Possibilities
I
The Issue
I dreamed I lived in a day when men dared have visions. I lay in a great
white Silence as one who waited for something.
And as I lay and waited, the Silence groped toward me and I felt it
gathering nearer and nearer about me.
Then it folded me to Itself.
I made Time my bedside.
And it seemed to me, when I had rested my soul with years, and when I
had found Space and had stretched myself upon it, I awoke.
I lay in a great white empty place, and the whole world like solemn
music came to me.
And I looked, and behold in the shadow of the earth, which came and
went, I saw Human Lives being tossed about. On the solemn rhythmic
music, back and forth, I saw them lifted across Silence.
And I said to my Spirit, "What is it they are doing?"
"They are living," the Spirit said.
So they floated before me while The Great Shadow came and went.
* * * * *
"O my Soul, hast thou forgotten thy days in the world, when thou didst
watch the processional of it, when the faces--day-lighted,
night-lighted, faces--trooped before thee, and thou didst look upon them
and delight in them? What didst thou see in the world?"
"I saw Two Immeasurable Hands in it," said my Soul, "over every man. I
saw that the man did not see the Hands. I saw that they reached out of
infinity for him down through the days and the nights. And whether he
slept or prayed or wrought, I saw that they still reached out for him,
and folded themselves about him."
And I asked God what The Hands were.
"The man calls them Heredity and Environment," God said.
And God laughed.
Words came from far for me and waited in tumult within me. But my mouth
was filled with silence.
* * * * *
I know that I do not know the world, but out of my little corner of time
and space I have watched in it,--watched men and truths struggling in
it, and in the struggle it has seemed to me I have seen three kinds of
men. I have seen the man who feels that he is being made, and the man
who feels that he is making himself. But I have seen also another kind
of man--the man who feels that the Universe is at work on him, but
(within limits) under his own supervision.
I have made a compact in my soul with this man, for a new world. He is
not willing to be a mere manufactured man--one more being turned out
from The Factory of Circumstance--neither does he think very much of the
man who makes himself--who could make himself. If he were to try such a
thing--try to make a man himself, he would really rather try it, if the
truth must be told, on some one else.
As near as he can define it, life seems to be (to the normal or inspired
man) a kind of alternate grasping and being grasped. Sometimes he feels
his destiny tossed between the Two Immeasurable Hands. Sometimes he
feels that they have paused--that the Immeasurable Hands have been lent
to him, that the toss of destiny is made his own.
He watches these two great forces playing under heaven, before his eyes,
with his immortal life, every day. His soul takes these powers of
heaven, as the mariner takes the winds of the sea. He tacks to destiny.
He takes the same attitude toward the laws of heredity and environment
that the Creator took when He made them. He takes it for granted that a
God who made these laws as conveniences for Himself, in running a
Universe, must have intended them for men as conveniences in living in
it. In proportion as men have been like God they have treated these laws
as He does--as conveniences. Thousands of men are doing it to-day. Men
did it for thousands of years before they knew what the laws were, when
they merely followed their instincts with them. In a man's answer to the
question, How can I make a convenience of the law of heredity and
environment?--education before being born and education after being
born--will be found to lie always the secret glory or the secret shame
of his life.
II
The First Selection
If the souls of the unborn could go about reconnoitering the earth a
little before they settled on it, selecting the parents they would have,
the places where it pleased them to be born, nine out of ten of them
(judging from the way they conduct themselves in the flesh) would spend
nearly all their time in looking for the best house and street to be
born in, the best things to be born to. Such a little matter as
selecting the right parents would be left, probably, to the last moment,
or they would expect it to be thrown in.
We are all of us more or less aware, especially as we advance in life,
that overlooking the importance of parents is a mistake. There have been
times in the lives of some of us when having parents at all seemed a
mistake. We can remember hours when we were sure we had the wrong ones.
