world that now yields itself, now conceals itself. It is a serious,
divine game.
Marcus Aurelius,[4] whose philosophy cannot be called futile, does
not hesitate, amid many austere counsels, to urge his friends to the
contemplation of those natural spectacles that are always rich in
meaning and suggestion. He writes:
Everything that comes forth from the works of nature has its grace
and beauty. The face wrinkles in middle age, the very ripe olive
is almost decomposed, but the fruit has, for all that, a unique
beauty. The bending of the corn toward the earth, the bushy brows
of the lion, the foam that drips from the mouth of the wild boar
and many other things, considered by themselves, are far from being
beautiful; nevertheless, since they are accessory to the works of
nature, they embellish them and add a certain charm. Thus a man
who has a sensitive soul, and who is capable of deep reflection,
will see in whatever exists in the world hardly anything that is
not pleasant in his eyes, since it is related in some way to the
totality of things.
This philosopher is right, as the poets are right. As our days permit
us, let us reflect and observe; let us never cease to see in each
fragment of the great whole a pure source of happiness. Like children
drawn into a marvelous dance, let us not relax our hold upon the hand
that sustains us and directs us.
SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS
1. Point out examples of figurative language.
2. Define what the writer means by “discovery.”
3. What is the value of discovery?
4. What joy does a child possess that many grown people do not have?
5. What criticism of modern education does the writer make?
6. What is the writer's ideal of education?
7. What sort of discoveries does the writer wish people to make?
8. What powers does the writer wish people to cultivate?
9. What sort of life does the writer admire?
10. What is the advantage of quoting from Marcus Aurelius?
SUBJECTS FOR WRITTEN IMITATION
1. Experimenting 11. Study
2. Travel 12. Collecting
3. Work 13. Science
4. Play 14. Astronomy
5. Recreation 15. The Weather
6. Exercise 16. The Stars
7. Walking 17. Clouds
8. Contests 18. Bees
9. Religion 19. Cats
10. Sympathy 20. Houses
DIRECTIONS FOR WRITING
Think of something you do that gives you real pleasure: that
is your subject. Your object is to lead other people to share in
what pleases you.
Intimate, as the author does, what various thrills may be experienced.
Write enthusiastically, and, if possible, with charm. Do not command
your reader, but entice him into the joys that you possess. Give a
supporting quotation from some one whose words will be respected.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] Marcus Aurelius (121-180). A Roman emperor and soldier, author of
_The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius_, a book of such wise and kindly
philosophy that it is still widely popular.
THE FURROWS[5]
By GILBERT K. CHESTERTON
_(1874). One of the greatest of living English essayists. He is
notable for originality of thought and expression. His habit of
turning ideas, as it were, “upside-down,” makes his work peculiarly
challenging. He has written under many types of literature.
Among his books are_ Robert Browning; Charles Dickens; Heretics;
Tremendous Trifles; Alarms and Discursions; The Victorian Age in
Literature.
=Many essays are like poems: from some subject that lies well within
common experience they spring to a height of emotion. Such is the
case with the essay that follows. Mr. Chesterton looked upon an
ordinary plowed field. At once his imagination took fire and he saw
in the field a significance, a beauty, that the everyday observer
might not note. It is the interpretation of what Carlyle calls “the
ideal in the actual” that makes Mr. Chesterton's essay so appealing.=
As I see the corn grow green all about my neighborhood, there rushes on
me for no reason in particular a memory of the winter. I say “rushes,”
for that is the very word for the old sweeping lines of the plowed
fields. From some accidental turn of a train-journey or a walking tour,
I saw suddenly the fierce rush of the furrows. The furrows are like
arrows; they fly along an arc of sky. They are like leaping animals;
they vault an inviolable hill and roll down the other side. They are
like battering battalions; they rush over a hill with flying squadrons
and carry it with a cavalry charge. They have all the air of Arabs
sweeping a desert, of rockets sweeping the sky, of torrents sweeping
a watercourse. Nothing ever seemed so living as those brown lines as
they shot sheer from the height of a ridge down to their still whirl
of the valley. They were swifter than arrows, fiercer than Arabs,
more riotous and rejoicing than rockets. And yet they were only thin
straight lines drawn with difficulty, like a diagram, by painful and
patient men. The men that plowed tried to plow straight; they had no
notion of giving great sweeps and swirls to the eye. Those cataracts of
cloven earth; they were done by the grace of God. I had always rejoiced
in them; but I had never found any reason for my joy. There are some
very clever people who cannot enjoy the joy unless they understand it.
There are other and even cleverer people who say that they lose the joy
the moment they do understand it. Thank God I was never clever, and
could always enjoy things when I understood them and when I didn't. I
can enjoy the orthodox Tory, though I could never understand him. I can
also enjoy the orthodox Liberal, though I understand him only too well.
