Most of the readers of the world are content to be partitioned off, and

having been duly set down for life in one or the other of these four

divisions of human nature they take sides from beginning to end with one

or the other of these four men. It is the distinction of the scholar of

the highest class in every period, that he declines to do this. In so

far as he finds each of the four men taking sides against each other, he

takes sides against each of them in behalf of all. He insists on being

able to absorb knowledge, to read and write in all four ways. If he is a

man of genius as well as a scholar, he insists on being able to read and

write, as a rule, in all four ways at once; if his genius is of the

lesser kind, in two or three ways at once. The eternal books are those

that stand this four-sided test. They are written from all of these

points of view. They have absorbed into themselves the four moods of

creation morning. It is thus that they bring the morning back to us.

The most important question in regard to books that our schools and

institutions of learning are obliged to face at present is, "How shall

we produce conditions that will enable the ordinary man to keep the

proportions that belong to a man, to absorb knowledge, to do his reading

and writing in all four ways at once?" In other words, How shall we

enable him to be a natural man, a man of genius as far as he goes?

A masterpiece is a book that can only be read by a man who is a master

in some degree of the things the book is master of. The man who has

mastered things the most is the man who can make those things. The man

who makes things is the artist. He has bowed down and worshipped and he

has arisen and stood before God and created before Him, and the spirit

of the Creator is in him. To take the artist's point of view, is to take

the point of view that absorbs and sums up the others. The supremacy and

comprehensiveness of this point of view is a matter of fact rather than

argument. The artist is the man who makes the things that Science and

Practical Affairs and Philosophy are merely about. The artist of the

higher order is more scientific than the scientist, more practical than

the man of affairs, and more philosophic than the philosopher, because

he combines what these men do about things, and what these men say about

things, into the things themselves, and makes the things live.

To combine these four moods at once in one's attitude toward an idea is

to take the artist's--that is, the creative--point of view toward it.

The only fundamental outfit a man can have for reading books in all four

ways at once is his ability to take the point of view of the man who

made the book in all four ways at once, and feel the way he felt when he

made it.

The organs that appreciate literature are the organs that made it. True

reading is latent writing. The more one feels like writing a book when

he reads it the more alive his reading is and the more alive the book

is.

The measure of culture is its originating and reproductive capacity, the

amount of seed and blossom there is in it, the amount it can afford to

throw away, and secure divine results. Unless the culture in books we

are taking such national pains to acquire in the present generation can

be said to have this pollen quality in it, unless it is contagious, can

be summed up in its pollen and transmitted, unless it is nothing more or

less than life itself made catching, unless, like all else that is

allowed to have rights in nature, it has powers also, has an almost

infinite power of self-multiplication, self-perpetuation, the more

cultured we are the more emasculated we are. The vegetables of the earth

and the flowers of the field--the very codfish of the sea become our

superiors. What is more to the point, in the minds and interests of all

living human beings, their culture crowds ours out.

Nature may be somewhat coarse and simple-minded and naive, but

reproduction is her main point and she never misses it. Her prejudice

against dead things is immutable. If a man objects to this prejudice

against dead things, his only way of making himself count is to die.

Nature uses such men over again, makes them into something more worth

while, something terribly or beautifully alive,--and goes on her way.

If this principle--namely, that the reproductive power of culture is the

measure of its value--were as fully introduced and recognised in the

world of books as it is in the world of commerce and in the natural

world, it would revolutionise from top to bottom, and from entrance

examination to diploma, the entire course of study, policy, and spirit

of most of our educational institutions. Allowing for exceptions in

every faculty--memorable to all of us who have been college

students,--it would require a new corps of teachers.

Entrance examinations for pupils and teachers alike would determine two

points. First, what does this person know about things? Second, what is

the condition of his organs--what can he do with them? If the privilege

of being a pupil in the standard college were conditioned strictly upon

the second of these questions--the condition of his organs--as well as

upon the first, fifty out of a hundred pupils, as prepared at present,

would fall short of admission. If the same test were applied for

admission to the faculty, ninety out of a hundred teachers would fall

short of admission. Having had analytic, self-destructive, learned

habits for a longer time than their pupils, the condition of their

organs is more hopeless.

The man who has the greatest joy in a symphony is:

First, the man who composes it.

Second, the conductor.

Third, the performers.

Fourth, those who might be composers of such music themselves.

Fifth, those in the audience who have been performers.

Sixth, those who are going to be.

Seventh, those who are composers of such music for other instruments.

Eighth, those who are composers of music in other arts--literature,

painting, sculpture, and architecture.

Ninth, those who are performers of music on other instruments.

Tenth, those who are performers of music in other arts.

Eleventh, those who are creators of music with their own lives.

Twelfth, those who perform and interpret in their own lives the music

they hear in other lives.

Thirteenth, those who create anything whatever and who love perfection

in it.

Fourteenth, "The Public."

Fifteenth, the Professional Critic--almost inevitably at the fifteenth

remove from the heart of things because he is the least creative, unless

he is a man of genius, or has pluck and talent enough to work his way

through the other fourteen moods and sum them up before he ventures to

criticise.

The principles that have been employed in putting life into literature

must be employed on drawing life out of it. These principles are the

creative principles--principles of joy. All influences in education,

family training, and a man's life that tend to overawe, crowd out, and

make impossible his own private, personal, daily habit of creative joy

are the enemies of books.

II

Private Road: Dangerous

The impotence of the study of literature as practised in the schools and

colleges of the present day turns largely on the fact that the principle

of creative joy--of knowing through creative joy--is overlooked. The

field of vision is the book and not the world. In the average course in

literature the field is not even the book. It is still farther from the

creative point of view. It is the book about the book.

It is written generally in the laborious unreadable, well-read

style--the book about the book. You are as one (when you are in the book

about the book) thrust into the shadow of the endless aisles of Other

Books--not that they are referred to baldly, or vulgarly, or in the

text. It is worse than this (for this could be skipped). But you are

surrounded helplessly. Invisible lexicons are on every page. Grammars

and rhetorics, piled up in paragraphs and between the lines thrust at

you everywhere. Hardly a chapter that does not convey its sense of

struggling faithfulness, of infinite forlorn and empty plodding--and all

for something a man might have known anyway. "I have toted a thousand

books," each chapter seems to say. "This one paragraph [page 1993--you

feel it in the paragraph] has had to have forty-seven books carried to

it." Not once, except in loopholes in his reading which come now and

then, does the face of the man's soul peep forth. One does not expect to

meet any one in the book about the book--not one's self, not even the

man who writes it, nor the man who writes the book that the book is

about. One is confronted with a mob.

Two things are apt to be true of students who study the great masters in

courses employing the book about the book. Even if the books about the

book are what they ought to be, the pupils of such courses find that (1)

studying the master, instead of the things he mastered, they lose all

power over the things he mastered; (2) they lose, consequently, not only

the power of creating masterpieces out of these things themselves, but

the power of enjoying those that have been created by others, of having

the daily experiences that make such joy possible. They are out of range

of experience. They are barricaded against life. Inasmuch as the

creators of literature, without a single exception, have been more

interested in life than in books, and have written books to help other

people to be more interested in life than in books, this is the gravest

possible defect. To be more interested in life than in books is the

first essential for creating a book or for understanding one.

The typical course of study now offered in literature carries on its

process of paralysis in various ways:

First. It undermines the imagination by giving it paper things instead

of real ones to work on.

Second. By seeing that these things are selected instead of letting the

imagination select its own things--the essence of having an imagination.

Third. By requiring of the student a rigorous and ceaselessly

unimaginative habit. The paralysis of the learned is forced upon him. He

finds little escape from the constant reading of books that have all the

imagination left out of them.

Fourth. By forcing the imagination to work so hard in its capacity of

pack-horse and memory that it has no power left to go anywhere of

itself.

Fifth. By overawing individual initiative, undermining personality in

the pupil, crowding great classics into him instead of attracting little

ones out of him. Attracting little classics out of a man is a thing that

great classics are always intended to do--the thing that they always

succeed in doing when left to themselves.

Sixth. The teacher of literature so-called, having succeeded in

destroying the personality of the pupil, puts himself in front of the

personality of the author.

Seventh. A teacher who destroys personality in a pupil is the wrong

personality to put in front of an author. If he were the right one, if

he had the spirit of the author, his being in front, now and then at

least, would be interpretation and inspiration. Not having the spirit of

the author, he is intimidated by him, or has all he can do not to be. A

classic cannot reveal itself to a groveller or to a critic. It is a book

that was written standing up and it can only be studied and taught by

those who stand up without knowing it. The decorous and beautiful

despising of one's self that the study of the classics has come to be as

conducted under unclassic teachers, is a fact that speaks for itself.

Eighth. Even if the personality of the teacher of literature is so

fortunate as not to be the wrong one, there is not enough of it. There

is hardly a course of literature that can be found in a college

catalogue at the present time that does not base itself on the dictum

that a great book can somehow--by some mysterious process--be taught by

a small person. The axiom that necessarily undermines all such courses

is obvious enough. A great book cannot be taught except by a teacher who

is literally living in a great spirit, the spirit the great book lived

in before it became a book,--a teacher who has the great book in

him--not over him,--who, if he took time for it, might be capable of

writing, in some sense at least, a great book himself. When the teacher

is a teacher of this kind, teaches the spirit of what he teaches--that

is, teaches the inside,--a classic can be taught.