After our first disappointment,--that is, when we have learned how
unmanageable parents are,--we have our time--most of us--of making
comparisons, of trying other people's parents on. This cannot be said to
work very well, taken as a whole, and it is generally admitted that
people who are most serious about it, who take unto themselves fathers-
and mothers-in-law seldom do any better than at first. The conclusion of
the whole matter would seem to be: Since a man cannot select his parents
and his parents cannot select him, he must select himself. That is what
books are for.
III
Conveniences
It is the first importance of a true book that a man can select his
neighbours with it,--can overcome space, riches, poverty, and time with
it,--and the grave, and break bread with the dead. A book is a portable
miracle. It makes a man's native place all over for him, for a dollar
and a quarter; and many a man in this somewhat hard and despairing world
has been furnished with a new heaven and a new earth for twenty-five
cents. Out of a public library he has felt reached down to him the grasp
of heroes. Hurrying home in the night, perhaps, with his tiny life hid
under stars, but with a Book under his arm, he has felt a Greeting
against his breast and held it tight. "Who art thou, my lad?" it said;
"who art thou?" And the saying was not forgotten. If it is true that the
spirits of the mighty dead are abroad in the night they are turning the
leaves of books.
There are other inspiring things in the world, but there is nothing else
that carries itself among the sons of men like the book. With such
divine plenteousness--seeds of the worlds in it--it goes about flocking
on the souls of men. There is something so broadcast, so universal about
the way of a book with a man: boundless, subtle, ceaseless,
irresistible, following him and loving him, renewing him, delighting in
him and hoping for him--like a god. It is as the way of Nature herself
with a man. One cannot always feel it, but somehow, when I am really
living a real day, I feel as if some Great Book were around me--were
always around me. I feel myself all-enfolded, penetrated, surrounded
with it--the vast, gentle force of it--sky and earth of it. It is as if
I saw it, sometimes, building new boundaries for me, out there--softly,
gently, on the edges of the night--for me and for all human life.
Other inspiring things seem to be less steadfast for us. They cannot
always free themselves and then come and free us. Music cannot be
depended upon. It sings sometimes for and sometimes against us.
Sometimes, also, music is still--absolutely still, all the way down from
the stars to the grass. At best it is for some people and for others
not, and is addicted to places. It is a part of the air--part of the
climate in Germany, but there is but one country in the world made for
listening in--where any one, every one listens, the way one breathes.
The great pictures inspire, on the whole, but few people--most of them
with tickets. Cathedrals cannot be unmoored, have never been seen by the
majority of men at all, except in dreams and photographs. Most mountains
(for all practical purposes) are private property. The sea (a look at
the middle of it) is controlled by two or three syndicates. The sky--the
last stronghold of freedom--is rented out for the most part, where most
men live--in cities; and in New York and London the people who can
afford it pay taxes for air, and grass is a dollar a blade. Being born
is the only really free thing--and dying. Next to these in any just
estimate of the comparatively free raw material that goes to the making
of a human life comes the printed book.
A library, on the whole, is the purest and most perfect form of power
that exists, because it is a lever on the nature of things. If a man is
born with the wrong neighbours it brings the right ones flocking to him.
It is the universe to order. It makes the world like a globe in a
child's hands. He turns up the part where he chooses to live--now one
way and now another, that he may delight in it and live in it. If he is
a poet it is the meaning of life to him that he can keep on turning it
until he has delighted and tasted and lived in all of it.
The second importance of true books is that they are not satisfied with
the first. They are not satisfied to be used to influence a man from the
outside--as a kind of house-furnishing for his soul. A true book is
never a mere contrivance for arranging the right bit of sky for a man to
live his life under, or the right neighbours for him to live his life
with. It goes deeper than this. A mere playing upon a man's environment
does not seem to satisfy a true book. It plays upon the latent infinity
in the man himself. The majority of men are not merely conceived in sin
and born in lies, but they are the lies; and lies as well as truths flow
in their veins. Lies hold their souls back thousands of years. When one
considers the actual facts about most men, the law of environment seems
a clumsy and superficial law enough. If all that a book can do is to
appeal to the law of environment for a man, it does not do very much.
