In general, the more facts a particular fact can be said to be a

delegate for, the more a particular fact can be said to represent other

facts, the more of the floor it should have. The power of reading for

facts depends upon a man's power to recognise symbolic or sum-total or

senatorial facts and keep all other facts, the general mob or common run

of facts, from interrupting. The amount of knowledge a man is going to

be able to master in the world depends upon the number of facts he knows

how to avoid.

This is where our common scientific training--the manufacturing of small

scientists in the bulk--breaks down. The first thing that is done with a

young man nowadays, if he is to be made into a scientist, is to take

away any last vestige of power his mind may have of avoiding facts.

Everyone has seen it, and yet we know perfectly well when we stop to

think about it that when in the course of his being educated a man's

ability to avoid facts is taken away from him, it soon ceases to make

very much difference whether he is educated or not. He becomes a mere

memory let loose in the universe--goes about remembering everything, hit

or miss. I never see one of these memory-machines going about mowing

things down remembering them, but that it gives me a kind of sad, sudden

feeling of being intelligent. I cannot quite describe the feeling. I am

part sorry and part glad and part ashamed of being glad. It depends upon

what one thinks of, one's own narrow escape or the other man, or the way

of the world. All one can do is to thank God, silently, in some safe

place in one's thoughts, that after all there is a great deal of the

human race--always is--in every generation who by mere circumstance

cannot be educated--bowled over by their memories. Even at the worst

only a few hundred persons can be made over into _reductio-ad-absurdum_

Stanley Halls (that is, study science under pupils of the pupils of

Stanley Hall) and the chances are even now, as bad as things are and are

getting to be, that for several hundred years yet, Man, the Big Brother

of creation, will insist on preserving his special distinction in it,

the thing that has lifted him above the other animals--his inimitable

faculty for forgetting things.

III

Duplicates: A Principle of Economy

I do not suppose that anybody would submit to my being admitted--I was

black-balled before I was born--to the brotherhood of scientists. And

yet it seems to me that there is a certain sense in which I am as

scientific as anyone. It seems to me, for instance, that it is a fairly

scientific thing to do--a fairly matter-of-fact thing--to consider the

actual nature of facts and to act on it. When one considers the actual

nature of facts, the first thing one notices is that there are too many

of them. The second thing one notices about facts is that they are not

so many as they look. They are mostly duplicates. The small scientist

never thinks of this because he never looks at more than one class of

facts, never allows himself to fall into any general, interesting,

fact-comparing habit. The small poet never thinks of it because he never

looks at facts at all. It is thus that it has come to pass that the most

ordinary human being, just living along, the man who has the habit of

general information, is the intellectual superior of the mere scientists

about him or the mere poets. He is superior to the mere poet because he

is interested in knowing facts, and he is superior to the minor

scientist because he does not want to know all of them, or at least if

he does, he never has time to try to, and so keeps on knowing something.

When one considers the actual nature of facts, it is obvious that the

only possible model for a scientist of the first class or a poet of the

first class in this world, is the average man. The only way to be an

extraordinary man, master of more of the universe than any one else, is

to keep out of the two great pits God has made in it, in which The

Educated are thrown away--the science-pit and the poet-pit. The area and

power and value of a man's knowledge depend upon his having such a

boundless interest in facts that he will avoid all facts he knows

already and go on to new ones. The rapidity of a man's education depends

upon his power to scent a duplicate fact afar off and to keep from

stopping and puttering with it. Is not one fact out of a thousand about

a truth as good as the other nine hundred and ninety-nine to enjoy it

with? If there were not any more truths or if there were not so many

more things to enjoy in this world than one had time for, it would be

different. It would be superficial, I admit, not to climb down into a

well and collect some more of the same facts about it, or not to crawl

under a stone somewhere and know what we know already--a little harder.

But as it is--well, it does seem to me that when a man has collected one

good, representative fact about a thing, or at most two, it is about

time to move on and enjoy some of the others. There is not a man living

dull enough, it seems to me, to make it worth while to do any other way.

There is not a man living who can afford, in a world made as this one

is, to know any more facts than he can help. Are not facts plenty enough

in the world? Are they not scattered everywhere? And there are not men

enough to go around. Let us take our one fact apiece and be off, and be

men with it. There is always one fact about everything which is the

spirit of all the rest, the fact a man was intended to know and to go on

his way rejoicing with. It may be superficial withal and merely

spiritual, but if there is anything worth while in this world to me, it

is not to miss any part of being a man in it that any other man has had.

I do not want to know what every man knows, but I do want to get the

best of what he knows and live every day with it. Oh, to take all

knowledge for one's province, to have rights with all facts, to be naive

and unashamed before the universe, to go forth fearlessly to know God in

it, to make the round of creation before one dies, to share all that has

been shared, to be all that is, to go about in space saying halloa to

one's soul in it, in the stars and in the flowers and in children's

faces, is not this to have lived,--that there should be nothing left out

in a man's life that all the world has had?

V--Reading for Results

I

The Blank Paper Frame of Mind

The P. G. S. of M. read a paper in our club the other day which he

called "Reading for Results." It was followed by a somewhat warm

discussion, in the course of which so many things were said that were

not so that the entire club (before any one knew it) had waked up and

learned something.

The P. G. S. of M. took the general ground that most of the men one

knows nowadays had never learned to read. They read wastefully. Our

common schools and colleges, he thought, ought to teach a young man to

read with a purpose. "When an educated young man takes up a book," he

said, "he should feel that he has some business in it, and attend to

it."

I said I thought young men nowadays read with purposes too much.

Purposes were all they had to read with. "When a man feels that he needs

a purpose in front of him, to go through a book with, when he goes about

in a book looking over the edge of a purpose at everything, the chances

are that he is missing nine tenths of what the book has to give."

The P. G. S. of M. thought that one tenth was enough. He didn't read a

book to get nine tenths of an author. He read it to get the one tenth he

wanted--to find out which it was.

I asked him which tenth of Shakespeare he wanted. He said that sometimes

he wanted one tenth and sometimes another.

"That is just it," I said. "Everybody does. It is at the bottom and has

been at the bottom of the whole Shakespeare nuisance for three hundred

years. Every literary man we have or have had seems to feel obliged

somehow to read Shakespeare in tenths. Generally he thinks he ought to

publish his tenth--make a streak across Shakespeare with his

soul--before he feels literary or satisfied or feels that he has a place

in the world. One hardly knows a man who calls himself really literary,

who reads Shakespeare nowadays except with a purpose, with some little

side-show of his own mind. It is true that there are still some

people--not very many perhaps--but we all know some people who can be

said to understand Shakespeare, who never get so low in their minds as

to have to read him with a purpose; but they are not prominent.

"And yet there is hardly any man who would deny that at best his reading

with a purpose is almost always his more anaemic, official,

unresourceful, reading. It is like putting a small tool to a book and

whittling on it, instead of putting one's whole self to it. One might as

well try to read most of Shakespeare's plays with a screw-driver or with

a wrench as with a purpose. There is no purpose large enough, that one

is likely to find, to connect with them. Shakespeare himself could not

have found one when he wrote them in any small or ordinary sense. The

one possible purpose in producing a work of art--in any age--is to

praise the universe with it, love something with it, talk back to life

with it, and the man who attempts to read what Shakespeare writes with

any smaller or less general, less overflowing purpose than Shakespeare

had in writing it should be advised to do his reading with some smaller,

more carefully fitted author,--one nearer to his size. Of course if one

wants to be a mere authority on Shakespeare or a mere author there is no

denying that one can do it, and do it very well, by reading him with

some purpose--some purpose that is too small to have ever been thought

of before; but if one wants to understand him, get the wild native

flavour and power of him, he must be read in a larger, more vital and

open and resourceful spirit--as a kind of spiritual adventure. Half the

joy of a great man, like any other great event, is that one can well

afford--at least for once--to let one's purposes go.

"To feel one's self lifted out, carried along, if only for a little

time, into some vast stream of consciousness, to feel great spaces

around one's human life, to float out into the universe, to bathe in it,

to taste it with every pore of one's body and all one's soul--this is

the one supreme thing that the reading of a man like William Shakespeare

is for. To interrupt the stream with dams, to make it turn

wheels,--intellectual wheels (mostly pin-wheels and theories) or any

wheels whatever,--is to cut one's self off from the last chance of

knowing the real Shakespeare at all. A man knows Shakespeare in

proportion as he gives himself, in proportion as he lets Shakespeare

make a Shakespeare of him, a little while. As long as he is reading in

the Shakespeare universe his one business in it is to live in it. He may

do no mighty work there,--pile up a commentary or throw on a

footnote,--but he will be a mighty work himself if he let William

Shakespeare work on him some. Before he knows it the universe that

Shakespeare lived in becomes his universe. He feels the might of that

universe being gathered over to him, descending upon him being breathed

into him day and night--to belong to him always.

"The power and effect of a book which is a real work of art seems always

to consist in the way it has of giving the nature of things a chance at

a man, of keeping things open to the sun and air of thought. To those

who cannot help being interested, it is a sad sight to stand by with the

typical modern man--especially a student--and watch him go blundering

about in a great book, cooping it up with purposes."

The P. G. S. of M. remarked somewhere at about this point that it seemed

to him that it made a great difference who an author or reader was. He

suggested that my theory of reading with a not-purpose worked rather

better with Shakespeare than with the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ or the

Hon. Carroll D. Wright, Commissioner of Statistics, or Ella Wheeler

Wilcox.

I admitted that in reading dictionaries, statistics, or mere poets or

mere scientists it was necessary to have a purpose to fall back upon to

justify one's self. And there was no denying that reading for results

was a necessary and natural thing. The trouble seemed to be, that very

few people could be depended on to pick out the right results. Most

people cannot be depended upon to pick out even the right directions in

reading a great book. It has to be left to the author. It could be

categorically proved that the best results in this world, either in

books or in life, had never been attained by men who always insisted on

doing their own steering. The special purpose of a great book is that a

man can stop steering in it, that one can give one's self up to the

undertow, to the cross-current in it. One feels one's self swept out

into the great struggling human stream that flows under life. One comes

to truths and delights at last that no man, though he had a thousand

lives, could steer to. Most of us are not clear-headed or far-sighted

enough to pick out purposes or results in reading. We are always

forgetting how great we are. We do not pick out results--and could not

if we tried--that are big enough.

