The Editor {75b} has somewhat insidiously laid a trap for his
correspondents, the question put appearing at first so innocent, truly
cutting so deep. It is not, indeed, until after some reconnaissance and
review that the writer awakes to find himself engaged upon something in
the nature of autobiography, or, perhaps worse, upon a chapter in the
life of that little, beautiful brother whom we once all had, and whom we
have all lost and mourned, the man we ought to have been, the man we
hoped to be. But when word has been passed (even to an editor), it
should, if possible, be kept; and if sometimes I am wise and say too
little, and sometimes weak and say too much, the blame must lie at the
door of the person who entrapped me.
The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works
of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must
afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson, which
he must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify
the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us
to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience,
not as we can see it for ourselves, but with a singular change—that
monstrous, consuming _ego_ of ours being, for the nonce, struck out. To
be so, they must be reasonably true to the human comedy; and any work
that is so serves the turn of instruction. But the course of our
education is answered best by those poems and romances where we breathe a
magnanimous atmosphere of thought and meet generous and pious characters.
Shakespeare has served me best. Few living friends have had upon me an
influence so strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. The last character,
already well beloved in the reading, I had the good fortune to see, I
must think, in an impressionable hour, played by Mrs. Scott Siddons.
Nothing has ever more moved, more delighted, more refreshed me; nor has
the influence quite passed away. Kent’s brief speech over the dying Lear
had a great effect upon my mind, and was the burthen of my reflections
for long, so profoundly, so touchingly generous did it appear in sense,
so overpowering in expression. Perhaps my dearest and best friend
outside of Shakespeare is D’Artagnan—the elderly D’Artagnan of the
_Vicomte de Bragelonne_. I know not a more human soul, nor, in his way,
a finer; I shall be very sorry for the man who is so much of a pedant in
morals that he cannot learn from the Captain of Musketeers. Lastly, I
must name the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, a book that breathes of every
beautiful and valuable emotion.
But of works of art little can be said; their influence is profound and
silent, like the influence of nature; they mould by contact; we drink
them up like water, and are bettered, yet know not how. It is in books
more specifically didactic that we can follow out the effect, and
distinguish and weigh and compare. A book which has been very
influential upon me fell early into my hands, and so may stand first,
though I think its influence was only sensible later on, and perhaps
still keeps growing, for it is a book not easily outlived: the _Essais_
of Montaigne. That temperate and genial picture of life is a great gift
to place in the hands of persons of to-day; they will find in these
smiling pages a magazine of heroism and wisdom, all of an antique strain;
they will have their ‘linen decencies’ and excited orthodoxies fluttered,
and will (if they have any gift of reading) perceive that these have not
been fluttered without some excuse and ground of reason; and (again if
they have any gift of reading) they will end by seeing that this old
gentleman was in a dozen ways a finer fellow, and held in a dozen ways a
nobler view of life, than they or their contemporaries.
The next book, in order of time, to influence me, was the New Testament,
and in particular the Gospel according to St. Matthew. I believe it
would startle and move any one if they could make a certain effort of
imagination and read it freshly like a book, not droningly and dully like
a portion of the Bible. Any one would then be able to see in it those
truths which we are all courteously supposed to know and all modestly
refrain from applying. But upon this subject it is perhaps better to be
silent.
I come next to Whitman’s _Leaves of Grass_, a book of singular service, a
book which tumbled the world upside down for me, blew into space a
thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion, and, having thus shaken
my tabernacle of lies, set me back again upon a strong foundation of all
the original and manly virtues. But it is, once more, only a book for
those who have the gift of reading. I will be very frank—I believe it is
so with all good books except, perhaps, fiction. The average man lives,
and must live, so wholly in convention, that gunpowder charges of the
truth are more apt to discompose than to invigorate his creed. Either he
cries out upon blasphemy and indecency, and crouches the closer round
that little idol of part-truths and part-conveniences which is the
contemporary deity, or he is convinced by what is new, forgets what is
old, and becomes truly blasphemous and indecent himself. New truth is
only useful to supplement the old; rough truth is only wanted to expand,
not to destroy, our civil and often elegant conventions. He who cannot
judge had better stick to fiction and the daily papers. There he will
get little harm, and, in the first at least, some good.
Close upon the back of my discovery of Whitman, I came under the
influence of Herbert Spencer. No more persuasive rabbi exists, and few
better. How much of his vast structure will bear the touch of time, how
much is clay and how much brass, it were too curious to inquire. But his
words, if dry, are always manly and honest; there dwells in his pages a
spirit of highly abstract joy, plucked naked like an algebraic symbol but
still joyful; and the reader will find there a _caput mortuum_ of piety,
with little indeed of its loveliness, but with most of its essentials;
and these two qualities make him a wholesome, as his intellectual vigour
makes him a bracing, writer. I should be much of a hound if I lost my
gratitude to Herbert Spencer.
_Goethe’s Life_, by Lewes, had a great importance for me when it first
fell into my hands—a strange instance of the partiality of man’s good and
man’s evil. I know no one whom I less admire than Goethe; he seems a
very epitome of the sins of genius, breaking open the doors of private
life, and wantonly wounding friends, in that crowning offence of
_Werther_, and in his own character a mere pen-and-ink Napoleon,
conscious of the rights and duties of superior talents as a Spanish
inquisitor was conscious of the rights and duties of his office. And yet
in his fine devotion to his art, in his honest and serviceable friendship
for Schiller, what lessons are contained! Biography, usually so false to
its office, does here for once perform for us some of the work of
fiction, reminding us, that is, of the truly mingled tissue of man’s
nature, and how huge faults and shining virtues cohabit and persevere in
the same character. History serves us well to this effect, but in the
originals, not in the pages of the popular epitomiser, who is bound, by
the very nature of his task, to make us feel the difference of epochs
instead of the essential identity of man, and even in the originals only
to those who can recognise their own human virtues and defects in strange
forms, often inverted and under strange names, often interchanged.