The very trees and stones do better for him, and the little birds in
their nests. No possible amount of environment crowded on their frail
souls would ever make it possible for most men to catch up--to overtake
enough truth before they die to make their seventy years worth while.
The majority of men (one hardly dares to deny) can be seen, sooner or
later, drifting down to death either bitterly or indifferently. The
shadows of their lives haunt us a little, then they vanish away from us
and from the sound of our voices. Oh, God, from behind Thy high
heaven--from out of Thy infinite wealth of years, hast Thou but the one
same pittance of threescore and ten for every man? Some of us are born
with the handicap of a thousand years woven in the nerves of our bodies,
the swiftness of our minds, and the delights of our limbs. Others of us
are born with the thousand years binding us down to blindness and
hobbling, holding us back to disease, but all with the same Imperious
Timepiece held above us, to run the same race, to overtake the same
truth--before the iron curtain and the dark. Some of us--a few men in
every generation--have two or three hundred years given to us outright
the day we are born. Then we are given seventy more. Others of us have
two hundred years taken away from us the day we are born. Then we are
given seventy years to make them up in, and it is called life.
If we are to shut ourselves up with one law, either the law of
environment or the law of heredity, it is obvious that the best a
logical man could do, would be to be ashamed of a universe like this and
creep out of it as soon as he could. The great glory of a great book is,
that it will not let itself be limited to the law of environment in
dealing with a man. It deals directly with the man himself. It appeals
to the law of heredity. It reaches down into the infinite depth of his
life. If a man has started a life with parents he had better not have
(for all practical purposes), it furnishes him with better ones. It
picks and chooses in behalf of his life out of his very grandfathers,
for him. It not only supplies him with a new set of neighbours as often
as he wants them. It sees that he is born again every morning on the
wide earth and that he has a new set of parents to be born to. It is a
part of the infinite and irrepressible hopefulness of this mortal life
that each man of us who dwells on the earth is the child of an infinite
marriage. We are all equipped, even the poorest of us, from the day we
begin, with an infinite number of fathers and an infinite number of
mothers--no telling, as we travel down the years, which shall happen to
us next. If what we call heredity were a matter of a few months,--a
narrow, pitiful, two-parent affair,--if the fate of a human being could
be shut in with what one man and one woman, playing and working, eating
and drinking, under heaven, for a score of years or more, would be
likely to have to give him from out of their very selves, heredity would
certainly be a whimsical, unjust, undignified law to come into a world
by, to don an immortal soul with. A man who has had his life so
recklessly begun for him could hardly be blamed for being reckless with
it afterward. But it is not true that the principle of heredity in a
human life can be confined to a single accident in it. We are all
infinite, and our very accidents are infinite. In the very flesh and
bones of our bodies we are infinite--brought from the furthest reaches
of eternity and the utmost bounds of created life to be ourselves. If we
were to do nothing else for threescore years, it is not in our human
breath to recite our fathers' names upon our lips. Each of us is the
child of an infinite mother, and from her breast, veiled in a thousand
years, we draw life, glory, sorrow, sleep, and death. The ones we call
fathers and mothers are but ambassadors to us--delegates from a million
graves--appointed for our birth. Every boy is a summed-up multitude. The
infinite crowd of his fathers beckons for him. As in some vast
amphitheatre he lives his life, before the innumerable audience of the
dead--each from its circle of centuries--calls to him, contends for him,
draws him to himself.
Inasmuch as every man who is born in the world is born with an infinite
outfit for living in it, it is the office of all books that are true and
beautiful books--true to the spirit of a man--that they shall play upon
the latent infinity in him; that they shall help him to select his
largest self; that they shall help him to give, as the years go on, the
right accent to the right fathers, in his life.
Books are more close to the latent infinity in a human being than
anything else can be, because the habit of the infinite is their habit.