Otherwise the best course in literature that can be devised is the one

that gives the masterpieces the most opportunity to teach themselves.

The object of a course in literature is best served in proportion as the

course is arranged and all associated studies are arranged in such a way

as to secure sensitive and contagious conditions for the pupil's mind in

the presence of the great masters, such conditions as give the pupil

time, freedom, space, and atmosphere--the things out of which a

masterpiece is written and with which alone it can be taught, or can

teach itself.

All that comes between a masterpiece and its thus teaching itself,

spreads ruin both ways. The masterpiece is partitioned off from the

pupil, guarded to be kept aloof from him--outside of him. The pupil is

locked up from himself--his possible self.

Not too much stress could possibly be laid upon intimacy with the great

books or on the constant habit of living on them. They are the movable

Olympus. All who create camp out between the heavens and the earth on

them and breathe and live and climb upon them. From their mighty sides

they look down on human life. But classics can only be taught by

classics. The creative paralysis of pupils who have drudged most deeply

in classical training--English or otherwise--is a fact that no observer

of college life can overlook. The guilt for this state of affairs must

be laid at the door of the classics or at the door of the teachers.

Either the classics are not worth teaching or they are not being taught

properly.

In either case the best way out of the difficulty would seem to be for

teachers to let the classics teach themselves, to furnish the students

with the atmosphere, the conditions, the points of view in life, which

will give the classics a chance to teach themselves.

This brings us to the important fact that teachers of literature do not

wish to create the atmosphere, the conditions, and points of view that

give the classics a chance to teach themselves. Creating the atmosphere

for a classic in the life of a student is harder than creating a

classic. The more obvious and practicable course is to teach the

classic--teach it one's self, whether there is atmosphere or not.

It is admitted that this is not the ideal way to do with college

students who suppose they are studying literature, but it is

contended--college students and college electives being what they

are--that there is nothing else to do. The situation sums itself up in

the attitude of self-defence. "It may be (as no one needs to point out),

that the teaching of literature, as at present conducted in college, is

a somewhat faithful and dogged farce, but whatever may be the faults of

modern college-teaching in literature, it is as good as our pupils

deserve." In other words, the teachers are not respecting their pupils.

It may be said to be the constitution and by-laws of the literature

class (as generally conducted) that the teachers cannot and must not

respect their pupils. They cannot afford to. It costs more than most

pupils are mentally worth, it is plausibly contended, to furnish

students in college with the conditions of life and the conditions in

their own minds that will give masterpieces a fair chance at them.

_Ergo_, inasmuch as the average pupil cannot be taught a classic he must

be choked with it.

The fact that the typical teacher of literature is more or less

grudgingly engaged in doing his work and conducting his classes under

the practical working theory that his pupils are not good enough for

him, suggests two important principles.

First. If his pupils are good enough for him, they are good enough to be

taught the best there is in him, and they must be taught this best there

is in him, as far as it goes, whether all of them are good enough for it

or not. There is as much learning in watching others being educated as

there is in appearing to be educated one's self.

Second. If his pupils are not good enough for him, the most literary

thing he can do with them is to make them good enough. If he is not a

sufficiently literary teacher to divine the central ganglion of interest

in a pupil, and play upon it and gather delight about it and make it

gather delight itself, the next most literary thing he can do is protect

both the books and the pupil by keeping them faithfully apart until they

are ready for one another.

If the teacher cannot recognise, arouse, and exercise such organs as his

pupil has, and carry them out into themselves, and free them in

self-activity, the pupil may be unfortunate in not having a better

teacher, but he is fortunate in having no better organs to be blundered

on.

The drawing out of a pupil's first faint but honest and lasting power of

really reading a book, of knowing what it is to be sensitive to a book,

does not produce a very literary-looking result, of course, and it is

hard to give the result an impressive or learned look in a catalogue,

and it is a difficult thing to do without considering each pupil as a

special human being by himself,--worthy of some attention on that

account,--but it is the one upright, worthy, and beautiful thing a

teacher can do. Any easier course he may choose to adopt in an

institution of learning (even when it is taken helplessly or

thoughtlessly as it generally is) is insincere and spectacular, a

despising not only of the pupil but of the college public and of one's

self.

If it is true that the right study of literature consists in exercising

and opening out the human mind instead of making it a place for cold

storage, it is not necessary to call attention to the essential

pretentiousness and shoddiness of the average college course in

literature. At its best--that is, if the pupils do not do the work, the

study of literature in college is a sorry spectacle enough--a kind of

huge girls' school with a chaperone taking its park walk. At its

worst--that is, when the pupils do do the work, it is a sight that would

break a Homer's heart. If it were not for a few inspired and

inconsistent teachers blessing particular schools and scholars here and

there, doing a little guilty, furtive teaching, whether or no,

discovering short-cuts, climbing fences, breaking through the fields,

and walking on the grass, the whole modern scheme of elaborate,

tireless, endless laboriousness would come to nothing, except the sight

of larger piles of paper in the world, perhaps, and rows of dreary,

dogged people with degrees lugging them back and forth in it,--one pile

of paper to another pile of paper, and a general sense that something is

being done.

In the meantime, human life around us, trudging along in its anger,

sorrow, or bliss, wonders what this thing is that is being done, and has

a vague and troubled respect for it; but it is to be noted that it buys

and reads the books (and that it has always bought and read the books)

of those who have not done it, and who are not doing it,--those who,

standing in the spectacle of the universe, have been sensitive to it,

have had a mighty love in it, or a mighty hate, or a true experience,

and who have laughed and cried with it through the hearts of their

brothers to the ends of the earth.

III

The Organs of Literature

The literary problem--the problem of possessing or appreciating or

teaching a literary style--resolves itself at last into a pure problem

of personality. A pupil is being trained in literature in proportion as

his spiritual and physical powers are being brought out by the teacher

and played upon until they permeate each other in all that he does and

in all that he is--in all phases of his life. Unless what a pupil is

glows to the finger tips of his words, he cannot write, and unless what

he is makes the words of other men glow when he reads, he cannot read.

In proportion as it is great, literature is addressed to all of a man's

body and to all of his soul. It matters nothing how much a man may know

about books, unless the pages of them play upon his senses while he

reads, he is not physically a cultivated man, a gentleman, or scholar

with his body. Unless books play upon all his spiritual and mental

sensibilities when he reads he cannot be considered a cultivated man, a

gentleman, and a scholar in his soul. It is the essence of all great

literature that it makes its direct appeal to sense-perceptions

permeated with spiritual suggestion. There is no such thing possible as

being a literary authority, a cultured or scholarly man, unless the

permeating of the sense-perceptions with spiritual suggestion is a daily

and unconscious habit of life. "Every man his own poet" is the

underlying assumption of every genuine work of art, and a work of art

cannot be taught to a pupil in any other way than by making this same

pupil a poet, by getting him to discover himself. Continued and

unfaltering disaster is all that can be expected of all methods of

literary training that do not recognise this.

To teach a pupil all that can be known about a great poem is to take the

poetry out of him, and to make the poem prose to him forever. A pupil

cannot even be taught great prose except by making a poet of him, in his

attitude toward it, and by so governing the conditions, excitements,

duties, and habits of his course of study that he will discover he is a

poet in spite of himself. The essence of Walter Pater's essays cannot be

taught to a pupil except by making a new creature of him in the presence

of the things the essays are about. Unless the conditions of a pupil's

course are so governed, in college or otherwise, as to insure and

develop the delicate and strong response of all his bodily senses, at

the time of his life when nature decrees that his senses must be

developed, that the spirit must be waked in them, or not at all, the

study of Walter Pater will be in vain.

The physical organisation, the mere bodily state of the pupil, necessary

to appreciate either the form or the substance of a bit of writing like

_The Child in the House_, is the first thing a true teacher is concerned

with. A college graduate whose nostrils have not been trained for

years,--steeped in the great, still delights of the ground,--who has not

learned the spirit and fragrance of the soil beneath his feet, is not a

sufficiently cultivated person to pronounce judgment either upon Walter

Pater's style or upon his definition of style.

To be educated in the great literatures of the world is to be trained in

the drawing out in one's own body and mind of the physical and mental

powers of those who write great literatures. Culture is the feeling of

the induced current--the thrill of the lives of the dead--the charging

the nerves of the body and powers of the spirit with the genius that has

walked the earth before us. In the borrowed glories of the great for one

swift and passing page we walk before heaven with them, breathe the long

breath of the centuries with them, know the joy of the gods and live.

The man of genius is the man who literally gives himself. He makes every

man a man of genius for the time being. He exchanges souls with us and

for one brief moment we are great, we are beautiful, we are immortal. We

are visited with our possible selves. Literature is the transfiguring of

the senses in which men are dwelling every day and of the thoughts of

the mind in which they are living every day. It is the commingling of

one's life in one vast network of sensibility, communion, and eternal

comradeship with all the joy and sorrow, taste, odor, and sound, passion

of men and love of women and worship of God, that ever has been on the

earth, since the watching of the first night above the earth, or since

the look of the first morning on it, when it was loved for the first

time by a human life.