Martial is a poet of no good repute, and it gives a man new thoughts to
read his works dispassionately, and find in this unseemly jester’s
serious passages the image of a kind, wise, and self-respecting
gentleman. It is customary, I suppose, in reading Martial, to leave out
these pleasant verses; I never heard of them, at least, until I found
them for myself; and this partiality is one among a thousand things that
help to build up our distorted and hysterical conception of the great
Roman Empire.
This brings us by a natural transition to a very noble book—the
_Meditations_ of Marcus Aurelius. The dispassionate gravity, the noble
forgetfulness of self, the tenderness of others, that are there expressed
and were practised on so great a scale in the life of its writer, make
this book a book quite by itself. No one can read it and not be moved.
Yet it scarcely or rarely appeals to the feelings—those very mobile,
those not very trusty parts of man. Its address lies further back: its
lesson comes more deeply home; when you have read, you carry away with
you a memory of the man himself; it is as though you had touched a loyal
hand, looked into brave eyes, and made a noble friend; there is another
bond on you thenceforward, binding you to life and to the love of virtue.
Wordsworth should perhaps come next. Every one has been influenced by
Wordsworth, and it is hard to tell precisely how. A certain innocence, a
rugged austerity of joy, a sight of the stars, ‘the silence that is in
the lonely hills,’ something of the cold thrill of dawn, cling to his
work and give it a particular address to what is best in us. I do not
know that you learn a lesson; you need not—Mill did not—agree with any
one of his beliefs; and yet the spell is cast. Such are the best
teachers; a dogma learned is only a new error—the old one was perhaps as
good; but a spirit communicated is a perpetual possession. These best
teachers climb beyond teaching to the plane of art; it is themselves, and
what is best in themselves, that they communicate.
I should never forgive myself if I forgot _The Egoist_. It is art, if
you like, but it belongs purely to didactic art, and from all the novels
I have read (and I have read thousands) stands in a place by itself.
Here is a Nathan for the modern David; here is a book to send the blood
into men’s faces. Satire, the angry picture of human faults, is not
great art; we can all be angry with our neighbour; what we want is to be
shown, not his defects, of which we are too conscious, but his merits, to
which we are too blind. And _The Egoist_ is a satire; so much must be
allowed; but it is a satire of a singular quality, which tells you
nothing of that obvious mote, which is engaged from first to last with
that invisible beam. It is yourself that is hunted down; these are your
own faults that are dragged into the day and numbered, with lingering
relish, with cruel cunning and precision. A young friend of Mr.
Meredith’s (as I have the story) came to him in an agony. ‘This is too
bad of you,’ he cried. ‘Willoughby is me!’ ‘No, my dear fellow,’ said
the author; ‘he is all of us.’
I have read _The Egoist_ five or six times myself, and I mean to read it
again; for I am like the young friend of the anecdote—I think Willoughby
an unmanly but a very serviceable exposure of myself.
I suppose, when I am done, I shall find that I have forgotten much that
was most influential, as I see already I have forgotten Thoreau, and
Hazlitt, whose paper ‘On the Spirit of Obligations’ was a turning-point
in my life, and Penn, whose little book of aphorisms had a brief but
strong effect on me, and Mitford’s _Tales of Old Japan_, wherein I
learned for the first time the proper attitude of any rational man to his
country’s laws—a secret found, and kept, in the Asiatic islands. That I
should commemorate all is more than I can hope or the Editor could ask.
It will be more to the point, after having said so much upon improving
books, to say a word or two about the improvable reader. The gift of
reading, as I have called it, is not very common, nor very generally
understood. It consists, first of all, in a vast intellectual
endowment—a free grace, I find I must call it—by which a man rises to
understand that he is not punctually right, nor those from whom he
differs absolutely wrong. He may hold dogmas; he may hold them
passionately; and he may know that others hold them but coldly, or hold
them differently, or hold them not at all. Well, if he has the gift of
reading, these others will be full of meat for him. They will see the
other side of propositions and the other side of virtues. He need not
change his dogma for that, but he may change his reading of that dogma,
and he must supplement and correct his deductions from it. A human
truth, which is always very much a lie, hides as much of life as it
displays. It is men who hold another truth, or, as it seems to us,
perhaps, a dangerous lie, who can extend our restricted field of
knowledge, and rouse our drowsy consciences. Something that seems quite
new, or that seems insolently false or very dangerous, is the test of a
reader. If he tries to see what it means, what truth excuses it, he has
the gift, and let him read. If he is merely hurt, or offended, or
exclaims upon his author’s folly, he had better take to the daily papers;
he will never be a reader.
And here, with the aptest illustrative force, after I have laid down my
part-truth, I must step in with its opposite. For, after all, we are
vessels of a very limited content. Not all men can read all books; it is
only in a chosen few that any man will find his appointed food; and the
fittest lessons are the most palatable, and make themselves welcome to
the mind. A writer learns this early, and it is his chief support; he
goes on unafraid, laying down the law; and he is sure at heart that most
of what he says is demonstrably false, and much of a mingled strain, and
some hurtful, and very little good for service; but he is sure besides
that when his words fall into the hands of any genuine reader, they will
be weighed and winnowed, and only that which suits will be assimilated;
and when they fall into the hands of one who cannot intelligently read,
they come there quite silent and inarticulate, falling upon deaf ears,
and his secret is kept as if he had not written.