for any vital and spontaneous nature--certainly the
last kind of practice that a student of the art of poetry (that is, the
art of literature, in the essential sense) would wish to make himself
master of. The first item in a critic's outfit for criticising a passion
is having one. The fact that this is not regarded as an axiom in our
current education in books is a very significant fact. It goes with
another significant fact--the assumption, in most courses of literature
as at present conducted, that a little man (that is, a man incapable of
a great passion), who is not even able to read a book with a great
passion in it, can somehow teach other people to read it.
It is not necessary to deny that analysis occasionally plays a valuable
part in bringing a pupil to a true method and knowledge of literature,
but unless the analysis is inspired nothing can be more dangerous to a
pupil under his thirtieth year, even for the shortest period of time, or
more likely to move him over to the farthest confines of the creative
life, or more certain, if continued long enough, to set him forever
outside all power or possibility of power, either in the art of
literature or in any of the other arts.
The first objection to the analysis of one of Shakespeare's plays as
ordinarily practised in courses of literature is that it is of doubtful
value to nine hundred and ninety-nine pupils in a thousand--if they do
it. The second is, that they cannot do it. The analysing of one of
Shakespeare's plays requires more of a commonplace pupil than
Shakespeare required of himself. The apology that is given for the
analysing method is, that the process of analysing a work of
Shakespeare's will show the pupil how Shakespeare did it, and that by
seeing how Shakespeare did it he will see how to do it himself.
In the first place, analysis will not show how Shakespeare did it, and
in the second place, if it does, it will show that he did not do it by
analysis. In the third place,--to say nothing of not doing it by
analysis,--if he had analysed it before he did it, he could not have
analysed it afterward in the literal and modern sense. In the fourth
place, even if Shakespeare were able to do his work by analysing it
before he did it, it does not follow that undergraduate students can.
A man of genius, with all his onset of natural passion, his natural
power of letting himself go, could doubtless do more analysing, both
before and after his work, than any one else without being damaged by
it. What shall be said of the folly of trying to teach men of talent,
and the mere pupils of men of talent, by analysis--by a method, that is,
which, even if it succeeds in doing what it tries to do, can only, at
the very best, reveal to the pupil the roots of his instincts before
they have come up? And why is it that our courses of literature may be
seen assuming to-day on every hand, almost without exception, that by
teaching men to analyse their own inspirations--the inspirations they
have--and teaching them to analyse the inspirations of other
men--inspirations they can never have--we are somehow teaching them
"English literature"?
It seems to have been overlooked while we are all analytically falling
at Shakespeare's feet, that Shakespeare did not become Shakespeare by
analytically falling at any one's feet--not even at his own--and that
the most important difference between being a Shakespeare and being an
analyser of Shakespeare is that with the man Shakespeare no submitting
of himself to the analysis-gymnast would ever have been possible, and
with the students of Shakespeare (as students go and if they are caught
young enough) the habit of analysis is not only a possibility but a
sleek, industrious, and complacent certainty.
After a little furtive looking backward perhaps, and a few tremblings
and doubts, they shall all be seen, almost to a man, offering their
souls to Moloch, as though the not having a soul and not missing it were
the one final and consummate triumph that literary culture could bring.
Flocks of them can be seen with the shining in their faces year after
year, term after term, almost anywhere on the civilised globe, doing
this very thing--doing it under the impression that they are learning
something, and not until the shining in their faces is gone will they be
under the impression that they have learned it (whatever it is) and that
they are educated.
The fact that the analytic mind is establishing itself, in a greater or
less degree, as the sentinel in college life of the entire creative
literature of the world is a fact with many meanings in it. It means not
only that there are a great many more minds like it in literature, but
that a great many other minds--nearly all college-educated minds--are
being made like it. It means that unless the danger is promptly faced
and acted upon the next generation of American citizens can neither
expect to be able to produce literature of its own nor to appreciate or
enjoy literature that has been produced. It means that another
eighteenth century is coming to the world; and, as the analysis is
deeper than before and more deadly-clever with the deeper things than
before, it is going to be the longest eighteenth century the world has
ever seen--generations with machines for hands and feet, machines for
minds, machines outside their minds to enjoy the machines inside their
minds with. Every man with his information-machine to be cultured with,
his religious machine to be good with, and his private Analysis Machine
to be beautiful with, shall take his place in the world--shall add his
soul to the Machine we make a world with. For every man that is born on
the earth one more joy shall be crowded out of it--one more analysis of
joy shall take its place, go round and round under the stars--dew, dawn,
and darkness--until it stops. How a sunrise is made and why a cloud is
artistic and how pines should be composed in a landscape, all men shall
know. We shall criticise the technique of thunderstorms. "And what is a
sunset after all?" The reflection of a large body on rarefied air.
Through analysed heaven and over analysed fields it trails its
joylessness around the earth.