The artist is recognised as an artist in proportion as the senses of his

body drift their glow and splendour over into the creations of his mind.

He is an artist because his flesh is informed with the spirit, because

in whatever he does he incarnates the spirit in the flesh.

The gentle, stroking delight in this universe that Dr. Holmes took all

his days, his contagious gladness in it and approval of it, his

impressionableness to its moods--its Oliver-Wendell ones,--who really

denies in his soul that this capacity of Dr. Holmes to enjoy, this

delicate, ceaseless tasting with sense and spirit of the essence of

life, was the very substance of his culture? The books that he wrote and

the things that he knew were merely the form of it. His power of

expression was the blending of sense and spirit in him, and because his

mind was trained into the texture of his body people delighted in his

words in form and spirit both.

There is no training in the art of expression or study of those who know

how to express, that shall not consist, not in a pupil's knowing wherein

the power of a book lies, but in his experiencing the power himself, in

his entering the life behind the book and the habit of life that made

writing such a book and reading it possible. This habit is the habit of

incarnation.

A true and classic book is always the history some human soul has had in

its tent of flesh, camped out beneath the stars, groping for the thing

they shine to us, trying to find a body for it. In the great wide plain

of wonder there they sing the wonder a little time to us, if we listen.

Then they pass on to it. Literature is but the faint echo tangled in

thousands of years, of this mighty, lonely singing of theirs, under the

Dome of Life, in the presence of the things that books are about. The

power to read a great book is the power to glory in these things, and to

use that glory every day to do one's living and reading with. Knowing

what is in the book may be called learning, but the test of culture

always is that it will not be content with knowledge unless it is inward

knowledge. Inward knowledge is the knowledge that comes to us from

behind the book, from living for weeks with the author until his habits

have become our habits, until God Himself, through days and nights and

deeds and dreams, has blended our souls together.

IV

Entrance Examinations in Joy

If entrance examinations in joy were required at our representative

colleges very few of the pupils who are prepared for college in the

ordinary way would be admitted. What is more serious than this, the

honour-pupils in the colleges themselves at commencement time--those who

have submitted most fully to the college requirements--would take a

lower stand in a final examination in joy, whether of sense or spirit,

than any others in the class. Their education has not consisted in the

acquiring of a state of being, a condition of organs, a capacity of

tasting life, of creating and sharing the joys and meanings in it. Their

learning has largely consisted in the fact that they have learned at

last to let their joys go. They have become the most satisfactory of

scholars, not because of their power of knowing, but because of their

willingness to be powerless in knowing. When they have been drilled to

know without joy, have become the day-labourers of learning, they are

given diplomas for cheerlessness, and are sent forth into the world as

teachers of the young. Almost any morning, in almost any town or city

beneath the sun, you can see them, Gentle Reader, with the children,

spreading their tired minds and their tired bodies over all the fresh

and buoyant knowledge of the earth. Knowledge that has not been throbbed

in cannot be throbbed out. The graduates of the colleges for women (in

The Association of Collegiate Alumnae) have seriously discussed the

question whether the college course in literature made them nearer or

farther from creating literature themselves. The Editor of _Harper's

Monthly_ has recorded that "the spontaneity and freedom of subjective

construction" in certain American authors was only made possible,

probably, by their having escaped an early academic training. The

_Century Magazine_ has been so struck with the fact that hardly a single

writer of original power before the public has been a regular college

graduate that it has offered special prizes and inducements for any form

of creative literature--poem, story, or essay--that a college graduate

could write.

If a teacher of literature desires to remove his subject from the

uncreative methods he finds in use around him, he can only do so

successfully by persuading trustees and college presidents that

literature is an art and that it can only be taught through the methods

and spirit and conditions that belong to art. If he succeeds in

persuading trustees and presidents, he will probably find that faculties

are not persuaded, and that, in the typical Germanised institution of

learning at least, any work he may choose to do in the spirit and method

of joy will be looked upon by the larger part of his fellow teachers as

superficial and pleasant. Those who do not feel that it is superficial

and pleasant, who grant that working for a state of being is the most

profound and worthy and strenuous work a teacher can do,--that it is

what education is for,--will feel that it is impracticable. It is thus

that it has come to pass in the average institution of learning, that if

a teacher does not know what education is, he regards education as

superficial, and if he does know what education is, he regards education

as impossible.

It is not intended to be dogmatic, but it may be worth while to state

from the pupil's point of view and from memory what kind of teacher a

college student who is really interested in literature would like to

have.

Given a teacher of literature who has _carte blanche_ from the other

teachers--the authorities around him--and from the trustees--the

authorities over him,--what kind of a stand will he find it best to

take, if he proposes to give his pupils an actual knowledge of

literature?

In the first place, he will stand on the general principle that if a

pupil is to have an actual knowledge of literature as literature, he

must experience literature as an art.

In the second place, if he is to teach literature to his pupils as an

art to be mastered, he will begin his teaching as a master. Instead of

his pupils determining that they will elect him, he will elect them. If

there is to be any candidating, he will see that the candidating is

properly placed; that the privilege at least of the first-class music

master, dancing master, and teacher of painting--the choosing of his own

pupils--is accorded to him. Inasmuch as the power and value of his class

must always depend upon him, he will not allow either the size or the

character of his classes to be determined by a catalogue, or by the

examinations of other persons, or by the advertising facilities of the

college. If actual results are to be achieved in his pupils, it can only

be by his governing the conditions of their work and by keeping these

conditions at all times in his own hands.

In the third place, he will see that his class is so conducted that out

of a hundred who desire to belong to it the best ten only will be able

to.

In the fourth place, he will himself not only determine which are the

best ten, but he will make this determination on the one basis possible

for a teacher of art--the basis of mutual attraction among the pupils.

He will take his stand on the spiritual principle that if classes are to

be vital classes, it is not enough that the pupils should elect the

teacher, but the teacher and pupils must elect each other. The basis of

an art is the mutual attraction that exists between things that belong

together. The basis for transmitting an art to other persons is the

natural attraction that exists between persons that belong together. The

more mutual the attraction is,--complementary or otherwise,--the more

condensed and powerful teaching can it be made the conductor of. If a

hundred candidates offer themselves, fifty will be rejected because the

attraction is not mutual enough to insure swift and permanent results.

Out of fifty, forty will be rejected probably for the sake of ten with

whom the mutual attraction is so great that great things cannot help

being accomplished by it.

The thorough and contagious teacher of literature will hold his

power--the power of conveying the current and mood of art to others--as

a public trust. He owes it to the institution in which he is placed to

refuse to surround himself with non-conductors; and inasmuch as his

power--such as it is--is instinctive power, it will be placed where it

instinctively counts the most. In proportion as he loves his art and

loves his kind and desires to get them on speaking terms with each

other, he will devote himself to selected pupils, to those with whom he

will throw the least away. His service to others will be to give to

these such real, inspired, and reproductive knowledge, that it shall

pass on from them to others of its own inherent energy. From the

narrower--that is, the less spiritual--point of view, it has seemed

perhaps a selfish and aristocratic thing for a teacher to make

distinctions in persons in the conduct of his work, but from the point

of view of the progress of the world, it is heartless and sentimental to

do otherwise; and without exception all of the most successful teachers

in all of the arts have been successful quite as much through a kind of

dictatorial insight in selecting the pupils they could teach, as in

selecting the things they could teach them.

In the fifth place, having determined to choose his pupils himself, the

selection will be determined by processes of his own choosing. These

processes, whatever form or lack of form they may take, will serve to

convey to the teacher the main knowledge he desires. They will be an

examination in the capacity of joy in the pupil. Inasmuch as surplus joy

in a pupil is the most promising thing he can have, the sole secret of

any ability he may ever attain of learning literature, the basis of all

discipline, it will be the first thing the teacher takes into account.

While it is obvious that an examination in joy could not be conducted in

any set fashion, every great joy in the world has its natural diviners

and experts, and teachers of literature who know its joy have plenty of

ways of divining this joy in others.

In the sixth place, pupils will be dropped and promoted by a teacher, in

such a class as has been described, according to the spirit and force

and creativeness of their daily work. Promotion will be by

elimination--that is, the pupil will stay where he is and the class will

be made smaller for him. The superior natural force of each pupil will

have full sway in determining his share of the teacher's force. As this

force belongs most to those who waste it least, if five tenths of the

appreciation in a class belongs to one pupil, five tenths of the teacher

belongs to him, and promotion is most truly effected, not by giving the

best pupils a new teacher, but by giving them more of the old one. A

teacher's work can only be successful in proportion as it is accurately

individual and puts each pupil in the place he was made to fit.

In the seventh place, the select class will be selected by the teacher

as a baseball captain selects his team: not as being the nine best men,

but as being the nine men who most call each other out, and make the

best play together. If the teacher selects his class wisely, the

principle of his selection sometimes--from the outside, at least--will

seem no principle at all. The class must have its fool, for instance,

and pupils must be selected for useful defects as well as for virtues.