As books are more independent of space and time than all other known
forces in the lives of men, they seem to make all the men who love them
independent also. If a man has not room for his life, he takes a book
and makes room for it. When the habit of books becomes the habit of a
man he unhands himself at will from space and time; he finds the
universe is his universe. He finds ancestors and neighbours alike
flocking to him--doing his bidding. God Himself says "Yes" to him and
delights in him. He has entered into conspiracy with the nature of
things. He does not feel that he is being made. He does not feel that he
is making himself. The universe is at work on him--under his own
supervision.
IV
The Charter of Possibility
In reading to select one's parents and one's self, there seem to be two
instincts involved. These instincts may vary more or less according to
the book and the mood of the reader, but the object of all live
reading--of every live experience with a book--is the satisfying of one
or both of them. A man whose reading means something to him is either
letting himself go in a book or letting himself come in it. He is either
reading himself out or reading himself in. It is as if every human life
were a kind of port on the edge of the universe, when it
reads,--possible selves outward-bound and inward-bound trooping before
It. Some of these selves are exports and some are imports.
If the principle of selection is conceived in a large enough spirit, and
is set in operation soon enough, and is continued long enough, there is
not a child that can be born on the earth who shall not be able to
determine by the use of books, in the course of the years, what manner
of man he shall be. He may not be able to determine how soon he shall be
that man, or how much of that man shall be fulfilled in himself before
he dies, and how much of him shall be left over to be fulfilled in his
children, but the fact remains that to an extraordinary degree, through
a live use of books, not only a man's education after he is born, but
his education before he is born, is placed in his hands. It is the
supreme office of books that they do this; that they place the laws of
heredity and environment where a man with a determined spirit can do
something besides cringing to them. Neither environment nor
heredity--taken by itself--can give a man a determined spirit, but it is
everything to know that, given a few books and the determined spirit
both, a man can have any environment he wants for living his life, and
his own assorted ancestors for living it. It is only by means of books
that a man can keep from living a partitioned-off life in the world--can
keep toned up to the divine sense of possibility in it. We hear great
men every day, across space and time, halloaing to one another in books,
and across all things, as we feel and read, is the call of our possible
selves. Even the impossible has been achieved, books tell us, in
history, again and again. It has been achieved by several men. This may
not prove very much, but if it does not prove anything else, it proves
that the possible, at least, is the privilege of the rest of us. It has
its greeting for every man. The sense of the possible crowds around him,
and not merely in his books nor merely in his life, but in the place
where his life and books meet--in his soul. However or wherever a man
may be placed, it is the great book that reminds him Who he is. It
reminds him who his Neighbour is. It is his charter of possibility.
Having seen, he acts on what he sees, and reads himself out and reads
himself in accordingly.
V
The Great Game
It would be hard to say which is the more important, reading for exports
or imports, reading one's self out or reading one's self in, but
inasmuch as the importance of reading one's self out is more generally
overlooked, it may be well to dwell upon it. Most of the reading
theories of the best people to-day, judging from the prohibitions of
certain books, overlook the importance altogether, in vital and normal
persons--especially the young,--of reading one's self out. It is only as
some people keep themselves read out, and read out regularly, that they
can be kept from bringing evil on the rest of us. If Eve had had a
novel, she would have sat down under the Tree and read about the fruit
instead of eating it. If Adam had had a morning paper, he would hardly
have listened to his wife's suggestion. If the Evil One had come up to
Eve in the middle of _Les Miserables_, or one of Rossetti's sonnets, no
one would ever have heard of him. The main misfortune of Adam and Eve
was that they had no arts to come to the rescue of their religion. If
Eve could have painted the apple, she would not have eaten it. She put
it into her mouth because she could not think of anything else to do
with it, and she had to do something. She had the artistic temperament
(inherited from her mother Sleep, probably, or from being born in a
dream), and the temptation of the artistic temperament is, that it gets
itself expressed or breaks something. She had tried everything--flowers,
birds, clouds, and her shadow in the stream, but she found they were all
inexpressible. She could not express them. She could not even express
herself. Taking walks in Paradise and talking with the one man the place
afforded was not a complete and satisfying self-expression. Adam had his
limitations--like all men. There were things that could not be said.