Time was, when the setting of the sun was the playing of two worlds upon
a human being's life on the edge of the little day, the blending of
sense and spirit for him, earth and heaven, out in the still west. His
whole being went forth to it. He watched with it and prayed and sang
with it. In its presence his soul walked down to the stars. Out of the
joy of his life, the finite sorrow and the struggle of his life, he
gazed upon it. It was the portrait of his infinite self. Every setting
sun that came to him was a compact with Eternal Joy. The Night
itself--his figure faint before it in the flicker of the east--whispered
to him: "Thou also--hills and heavens around thee, hills and heavens
within thee--oh, Child of Time--Thou also art God!"
"Ah me! How I could love! My soul doth melt," cries Keats:
Ye deaf and senseless minutes of the day,
And thou old forest, hold ye this for true,
There is no lightning, no authentic dew
But in the eye of love; there's not a sound,
Melodious howsoever, can confound
The heavens and the earth to such a death
As doth the voice of love; there's not a breath
Will mingle kindly with the meadow air,
Till it has panted round, and stolen a share
Of passion from the heart.
John Keats and William Shakespeare wrote masterpieces because they had
passions, spiritual experiences, and the daily habit of inspiration. In
so far as these masterpieces are being truthfully taught, they are
taught by teachers who themselves know the passion of creation. They
teach John Keats and William Shakespeare by rousing the same passions
and experiences in the pupil that Keats and Shakespeare had, and by
daily appealing to them.
II
Analysis Analysed
There are a great many men in the world to-day, faithfully doing their
stint in it (they are commonly known as men of talent), who would have
been men of genius if they had dared. Education has made cowards of us
all, and the habit of examining the roots of one's instincts, before
they come up, is an incurable habit.
The essential principle in a true work of art is always the poem or the
song that is hidden in it. A work of art by a man of talent is generally
ranked by the fact that it is the work of a man who analyses a song
before he sings it. He puts down the words of the song first--writes it,
that is--in prose. Then he lumbers it over into poetry. Then he looks
around for some music for it. Then he practises at singing it, and then
he sings it. The man of genius, on the other hand, whether he be a great
one or a very little one, is known by the fact that he has a song sent
to him. He sings it. He has a habit of humming it over afterwards. His
humming it over afterwards is his analysis. It is the only possible
inspired analysis.
The difference between these two types of men is so great that anything
that the smaller of them has to say about the spirit or the processes of
the other is of little value. When one of them tries to teach the work
of the other, which is what almost always occurs,--the man of talent
being the typical professor of works of genius,--the result is fatal. A
singer who is so little capable of singing that he can give a prose
analysis of his own song while it is coming to him and before he sings
it, can hardly be expected to extemporise an inspired analysis of
another man's song after reading it. If a man cannot apply inspired
analysis to a little common passion in a song he has of his own, he is
placed in a hopeless position when he tries to give an inspired analysis
of a passion that only another man could have and that only a great man
would forget himself long enough to have.
An inspired analysis may be defined as the kind of analysis that the
real poet in his creatively critical mood is able to give to his work--a
low-singing or humming analysis in which all the elements of the song
are active and all the faculties and all the senses work on the subject
at once. The proportions and relations of a living thing are all kept
perfect in an inspired analysis, and the song is made perfect at last,
not by being taken apart, but by being made to pass its delight more
deeply and more slowly through the singer's utmost self to its
fulfilment.
What is ordinarily taught as analysis is very different from this. It
consists in the deliberate and triumphant separation of the faculties
from one another and from the thing they have produced--the dull, bare,
pitiless process of passing a living and beautiful thing before one
vacant, staring faculty at a time. This faculty, being left in the
stupor of being all by itself, sits in complacent judgment upon a work
of art, the very essence of the life and beauty of which is its
appealing to all of the faculties and senses at once, in their true
proportion, glowing them together into a unit--namely, several things
made into one thing, that is--several things occupying the same time and
the same place, that is--synthesis. An inspired analysis is the
rehearsal of a synthesis. An analysis is not inspired unless it comes as
a flash of light and a burst of music and a breath of fragrance all in
one. Such an analysis cannot be secured with painstaking and slowness,
unless the painstaking and slowness are the rehearsal of a synthesis,
and all the elements in it are laboured on and delighted in at once. It
must be a low-singing or humming analysis.
The expert student or teacher of poetry who makes "a dispassionate
criticism" of a passion, who makes it his special boast that he is able
to apply his intellect severely by itself to a great poem, boasts of the
devastation of the highest power a human being can attain. The commonest
man that lives, whatever his powers may be, if they are powers that act
together, can look down on a man whose powers cannot, as a mutilated
being. While it cannot be denied that a being who has been thus
especially mutilated is often possessed of a certain literary ability,
he belongs to the acrobats of literature rather than to literature
itself. The contortionist who separates himself from his hands and feet
for the delectation of audiences, the circus performer who makes a
battering-ram of his head and who glories in being shot out of a cannon
into space and amazement, goes through his motions with essentially the
same pride in his strength, and sustains the same relation to the
strength of the real man of the world.
Whatever a course of literary criticism may be, or its value may be, to
the pupils who take it, it consists, more often than not, on the part of
pupil and teacher both, in the dislocating of one faculty from all the
others, and the bearing it down hard on a work of art, as if what it was
made of, or how it was made, could only be seen by scratching it.