Belonging to such a class will not be allowed to have a stiff, definite,

water-metre meaning in it, with regard to the capacity of a pupil. It

will only be known that he is placed in the class for some quality,

fault, or inspiration in him that can be brought to bear on the state of

being in the class in such a way as to produce results, not only for

himself but for all concerned.

V

Natural Selection in Theory

The conditions just stated as necessary for the vital teaching of

literature narrow themselves down, for the most part, to the very simple

and common principle of life and art, the principle of natural

selection.

As an item in current philosophy the principle of natural selection

meets with general acceptance. It is one of those pleasant and

instructive doctrines which, when applied to existing institutions, is

opposed at once as a sensational, visionary, and revolutionary doctrine.

There are two most powerful objections to the doctrine of natural

selection in education. One of these is the scholastic objection and the

other is the religious one.

The scholastic objection is that natural selection in education is

impracticable. It cannot be made to operate mechanically, or for large

numbers, and it interferes with nearly all of the educational machinery

for hammering heads in rows, which we have at command at present. Even

if the machinery could be stopped and natural selection could be given

the place that belongs to it, all success in acting on it would call for

hand-made teachers; and hand-made teachers are not being produced when

we have nothing but machines to produce them with. The scholastic

objection--that natural selection in education is impracticable under

existing conditions--is obviously well taken. As it cannot be answered,

it had best be taken, perhaps, as a recommendation.

The religious objection to natural selection in education is not that it

is impracticable, but that it is wicked. It rests its case on the

defence of the weak.

But the question at issue is not whether the weak shall be served and

defended or whether they shall not. We all would serve and defend the

weak. If a teacher feels that he can serve his inferior pupils best by

making his superior pupils inferior too, it is probable that he had

better do it, and that he will know how to do it, and that he will know

how to do it better than any one else. There are many teachers, however,

who have the instinctive belief, and who act on it so far as they are

allowed to, that to take the stand that the inferior pupil must be

defended at the expense of the superior pupil is to take a sentimental

stand. It is not a stand in favour of the inferior pupil, but against

him.

The best way to respect an inferior pupil is to keep him in place. The

more he is kept in place, the more his powers will be called upon. If he

is in the place above him, he may see much that he would not see

otherwise, much at which he will wonder, perhaps; but he deserves to be

treated spiritually and thoroughly, to be kept where he will be

creative, where his wondering will be to the point, both at once and

eventually.

It is a law that holds as good in the life of a teacher of literature as

it does in the lives of makers of literature. From the point of view of

the world at large, the author who can do anything else has no right to

write for the average man. There are plenty of people who cannot help

writing for him. Let them do it. It is their right and the world's right

that they should be the ones to do it. It is the place that belongs to

them, and why should nearly every man we have of the more seeing kind

to-day deliberately compete with men who cannot compete with him? The

man who abandons the life that belongs to him,--the life that would not

exist in the world if he did not live it and keep it existing in the

world, and who does it to help his inferiors, does not help his

inferiors. He becomes their rival. He crowds them out of their lives.

There could not possibly be a more noble, or more exact and spiritual

law of progress than this--that every man should take his place in human

society and do his work in it with his nearest spiritual neighbours.

These nearest spiritual neighbours are a part of the economy of the

universe. They are now and always have been the natural conductors over

the face of the earth of all actual power in it. It has been through the

grouping of the nearest spiritual neighbours around the world that men

have unfailingly found the heaven-appointed, world-remoulding teachers

of every age.

It does not sound very much like Thomas Jefferson,--and it is to be

admitted that there are certain lines in our first great national

document which, read on the run at least, may seem to deny it,--but the

living spirit of Thomas Jefferson does not teach that amputation is

progress, nor does true Democracy admit either the patriotism or the

religion of a man who feels that his legs must be cut off to run to the

assistance of neighbours whose legs are cut off. An educational

Democracy which expects a pupil to be less than himself for the benefit

of other pupils is a mock Democracy, and it is the very essence of a

Democracy of the truer kind that it expects every man in it to be more

than himself. And if a man's religion is of the truer kind, it will not

be heard telling him that he owes it to God and the Average Man to be

less than himself.

VI

Natural Selection in Practice

It is not going to be possible very much longer to take it for granted

that natural selection is a somewhat absent-minded and heathen habit

that God has fallen into in the natural world, and uses in his dealings

with men, but that it is not a good enough law for men to use in their

dealings with one another.

The main thing that science has done in the last fifty years, in spite

of conventional religion and so-called scholarship, has been to bring to

pass in men a respect for the natural world. The next thing that is to

be brought to pass--also in spite of conventional religion and so-called

scholarship--is the self-respect of the natural man and of the instincts

of human nature. The self-respect of the natural man, when once he gains

it, is a thing that is bound to take care of itself, and take care of

the man, and take care of everything that is important to the man.

Inasmuch as, in the long run at least, education, even in times of its

not being human, interests humanity more than anything else, a most

important consequence of the self-respect of the natural man is going to

be an uprising, all over the world, of teachers who believe something.

The most important consequence of having teachers who believe something

will be a wholesale and uncompromising rearrangement of nearly all our

systems and methods of education. Instead of being arranged to cow the

teacher with routine, to keep teachers from being human beings, and to

keep their pupils from finding it out if they are human beings, they

will be arranged on the principle that the whole object of knowledge is

the being of a human being, and the only way to know anything worth

knowing in the world is to begin by knowing how to be a human being--and

by liking it.

Not until our current education is based throughout on expecting great

things of human nature instead of secretly despising it, can it truly be

called education. Expectancy is the very essence of education. Actions

not only speak louder than words, they make words as though they were

not; and so long as our teachers confine themselves to saying beautiful

and literary things about the instincts of the human heart, and do not

trust their own instincts in their daily teaching, and the instincts of

their pupils, and do not make this trust the foundation of all their

work, the more they educate the more they destroy. The destruction is

both ways, and whatever the subjects are they may choose to know, murder

and suicide are the branches they teach.

The chief characteristic of the teacher of the future is going to be

that he will dare to believe in himself, and that he will divine some

one thing to believe in, in everybody else, and that, trusting the laws

of human nature, he will go to work on this some one thing, and work out

from it to everything. Inasmuch as the chief working principle of human

nature is the principle of natural selection, the entire method of the

teacher of the future will be based on his faith in natural selection.

All such teaching as he attempts to do will be worked out from the

temperamental, involuntary, primitive choices of his own being, both in

persons and in subject. His power with his classes will be his power of

divining the free and unconscious and primitive choices of individual

pupils in persons and subjects.

Half of the battle is already won. The principle of natural selection

between pupils and subjects is recognised in the elective system, but we

have barely commenced to conceive as yet the principle of natural

selection in its more important application--mutual attraction between

teacher and pupil--natural selection in its deeper and more powerful and

spiritual sense: the kind of natural selection that makes the teacher a

worker in wonder, and education the handiwork of God.

In most of our great institutions we do not believe in even the theory

of this deeper natural selection: and if we do believe in it, sitting in

endowed chairs under the Umbrella of Endowed Ideas, how can we act on

that belief? And if we do, who will come out and act with us? If it does

not seem best for even the single teacher, doing his teaching unattached

and quite by himself, to educate in the open,--to trust his own soul and

the souls of his pupils to the nature of things, how much less shall the

great institution, with its crowds of teachers and its rows of pupils

and its Vested Funds be expected to lay itself open--lay its teachers

and pupils and its Vested Funds open--to the nature of things? We are

suspicious of the nature of things. God has concealed a lie in them. We

do not believe. Therefore we cannot teach.

The conclusion is inevitable. As long as we believe in natural selection

between pupil and subject, but do not believe in natural selection

between pupil and teacher, no great results in education or in teaching

a vital relation to books or to anything else will be possible. As long

as natural selection between pupil and teacher is secretly regarded as

an irreligious and selfish instinct, with which a teacher must have

nothing to do, instead of a divine ordinance, a Heaven-appointed

starting-point for doing everything, the average routine teacher in the

conventional school and college will continue to be the kind of teacher

he is, and will continue to belong to what seems to many, at least, the

sentimental and superstitious and pessimistic profession he belongs to

now. Why should a teacher allow himself to teach without inspiration in

the one profession on the earth where, between the love of God and the

love of the opening faces, inspiration--one would say--could hardly be

missed? Certainly, if it was ever intended that artists should be in the

world it was intended that teachers should be artists. And why should we

be artisans? If we cannot be artists, if we are not allowed to make our

work a self-expression, were it not better to get one's living by the

labour of one's hands,--by digging in the wonder of the ground? A

stone-crusher, as long as one works one's will with it, makes it say

something, is nearer to nature than a college. "I would rather do manual

labour with my hands than manual labour with my soul," the true artist

is saying to-day, and a great many thousand teachers are saying it, and

thousands more who would like to teach. The moment that teaching ceases

to be a trade and becomes a profession again, these thousands are going

to crowd into it. Until the artist-teachers have been attracted to

teaching, things can only continue as they are. Young men and women who

are capable of teaching will continue to do all that they can not to get

into it; and young men and women who are capable of teaching, and who

are still trying to teach, will continue to do all that they can to get

out of it. When the schools of America have all been obliged, like the

city of Brooklyn, to advertise to secure even poor teachers, we shall

begin to see where we stand,--stop our machinery a while and look at it.