II

The Usefully Unfinished

The P. G. S. of M. remarked that he thought there was such a thing as

having purposes in reading that were too big. It seemed to him that a

man who spent nearly all his strength when he was reading a book, in

trying to use it to swallow a universe with, must find it monotonous. He

said he had tried reading a great book without any purpose whatever

except its tangents or suggestions, and he claimed that when he read a

great book in that way--the average great book--the monotone of

innumerable possibility wore on him. He wanted to feel that a book was

coming to something, and if he couldn't feel in reading it that the book

was coming to something he wanted to feel at least that he was. He did

not say it in so many words, but he admitted he did not care very much

in reading for what I had spoken of as a "stream of consciousness." He

wanted a nozzle on it.

I asked him at this point how he felt in reading certain classics. I

brought out quite a nice little list of them, but I couldn't track him

down to a single feeling he had thought of--had had to think of, all by

himself, on a classic. I found he had all the proper feelings about them

and a lot of well-regulated qualifications besides. He was on his guard.

Finally I asked him if he had read (I am not going to get into trouble

by naming it) a certain contemporary novel under discussion.

He said he had read it. "Great deal of power in it," he said. "But it

doesn't come to anything. I do not see any possible artistic sense," he

said, "in ending a novel like that. It doesn't bring one anywhere."

"Neither does one of Keats's poems," I said, "or Beethoven's _Ninth

Symphony_. The odour of a rose doesn't come to anything--bring one

anywhere. It would be hard to tell what one really gets out of the taste

of roast beef. The sound of the surf on the Atlantic doesn't come to

anything, but hundreds of people travel a long way and live in

one-windowed rooms and rock in somebody else's bedroom rocker, to hear

it, year after year. Millions of dollars are spent in Europe to look at

pictures, but if a man can tell what it is he gets out of a picture in

so many words there is something very wrong with the picture."

The P. G. S. of M. gave an impatient wave of his hand. (To be strictly

accurate, he gave it in the middle of the last paragraph, just before we

came to the Atlantic. The rest is Congressional Record.) And after he

had given the impatient wave of his hand he looked hurt. I accordingly

drew him out. He was still brooding on that novel. He didn't approve of

the heroine.

"What was the matter?" I said; "dying in the last chapter?" (It is one

of those novels in which the heroine takes the liberty of dying, in a

mere paragraph, at the end, and in what always has seemed and always

will, to some people, a rather unsatisfactory and unfinished manner.)

"The moral and spiritual issues of a book ought to be--well, things are

all mixed up. She dies indefinitely."

"Most women do," I said. I asked him how many funerals of women--wives

and mothers--he had been to in the course of his life where he could sit

down and really think that they had died to the point--the way they do

in novels. I didn't see why people should be required by critics and

other authorities, to die to the point in a book more than anywhere

else. It is this shallow, reckless way that readers have of wanting to

have everything pleasant and appropriate when people die in novels which

makes writing a novel nowadays as much as a man's reputation is worth.

The P. G. S. of M. explained that it wasn't exactly the way she died but

it was the way everything was left--left to the imagination.

I said I was sorry for any human being who had lived in a world like

this who didn't leave a good deal to the imagination when he died. The

dullest, most uninteresting man that any one can ever know becomes

interesting in his death. One walks softly down the years of his life,

peering through them. One cannot help loving him a little--stealthily.

One goes out a little way with him on his long journey--feels bound in

with him at last--actually bound in with him (it is like a promise) for

ever. The more one knows about people's lives in this world, the more

indefinitely, the more irrelevantly,--sometimes almost comically, or as

a kind of an aside, or a bit of repartee,--they end them. Suddenly,

sometimes while we laugh or look, they turn upon us, fling their souls

upon the invisible, and are gone. It is like a last wistful haunting

pleasantry--death is--from some of us, a kind of bravado in it--as one

would say, "Oh, well, dying is really after all--having been allowed one

look at a world like this--a small matter."

It is true that most people in most novels, never having been born, do

not really need to die--that is, if they are logical,--and they might as

well die to the point or as the reader likes as in any other way, but if

there is one sign rather than another that a novel belongs to the first

class, it is that the novelist claims all the privileges of the stage of

the world in it. He refuses to write a little parlour of a book and he

sees that his people die the way they live, leaving as much left over to

the imagination as they know how.

That there are many reasons for the habit of reading for results, as it

is called, goes without saying. It also goes without saying--that is, no

one is saying very much about it--that the habit of reading for results,

such as it is, has taken such a grim hold on the modern American mind

that the greatest result of all in reading, the result in a book that

cannot be spoken in it, or even out of it, is being unanimously missed.

The fact seems to need to be emphasised that the novel which gives

itself to one to be breathed and lived, the novel which leaves a man

with something that he must finish himself, with something he must do

and be, is the one which "gets a man somewhere" most of all. It is the

one which ends the most definitely and practically.

When a novel, instead of being hewn out, finished, and decorated by the

author,--added as one more monument or tomb of itself in a man's

memory,--becomes a growing, living daily thing to him, the wondering,

unfinished events of it, and the unfinished people of it, flocking out

to him, interpreting for him the still unfinished events and all the

dear unfinished people that jostle in his own life,--it is a great

novel.

It seems to need to be recalled that the one possible object of a human

being's life in a novel (as out of it) is to be loved. This is definite

enough. It is the novel in which the heroine looks finished that does

not come to anything. I always feel a little grieved and frustrated--as

if human nature had been blasphemed a little in my presence--if a novel

finishes its people or thinks it can. It is a small novel which finishes

love--and lays it away; which makes me love say one brave woman or

mother in a book, and close her away for ever. The greater novel makes

me love one woman in a book in such a way that I go about through all

the world seeking for her--knowing and loving a thousand women through

her. I feel the secret of their faces--through her--flickering by me on

the street. This intangible result, this eternal flash of a life upon

life is all that reading is for. It is practical because it is eternal

and cannot be wasted and because it is for ever to the point.

Life is greater than art and art is great only in so far as it proves

that life is greater than art, interprets and intensifies life and the

power to taste life--makes us live wider and deeper and farther in our

seventy years.

III

Athletics

"The world is full," Ellery Charming used to say, "of fools who get

a-going and never stop. Set them off on another tack, and they are

half-cured." There are grave reasons to believe that, if an archangel

were to come to this earth and select a profession on it, instead of

taking up some splendid, serious, dignified calling he would devote

himself to a comparatively small and humble-looking career--that of

jogging people's minds. This might not seem at first sight to be a

sufficiently large thing for an archangel to do, but if it were to be

done at all (those who have tried it think) it would take an archangel

to do it.

The only possible practical or businesslike substitute one can think of

in modern life for an archangel would have to be an Institution of some

kind. Some huge, pleasant Mutual Association for Jogging People's Minds

might do a little something perhaps, but it would not be very thorough.

The people who need it most, half or three-quarters of them, the

treadmill-conscientious, dear, rutty, people of this world, would not be

touched by it. What is really wanted, if anything is really to be done

in the way of jogging, is a new day in the week.

I have always thought that there ought to be a day, one day in the week,

to do wrong in--not very wrong, but wrong enough to answer the

purpose--a perfectly irresponsible, delectable, inconsequent day--a

sabbath of whims. There ought to be a sort of sabbath for things that

never get done because they are too good or not good enough. Letters

that ought to be postponed until others are written, letters to friends

that never dun, books that don't bear on anything, books that no one has

asked one to read, calls on unexpecting people, bills that might just as

well wait, tinkering around the house on the wrong things, the right

ones, perfectly helpless, standing by. Sitting with one's feet a little

too high (if possible on one's working desk), being a little foolish and

liking it--making poor puns, enjoying one's bad grammar--a day, in

short, in which, whatever a man is, he rests from himself and play

marbles with his soul.

Most people nowadays--at least the intellectual, so-called, and the

learned above all others--are so far gone under the reading-for-results

theory that they have become mere work-worshippers in books, worshippers

of work which would not need to be performed at all--most of it--by men

with healthy natural or fully exercised spiritual organs. One very

seldom catches a man in the act nowadays of doing any old-fashioned or

important reading. The old idea of reading for athletics instead of

scientifics has almost no provision made for it in the modern

intellectual man's life. He does not seem to know what it is to take his

rest like a gentleman. He lunges between all-science and all-vaudeville,

and plays in his way, it is true, but he never plays with his mind. He

never takes playing with a mind seriously, as one of the great standard

joys and powers and equipments of human life. He does not seem to love

his mind enough to play with it. Above all, he does not see that playing

with a mind (on great subjects, at least) is the only possible way to

make it work. He entirely overlooks the fact, in his little round of

reading for results, that the main thing a book is in a man's hands for

is the man--that it is there to lift him over into a state of being, a

power of action. A man who really reads a book and reads it well, reads

it for moral muscle, spiritual skill, for far-sightedness, for

catholicity--above all for a kind of limberness and suppleness, a swift

sure strength through his whole being. He faces the world with a new

face when he has truly read a true book, and as a bridegroom coming out

of his chamber, he rejoices as a strong man to run a race.

As between reading to heighten one's senses, one's suggestibility, power

of knowing and combining facts, the _multum-in-parvo_ method in reading,

and the _parvum-in-multo_ method, a dogged, accumulating, impotent,

callous reading for results, it is not hard to say which, in the

equipment of the modern scientist, is being overlooked.

It is doubtless true, the common saying of the man of genius in every

age, that "everything is grist to his mill," but it would not be if he

could not grind it fine enough. And he is only able to grind it fine

enough because he makes his reading bring him power as well as grist.