Standing as we do on the present height of history, with all the
resources of sympathy in the modern world, its countless arts drawing
the sexes together, going about understanding people, communing with
them, and expressing them, making a community for every man, even in his
solitude, it is not hard to see that the comparative failure of the
first marriage was a matter of course. The real trouble was that Adam
and Eve, standing in their brand-new world, could not express themselves
to one another. As there was nothing else to express them, they were
bored. It is to Eve's credit that she was more bored than Adam was, and
that she resented it more; and while a Fall, under the circumstances,
was as painful as it was inevitable, and a rather extreme measure on
Eve's part, no one will deny that it afforded relief on the main point.
It seems to be the universal instinct of all Eve's sons and daughters
that have followed since, that an expressive world is better than a dull
one. An expressive world is a world in which all the men and women are
getting themselves expressed, either in their experiences or in their
arts--that is, in other people's experiences.
The play, the picture, and the poem and the novel and the symphony have
all been the outgrowth of Eve's infinity. She could not contain herself.
She either had more experience than she could express, or she had more
to express than she could possibly put into experience.
One of the worst things that we know about the Japanese is that they
have no imperative mood in the language. To be able to say of a nation
that it has been able to live for thousands of years without feeling the
need of an imperative, is one of the most terrible and sweeping
accusations that has ever been made against a people on the earth.
Swearing may not be respectable, but it is a great deal more respectable
than never wanting to. Either a man is dead in this world, or he is out
looking for words on it. There is a great place left over in him, and as
long as that place is left over, it is one of the practical purposes of
books to make it of some use to him. Whether the place is a good one or
a bad one, something must be done with it, and books must do it.
If there were wordlessness for five hundred years, man would seek vast
inarticulate words for himself. Cathedrals would rise from the ground
undreamed as yet to say we worshipped. Music would be the daily
necessity of the humblest life. Orchestras all around the world would be
created,--would float language around the dumbness in it. Composers
would become the greatest, the most practical men in all the nations.
Viaducts would stretch their mountains of stone across the valleys to
find a word that said we were strong. Out of the stones of the hills,
the mists of rivers, out of electricity, even out of silence itself, we
would force expression. From the time a baby first moves his limbs to
when--an old man--he struggles for his last breath, the one imperious
divine necessity of life is expression. Hence the artist now and for
ever--the ruler of history--whoever makes it. And if he cannot make it,
he makes the makers of it. The artist is the man who, failing to find
neighbours for himself, makes his neighbours with his own hands. If a
woman is childless, she paints Madonnas. It is the inspiration, the
despair that rests over all life. If we cannot express ourselves in
things that are made, we make things, and if we cannot express ourselves
in the things we make, we turn to words, and if we cannot express
ourselves in words, we turn to other men's words.
The man who is satisfied with one life does not exist. The suicide does
not commit suicide because he is tired of life, but because he wants so
many more lives that he cannot have. The native of the tropics buys a
book to the North Pole. If we are poor, we grow rich on paper. We roll
in carriages through the highway of letters. If we are rich, we revel in
a printed poverty. We cry our hearts out over our starving
paper-children and hold our shivering, aching magazine hands over dying
coals in garrets we live in by subscription at three dollars a year. The
Bible is the book that has influenced men most in the world because it
has expressed them the most. The moment it ceases to be the most
expressive book, it will cease to be the most practical and effective
one in human life. There is more of us than we can live. The touch of
the infinite through which our spirits wandered is still upon us. The
world cries to the poet: "Give me a new word--a word--a word! I will
have a word!" It cries to the great man out of all its narrow places:
"Give me another life! I will have a new life!" and every hero the world
has known is worn threadbare with worship, because his life says for
other men what their lives have tried to say. Every masterful life calls
across the world a cry of liberty to pent-up dreams, to the ache of
faith in all of us, "Here thou art my brother--this is thy heart that I
have lived." A hero is immortalised because his life is every man's
larger self. So through the day-span of our years--a tale that is never
told--we wander on, the infinite heart of each of us prisoned in blood
and flesh and the cry of us everywhere, throughout all being, "Give me
room!" It cries to the composer, "Make a high wide place for me!" and on
the edge of the silence between life and words, to music we come at last
because it is the supreme confidante of the human heart, the
confessional, the world-priest between the actual self and the larger
self of all of us. With all the multiplying of arts and the piling up of
books that have come to us, the most important experience that men have
had in this world since they began on it, is that they are infinite,
that they cannot be expressed on it. It is not infrequently said that
men must get themselves expressed in living, but the fact remains that
no one has ever heard of a man as yet who really did it, or who was
small enough to do it. There was One who seemed to express Himself by
living and by dying both, but if He had any more than succeeded in
beginning to express Himself, no one would have believed that He was the
Son of God,--even that He was the Son of Man. It was because He could
not crowd all that He was into thirty-three short years and twelve
disciples and one Garden of Gethsemane and one Cross that we know who He
was.