The only way out is the return to nature, and to faith in the freedom of

nature. Not until the teacher of the young has dared to return to

nature, has won the emancipation of his own instincts and the

emancipation of the instincts of his pupils, can we expect anything

better than we have now of either of them. Not until the modern teacher

has come to the point where he deliberately works with his instincts,

where he looks upon himself as an artist working in the subject that

attracts him most, and in the material that is attracted to him most,

can we expect to secure in our crowded conditions to-day enough teaching

to go around. The one practical and economical way to make our limited

supply of passion and thought cover the ground is to be spiritual and

spontaneous and thorough with what we have. The one practical and

economical way to do this is to leave things free, to let the natural

forces in men's lives find the places that belong to them, develop the

powers that belong to them, until power in every man's life shall be

contagious of power. In the meantime, having brought out the true and

vital energies of men as far as we go, if we are obliged to be

specialists in knowledge we shall be specialists of the larger sort. The

powers of each man, being actual and genuine powers, shall play into the

powers of other men. Each man that essays to live shall create for us a

splendour and beauty and strength he was made to create from the

beginning of the world.

To those who sit in the seat of the scornful the somewhat lyrical idea

of an examination in joy as a basis of admission to the typical college

appeals as a fit subject of laughter. So it is. Having admitted the

laugh, the question is,--all human life is questioning the college

to-day,--which way shall the laugh point?

If the conditions of the typical college do not allow for the working of

the laws of nature, so much the worse for the laws of nature, or so much

the worse for the college. In the meantime, it is good to record that

there are many signs--thanks to these same laws of nature--that a most

powerful reaction is setting in, not only in the colleges themselves,

but in all the forces of culture outside and around them. The

examination in joy--the test of natural selection--is already employed

by all celebrated music masters the world over in the choosing of

pupils, and by all capable teachers of painting; and the time is not far

off when, so far as courses in literature are concerned (if the teaching

of literature is attempted in crowded institutions), the examination in

joy will be the determining factor with all the best teachers, not only

in the conduct of their classes, but in the very structure of them.

Structure is the basis of conduct.

VII

The Emancipation of the Teacher

The custom of mowing lawns in cities, of having every grass-blade in

every door-yard like every other grass-blade, is considered by many

persons as an artificial custom--a violation of the law of nature. It is

contended that the free-swinging, wind-blown grasses of the fields are

more beautiful and that they give more various and infinite delight in

colour and line and movement. If a piece of this same field, however,

could be carefully cut out and moved and fitted to a city

door-yard--bobolinks and daisies and shadows and all, precisely as they

are--it would not be beautiful. Long grass conforms to a law of nature

where nature has room, and short grass conforms to a law of nature where

nature has not room.

When, for whatever reason, of whatever importance, men and women choose

to be so close together, that it is not fitting they should have

freedom, and when they choose to have so little room to live in that

development is not fitting lest it should inconvenience others, the

penalty follows. When grass-blades are crowded between walls and fences,

the more they can be made to look alike the more pleasing they are, and

when an acre of ground finds itself covered with a thousand people, or a

teacher of culture finds himself mobbed with pupils, the law of nature

is the same. Whenever crowding of any kind takes place, whether it be in

grass, ideas, or human nature, the most pleasing as well as the most

convenient and natural way of producing a beautiful effect is with the

Lawn Mower. The dead level is the logic of crowded conditions. The city

grades down its hills for the convenience of reducing its sewer problem.

It makes its streets into blocks for the convenience of knowing where

every home is, and how far it is, by a glance at a page, and, in order

that the human beings in it (one set of innumerable nobodies hurrying to

another set of innumerable nobodies) may never be made to turn out

perchance for an elm on a sidewalk, it cuts down centuries of trees, and

then, out of its modern improvements, its map of life, its woods in

rows, its wheels on tracks, and its souls in pigeonholes--out of its

huge Checker-board under the days and nights--it lifts its eyes to the

smoke in heaven, at last, and thanks God it is civilised!

The substantial fact in the case would seem to be that every human being

born into the world has a right to be treated as a special creation all

by himself. Society can only be said to be truly civilised in proportion

as it acts on this fact. It is because in the family each being is

treated as one out of six or seven, and in the school as one out of six

hundred, that the family (with approximately good parents) comes nearer

to being a model school than anything we have.

If we deliberately prefer to live in crowds for the larger part of our

lives, we must expect our lives to be cut and fitted accordingly. It is

an aesthetic as well as a practical law that this should be so. The law

of nature where there is room for a man to be a man is not the law of

nature where there is not room for him to be a man. If there is no

playground for his individual instincts except the street he must give

them up. Inasmuch as natural selection in overcrowded conditions means

selecting things by taking them away from others, it can be neither

beautiful nor useful to practise it.

People who prefer to be educated in masses must conform to the law of

mass, which is inertia, and to the law of the herd, which is the Dog. As

long as our prevailing idea of the best elective is the one with the

largest class, and the prevailing idea of culture is the degree from the

most crowded college, all natural gifts, whether in teachers or pupils,

are under a penalty. If we deliberately place ourselves where everything

is done by the gross, as a matter of course and in the nature of things

the machine-made man, taught by the machine-made teacher, in a

teaching-machine, will continue to be the typical scholar of the modern

world; and the gentleman-scholar--the man who made himself, or who gave

God a chance to make him--will continue to be what he is now in most of

our large teaching communities--an exception.

Culture which has not the power to win the emancipation of its teachers

does not produce emancipated and powerful pupils. The essence of culture

is selection, and the essence of selection is natural selection, and

teachers who have not been educated with natural selection cannot teach

with it. Teachers who have given up being individuals in the main

activity of their lives, who are not allowed to be individuals in their

teaching, do not train pupils to be individuals. Their pupils, instead

of being organic human beings, are manufactured ones. Literary drill in

college consists in drilling every man to be himself--in giving him the

freedom of himself. Probably it would be admitted by most of us who are

college graduates that the teachers who loom up in our lives are those

whom we remember as emancipated teachers--men who dared to be

individuals in their daily work, and who, every time they touched us,

helped us to be individuals.

VIII

The Test of Culture

Looking at our great institutions of learning in a general way, one

might be inclined to feel that literature cannot be taught in them,

because the classes are too large. When one considers, however, the

average class in literature, as it actually is, and the things that are

being taught in it, it becomes obvious that the larger such a class can

be made, and the less the pupil can be made to get out of it, the

better.

The best test of a man's knowledge of the Spanish language would be to

put him in a balloon and set him down in dark night in the middle of

Spain and leave him there with his Spanish words. The best test of a

man's knowledge of books is to see what he can do without them on a

desert island in the sea. When the ship's library over the blue horizon

dwindles at last in its cloud of smoke and he is left without a shred of

printed paper by him, the supreme opportunity of education will come to

him. He will learn how vital and beautiful, or boastful and empty, his

education is. If it is true education, the first step he takes he will

find a use for it. The first bird that floats from its tree-top shall be

a message from London straight to his soul. If he has truly known them,

the spirits of all his books will flock to him. If he has known

Shakespeare, the ghost of the great master will rise from beneath its

Stratford stone, and walk oceans to be with him. If he knows Homer,

Homer is full of Odysseys trooping across the seas. Shall he sit him

down on the rocks, lift his voice like a mere librarian, and, like a

book-raised, paper-pampered, ink-hungry babe cry to the surf for a Greek

dictionary? The rhythm of the beach is Greece to him, and the singing of

the great Greek voice is on the tops of waves around the world.

A man's culture is his knowledge become himself. It is in the seeing of

his eyes and the hearing of his ears and the use of his hands. Is there

not always the altar of the heavens and the earth? Laying down days and

nights of joy before it and of beauty and wonder and peace, the scholar

is always a scholar, _i. e._, he is always at home. To be cultured is to

be so splendidly wrought of body and soul as to get the most joy out of

the least and the fewest things. Wherever he happens to be,--whatever he

happens to be without,--his culture is his being master. He may be naked

before the universe, and it may be a pitiless universe or a gracious

one, but he is always master, knowing how to live in it, knowing how to

hunger and die in it, or, like Stevenson, smiling out of his poor, worn

body to it. He is the unconquerable man. Wherever he is in the world, he

cannot be old in the presence of the pageant of Life. From behind the

fading of his face lie watches it, child after child, spring after

spring as it flies before him; he will not grow old while it still

passes by. It carries delight across to him to the end. He watches and

sings with it to the end, down to the edge of sleep.

A bird's shadow is enough to be happy with, if a man is educated, or the

flicker of light on a leaf, and when really a song is being lived in a

man, all nature plays its accompaniment. To possess one's own senses, to

know how to conduct one's self, is to be the conductor of orchestras in

the clouds and in the grass. The trained man is not dependent on having

the thing itself. He borrows the boom of the sea to live with, anywhere,

and the gladness of continents.