Having provided for energy, stored-up energy for grinding, he guards and

preserves that energy as the most important and culminating thing in his

intellectual life. He insists on making provision for it. He makes ready

solitude for it, blankness, reverie, sleep, silence. He cultivates the

general habit not only of rejecting things, but of keeping out of their

way when necessary, so as not to have to reject them, and he knows the

passion in all times and all places for grinding grist finer instead of

gathering more grist. These are going to be the traits of all the mighty

reading, the reading that achieves, in the twentieth century. The saying

of the man of genius that everything is grist to his mill merely means

that he reads a book athletically, with a magnificent play of power

across it, with an heroic imagination or power of putting together. He

turns everything that comes to him over into its place and force and

meaning in everything else. He reads slowly and organically where others

read with their eyes. He knows what it is to tingle with a book, to

blush and turn pale with it, to read his feet cold. He reads all over,

with his nerves and senses, with his mind and heart. He reads through

the whole tract of his digestive and assimilative nature. To borrow the

Hebrew figure, he reads with his bowels. Instead of reading to maintain

a theory, or a row of facts, he reads to sustain a certain state of

being. The man who has the knack, as some people seem to think it, of

making everything he reads and sees beautiful or vigorous and practical,

does not need to try to do it. He does it because he has a habit of

putting himself in a certain state of being and cannot help doing it. He

does not need to spend a great deal of time in reading for results. He

produces his own results. The less athletic reader, the smaller poet or

scientist, confines himself to reading for results, for ready-made

beauty and ready-made facts, because he is not in condition to do

anything else. The greater poet or scientist is an energy, a

transfigurer, a transmuter of everything into beauty and truth.

Everything having passed through the heat and light of his own being is

fused and seen where it belongs, where God placed it when He made it, in

some relation to everything else.

I fear that I may have come, in bearing down on this point, to another

of the of-course places in this book. It is not just to assume that

because people are not living with a truth that they need to be told it.

It is of little use, when a man has used his truth all up boring people

with it, to try to get them (what is left of the truth and the people)

to do anything about it. But if I may be allowed one page more I would

like to say in the present epidemic of educating for results, just what

a practical education may be said to be.

The indications are that the more a man spends, makes himself able to

spend, a large part of his time, as Whitman did, in standing still and

looking around and loving things, the more practical he is. Even if a

man's life were to serve as a mere guide-board to the universe, it would

supply to all who know him the main thing the universe seems to be

without. But a man who, like Walt Whitman, is more than a guide-board to

the universe, who deliberately takes time to live in the whole of it,

who becomes a part of the universe to all who live always, who makes the

universe human to us--companionable,--such a man may not be able to fix

a latch on a kitchen door, but I can only say for one that if there is a

man who can lift a universe bodily, and set it down in my front yard

where I can feel it helping me do my work all day and guarding my sleep

at night, that man is practical. Who can say he does not "come to

anything"? To have heard it rumoured that such a man has lived, can

live, is a result--the most practical result of all to most of the

workers of the world. A bare fact about such a man is a gospel. Why work

for nothing (that is, with no result) in a universe where you can play

for nothing--and by playing earn everything?

Such a man is not only practical, serving those who know him by merely

being, but he serves all men always. They will not let him go. He

becomes a part of the structure of the world. The generations keep

flocking to him the way they flock to the great sane silent ministries

of the sky and of the earth. Their being drawn to them is their being

drawn to him. The strength of clouds is in him, and the spirit of

falling water, and he knoweth the way of the wind. When a man can be

said by the way he lives his life to have made himself the companion of

his unborn brothers and of God; when he can be said to have made

himself, not a mere scientist, but a younger brother, a real companion

of air, water, fire, mist, and of the great gentle ground beneath his

feet--he has secured a result.

VI--Reading for Feelings

I

The Passion of Truth

Reading resolves itself sooner or later into two elements in the

reader's mind:

1. Tables of facts. (a) Rows of raw fact; (b) Principles, spiritual or

sum-total facts.

2. Feelings about the facts.

But the Man with the Scientific Method, who lives just around the corner

from me, tells me that reading for feelings is quite out of the question

for a scientific mind. It is foreign to the nature of knowledge to want

knowledge for the feelings that go with it. Feelings get in the way.

I find it impossible not to admit that there is a certain force in this,

but I notice that when the average small scientist, the man around the

corner, for instance, says to me what he is always saying, "Science

requires the elimination of feelings,"--says it to me in his usual

chilled-through, ophidian, infallible way,--I never believe it, or at

least I believe it very softly and do not let him know it. But when a

large scientist, a man like Charles Darwin, makes a statement like this,

I believe it as hard, I notice, as if I had made it all up myself. The

statement that science requires the elimination of the feelings is true

or not true, it seems to me, according to the size of the feelings.

Considering what most men's feelings are, a man like Darwin feels that

they had better be eliminated. If a man's feelings are small feelings,

they are in the way in science, as a matter of course. If he has large

noble ones, feelings that match the things that God has made, feelings

that are free and daring, beautiful enough to belong with things that a

God has made, he will have no trouble with them. It is the feelings in a

great scientist which have always fired him into being a man of genius

in his science, instead of a mere tool, or scoop, or human dredge of

truth. All the great scientists show this firing-process down

underneath, in their work. The idea that it is necessary for a

scientific man to give up his human ideal, that it is necessary for him

to be officially brutal, in his relation to nature, to become a

professional nobody in order to get at truth, to make himself over into

matter in order to understand matter, has not had a single great

scientific achievement or conception to its credit. All great insight or

genius in science is a passion of itself, a passion of worshipping real

things. Science is a passion not only in its origin, but in its motive

power and in its end. The real truth seems to be that the scientist of

the greater sort is great, not by having no emotions, but by having

disinterested emotions, by being large enough to have emotions on both

sides and all sides, all held in subjection to the final emotion of

truth. Having a disinterested, fair attitude in truth is not a matter of

having no passions, but of having passions enough to go around. The

temporary idea that a scientist cannot be scientific and emotional at

once is based upon the experience of men who have never had emotions

enough. Men whose emotions are slow and weak, who have one-sided or

wavering emotions, find them inconvenient as a matter of course. The men

who, like Charles Darwin or some larger Browning, have the passion of

disinterestedness are those who are fitted to lead the human race, who

are going to lead it along the paths of space and the footsteps of the

worlds into the Great Presence.

The greatest astronomer or chemist is the man who glows with the joy of

wrestling with God, of putting strength to strength.

To the geologist who goes groping about in stones, his whole life is a

kind of mind-reading of the ground, a passion for getting underneath,

for communing flesh to flesh with a planet. What he feels when he breaks

a bit of rock is the whole round earth--the wonder of it--the great

cinder floating through space. He would all but risk his life or sell

his soul for a bit of lava. He is studying the phrenology of a star. All

the other stars watch him. The feeling of being in a kind of eternal,

invisible, infinite enterprise, of carrying out a world, of tracking a

God, takes possession of him. He may not admit there is a God, in so

many words, but his geology admits it. He devotes his whole life to

appreciating a God, and the God takes the deed for the word, appreciates

his appreciation, whether he does or not. If he says that he does not

believe in a God, he merely means that he does not believe in Calvin's

God, or in the present dapper, familiar little God or the hero of the

sermon last Sunday. All he means by not believing in a God is that his

God has not been represented yet. In the meantime he and his geology go

sternly, implacably on for thousands of years, while churches come and

go. So does his God. His geology is his own ineradicable worship. His

religion, his passion for the all, for communing through the part with

the Whole, is merely called by the name of geology. In so far as a man's

geology is real to him, if he is after anything but a degree in it, or a

thesis or a salary, his geology is an infinite passion taking possession

of him, soul and body, carrying him along with it, sweeping him out with

it into the great workroom, the flame and the glow of the world-shop of

God.

It would not seem necessary to say it if it were not so stoutly denied,

but living as we do, most of us, with a great flock of little scientists

around us, pecking on the infinite most of them, each with his own

little private strut, or blasphemy, bragging of a world without a God,

it does seem as if it were going to be the great strategic event of the

twentieth century, for all men, to get the sciences and the humanities

together once more, if only in our own thoughts, to make ourselves

believe as we must believe, after all, that it is humanity in a

scientist, and not a kind of professional inhumanity in him, which makes

him a scientist in the great sense--a seer of matter. The great

scientist is a man who communes with matter, not around his human

spirit, but through it.

The small scientist, violating nature inside himself to understand it

outside himself, misses the point.

At all events if a man who has locked himself out of his own soul goes

around the world and cannot find God's in it, he does not prove

anything. The man who finds a God proves quite as much. And he has his

God besides.

II

Topical Point of View

If it is true that reading resolves itself sooner or later into two

elements in the reader's mind, tables of facts and feelings about the

facts, that is, rows of raw fact, and spiritualised or related facts,

several things follow. The most important of them is one's definition of

education. The man who can get the greatest amount of feeling out of the

smallest number and the greatest variety of facts is the greatest and

most educated man--comes nearest to living an infinite life. The purpose

of education in books would seem to be to make every man as near to this

great or semi-infinite man as he can be made.

If men were capable of becoming infinite by sitting in a library long

enough, the education-problem would soon take care of itself. There is

no front or side door to the infinite. It is all doors. And if the mere

taking time enough would do it, one could read one's way into the

infinite as easily as if it were anything else. One can hardly miss it.

One could begin anywhere. There would be nothing to do but to proceed at

once to read all the facts and have all the feelings about the facts and

enjoy them forever. The main difficulty one comes to, in being infinite,

is that there is not time, but inasmuch as great men or semi-infinite

men have all had to contend with this same difficulty quite as much as

the rest of us, it would seem that in getting as many of the infinite

facts, and having as many infinite feelings about the facts, as they do,

great men must employ some principle of economy or selection, that

common, that is, artificial men, are apt to overlook.

There seem to be two main principles of economy open to great men and to

all of us, in the acquiring of knowledge. One of these, as has been

suggested, may be called the scientist's principle of economy, and the

other the poet's or artist's. The main difference between the scientific

and the artistic method of selection seems to be that the scientist does

his selecting all at once and when he selects his career, and the artist

makes selecting the entire business of every moment of his life. The

scientist of the average sort begins by partitioning the universe off

into topics. Having selected his topic and walled himself in with it, he

develops it by walling the rest of the universe out. The poet (who is

almost always a specialist also, a special kind of poet), having

selected his specialty, develops it by letting all the universe in. He

spends his time in making his life a cross section of the universe. The

spirit of the whole of it, something of everything in it, is represented

in everything he does. Whatever his specialty may be in poetry,

painting, or literature, he produces an eternal result by massing the

infinite and eternal into the result. He succeeds by bringing the

universe to a point, by accumulating out of all things--himself. It is

the tendency of the scientist to produce results by dividing the

universe and by subdividing himself. Unless he is a very great scientist

he accepts it as the logic of his method that he should do this. His

individual results are small results and he makes himself professedly

small to get them.