Riveted down to its little place with iron circumstance, the actual self
in every man depends upon the larger possible self for the something
that makes the actual self worth while. It is hard to be held down by
circumstance, but it would be harder to be contented there, to live
without those intimations of our diviner birth that come to us in
books--books that weave some of the glory we have missed in our actual
lives, into the glory of our thoughts. Even if life be to the uttermost
the doing of what are called practical things, it is only by the
occasional use of his imagination in reading or otherwise, that the
practical man can hope to be in physical or mental condition to do them.
He needs a rest from his actual self. A man cannot even be practical
without this imaginary or larger self. Unless he can work off his
unexpressed remnant, his limbs are not free. Even down to the meanest of
us, we are incurably larger than anything we can do.
Reading a book is a game a man plays with his own infinity.
VI
Outward Bound
If there could only be arranged some mystical place over the edge of
human existence, where we all could go and practise at living, have
full-dress rehearsals of our parts, before we are hustled in front of
the footlights in our very swaddling clothes, how many people are there
who have reached what are fabulously called years of discretion, who
would not believe in such a place, and who would not gladly go back to
it and spend most of the rest of their lives there?
This is one of the things that the world of books is for. Most of us
would hardly know what to do without it, the world of books, if only as
a place to make mistakes and to feel foolish in. It seems to be the one
great unobserved retreat, where all the sons of men may go, may be seen
flocking day and night, to get the experiences they would not have, to
be ready for those they cannot help having. It is the Rehearsal Room of
History. The gods watch it--this Place of Books--as we who live go
silent, trooping back and forth in it--the ceaseless, heartless, awful,
beautiful pantomime of life.
It seems to be the testimony of human nature, after a somewhat
immemorial experience, that some things in us had better be expressed by
being lived, and that other things had better be expressed--if
possible--in some other way.
There are a great many men, even amongst the wisest and strongest of us,
who benefit every year of their lives by what might be called the
purgative function of literature,--men who, if they did not have a
chance at the right moment to commit certain sins with their imaginary
selves, would commit them with their real ones. Many a man of the larger
and more comprehensive type, hungering for the heart of all experience,
bound to have its spirit, if not itself, has run the whole gamut of his
possible selves in books, until all the sins and all the songs of men
have coursed through his being. He finds himself reading not only to
fill his lungs with ozone and his heart with the strength of the gods,
but to work off the humour in his blood, to express his underself, and
get it out of the way. Women who never cry their tears out--it is
said--are desperate, and men who never read their sins away are
dangerous. People who are tired of doing wrong on paper do right. To be
sick of one's sins in a book saves not only one's self but every one
else a deal of trouble. A man has not learned how to read until he reads
with his veins as well as his arteries.
It would be useless to try to make out that evil passions in literature
accomplish any absolute good, but they accomplish a relative good which
the world can by no means afford to overlook. The amount of crime that
is suggested by reading can be more than offset by the extraordinary
amount of crime waiting in the hearts of men, aimed at the world and
glanced off on paper.