Literary training consists in the acquiring of a state of mind and body

to feel the universe with; in becoming an athlete toward beauty, a giver

of great lifts of joy to this poor, straining, stumbling world with its

immemorial burden on its back, which, going round and round, for the

most part with its eyes shut, between infinities, is the hope and sorrow

of all of us for the very reason that its eyes are shut.

IX

Summary

The proper conditions for literary drill in college would seem to sum

themselves up in the general idea that literature is the spirit of life.

It can therefore only be taught through the spirit.

_First._ It can only be taught through the spirit by being taught as an

art, through its own nature and activity, reproductively--giving the

spirit body. Both the subject-matter and the method in true literary

drill can only be based on the study of human experience. The intense

study of human experience in a college course may be fairly said to

involve three things that must be daily made possible to the pupil in

college life. Everything that is given him to do, and everything that

happens to him in college, should cultivate these three things in the

pupil: (1) Personality--an intense first person singular, as a centre

for having experience; (2) Imagination--the natural organ in the human

soul for realising what an experience is and for combining and

condensing it; (3) The habit of having time and room, for

re-experiencing an experience at will in the imagination, until the

experience becomes so powerful and vivid, so fully realises itself in

the mind, that the owner of the mind is an artist with his mind. When he

puts the experience of his mind down it becomes more real to other men

on paper than their own experiences are to them in their own lives.

It is hardly necessary to point out that whatever our conventional

courses in literature may be doing, whether in college or anywhere else,

they are not bringing out this creative joy and habit of creative joy in

the pupils. Those who are interested in literature-courses--such as we

have--for the most part do not believe in trying to bring out the

creative joy of each pupil. Those who might believe in trying to do it

do not believe it can be done. They do not believe it can be done

because they do not realise that in the case of each and every pupil--so

far as he goes--it is the only thing worth doing. They fail to see from

behind their commentaries and from out of their footnotes, the fact that

the one object in studying literature is joy, that the one way of

studying and knowing literature is joy, and that the one way to attain

joy is to draw out creative joy.

_Second._ And if literature is to be taught as an art it must be taught

as a way of life. As long as literature and life continue to be

conceived and taught as being separate things, there can be no wide and

beautiful hope for either of them. The organs of literature are

precisely the same organs and they are trained on precisely the same

principles as the organs of life.

Except an education in books can bring to pass the right condition of

these organs, a state of being in the pupil, his knowledge of no matter

how long a list of masterpieces is but a catalogue of the names of

things for ever left out of his life. It is little wonder, when the

drudgery has done its work and the sorry show is over, and the victim of

the System is face to face with his empty soul at last, if in his

earlier years at least he seems overfond to some of us of receiving

medals, honours, and valedictories for what he might have been and of

flourishing a Degree for what he has missed.

There was once a Master of Arts,

Who was "nuts" upon cranberry tarts:

When he'd eaten his fill

He was awfully ill,

But he was still a Master of Arts.

The power and habit of studying and enjoying human nature as it lives

around us, is not only a more human and alive occupation, but it is a

more literary one than becoming another editor of AEschylus or going down

to posterity in footnotes as one of the most prominent bores that

Shakespeare ever had. If a teacher of literature enjoys being the editor

of AEschylus, or if he is happier in appearing on a title-page with a

poet than he could possibly be in being a poet, it is personally well

enough, though it may be a disaster to the rest of us and to AEschylus.

Men who can be said as a class to care more about literature than they

do about life, who prefer the paper side of things to the real one, are

at liberty as private persons to be editors and footnote hunters to the

top of their bent; but why should they call it "The Study of

Literature," to teach their pupils to be footnote hunters and editors?

and how can they possibly teach anything else? and do they teach

anything else? And if good teachers can only teach what they have, what

shall we expect of poor ones?

In the meantime the Manufacture of the Cultured Mind is going ruthlessly

on, and thousands of young men and women who, left alone with the

masters of literature, might be engaged in accumulating and multiplying

inspiration, are engaged in analysing--dividing what inspiration they

have; and, in the one natural, creative period of their lives, their

time is entirely spent in learning how inspired work was done, or how it

might have been done, or how it should have been done; in absorbing

everything about it except its spirit--the power that did it--the power

that makes being told how to do it uncalled for, the power that asks and

answers its "Hows?" for itself. The serene powerlessness of it all,

without courage or passion or conviction, without self-discovery in it,

or self-forgetfulness or beauty in it, or for one moment the great

contagion of the great, is one of the saddest sights in this modern day.

In the meantime the most practical thing that can be done with the

matter of literary drill in college is to turn the eye of the public on

it. Methods will change when ideals change, and ideals will change when

the public clearly sees ideals, and when the public encourages colleges

that see them. The time is not far off when it will be admitted by all

concerned that the true study of masterpieces consists, and always must

consist, in communing with the things that masterpieces are about, in

the learning and applying of the principles of human nature, in a

passion for real persons, and in a daily loving of the face of the

universe.

This idea may not be considered very practical. It stands for a kind of

education in which it is difficult to exhibit in rows actual results. We

are not contending for an education that looks practical. We are

contending merely for education that will be true and beautiful and

natural. It will be practical the way the forces of nature are

practical--whether any one notices it or not.

The following announcement can already be seen on the bulletin boards of

universities around the world(--if looked for twice).

THEY ARE COMING! O Shades of Learning, THE LOVERS OF JOY, IMPERIOUS WITH

JOY, UNCONQUERABLE!

Their Sails are Flocking the East.

The High Seas are Theirs.

They shall command you, overwhelm you. Book-lubbers, paper-plodders,

shall be as though they were not. The youth of the earth shall be

renewed in the morning, the suns and the stars shall be unlocked, and

the evening shall go forth with joy. The mountains shall be freed from

the pick and the shovel and the book, and lift themselves to heaven.

Flowers shall again outblossom botanies, and gymnasts of music shall be

laid low, and Birds Through An Opera Glass shall sing. Joy shall come to

knowledge, and the strength of Joy upon it. THEY ARE COMING, O Ye Shades

of Learning, a thousand thousand strong. Their sails flock the Sea. The

smoke and the throb of their engines is the promise of the east. The

days of thirteen-thousand-ton, three-horse-power education are numbered.

X

A Note

It is one of the danger signs of the times that the men who have most

closely observed our modern life, in its social, industrial, artistic,

educational, and religious aspects seem to be gradually coming to the

point where they all but take it for granted in considering all social,

industrial, and educational and political questions, that the conditions

of modern times are such, and are going to be such that imagination and

personality might as well be dropped as practical forces--forces that

must be reckoned with in the movement of human life. Nearly all the

old-time outlooks of the Soul, as they stand in history, have been taken

for factory sites, bought up by syndicates, moral and otherwise, and are

being used for chimneys. Nothing but smoke and steel and wooden Things

come out of them. Poets and brokers are both telling us on every hand

that imagination is impossible and personality incredible in modern

life.

Imagination and personality are the spirit and the dust out of which all

great nations and all great religions are made.

The attempt has been made in the foregoing pages to point out that they

are not dead. The Altar smoulders.

In pointing out how imagination and personality can be wrought into one

single branch of a man's education--his relation to books--principles

may have been suggested which can be concretely applied by all of us,

each in our own department, to the education of the whole man.

The Seventh Interference: Libraries. Wanted: An Old-Fashioned Librarian

I

viz.

I never shall quite forget the time when the rumour was started in our

town that old Mr. M----, our librarian--a gentle, furtive, silent man--a

man who (with the single exception of a long white beard) was all

screwed up and bent around with learning, who was always slipping

invisibly in and out of his high shelves, and who looked as if his whole

life had been nothing but a kind of long, perpetual salaam to books--had

been caught dancing one day with his wife.

"Which only goes to show," broke in The M. P., "what a man of fixed

literary habits--mere book-habits--if he keeps on, is reduced to."

But as I was about to remark, for a good many weeks afterward--after the

rumour was started--one kept seeing people (I was one of them) as they

came into the library, looking shyly at Mr. M----, as if they were

looking at him all over again. They looked at him as if they had really

never quite noticed him before. He sat at his desk, quiet and busy, and

bent over, with his fine-pointed pen and his labels, as usual, and his

big leather-bound catalogue of the universe.

A few of us had had reason to suspect--at least we had had hopes--that

the pedantry in Mr. M---- was somewhat superimposed, that he had

possibilities, human and otherwise, but none of us, it must be

confessed, had been able to surmise quite accurately just where they

would break out. We were filled with a gentle spreading joy with the

very thought of it, a sense of having acquired a secret possession in a

librarian. The community at large, however, as it walked into its

library, looked at its Acre of Books, and then looked at its librarian;

felt cheated. It was shocked. The community had always been proud of its

books, proud of its Book Worm. It had always paid a big salary to it.

And the Worm had turned.

I have only been back to the old town twice since the day I left it, as

a boy--about this time. The first time I went he was there. I came

across him in his big, splendid new library, his face like some live,

but wrinkled old parchment, twinkling and human though--looking out from

its Dust Heap. "It seems to me," I thought, as I stood in the

doorway,--saw him edging around an alcove in The Syriac

Department,--"that if one must have a great dreary heaped-up pile of

books in a town--anyway--the spectacle of a man like this, flitting

around in it, doting on them, is what one ought to have to go with it."