All questions with regard to the reading habit narrow themselves down at

last: "Is the Book to be divided for the Man, or is the Man to be

divided for the Book? Shall a man so read as to lose his soul in a

subject, or shall he so read that the subject Loses itself in

him--becomes a part of him?" The main fact about our present education

is that it is the man who is getting lost. And not only is every man

getting lost to himself, but all men are eagerly engaged in getting lost

to each other. The dead level of intelligence, being a dead level in a

literal sense, is a spiritless level--a mere grading down and grading up

of appearances. In all that pertains to real knowledge of the things

that people appear to know, greater heights and depths of difference in

human lives are revealed to-day than in almost any age of the world.

What with our steam-engines (machines for our hands and feet) and our

sciences (machines for our souls) we have arrived at such an

extraordinary division of labour, both of body and mind, that people of

the same classes are farther apart than they used to be in different

classes. Lawyers, for instance, are as different from one another as

they used to be from ministers and doctors. Every new skill we come to

and every new subdivision of skill marks the world off into pigeon-holes

of existence, into huge, hopeless, separate divisions of humanity. We

live in different elements, monsters of the sea wondering at the air,

air-monsters peering curiously down into the sea, sailors on surfaces,

trollers over other people's worlds. We commune with each other with

lines and hooks. Some of us on the rim of the earth spend all our days

quarrelling over bits of the crust of it. Some of us burrow and live in

the ground, and are as workers in mines. The sound of our voices to one

another is as though they were not. They are as the sound of picks

groping in rocks.

The reason that we are not able to produce or even to read a great

literature is that a great book can never be written, in spirit at

least, except to a whole human race. The final question with regard to

every book that comes to a publisher to-day is what mine shall it be

written in, which public shall it burrow for? A book that belongs to a

whole human race, which cannot be classified or damned into smallness,

would only be left by itself on the top of the ground in the sunlight.

The next great book that comes will have to take a long trip, a kind of

drummer's route around life, from mind to mind, and now in one place and

now another be let down through shafts to us. There is no whole human

race. A book with even forty-man power in it goes begging for readers.

The reader with more than one-, two-, or three-man power of reading

scarcely exists. We shall know our great book when it comes by the fact

that crowds of kinds of men will flock to the paragraphs in it, each

kind to its own kind of paragraph. It will hardly be said to reach us,

the book with forty-man power in it, until it has been broken up into

fortieths of itself. When it has been written over again--broken off

into forty books by forty men, none of them on speaking terms with each

other--it shall be recognised in some dim way that it must have been a

great book.

It is the first law of culture, in the highest sense, that it always

begins and ends with the fact that a man is a man. Teaching the fact to

a man that he can be a greater man is the shortest and most practical

way of teaching him other facts. It is only by being a greater man, by

raising his state of being to the _n^th_ power, that he can be made to

see the other facts. The main attribute of the education of the future,

in so far as it obtains to-day, is that it strikes both ways. It strikes

in and makes a man mean something, and having made the man--the main

fact--mean something, it strikes out through the man and makes all other

facts mean something. It makes new facts, and old facts as good as new.

It makes new worlds. All attempts to make a whole world without a single

whole man anywhere to begin one out of are vain attempts. We are going

to have great men again some time, but the science that attempts to

build a civilisation in this twentieth century by subdividing such men

as we already have mocks at itself. The devil is not a specialist and

never will be. He is merely getting everybody else to be, as fast as he

can.

It is safe to say in this present hour of subdivided men and

sub-selected careers that any young man who shall deliberately set out

at the beginning of his life to be interested, at any expense and at all

hazards, in everything, in twenty or thirty years will have the field

entirely to himself. It is true that he will have to run, what every

more vital man has had to run, the supreme risk, the risk of being

either a fool or a seer, a fool if he scatters himself into everything,

a seer if he masses everything into himself. But when he succeeds at

last he will find that for all practical purposes, as things are going

to-day, he will have a monopoly of the universe, of the greatest force

there is in it, the combining and melting and fusing force that brings

all men and all ideas together, making the race one--a force which is

the chief characteristic of every great period and of every great

character that history has known.

It is obvious that whatever may be its dangers, the topical or

scientific point of view in knowledge is one that the human race is not

going to get along without, if it is to be master of the House it lives

in. It is also obvious that the human or artistic, the man-point of view

in knowledge is one that it is not going to get along without, if the

House is to continue to have Men in it.

The question remains, the topical point of view and the artistic point

of view both being necessary, how shall a man contrive in the present

crowding of the world to read with both? Is there any principle in

reading that fuses them both? And if there is, what is it?

VII--Reading the World Together

I

Focusing

There are only a few square inches--of cells and things, no one quite

knows what--on a human face, but a man can see more of the world in

those few inches, and understand more of the meaning of the world in

them, put the world together better there, than in any other few inches

that God has made. Even one or two faces do it, for a man, for most of

us, when we have seen them through and through. Not a face anywhere--no

one has ever seen one that was not a mirror of a whole world, a poor and

twisted one perhaps, but a great one. The man that goes with it may not

know it, may not have much to do with it. While he is waiting to die,

God writes on him; but however it is, every man's face (I cannot help

feeling it when I really look at it) is helplessly great. It is one

man's portrait of the universe as he has found it--his portrait of a

Whole. I have caught myself looking at crowds of faces as if they were

rows of worlds. Is not everything I can know or guess or cry or sing

written on faces? An audience is a kind of universe by itself. I could

pray to one--when once the soul is hushed before it. If there were any

necessity to select one place rather than another, any particular place

to address a God in, I think I would choose an audience. Praying for it

instead of to it is a mere matter of form. I cannot find a face in it

that does not lead to a God, that does not gather a God in for me out of

all space, that is not one of His assembling places. Many and many a

time when heads were being bowed have I caught a face in a congregation

and prayed to it and with it. Every man's face is a kind of prayer he

carries around with him. One can hardly help joining in it. It is

sacrament to look at his face, if only to take sides in it, join with

the God-self in it and help against the others. Whoever or Whatever He

is, up there across all heaven, He is a God to me because He can be

infinitely small or infinitely great as He likes. I will not have a God

that can be shut up into any horizon or shut out of any face. When I

have stood before audiences, have really realised faces, felt the still

and awful thronging of them through my soul, it has seemed to me as if

some great miracle were happening. It's as if--but who shall say

it?--Have you never stood, Gentle Reader, alone at night on the frail

rim of the earth--spread your heart out wide upon the dark, and let it

lie there,--let it be flocked on by stars? It is like that when

Something is lifted and one sees faces. Faces are worlds to me. However

hard I try, I cannot get a man, somehow, any smaller than a world. He is

a world to himself, and God helping me, when I deal with him, he shall

be a world to me. The dignity of a world rests upon him. His face is a

sum-total of the universe. It is made by the passing of the infinite

through his body. It is the mark of all things that are, upon his flesh.

What I like to believe is, that if there is an organic principle of

unity like this in a little human life, if there is some way of summing

up a universe in a man's face, there must be some way of summing it up,

of putting it together in his education. It is this summing a universe

up for one's self, and putting it together for one's self, and for one's

own use, which makes an education in a universe worth while.

In other words, with a symbol as convenient, as near to him as his own

face, a man need not go far in seeking for a principle of unity in

focusing education. A man's face makes it seem not unreasonable to claim

that the principle of unity in all education is the man, that the single

human soul is created to be its own dome of all knowledge. A man's

education may be said to be properly laid out in proportion as it is

laid out the way he lays out his countenance. The method or process by

which a man's countenance is laid out is a kind of daily organic process

of world-swallowing. What a man undertakes in living is the making over

of all phenomena, outer sights and sounds into his own inner ones, the

passing of all outside knowledge through himself. In proportion as he is

being educated he is making all things that are, into his own flesh and

spirit.

When one looks at it in this way it is not too much to say that every

man is a world. He makes the tiny platform of his soul in infinite

space, a stage for worlds to come to, to play their parts on. His soul

is a little All-show, a kind of dainty pantomime of the universe.

* * * * *

It seemed that I stood and watched a world awake, the great night still

upbearing me above the flood of the day. I watched it strangely, as a

changed being, the godlikeness and the might of sleep, the spell of the

All upon me. I became as one who saw the earth as it is, in a high noon

of its real self. Hung in its mist of worlds, wrapped in its own breath,

I saw it--a queer little ball of cooled-off fire, it seemed, still and

swift plunging through space. And when I looked close in my heart, I saw

cunning little men on it, nations and things running around on it. And

when I looked still nearer, looked at the lighted side of it, I saw that

each little man was not what I thought--a dot or fleck on the universe.

And I saw that he was a reflection, a serious, wondrous miniature of all

the rest. It all seemed strange to me at first--to a man who lives, as I

do, in a rather weary, laborious, painstaking age--that this should be

so. As I looked at the little man I wondered if it really could be so.

Then, as I looked, the great light flowed all around the little man, and

the little man reflected the great light.

But he did not seem to know it.

I felt like calling out to him--to one of them--telling him out loud to

himself, wrapped away as he was, in his haste and dumbness, not knowing,

and in the funny little noise of cities in the great still light. And so

while the godlikeness and the might of sleep was upon me, I watched him,

longed for him, wanted him for myself. I thought of my great cold,

stretched-out wisdom. How empty and bare it was, this staring at stars

one by one, this taking notes on creation, this slow painful tour of

space, when after all right down there in this little man, I said "Is

not all I can know, or hope to know stowed away and written up?" And

when I thought of this--the blur of sleep still upon me--I could hardly

help reaching down for him, half-patronising him, half-worshipping him,

taking him up to myself, where I could keep him by me, keep him to

consult, watch for the sun, face for the infinite.--"Dear little

fellow!" I said, "my own queer little fellow! my own little Kosmos,

pocket-size!"

I thought how convenient it would be if I could take one in my hand, do

my seeing through it, focus my universe with it. And when the strange

mood left me and I came to, I remembered or thought I remembered that I

was one of Those myself. "Why not be your own little Kosmos-glass?" I

said.