There are many indications that this purgative function of literature is
the main thing it is for in our present modern life. Modern life is so
constituted that the majority of people who live in it are expressing
their real selves more truly in their reading than they are in their
lives. When one stops to consider what these lives are--most of
them--there can be but one conclusion about the reading of the people
who have to live them, and that is that while sensational reading may be
an evil, as compared with the evil that has made it necessary, it is an
immeasurable blessing.
The most important literary and artistic fact of the nineteenth century
is the subdivision of labour--that is, the subdividing of every man's
life and telling him he must only be alive in a part of it. In
proportion as an age takes sensations out of men's lives it is obliged
to put them into their literature. Men are used to sensations on the
earth as long as they stay on it and they are bound to have them in one
way or another. An age which narrows the actual lives of men, which so
adjusts the labour of the world that nearly every man in it not only
works with a machine, spiritual or otherwise, but is a machine himself,
and a small part of a machine, must not find fault with its art for
being full of hysterics and excitement, or with its newspapers for being
sensational. Instead of finding fault it has every reason to be
grateful--to thank a most merciful Heaven that the men in the world are
still alive enough in it to be capable of feeling sensation in other
men's lives, though they have ceased to be capable of having sensations
in their own, or of feeling sensations if they had them. It was when the
herds of her people were buried in routine and peace that Rome had
bull-fights. New York, with its hordes of drudges, ledger-slaves,
machinists, and clerks, has the New York _World_. It lasts longer than a
bull-fight and it can be had every morning before a man starts off to be
a machine and every evening when he gets back from being a machine--for
one cent. On Sunday a whole Colosseum fronts him and he is glutted with
gore from morning until night. To a man who is a penholder by the week,
or a linotype machine, or a ratchet in a factory, a fight is infinite
peace. Obedience to the command of Scripture, making the Sabbath a day
of rest, is entirely relative. Some of us are rested by taking our
under-interested lives to a Sunday paper, and others are rested by
taking our over-interested lives to church. Men read dime novels in
proportion as their lives are staid and mechanical. Men whose lives are
their own dime novels are bored by printed ones. Men whose years are
crowded with crises, culminations, and events, who run the most risks in
business, are found with the steadiest papers in their hands. The
train-boy knows that the people who buy the biggest headlines are all on
salaries and that danger and blood and thunder are being read nowadays
by effeminately safe men, because it is the only way they can be had.
But it is not only the things that are left out of men's lives but the
things they have too much of, which find their remedy in books. They are
the levers with which the morbid is controlled. _Similia similibus
curantur_ may be a dangerous principle to be applied by everybody, but
thousands of men and women mulling away on their lives and worrying
themselves with themselves, cutting a wide swath of misery wherever they
go, have suddenly stopped in a book--have purged away jealousy and
despair and passion and nervous prostration in it. A paper-person with
melancholia is a better cure for gloom than a live clown can be--who
merely goes about reminding people how sad they are.
A man is often heard to say that he has tragedy enough in his own life
not to want to go to a play for more, but this much having been said and
truly said, he almost always goes to the play--to see how true it is.
The stage is his huge confidante. Pitying one's self is a luxury, but it
takes a great while, and one can never do it enough. Being pitied by a
five-thousand-dollar house, and with incidental music, all for a dollar
and a half, is a sure and quick way to cheer up. Being pitied by Victor
Hugo is a sure way also. Hardy can do people's pitying for them much
better than they can do it, and it's soon over and done with. It is
noticeable that while the impressive books, the books that are written
to impress people, have a fair and nominal patronage, it is the
expressive books, the books that let people out, which have the enormous
sales. This seems to be true of the big-sale books whether the people
expressed in them are worth expressing (to any one but themselves) or
not. The principle of getting one's self expressed is so largely in
evidence that not only the best but the worst of our books illustrate
it. Our popular books are carbuncles mostly. They are the inevitable and
irrepressible form of the instinct of health in us, struggling with
disease. On the whole, it makes being an optimist in modern life a
little less of a tight-rope-walk. If even the bad elements in current
literature--which are discouraging enough--are making us better, what
shall be said of the good?