He always seemed to me a kind of responsive every-way-at-once little

man, book-alive all through. One never missed it with him. He had the

literary nerves of ten dead nations tingling in him.

The next time I was in town they said he had resigned. They said he

lived in the little grey house around the corner from the great new

glaring stone library. No one ever saw him except in one of his long,

hesitating walks, or sometimes, perhaps, by the little study window,

pouring himself over into a book there. It was there that I saw him

myself that last morning--older and closer to the light turning

leaves--the same still, swift eagerness about him.

I stepped into the library next door and saw the new librarian--an

efficient person. He seemed to know what time it was while we stood and

chatted together. That is the main impression one had of him--that he

would always know what time it was. Put him anywhere. One felt it.

II

cf.

Our new librarian troubles me a good deal. I have not quite made out

why. Perhaps it is because he has a kind of chipper air with the books.

I am always coming across him in the shelves, but I do not seem to get

used to him. Of course I pull myself together, bow and say things, make

it a point to assume he is literary, go through the form of not letting

him know what I think as well as may be, but we do not get on.

And yet all the time down underneath I know perfectly well that there is

no real reason why I should find fault with him. The only thing that

seems to be the matter with him is that he keeps right on, every time I

see him, making me try to.

I have had occasion to notice that, as a general rule, when I find

myself finding fault with a man in this fashion--this vague, eager

fashion--the gist of it is that I merely want him to be some one else.

But in this case--well, he is some one else. He is almost anybody else.

He might be a head salesman in a department store, or a hotel clerk, or

a train dispatcher, or a broker, or a treasurer of something. There are

thousands of things he might be--ought to be--except our librarian. He

has an odd, displaced look behind the great desk. He looks as if he had

gotten in by mistake and was trying to make the most of it. He has a

business-like, worldly-minded, foreign air about him--a kind of

off-hand, pert, familiar way with books. He does not know how to bend

over--like a librarian--and when one comes on him in an alcove, the way

one ought to come on a librarian, with a great folio on his knees, he

is--well, there are those who think, that have seen it, that he is

positively comic. I followed him around only the other day for fifteen

or twenty minutes, from one alcove to another, and watched him taking

down books. He does not even know how to take down a book. He takes all

the books down alike--the same pleasant, dapper, capable manner, the

same peek and clap for all of them. He always seems to have the same

indefatigable unconsciousness about him, going up and down his long

aisles, no more idea of what he is about or of what the books are about;

everything about him seems disconnected with a library. I find I cannot

get myself to notice him as a librarian or comrade, or book-mind. He

does not seem to have noticed himself in this capacity--exactly. So far

as I can get at his mind at all, he seems to have decided that his mind

(any librarian's mind) is a kind of pneumatic-tube, or carrier

system--apparently--for shoving immortals at people. Any higher or more

thorough use for a mind, such as being a kind of spirit of the books for

people, making a kind of spiritual connection with them down underneath,

does not seem to have occurred to him.

Time was when librarians really had something to do with books. They

looked it. One could almost tell a librarian on the street--tell him at

sight, if he had been one long enough. One could feel a library in a man

somehow. It struck in. Librarians were allowed to be persons. It was

expected of them. They have not always been what so many of them are

now--mere couplings, conveniences, connecting-rods, literary-beltings.

They were identified--wrought in with books. They could not be unmixed.

They ate books; and, like the little green caterpillars that eat green

grass, the colour showed through. A sort of general brown, faded colour,

a little undusted around the edges, was the proper colour for

librarians.

It is true that people did not expect librarians to look quite human--at

least on the outside, sometimes, and doubtless the whole matter was

carried too far. But it does seem to me it is some comfort (if one has

to have a librarian in a library) to have one that goes with the

books--same colour, tone, feeling, spirit, and everything--the kind of

librarian that slips in and out among books without being noticed there,

one way or the other, like the overtone in a symphony.

III

et al.

But the trouble with our library is not merely the new librarian, who

permeates, penetrates, and ramifies the whole library within and

without, percolating efficiency into its farthest and loneliest alcoves.

Our new librarian has a corps of assistants. And even if you manage, by

slipping around a little, to get over to where a book is, alone, and get

settled down with it, there is always some one who is, has been, or will

be looking over your shoulder.

I dare say it's a defect of temperament--this having one's shoulder

looked over in libraries. Other people do not seem to be troubled much,

and I suppose I ought to admit, while I am about it, that having one's

shoulder looked over in a library does not in the least depend upon any

one's actually looking over it. That is merely a matter of form. It is a

little hard to express it. What one feels--at least in our library--is

that one is in a kind of side-looking place. One feels a kind of

literary detective system going silently on in and out all around one, a

polite, absent-minded-looking watchfulness.

Now I am not for one moment flattering myself that I can make my

fault-finding with our librarian's assistants amount to much--fill out a

blank with it.

No one can feel more strongly than I do my failure to put my finger on

the letter of our librarian's faults. I cannot even tell the difference

between the faults and the virtues of our librarian's assistants. Either

by doing the right thing with the wrong spirit, or the wrong thing with

the right spirit they do their faults and virtues all up together. Their

indefatigable unobtrusiveness, their kindly, faithful service I both

dread and appreciate. I have tried my utmost to notice and emphasise

every day the pleasant things about them, but I always get tangled up. I

have started out to think with approval, for instance, of the hush,--the

hush that clothes them as a garment,--but it has all ended in my merely

wondering where they got it and what they thought they were doing with

it. One would think that a hush--a hush of almost any kind--could hardly

help--but I have said enough. I do not want to seem censorious, but if

ever there was a visible, unctuous, tangible, actual thick silence, a

silence that can be proved, if ever there was a silence that stood up

and flourished and swung its hat, that silence is in our library. The

way our librarian's assistants go tiptoeing and reverberating around the

room--well--it's one of those things that follow a man always, follow

his inmost being all his life. It gets in with the books--after a few

years or so. One can feel the tiptoeing going on in a book--one of our

library books--when one gets home with it. It is the spirit of the

place. Everything that comes out of it is followed and tiptoed around by

our librarian's assistants' silence. They are followed about by it

themselves. The thick little blonde one, with the high yellow hair,

lives in our ward. One feels a kind of hush rimming her around, when one

meets her on the street.

Now I do not wish to claim that librarians' assistants can possibly be

blamed, in so many words, either for this, or for any of the other

things that seem to make them (in our library, at least) more prominent

than the books. Everything in a library seems to depend upon something

in it that cannot be put into words. It seems to be a kind of spirit. If

the spirit is the wrong spirit, not all the librarians in the world, not

even the books themselves can do anything about it.

* * * * *

Postscript. I do hope that no one will suppose from this chapter that I

am finding fault or think I am finding fault with our assistant

librarians. I am merely finding fault with them (may Heaven forgive

them!) because I cannot. It doesn't seem to make very much

difference--their doing certain things or not doing them. They either do

them or they don't do them--whichever it is--with the same spirit. They

are not really down in their hearts true to the books. One can hardly

help feeling vaguely, persistently resentful over having them about

presiding over the past. One never catches them--at least I never

do--forgetting themselves. One never comes on one loving a book. They

seem to be servants,--most of them,--book chambermaids. They do not care

anything about a library as a library. They just seem to be going around

remembering rules in it.

IV

etc.

The P. G. S. of M. as good as said the other day, when I had been trying

as well as I could to express something of this kind, that the real

trouble with the modern library was not with the modern library, but

with me. He thought I tried to carry too many likes and dislikes around

with me, that I was too sensitive. He seemed to think that I should

learn to be callous in places of public resort.

I said I had no very violent dislikes to deal with. The only thing I

could think of that was the matter with me in a library was that I had a

passion for books. I didn't like climbing over a barricade of catalogues

to get to books. I hated to feel partitioned off from them, to stand and

watch rows of people marking things between me and books. I thought that

things had come to a pretty pass, if a man could not so much as touch

elbows with a poet nowadays--with Plato, for instance--without carrying

a redoubt of terrible beautiful young ladies. I said I thought a great

many other people felt the way I did. I admitted there were other sides

to it, but there were times, I said, when it almost seemed to me that

this spontaneous uprising in our country--this movement of the Book

Lovers, for instance--was simply a struggle on the part of the people to

get away from Mr. Carnegie's libraries. They are hemming literature and

human nature in, on every side, or they are going to unless Mr. Carnegie

can buy up occasional old-fashioned librarians--some other kind than are

turned out in steel works--to put into them. Libraries are getting to be

huge Separators. Books that have been put through libraries are

separated from themselves. They are depersonalised--the human nature all

taken off. And yet when one thinks of it, with nine people out of

ten--the best people and the worst both--the sense of having a personal

relation to a book, the sense of snuggling up with one's own little life

to a book, is what books are for.

"To a man," I said, "to whom books are people, and the livest kind of

people, brothers of his own flesh, cronies of his life, the whole

business of getting a book in a library is full of resentment and

rebellion. He finds his rights, or what he thinks are his rights, being

treated as privileges, his most sacred and confidential relations, his

relations with the great, meddled with by strangers--pleasant enough

strangers, but still strangers. Perhaps he wishes to see John Milton. He

goes down town to a great unhomelike-looking building, and slides in at

the door. He steps up to a wall, and asks permission to see John Milton.