I have been trying it now for some time. It is hard to regulate the

focus of course, and it is not always what it ought to be. It has to be

allowed for some. I do not claim much for it. But it's better, such as

it is, than a sheer bit of Nothing, I think, to look at a universe with.

II

The Human Unit

It matters little that the worlds that are made in this way are very

different in detail or emphasis, that some of them are much smaller and

more twisted than others. The great point, so far as education is

concerned, is for all teachers to realise that every man is a whole

world, that it is possible and natural for every man to be a whole

world. His very body is, and there must be some way for him to have a

whole world in his mind. A being who finds a way of living a world into

his face can find a way of reading a world together. If a man is going

to have unity, read his world together, possess all-in-oneness in

knowledge, he will have to have it the way he has it in his face.

It is superficial to assume, as scientists are apt to do, that in a

world where there are infinite things to know, a man's knowledge must

have unity or can have unity, in and of itself. The moment that all the

different knowledges of a man are passed over or allowed to be passed

over into his personal qualities, into the muscles and traits and organs

and natural expressions of the man, they have unity and force and order

and meaning as a matter of course. Infinite opposites of knowledge,

recluses and separates of knowledge are gathered and can be seen

gathered every day in almost any man, in the glance of his eye, in the

turn of his lip, or in the blow of his fist.

It is not the method of science as science, and it is not in any sense

put forward as the proper method for a man to use in his mere specialty,

but it does seem to be true that if a man wants to know things which he

does not intend to know all of, the best and most scientific way for him

to know such things is to reach out to them and know them through their

human or personal relations. I can only speak for myself, but I have

found for one that the easiest and most thorough, practical way for me

to get the benefit of things I do not know, is to know a man who does.

If he is an educated man, a man who really knows, who has made what he

knows over into himself, I find if I know him that I get it all--the

gist of it. The spirit of his knowledge, its attitude toward life, is

all in the man, and if I really know the man, absorb his nature, drink

deep at his soul, I know what he knows--it seems to me--and what I know

besides. It is true that I cannot express it precisely. He would have to

give the lecture or diagram of it, but I know it--know what it comes to

in life, his life and my life. I can be seen going around living with it

afterwards, any day. His knowledge is summed up in him, his whole world

is read together in him, belongs to him, and he belongs to me. To know a

man is to know what he knows in its best form--the things that have made

the man possible.

A great portrait painter, it has always seemed to me, is a kind of god

in his way--knows everything his sitters know. He knows what every man's

knowledge has done with the man--the best part of it--and makes it

speak. I have never yet found myself looking at great walls of faces

(one painter's faces), found myself walking up and down in Sargent's

soul, without thinking what a great inhabited, trooped-through man he

was--all knowledges flocking to him, showing their faces to him, from

the ends of the earth, emptying their secrets silently out to his brush.

If a man like Sargent has for one of his sitters a great astronomer, an

astronomer who is really great, who knows and absorbs stars, Sargent

absorbs the man, and as a last result the stars in the man, and the man

in Sargent, and the man's stars in Sargent, all look out of the canvas.

It is the spirit that sums up and unifies knowledge. It is a fact to be

reckoned with, in education, that knowledge can be summed up, and that

the best summing up of it is a human face.

III

The Higher Cannibalism

It is not unnatural to claim, therefore, that the most immediate and

important short-cut in knowledge that the comprehensive or educated man

can take comes to him through his human and personal relations. There is

no better way of getting at the spirits of facts, of tracing out

valuable and practical laws or generalisations, than the habit of trying

things on to people in one's mind.

I have always thought that if I ever got discouraged and had to be an

editor, I would do this more practically. As it is, I merely do it with

books. I find no more satisfactory way of reading most books--the way

one has to--through their backs, than reading the few books that one

does read, through persons and for persons and with persons. It is a

great waste of time to read a book alone. One needs room for rows of

one's friends in a book. One book read through the eyes of ten people

has more reading matter in it than ten books read in a common, lazy,

lonesome fashion. One likes to do it, not only because one finds one's

self enjoying a book ten times over, getting ten people's worth out of

it, but because it makes a kind of sitting-room of one's mind, puts a

fire-place in it, and one watches the ten people enjoying one another.

It may be for better and it may be for worse, but I have come to the

point where, if I really care about a book, the last thing I want to do

with it is to sit down in a chair and read it by myself. If I were ever

to get so low in my mind as to try to give advice to a real live author

(any author but a dead one), it would be, "Let there be room for all of

us, O Author, in your book. If I am to read a live, happy, human book,

give me a bench."

I have noticed that getting at truth on most subjects is a dramatic

process rather than an argumentative one. One gets at truth either in a

book or in a conversation not so much by logic as by having different

people speak. If what is wanted is a really comprehensive view of a

subject, two or three rather different men placed in a row and talking

about it, saying what they think about it in a perfectly plain way,

without argument, will do more for it than two or three hundred

syllogisms. A man seems to be the natural or wild form of the syllogism,

which this world has tacitly agreed to adopt. Even when he is a very

poor one he works better with most people than the other kind. If a man

takes a few other men (very different ones), uses them as glasses to see

a truth through, it will make him as wise in a few minutes, with that

truth, as a whole human race.

Knowledge which comes to a man with any particular sweep or scope is, in

the very nature of things, dramatic.

* * * * *

[I fear, Gentle Reader, I am nearing a conviction. I feel a certain

constraint coming over me. I always do, when I am nearing a conviction.

I never can be sure how my soul will take it upon itself to act when I

am making the attempt I am making now, to state what is to me an

intensely personal belief, in a general, convincing, or impersonal way.

The embarrassing part of a conviction is that it is so. And when a man

attempts to state a thing as it is, to speak for God or

everybody,--well, it would not be respectable not to be embarrassed a

little--speaking for God. I know perfectly well, sitting here at my

desk, this minute, with this conviction up in my pen, that it is merely

a little thing of my own, that I ought to go on from this point cool and

straight with it. But it is a conviction, and if you find me, Gentle

Reader, in the very next page, swivelling off and speaking for God, I

can only beg that both He and you will forgive me. I solemnly assure you

herewith, that, however it may look, I am merely speaking for myself. I

have thought of having a rubber stamp for this book, a stamp with IT

SEEMS TO ME on it. A good many of these pages need going over with it

afterwards. I do not suppose there is a man living--either I or any

other dogmatist--who would not enjoy more speaking for himself (if

anybody would notice it) than speaking for God. I have a hope that if I

can only hold myself to it on this subject I shall do much better in

speaking for myself, and may speak accidentally for God besides. I leave

it for others to say, but it is hard not to point a little--in a few

places.]

But here is the conviction. As I was going to say, knowledge which comes

to a man with any particular sweep or scope is in the very nature of

things dramatic. If the minds of two men expressing opinions in the dark

could be flashed on a canvas, if there could be such a thing as a

composite photograph of an opinion--a biograph of it,--it would prove to

be, with nine men out of ten, a dissolving view of faces. The unspoken

sides of thought are all dramatic. The palest generalisation a man can

express, if it could be first stretched out into its origins, and then

in its origins could be crowded up and focused, would be found to be a

long unconscious procession of human beings--a murmur of countless

voices. All our knowledge is conceived at first, taken up and organised

in actual men, flashed through the delights of souls and the music of

voices upon our brains. If it is true even in the business of the street

that the greatest efficiency is reached by dealers who mix with the

knowledge of their subject a keen appreciation and mastery of men, it is

still more true of the business of the mind that the greatest, most

natural and comprehensive results are reached through the dramatic or

human insights.

All our knowledge is dead drama. Wisdom is always some old play faded

out, blurred into abstractions. A principle is a wonderful disguised

biograph. The power of Carlyle's _French Revolution_ is that it is a

great spiritual play, a series of pictures and faces.

It was the French Revolution all happening over again to Carlyle, and it

was another French Revolution to every one of his readers. It was

dynamic, an induced current from Paris via Craigenputtock, because it

was dramatic--great abstractions, playing magnificently over great

concretes. Every man in Carlyle's history is a philosophy, and every

abstraction in it a man's face, a beckoning to us. He always seems to me

a kind of colossus of a man stalking across the dark, way out in The

Past, using men as search-lights. He could not help doing his thinking

in persons, and everything he touches is terribly and beautifully alive.

It was because he saw things in persons, that is, in great, rapid,

organised sum-totals of experience and feeling, that he was able to make

so much of so little as a historian, and what is quite as important (at

least in history), so little of so much.

The true criticism of Carlyle as a historian is not a criticism of his

method, that he went about in events and eras doing his seeing and

thinking with persons, but that there were certain sorts of persons that

Carlyle, with his mere lighted-up-brute imagination, could never see

with. They were opaque to him. Every time he lifted one of them up to

see ten years with, or a bevy of events or whatever it might be, he

merely made blots or sputters with them, on his page. But it was his

method that made it a great page, wider and deeper and more splendid

than any of the others, and the blots were always obvious blots, did no

harm there--no historical harm--almost any one could see them, and if

they could not, were there not always plenty of little chilled-through

historians, pattering around after him, tracking them out? But the great

point of Carlyle's method was that he kept his perspective with it.

Never flattened out like other historians, by tables of statistics,

unbewildered by the blur of nobodies, he was able to have a live,

glorious giant's way of writing, a godlike method of handling great

handfuls of events in one hand, of unrolling great stretches of history

with a look, of seeing things and making things seen, in huge, broad,

focussed, vivid human wholes. It was a historical method of treating

great masses, which Thomas Carlyle and Shakespeare and Homer and the Old

Testament all have in common.

The fact that it fails in the letter and with hordes of literal persons,

that it has great gaps of temperament left over in it, is of lesser

weight. The letter passes by (thank Heaven!) in the great girths of time

and space. In all lasting or real history, only the spirit has a right

to live. Temperaments in histories even at the worst are easily allowed

for, filled out with temperaments of other historians--that is, they

ought to be and are going to be if we ever have real historians any

more, historians great enough and alive enough to have temperaments, and

with temperaments great enough to write history the way God does--that

can be read.

History can only be truly written by men who have concepts of history,

and "Every concept," says Hegel, "must be universal, concrete, and

particular, or else it cannot be a concept." That is, it must be

dramatic.

And what is true of a great natural man or man of genius like Carlyle is

equally true of all other natural persons whether men of genius or not.