It is to be expected now and then, in the hurry of the outside world,
that a newspaper critic will be found writing a cerebellum criticism of
a work of the imagination; but the student of literature, in the
comparative quiet and leisure of the college atmosphere, who works in
the same separated spirit, who estimates a work by dislocating his
faculties on it, is infinitely more blameworthy; and the college teacher
who teaches a work of genius by causing it to file before one of his
faculties at a time, when all of them would not be enough,--who does
this in the presence of young persons and trains them to do it
themselves,--is a public menace. The attempt to master a masterpiece, as
it were, by reading it first with the sense of sight, and then with the
sense of smell, and with all the senses in turn, keeping them carefully
guarded from their habit of sensing things together, is not only a
self-destructive but a hopeless attempt. A great mind, even if it would
attempt to master anything in this way, would find it hopeless, and the
attempt to learn a great work of art--a great whole--by applying the
small parts of a small mind to it, one after the other, is more hopeless
still. It can be put down as a general principle that a human being who
is so little alive that he finds his main pleasure in life in taking
himself apart, can find little of value for others in a masterpiece--a
work of art which is so much alive that it cannot be taken apart, and
which is eternal because its secret is eternally its own. If the time
ever comes when it can be taken apart, it will be done only by a man who
could have put it together, who is more alive than the masterpiece is
alive. Until the masterpiece meets with a master who is more creative
than its first master was, the less the motions of analysis are gone
through with by those who are not masters, the better. A masterpiece
cannot be analysed by the cold and negative process of being taken
apart. It can only be analysed by being melted down. It can only be
melted down by a man who has creative heat in him to melt it down and
the daily habit of glowing with creative heat.
It is a matter of common observation that the fewer resources an artist
has, the more things there are in nature and in the nature of life which
he thinks are not beautiful. The making of an artist is his sense of
selection. If he is an artist of the smaller type, he selects beautiful
subjects--subjects with ready-made beauty in them. If he is an artist of
the larger type, he can hardly miss making almost any subject beautiful,
because he has so many beautiful things to put it with. He sees every
subject the way it is--that is, in relation to a great many other
subjects--the way God saw it, when He made it, and the way it is.
The essential difference between a small mood and a large one is that in
the small one we see each thing we look on, comparatively by itself, or
with reference to one or two relations to persons and events. In our
larger mood we see it less analytically. We see it as it is and as it
lives and as a god would see it, playing its meaning through the whole
created scheme into everything else.
The soul of beauty is synthesis. In the presence of a mountain the sound
of a hammer is as rich as a symphony. It is like the little word of a
great man, great in its great relations. When the spirit is waked and
the man within the man is listening to it, the sound of a hoof on a
lonely road in the great woods is the footstep of cities to him coming
through the trees, and the low, chocking sound of a cartwheel in the
still and radiant valley throngs his being like an opera. All sights and
echoes and thoughts and feelings revel in it. It is music for the smoke,
rapt and beautiful, rising from the chimneys at his feet. A sheet of
water--making heaven out of nothing--is beautiful to the dullest man,
because he cannot analyse it, could not--even if he would--contrive to
see it by itself. Skies come crowding on it. There is enough poetry in
the mere angle of a sinking sun to flood the prose of a continent with,
because the gentle earthlong shadows that follow it lay their fingers
upon all life and creep together innumerable separated things.
In the meadow where our birds are there is scarcely a tree in sight to
tangle the singing in. It is a meadow with miles of sunlight in it. It
seems like a kind of world-melody to walk in the height of noon
there--infinite grass, infinite sky, gusts of bobolinks' voices--it's as
if the air that drifted down made music of itself; and the song of all
the singing everywhere--the song the soul hears--comes on the slow
winds.
Half the delight of a bobolink is that he is more synthetic, more of a
poet, than other birds,--has a duet in his throat. He bursts from the
grass and sings in bursts--plays his own obligato while he goes. One can
never see him in his eager flurry, between his low heaven and his low
nest, without catching the lilt of inspiration. Like the true poet, he
suits the action to the word in a weary world, and does his flying and
singing together. The song that he throws around him, is the very spirit
of his wings--of all wings. More beauty is always the putting of more
things together. They were created to be together. The spirit of art is
the spirit that finds this out. Even the bobolink is cosmic, if he sings
with room enough; and when the heart wakes, the song of the cricket is
infinite. We hear it across stars.
The Sixth Interference: Literary Drill in College
I
Seeds and Blossoms
Four men stood before God at the end of The First Week, watching Him
whirl His little globe.[2] The first man said to Him, "Tell me how you
did it." The second man said, "Let me have it." The third man said,
"What is it for?" The fourth man said nothing, and fell down and
worshipped. Having worshipped he rose to his feet and made a world
himself.
[2] Recently discovered manuscript.
These four men have been known in history as the Scientist, the Man of
Affairs, the Philosopher, and the Artist. They stand for the four
necessary points of view in reading books.