He waits in a kind of vague, unsatisfied fashion, but he feels that

machinery is being set in motion. While it is being set in motion, he

sits down before the wall on one of the seats or pews where a large

audience of other comfortless and lonely-looking people are. He feels

the great, heartless building gathering itself together, going after

John Milton for him, while he sits and waits. One after the other he

hears human beings' names being called out in space, and one by one poor

scared-looking people who seem to be ashamed to go with their

names--most of them--step up before the audience. He sees a book being

swung out to them, watches them slink gratefully away, and finally his

own name echoing about among the Immortals, startles its way down to

him. Then he steps up to the wall again, and John Milton at last, as on

some huge transcendental derrick belonging to the city of ----, is swung

into his arms. He feels of the outside gropingly--takes it home. If he

can get John Milton to come to life again after all this, he communes

with him. In two weeks he takes him back. Then the derrick again."

The only kind of book that I ever feel close to, in the average library,

is a book on war. Even if I go in, in a gentle, harmless, happy, singing

sort of way, thinking I want a volume of pastoral poems, by the time I

get it, I wish it were something that could be loaded, or that would go

off. As for asking for a book and reading it in cold blood right in the

middle of such a place, it will always be beyond me. I have never found

a book I could do it with yet. However I struggle to follow the train of

thought in it, it's a fuse. I find myself breaking out, when I see all

these far-away-looking people coming up in rows to their faraway books.

"A library," I say to myself, "is a huge barbaric, mediaeval institution,

where behind stone and glass a man's dearest friends in the world, the

familiars of his life, lie helpless in their cells. It is the

Penitentiary of Immortals. There are certain visiting days when friends

and relatives are allowed to come, but it only--" At this point a gong

sounds and tells me to go home. "Are not books bone of a man's bone, and

flesh of his flesh? Oughtn't they to be? Shall a man ask permission to

see his wife? Why should I fill out a slip to a pretty girl, when I want

to be in Greece with Homer, or go to hell with Dante? Why should I write

on a piece of paper, 'I promise to return--infinity--by six o'clock'? A

library is a huge machine for keeping the letter with books and

violating their spirit. The fact that the machinery is filled with a

mirage of pleasant faces does not help. Pleasant faces make machinery

worse--if they are a part of it. They make one expect something better."

The P. G. S. of M. wished me to understand at this point that I was not

made right, that I was incapable, helpless in a library, that I did not

seem to know what to do unless I could have a simple, natural, or

country relation to books.

"It doesn't follow," he said, "because you are bashful in a library,

cannot get your mind to work there, with other people around, that the

other people oughtn't to be around. There are a great many ways of using

a library, and the more people there are crowded in with the books

there, other things being equal, the better. It's what a library is

for," he said, and a great deal more to the same effect.

I listened a while and told him that I supposed he was right. I supposed

I had naturally a kind of wild mind. I allowed that the more a library

in a general way took after a piece of woods, the more I enjoyed it. I

did not attempt to deny that a library was made for the people, but I

did think there ought to be places in libraries--all libraries--where

wild ones, like me, could go. There ought to be in every library some

uncultivated, uncatalogued, unlibrarianed tract where a man with a

skittish or country mind will have a chance, where a man who likes to be

alone with books--with books just as books--will be permitted to browze,

unnoticed, bars all down, and frisk with his mind and roll himself,

without turning over all of a sudden only to find a librarian's

assistant standing there wondering at him, looking down to the bottom of

his soul.

I am not in the least denying that librarians are well enough,--that is,

might be well enough,--but as things are going to-day, they all seem to

contribute, somehow, toward making a library a conscious and stilted

place. They hold one up to the surface of things, with books. They make

impossible to a man those freedoms of the spirit--those best times of

all in a library, when one feels free to find one's mood, when one gets

hold of one's divining-rod, opens down into a book, discovers a new,

unconscious, subterranean self there.

The P. G. S. of M. broke in at this point and said this was all

subjective folderol on my part--that I had better drop it--a kind of

habit I had gotten into lately, of splitting the hairs of my

emotions--or something to that effect. He went on at some length and

took the general ground before he was through, that absolutely

everything in modern libraries depended on the librarians. Librarians--I

should judge--in a modern library were what books were for. He said that

the more intelligent people were nowadays the more they enjoyed

librarians--knew how to use them--doted on them, etc., _ad infinitum_.

"The kind of people one sees at operas," I interrupted, "listening with

librettos, the kind of people who puff up mountains to see views and

extract geography from them, the people one meets in the fields,

nowadays, flower in one hand, botany in the other, the kind of people

who have to have charts to enjoy stars with--these are the people who

want librarians between them and their books. The more librarians they

can get standing in a row between them and a masterpiece the more they

feel they are appreciating it, the more card catalogues, gazetteers,

dictionaries, derricks, and other machinery they can have pulling and

hauling above their heads in a library the more literary they feel in

it. They feel culture--somehow--stirring around them. They are not

exactly sure what culture is, but they feel that a great deal of

it--whatever it is--is being poured over into them."

But I must begin to bring these wanderings about libraries to a close.

It can do no harm to remark, perhaps, that I am not maintaining--do not

wish to maintain (I could not if I dared) that the modern librarian with

all his faults is not useful at times. As a sort of pianola or aeolian

attachment for a library, as a mechanical contrivance for making a

comparatively ignorant man draw perfectly enormous harmonies out of it

(which he does not care anything about), a modern librarian helps. All

that I am maintaining is, that I am not this comparatively ignorant man.

I am another one. I am merely saying that the pianola way of dealing

with ignorance, in my own case, up to the present at least, does not

grow on me.

V

O

I suppose that the Boston Public Library would say--if it said

anything--that I had a mere Old Athenaeum kind of a mind. I am obliged to

confess that I dote on the Old Athenaeum. It protects one's optimism. One

is made to feel there--let right down in the midst of civilisation,

within a stone's throw of the State House--that it is barely possible to

keep civilisation off. One feels it rolling itself along, heaping itself

up out on Tremont Street and the Common (the very trees cannot live in

it), but one is out of reach. When one has to live in civilisation, as

most of us do, nearly all of one's time every day in the week, it means

a great deal. I can hardly say how much it means to me, in the daily

struggle with it, to be able to dodge behind the Athenaeum, to be able to

go in and sit down there, if only for a minute, to be behind glass, as

it were, to hear great, hungry Tremont Street chewing men up, hundreds

of trainloads at a time, into wood-pulp, smoothing them out into nobody

or everybody; it makes one feel, while it is not as it ought to be, as

if, after all, there might be some way out, as if some provision had

been made in this world, or might be made, for letting human beings live

on it.

The general sense of unsensitiveness in a modern library, of hurry and

rush and efficiency, above all, the kind of moral smugness one feels

there, the book-self-consciousness, the unprotected, public-street

feeling one has--all these things are very grave and important obstacles

which our great librarians, with their great systems--most of them--have

yet to reckon with. A little more mustiness, gentlemen, please, silence,

slowness, solitude with books, as if they were woods, unattainableness

(and oh, will any one understand it?), a little inconvenience, a little

old-fashioned, happy inconvenience; a chance to gloat and take pains and

love things with difficulties, a chance to go around the corners of one's

knowledge, to make modest discoveries all by one's self. It is no small

thing to go about a library having books happen to one, to feel one's

self sitting down with a book--one's own private Providence--turning the

pages of events.

One cannot help feeling that if a part of the money that is being spent

carnegieing nowadays, that is, in arranging for a great many books and a

great many people to pile up order among a great many books, could be

spent in providing hundreds of thousands of small libraries, or small

places in large ones, where men who would like to do it would feel safe

to creep in sometimes and open their souls--nobody looking--it would be

no more than fair.

* * * * *

Postscript. One has to be so much of one's time helpless before a

librarian in this world, one has to put him on his honour as a gentleman

so much, to expose such vast, incredible tracts of ignorance to him,

that I know only too well that I, of all men, cannot afford, in these

pages or anywhere else, to say anything that will permanently offend

librarians. I do hope I have not. It is only through knowing so many

good ones that I know enough to criticise the rest. If I am right, it is

because I am their spokesman. If I am wrong, I am not a well-informed

person, and I do not count anywhere in particular on anything. The best

way, I suspect, for a librarian to deal with me is not to try to

classify me. I ought to be put out of the way on this subject, tucked

back into any general pigeon-hole of odds and ends of temperament. If I

had not felt that I could be cheerfully sorted out at the end of this

page, filed away by everybody,--almost anybody,--as not making very much

difference, I would not have spoken so freely. There is not a librarian

who has read as far as this, in this book, who, though he may have had

moments of being troubled in it, will not be able to dispose of me with

a kind of grateful, relieved certainty. However that may be, I can only

beg you, Oh, librarians, and all ye kindly learned ones, to be generous

with me, wherever you put me. I leave my poor, naked, shivering,

miscellaneous soul in your hands.