A stenographic report of all the thoughts of almost any man's brain for

a day would prove to almost any scientist how spiritually organised,

personally conducted a human being's brain is bound to be, almost in

spite of itself--even when it has been educated, artificially numbed and

philosophised. A man may not know the look of the inside of his mind

well enough to formulate or recognise it, but nearly every man's

thinking is done, as a matter of course, either in people, or to people,

or for people, or out of people. It is the way he grows, the way the

world is woven through his being, the way of having life more

abundantly.

It is not at all an exaggeration to say that if Shakespeare had not

created his characters they would have created him. One need not wonder

so very much that Shakespeare grew so masterfully in his later plays and

as the years went on. Such a troop of people as flocked through

Shakespeare's soul would have made a Shakespeare (allowing more time for

it) out of almost anybody.

The essential wonder of Shakespeare, the greatness which has made men

try to make a dozen specialists out of him, is not so very wonderful

when one considers that he was a dramatist. A dramatist cannot help

growing great. At least he has the outfit for it if he wants to. One

hardly wants to be caught giving a world recipe,--a prescription for

being a great man; but it does look sometimes as if the habit of reading

for persons, of being a sort of spiritual cannibal, or man-eater, of

going about through all the world absorbing personalities the way other

men absorb facts, would gradually store up personality in a man, and

make him great--almost inconveniently great, at times, and in spite of

himself. The probabilities seem to be that it was because Shakespeare

instinctively picked out persons in the general scheme of knowledge more

than facts; it was because persons seemed to him, on the whole in every

age, to be the main facts the age was for, summed the most facts up; it

was because they made him see the most facts, helped him to feel and act

on facts, made facts experiences to him, that William Shakespeare became

so supreme and masterful with facts and men both.

To learn how to be _pro tem_. all kinds of men, about all things, to

enjoy their joys in the things, is the greatest and the livest way of

learning the things.

To learn to be a Committee of the Temperaments all by one's self (which

is what Shakespeare did) is at once the method and the end of

education--outside of one's specialty.

There could be no better method of doing this (no method open to

everybody) than the method,--outside of one's specialty,--of reading for

persons and with persons. It makes all one's life a series of spiritual

revelations. It is like having regular habits of being born again, of

having new experiences at will. It mobilises all love and passion and

delight in the world and sends it flowing past one's door.

In this day of immeasurable exercises, why does not some one put in a

word for the good old-fashioned exercise of being born again? It is an

exercise which few men seem to believe in, not even once in a lifetime,

but it is easily the best all-around drill for living, and even for

reading, that can be arranged. And it is not a very difficult exercise

if one knows how, does it regularly enough. It is not at all necessary

to go off to another world to believe in reincarnations, if one

practises on them every day. Women have always seemed to be more

generally in the way of being born again than men, but they have less

scope and sometimes there is a certain feverish smallness about it, and

when men once get started (like Robert Browning in distinction from Mrs.

Browning) they make the method of being born again seem a great

triumphant one. They seem to have a larger repertoire to be born to, and

they go through it more rapidly and justly. At the same time it is true

that nearly all women are more or less familiar with the exercise of

being born again--living _pro tem_. and at will--in others, and only a

few men do it--merely the greatest ones, statesmen, diplomats, editors,

poets, great financiers, and other prophets--all men who live by seeing

more than others have time for. They are found to do their seeing rather

easily on the whole. They do it by the perfectly normal exercise of

being born into other men, looking out of their eyes a minute, whenever

they like. All great power in its first stage is essentially dramatic, a

man-judging, man-illuminating power, the power of guessing what other

people are going to think and do.

When the world points out to the young man, as it is very fond of doing,

that he must learn from experience, what it really means is, that he

must learn from his dramatic drill in human life, his contact with real

persons, his slow, compulsory scrupulous going the rounds of his heart,

putting himself in the place of real persons.

Probably every man who lives, in proportion as he covets power or

knowledge, would like to be (at will at least) a kind of focused

everybody. It is true that in his earlier stages, and in his lesser

moods afterward, he would probably seem to most people a somewhat

teetering person, diffused, chaotic, or contradictory. It could hardly

be helped--with the raw materials of a great man all scattered around in

him, great unaccounted-for insights, idle-looking powers all as yet

unfused. But a man in the long run (and longer the better) is always

worth while, no matter how he looks in the making, and it certainly does

seem reasonable, however bad it may look, that this is the way he is

made, that in proportion as he does his knowing spiritually and

powerfully, he will have to do it dramatically. It sometimes seems as if

knowing, in the best sense, were a kind of rotary-person process, a

being everybody in a row, a state of living symposium. The

interpenetrating, blending-in, digesting period comes in due course, the

time of settling down into himself, and behold the man is made, a

unified, concentrated, individual, universal man--a focused everybody.

This is not quite being a god perhaps, but it is as near to it, on the

whole, as a man can conveniently get.

IV

Spiritual Thrift

But perhaps one of the most interesting things about doing up one's

knowing in persons is that it is not only the most alive, but the most

economical knowledge that can be obtained. On the whole, eleven or

twelve people do very well to know the world with, if one can get a

complete set, if they are different enough, and one knows them down

through. The rest of the people that one sees about, from the point of

view of stretching one's comprehension, one's essential sympathy or

knowledge, do not count very much. They are duplicates--to be respected

and to be loved, of course, but to be kept in the cellar of actual

consciousness. There is no other way to do. Everybody was not intended

to be used by everybody. It is because we think that they were, mostly,

that we have come to our present, modern, heartlessly-cordial fashion of

knowing people--knowing people by parlourfuls--whole parlourfuls at a

time. "Is thy servant a whale?" said my not unsociable soul to me. "Is

one to be fed with one's kind as if they were animalculae, as if they had

to be taken in the bulk if one were really to get something?" It is

heartless and shallow enough. Who is not weary of it? No one knows

anybody nowadays. He merely knows everybody. He falls before The

Reception Room. A reception room is a place where we set people up in

rows like pickets on a fence to know them. Then like the small boy with

a stick, one tap per picket, we run along knowing people. No one comes

in touch with any one. It is getting so that there is hardly any

possible way left in our modern life for knowing people except by

marrying them. One cannot even be sure of that, when one thinks how

married people are being driven about by books and by other people.

Society is a crowd of crowds mutually destroying each other and

literature is a crowd of books all shutting each other up, and the law

seems to be either selection or annihilation, whether in reading or

living. The only way to love everybody in this world seems to be to pick

out a few in it, delegates of everybody, and use these few to read with,

and to love and understand the world with, and to keep close to it, all

one's days.

The higher form one's facts are put in in this world the fewer one

needs. To know twelve extremely different souls utterly, to be able to

borrow them at will, turn them on all knowledge, bring them to bear at a

moment's notice on anything one likes, is to be an educated, masterful

man in the most literal possible sense. Except in mere matters of

physical fact, things which are small enough to be put in encyclopedias

and looked up there, a man with twelve deeply loved or deeply pitied

souls woven into the texture of his being can flash down into almost any

knowledge that he needs, or go out around almost any ignorance that is

in his way, through all the earth. The shortest way for an immortal soul

to read a book is to know and absorb enough other immortal souls, and

get them to help. Any system of education which like our present

prevailing one is so vulgar, so unpsychological, as to overlook the soul

as the organ and method of knowledge, which fails to see that the

knowledge of human souls is itself the method of acquiring all other

knowledge and of combining and utilising it, makes narrow and trivial

and impotent scholars as a matter of course.

Knowledge of human nature and of one's self is the nervous system of

knowledge, the flash and culmination, the final thoroughness of all the

knowledge that is worth knowing and of all ways of knowing it.

It is all a theory, I suppose. I cannot prove anything with it. I dare

say it is true that neither I nor any one else can get, by reading in

this way, what I like to think I am getting, slowly, a cross-section of

the universe. But it is something to get as time goes on a cross-section

of all the human life that is being lived in it. It is something to take

each knowledge that comes, strike all the keys of one's friends on

it--clear the keyboard of space on it. When one really does this,

nothing can happen to one which does not or cannot happen to one in the

way one likes. Events and topics in this world are determined to a large

degree by circumstances--dandelions, stars, politics, bob-whites, acids,

Kant, and domestic science--but personalities, a man's means of seeing

things, are determined only by the limits of his imagination. One's

knowledge of pictures, or of Kant, of bob-whites or acids, cannot be

applied to every conceivable occasion, but nothing can happen in all the

world that one cannot see or feel or delight in, or suffer in, through

Charles Lamb's soul if one has really acquired it. One can be a Charles

Lamb almost anywhere toward almost anything that happens along, or a

Robert Burns or a Socrates or a Heine, or an Amiel or a Dickens or Hugo

or any one, or one can hush one's soul one eternal moment and be the Son

of God. To know a few men, to turn them into one's books, to turn them

into one another, into one's self, to study history with their hearts,

to know all men that live with them, to put them all together and guess

at God with them--it seems to me that knowledge that is as convenient

and penetrating, as easily turned on and off, as much like a light as

this, is well worth having. It would be like taking away a whole world,

if it were taken away from me--the little row of people I do my reading

with. And some of them are supposed to be dead--hundreds of years.

* * * * *

But the dramatic principle in education strikes both ways. While it is

true that one does not need a very large outfit of people to do one's

knowing with, if one has the habit of thinking in persons, it is still

more true that one does not need a large outfit of books.

As I sit in my library facing the fire I fancy I hear, sometimes, my

books eating each other up. One by one through the years they have

disappeared from me--only portraits or titles are left. The more

beautiful book absorbs the less and the greater folds itself around the

small. I seldom take down a book that was an enthusiasm once without

discovering that the heart of it has fled away, has stealthily moved

over, while I dreamed, to some other book. Lowell and Whittier are

footnotes scattered about in several volumes, now. J. G. Holland

(Sainte-Beuve of my youth!) is digested by Matthew Arnold and Matthew

Arnold by Walter Pater and Walter Pater by Walt Whitman. Montaigne and

Plato have moved over into Emerson, and Emerson has been distilled

slowly into--forty years. Holmes has dissolved into Charles Lamb and

Thomas Browne. A big volume of Rossetti (whom I oddly knew first) is

lost in a little volume of Keats, and as I sit and wait Ruskin and

Carlyle are going fast into a battered copy on my desk--of the Old

Testament. Once let the dramatic principle get well started in a man's

knowledge and it seems to keep on sending him up new currents the way

his heart does, whether he notices it or not. If a man will leave his

books and his people to themselves, if he will let them do with him and

with one another what they want to do, they all work while he sleeps. If

the spirit of knowledge, the dramatic principle in it, is left free,

knowledge all but comes to a man of itself, cannot help coming, like the

dew on the grass. With enough reading for persons one need not buy very

many books. One allows for unconscious cerebration in books. Books not

only have a way of being read through their backs, but of reading one

another.

V

The City, the Church, and the College

The greatest event of the nineteenth century was that somewhere in it,

at some immense and hidden moment in it, human knowledge passed silently

over from the emphasis of Persons to the emphasis of Things.

I have walked up and down Broadway when the whole street was like a

prayer to me--miles of it--a long dull cry to its little strip of

heaven. I have been on the Elevated--the huge shuttle of the great

city--hour by hour, had my soul woven into New York on it, back and

forth, up and down, until it was hardly a soul at all, a mere ganglion,

a quivering, pressed-in nerve of second-story windows, skies of

clotheslines, pale faces, mist and rumble and dust. "Perhaps I have a

soul," I say. "Perhaps I have not. Has any one a soul?" When I look at

the men I say to myself, "Now I will look at the women," and when I look

at the women I say, "Now I will look at the men." Then I look at shoes.

Men are cheap in New York. Every little man I see stewing along the

street, when I look into his face in my long, slow country way, as if a

hill belonged with him or a scrap of sky or something, or as if he

really counted, looks at me as one would say, "I? I am a millionth of

New York--and you?"

I am not even that. The city gathers itself together in a great roar

about me, puts its hands to its mouth and bellows in my country ears,

"Men are cheap enough, dear boy, didn't you know that? See those dots on

Brooklyn Bridge?"

I go on with my walk. I stop and look up at the great blocks. "Who are

you?" the great blocks say. I take another step. I am one more shuffle

on the street. "Men are cheap. Look at _us_--" a thousand show windows

say. Are there not square miles of human countenance drifting up

Broadway any day? "And where are they going?" I asked my soul. "To

oblivion?"--"They are going from Things," said my soul, "to Things"; and

_sotto voce_, "From one set of Things they know they do not want, to

another set of Things they do not know they do not want."

One need not wonder very long that nearly every man one knows in New

York is at best a mere cheered-up and plucky pessimist. Of course one

has to go down and see one's favourite New Yorker, one needs to and

wants to, and one needs to get wrought in with him too, but when one

gets home, who is there who does not have to get free from his favourite

New Yorker, shake himself off from him, save his soul a little longer?

"Men are cheap," it keeps saying over and over to one,--a New York soul

does. It keeps coming back--whispering through all the aisles of

thought. New York spreads itself like a vast concrete philosophy over

every man's spirit. It reeks with cheapness, human cheapness. How could

it be otherwise with a New York man? I never come home from New York,

wander through the city with my heart, afterward, look down upon it, see

Broadway with this little man on it, fretting up and down between his

twenty-story blocks, in his little trough of din under the wide heaven,

loomed at by iron and glass, browbeaten by stone, smothered by smoke,

but that he all but seems to me, this little Broadway man, to be

slipping off the planet, to barely belong to the planet. I feel like

clutching at him, helping him to hold on, pitying him. Then I remember

how it really is (if there is any pitying to be done),--this

crowded-over, crowded-off, matter-cringing, callous-looking man, pities

me.

When I was coming home from New York the last time, had reached a safe

distance behind my engine, out in the fields, I found myself listening

all over again to the roar (saved up in me) of the great city. I tried

to make it out, tried to analyse what it was that the voice of the great

city said to me. "The voice of the city is the Voice of Things," my soul

said to me. "And the Man?" I said, "where does the Man come in? Are not

the Things for the Man?" Then the roar of the great city rose up about

me, like a flood, swallowed my senses in itself, numbed and overbore me,

swooned my soul in itself, and said: "NO, THE THINGS ARE NOT FOR THE

MAN. THE MAN IS FOR THE THINGS."

This is what the great city said. And while I still listened, the roar

broke over me once more with its NO! NO! NO! its million voices in it,

its million souls in it. All doubts and fears and hates and cries, all

deadnesses flowed around me, took possession of me.

Then I remembered the iron and wood faces of the men, great processions

of them, I had seen there, the strange, protected-looking, boxed-in

faces of the women, faces in crates, I had seen, and I understood. "New

York," I said, "is a huge war, a great battle numbered off in streets

and houses, every man against every man, every man a shut-in,

self-defended man. It is a huge lamp-lighted, sun-lighted, ceaseless

struggle, day unto day."

"But New York is not the world. Try the whole world," said my soul to

me. "Perhaps you can do better. Are there not churches, men-making,

men-gathering places, oases for strength and rest in it?"

Then I went to all the churches in the land at once, of a still Sabbath

morning, steeples in the fields and hills, and steeples in cities. The

sound of splendid organs praying for the poor emptied people, the long,

still, innumerable sound of countless collections being taken, the drone

and seesaw of sermons, countless sermons! (Ah, these poor helpless

Sundays!) Paper-philosophy and axioms. Chimes of bells to call the

people to paper-philosophy and axioms! "Canst thou not," said I to my

soul, "guide me to a Man, to a door that leads to a Man--a world-lover

or prophet?" Then I fled (I always do after a course of churches) to the

hills from whence cometh strength. David tried to believe this. I do

sometimes, but hills are great, still, coldly companionable, rather

heartless fellows. I know in my heart that all the hills on earth, with

all their halos on them, their cities of leaves, and circles of life,

would not take the place to me, in mystery, closeness, illimitableness,

and wonder--of one man.

And when I turn from the world of affairs and churches, to the world of

scholarship, I cannot say that I find relief. Even scholarship,

scholarship itself, is under a stone most of it, prone and pale and like

all the rest, under The Emphasis of Things. Scholarship is getting to be

a mere huge New York, infinite rows and streets of things, taught by

rows of men who have made themselves over into things, to another row of

men who are trying to make themselves over into things. I visit one

after the other of our great colleges, with their forlorn, lonesome

little chapels, cosy-corners for God and for the humanities, their vast

Thing-libraries, men like dots in them, their great long, reached-out

laboratories, stables for truth, and I am obliged to confess in spirit

that even the colleges, in all ages the strongholds of the human past,

and the human future, the citadels of manhood, are getting to be great

man-blind centres, shambles of souls, places for turning every man out

from himself, every man away from other men, making a Thing of him--or

at best a Columbus for a new kind of fly, or valet to a worm, or tag or

label on Matter.

When one considers that it is a literal, scientific, demonstrable fact

that there is not a single evil that can be named in modern life,

social, religious, political, or industrial, which is not based on the

narrowness and blindness of classes of men toward one another, it is

very hard to sit by and watch the modern college almost everywhere, with

its silent, deadly Thing-emphasis upon it, educating every man it can

reach, into not knowing other men, into not knowing even himself.

VI

The Outsiders

One cannot but look with deep pleasure at first, and with much relief,

upon these healthy objective modern men of ours. The only way out, for

spiritual hardihood, after the world-sick Middle Ages, was a Columbus, a

vast splendid train of Things after him, of men who emphasised

Things,--who could emphasise Things. It is a great spectacle and a

memorable one--the one we are in to-day, the spectacle of the wonder

that men are doing with Things, but when one begins to see that it is

all being turned around, that it is really a spectacle of what Things

are doing with men, one wakes with a start. One wonders if there could

be such a thing as having all the personalities of a whole generation

lost. One looks suspiciously and wistfully at the children one sees in

the schools. One wonders if they are going to be allowed, like their

fathers and mothers, to have personalities to lose. I have all but

caught myself kidnapping children as I have watched them flocking in the

street. I have wanted to scurry them off to the country, a few of them,

almost anywhere--for a few years. I have thought I would try to find a

college to hide them in, some back-county, protected college, a college

which still has the emphasis of Persons as well as the emphasis of

Things upon it. Then I would wait and see what would come of it. I would

at least have a little bevy of great men perhaps, saved out for a

generation, enough to keep the world supplied with samples--to keep up

the bare idea of the great man, a kind of isthmus to the future.

The test of civilisation is what it produces--its man, if only because

he produces all else. If we have all made up our minds to allow the

specialist to set the pace for us, either to be specialists ourselves or

vulgarly to compete with specialists, for the right of living, or

getting a living, there is going to be a crash sometime. Then a sense of

emptiness after the crash which will call us to our senses. The

specialist's view of the world logically narrows itself down to a race

of nonentities for nothings. And even if a thing is a thing, it is a

nothing to a nonentity. And if it is the one business of the specialist

to obtain results, and we are all browbeaten into being specialists, but

one result is going to be possible. It is obvious that the man who is

willing to sacrifice the most is going to have the most success in the

race, crowd out and humiliate or annihilate the others. If this is to be

the world, it is only men who are ready to die for nothing in order to

create nothing who will be able to secure enough of nothing to rule it.

One wonders how long ruling such a world will be worth while, a world

which has accepted as the order of the day success by suicide, the

spending of manhood on things which only by being men we can enjoy--the

method of forging boilers and getting deaf to buy violins, of having

elevated railways for dead men, wireless telegraphs for clods, gigantic

printing-presses for men who have forgotten how to read. "Let us all, by

all means, make all things for the world." So we set ourselves to our

task cheerfully, the task of attaining results for people at large by

killing people in particular off. We are getting to be already, even in

the arts, men with one sense. We have classes even in colour. Schools of

painters are founded by men because they have one seventh of a sense of

sight. Schools of musicians divide themselves off into fractions of the

sense of sound, and on every hand men with a hundred and forty-three

million cells in their brains, become noted (nobodies) because they only

use a hundred and forty-three. "What is the use of attaining results,"

one asks, "of making such a perfectly finished world, when there is not

a man in it who would pay any attention to it as a world?" If the planet

were really being improved by us, if the stars shone better by our

committing suicide to know their names, it might be worth while for us

all to die, perhaps, to make racks of ourselves, frames for souls (one

whole generation of us), in one single, heroic, concerted attempt to

perfect a universe like this, the use and mastery of it. But what would

it all come to? Would we not still be left in the way on it, we and our

children, lumbering it up, soiling and disgracing it, making a machine

of it? There would be no one to appreciate it. Our children would

inherit the curse from us, would be more like us than we are. If any one

is to appreciate this world, we must appreciate it and pass the old

secret on.

No one seems to believe in appreciating--appreciating more than one

thing, at least. The practical disappearance in any vital form of the

lecture-lyceum, the sermon, the essay, and the poem, the annihilation of

the imagination or organ of comprehension, the disappearance of

personality, the abolition of the editorial, the temporary decline of

religion, of genius, of the artistic temperament, can all be summed up

and symbolised in a single trait of modern life, its separated men,

interested in separate things. We are getting to be lovers of

contentedly separate things, little things in their little places all by

themselves. The modern reader is a skimmer, a starer at pictures, like a

child, while he reads, never thinking a whole thought, a lover of peeks

and paragraphs, as a matter of course. Except in his money-making, or

perhaps in the upper levels of science, the typical modern man is all

paragraphs, not only in the way he reads, but in the way he lives and

thinks. Outside of his specialty he is not interested in anything more

than one paragraph's worth. He is as helpless as a bit of protoplasm

before the sight of a great many very different things being honestly

put together. Putting things together tires him. He has no imagination,

because he has the daily habit of contentedly seeing a great many things

which he never puts together. He is neither artistic nor original nor

far-sighted nor powerful, because he has a paragraph way of thinking, a

scrap-bag of a soul, because he cannot concentrate separate things,

cannot put things together. He has no personality because he cannot put

himself together.

It is significant that in the days when personalities were common and

when very powerful, interesting personalities could be looked up,

several to the mile, on almost any road in the land, it was not uncommon

to see a business letter-head like this:

----------------------------------------------

| General Merchandise, |

| Dry Goods, Notions, Hats, |

| Shoes, Groceries, Hardware, Coffins |

| and Caskets, Livery and |

| Feed Stable. |

| Physician and Surgeon. |

| Justice of the Peace, Licensed to Marry. |

----------------------------------------------

If, as it looks just at present, the nation is going to believe in

arbitration as the general modern method of adjustment, that is, in the

all-siding up of a subject, the next thing it will be obliged to believe

in will be some kind of an institution of learning which will produce

arbitrators, men who have two or three perfectly good, human sides to

their minds, who have been allowed to keep minds with three dimensions.

The probabilities are that if the mind of Socrates, or any other great

man, could have an X-ray put on it, and could be thrown on a canvas, it

would come out as a hexagon, or an almost-circle, with lines very like

spokes on the inside bringing all things to a centre.

It is not necessary to deny, in the present emphasis of Things, that we

are making and inspiring all Things except ourselves in a way that would

make the Things glad. The trouble is that Things are getting too glad.

They are turning around and making us. Nearly every man in college is

being made over, mind and body, into a sort of machine. When the college

has finished him, and put him on the market, and one wonders what he is

for, one learns he is to do some very little part, of some very little

thing, and nothing else. The local paper announces with pride that in

the new factory we have for the manufacture of shoes it takes one

hundred and sixty-three machines to make one shoe--one man to each

machine. I ask myself, "If it takes one hundred and sixty-three machines

to make one shoe, how many machines does it take to make one man?"

The Infinite Face of The Street goes by me night and day. To and fro,

its innumerable eyes, always the sound of footsteps in my ears, out of

all these--jostling our shoulders, hidden from our souls, there waits an

All-man, a great man, I know, as always great men wait, whose soul shall

be the signal to the latent hero in us all, who, standing forth from the

machines of learning and the machines of worship, that spread their

noise and network through all the living of our lives, shall start again

the old sublime adventure of keeping a Man upon the earth. He shall

rouse the glowing crusaders, the darers of every land, who through the

proud and dreary temples of the wise shall go, with the cry from

Nazareth on their lips, "Woe unto you ye men of learning, ye have taken

away the key of knowledge, ye have entered not in yourselves and them

that were entering in, ye have hindered," and the mighty message of the

one great scholar of his day who knew a God: "Whether there be

prophecies they shall fail, whether there be tongues they shall cease,

whether there be knowledge it shall vanish away. Though I speak with the

tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding

brass and tinkling cymbal,..."

I do not forget of Him, whose "I, IF I BE LIFTED UP" is the hail of this

modern world, that there were men of letters in those far-off days, when

once He walked with us, who, sounding their brass and tinkling their

cymbals, asked the essentially ignorant question of all outsiders of

knowledge in every age--"How knoweth this man letters, never having

learned?"

As I lay on my bed in the night

They came

Pale with sleep--

The faces of all the living

As though they were dead;

"What is Power?" they cried,

Souls that were lost from their masters while they slept--

Trooping through my dream,

"What is Power?"

Now these nineteen hundred years since the Boy

In the temple with The Doctors

Still the wind of faces flying

Through the spaces of my dream,

"WHAT IS POWER?" they cried.

VII

Reading the World Together

It is not necessary to decry science, but it should be cried on the

housetops of education, the world around in this twentieth century, that

science is in a rut of dealing solely with things and that the pronoun

of science is It. While it is obvious that neuter knowledge should have

its place in any real scheme of life, it is also obvious that most of

us, making locomotives, playing with mist, fire and water and lightning,

and the great game with matter, should be allowed to have sex enough to

be men and women a large part of the time, the privilege of being

persons, perchance gods, surmounting this matter we know so much about,

rather than becoming like it.

The next great move of education--the one which is to be expected--is

that the educated man of the twentieth century is going to be educated

by selecting out of all the bare knowledges the warm and human elements

in them. He is going to work these over into a relation to himself and

when he has worked them over into relation to himself, he is going to

work them over through himself into every one else and read the world

together.

It is because the general habit of reading for persons, acquiring one's

knowledge naturally and vitally and in its relation to life, has been

temporarily swept one side in modern education that we are obliged to

face the divorced condition of the educated world to-day. There seem to

be, for the most part, but two kinds of men living in it, living on

opposite sides of the same truths glaring at each other. On the one hand

the anaemically spiritual, broad, big, pallid men, and on the other the

funny, infinitesimal, provincial, matter cornered, matter-of-fact ones.

However useless it may seem to be there is but one way out. Some man is

going to come to us, must come to us, who will have it in him to

challenge these forces, do battle with them, fight with fog on one hand

and desert on the other. There never will be one world in education

until we have one man who can emphasise persons and things together, and

do it every day, side by side, in his own mind. When there is one man

who is an all-man, an epitome of a world, there shall be more all-men.

He cannot help attracting them, drawing them out, creating them. With

enough men who have a whole world in their hearts, we shall soon have a

whole world.

Whether it is true or not that the universe is most swiftly known, most

naturally enjoyed as related to one Creator or Person, as the

self-expression of one Being who loved all these things enough to gather

them together, it is generally admitted that the natural man seems to

have been created to enjoy a universe as related to himself. His most

natural and powerful way of enjoying it is to enjoy it in its relation

to persons. A Person may not have created it, but it seems for the time

being at least, and so far as persons are concerned, to have been

created for persons. To know the persons and the things together, and

particularly the things in relation to the persons, is the swiftest and

simplest way of knowing the things. Persons are the nervous system of

all knowledge. So far as man is concerned all truth is a sub-topic under

his own soul, and the universe is the tool of his own life. Reading for

different topics in it gives him a superficial knowledge of the men who

write about them. Reading to know the men gives him a superficial

knowledge, in the technical sense, of the things they write about. Let

him stand up and take his choice like a man between being superficial in

the letter and superficial in the spirit. Outside of his specialty,

however, being superficial in the letter will lead him to the most

knowledge. Man is the greatest topic. All other knowledge is a sub-topic

under a Man, and the stars themselves are as footnotes to the thoughts

of his heart.

"Things are not only related to other things," the soul of the man says,

"they are related to me." This relation of things to me is a mutual

affair, partly theirs and partly mine, and I am going to do my knowing,

act on my own knowledge, as if I were of some importance in it. Shall I

reckon with alkalis and acids and not reckon with myself? I say, "O

great Nature, O infinite Things, by the charter of my soul (and whether

I have a soul or not), I am not only going to know things, but things

shall know _me_. I stamp myself upon them. I shall receive from them and

love them and belong to them, but they shall be my things because they

are things, and they shall be to me, what I make them." "The sun is thy

plaything," my soul says to me, "O, mighty Child, the stars thy

companions. Stand up! Come out in the day! laugh the great winds to thy

side. The sea, if thou wilt have it so, is thy frog-pond and thou shalt

play with the lightnings in thy breast."

"Aye, aye," I cry, "I know it! The youth of the world seizes my whole

being. I hurrah like a child through all knowledge. I have taken all

heaven for my nursery. The world is my rocking-horse. Things are not

only for things, and my body in the end for things, but now I _live_, I

_live_, and things are for me!" "Aye, aye, and they shall be to thee,"

said my soul, "what thou biddest them."

And now I go forth quietly. "Do you not see, O mountains, that you must

reckon with me? I am the younger brother of the stars. I have faced

nations in my heart. Great bullying, hulking, half-dead centuries I have

faced. I have made them speak to me, and have dared against them. If

there is history, I also am history. If there are facts, I also am a

fact. If there are laws, it is one of the laws that I am one of the

laws."

All knowledge, I have said in my heart, instead of being a kind of vast

overseer-and-slave system for a man to lock himself up in, and throw

away his key in, becomes free, fluent, daring, and glorious the moment

it is conceived through persons and for persons and with persons.

Knowledge is not knowledge until it is conceived in relation to persons;

that is, in relation to all the facts. Persons are facts also and on the

whole the main facts, the facts which for seventy years, at least, or

until the planet is too cooled off, all other facts are for. The world

belongs to persons, is related to persons, and all the knowledge

thereof, and by heaven, and by my soul's delight, all the persons the

knowledge is related to shall belong to me, and the knowledge that is

related to them shall belong to me, the whole human round of it. The

spirit and rhythm and song of their knowledge, the thing in it that is

real to them, that sings out their lives to them, shall sing to me.