* * * * *
But the splendor of furrowed fields is this: that like all brave
things they are made straight, and therefore they bend. In everything
that bows gracefully there must be an effort at stiffness. Bows are
beautiful when they bend only because they try to remain rigid; and
sword-blades can curl like silver ribbons only because they are certain
to spring straight again. But the same is true of every tough curve
of the tree-trunk, of every strong-backed bend of the bough; there is
hardly any such thing in Nature as a mere droop of weakness. Rigidity
yielding a little, like justice swayed by mercy, is the whole beauty of
the earth. The cosmos is a diagram just bent beautifully out of shape.
Everything tries to be straight; and everything just fortunately fails.
The foil may curve in the lunge; but there is nothing beautiful about
beginning the battle with a crooked foil. So the strict aim, the strong
doctrine, may give a little in the actual fight with facts; but that
is no reason for beginning with a weak doctrine or a twisted aim. Do
not be an opportunist; try to be theoretic at all the opportunities;
fate can be trusted to do all the opportunist part of it. Do not try to
bend, any more than the trees try to bend. Try to grow straight, and
life will bend you.
Alas! I am giving the moral before the fable; and yet I hardly think
that otherwise you could see all that I mean in that enormous vision
of the plowed hills. These great furrowed slopes are the oldest
architecture of man; the oldest astronomy was his guide, the oldest
botany his object. And for geometry, the mere word proves my case.
* * * * *
But when I looked at those torrents of plowed parallels, that great
rush of rigid lines, I seemed to see the whole huge achievement of
democracy. Here was more equality; but equality seen in bulk is more
superb than any supremacy. Equality free and flying, equality rushing
over hill and dale, equality charging the world--that was the meaning
of those military furrows, military in their identity, military in
their energy. They sculptured hill and dale with strong curves merely
because they did not mean to curve at all. They made the strong lines
of landscape with their stiffly driven swords of the soil. It is not
only nonsense, but blasphemy, to say that man has spoilt the country.
Man has created the country; it was his business, as the image of God.
No hill, covered with common scrub or patches of purple heath, could
have been so sublimely hilly as that ridge up to which the ranked
furrows rose like aspiring angels. No valley, confused with needless
cottages and towns, can have been so utterly valleyish as that abyss
into which the down-rushing furrows raged like demons into the swirling
pit.
It is the hard lines of discipline and equality that mark out a
landscape and give it all its mold and meaning. It is just because the
lines of the furrow are ugly and even that the landscape is living and
superb. As I think I have remarked before, the Republic is founded on
the plow.
SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS
1. Explain the figures of speech that occur in the essay.
2. Why did Mr. Chesterton use so many figures of speech?
3. How can you account for his poetic language?
4. What leads him to think the furrows beautiful?
5. What meaning does the writer find in the plowed field?
6. Explain in full the last paragraph of the essay.
7. In what respect is the Republic, “founded on the plow”?
8. What does the essay show concerning Mr. Chesterton's
personality?
9. In what respects is his style original?
10. By what means does he gain emphasis?
SUBJECTS FOR WRITTEN IMITATION
1. A River 11. A House
2. A Road 12. A Book
3. A Cloud 13. A Bridge
4. The Sunshine 14. A Railroad Track
5. A Stone Wall 15. An Airplane
6. A Horse 16. A Flag
7. A Tree 17. A Pen
8. A Garden 18. A Valley
9. A Mountain 19. A High Building
10. The Wind 20. A Telescope
DIRECTIONS FOR WRITING
Take for your subject anything that is extremely familiar. Show
your reader both the physical beauty that any one may observe and
also the inner beauty that the average person is not so likely to
note. Write in such a way that you will show your real emotions
towards your subject. Make your essay rise steadily in power
and let your last paragraph present the thought that you wish to
leave with your reader.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] From “Alarms and Discursions,” by Gilbert K. Chesterton. Copyright,
1911, by Dodd, Mead and Company.
MEDITATION AND IMAGINATION[6]
By HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE
_(1846-1916). An American essayist and journalist, for many years
editor of The Outlook. His literary work was so important that he
was made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Among his books are_ Nature in New England; My Study Fire; Short
Studies in Literature; Essays on Books and Culture; The Life of the
Spirit; Japan To-day and To-morrow.
=Essayists are natural lovers of books. In the records of human
experience they find subjects that stimulate the imagination,
arouse the sentiments, and lead to meditation.=
=Almost every essayist draws largely, for the better illustration of
his thought, from the field of literature. To him the characters
of history or of fiction are almost as real as those of to-day. In
the realm of books the essayist sees an expansion of the world in
which he lives. In addition, he makes the acquaintance of others
who have meditated on the many interests of life. He looks upon
authors, living or dead, as upon a company of friends. In their
companionship he gains unceasing delight.=
=Mr. Hamilton Wright Mabie sets forward very pleasingly the way in
which a reader may gain the most from books.=
There is a book in the British Museum which would have, for many
people, a greater value than any other single volume in the world;
it is a copy of Florio's translation of Montaigne,[7] and it bears
Shakespeare's autograph on a flyleaf. There are other books which
must have had the same ownership; among them were Holinshed's
“Chronicles,”[8] and North 's translation of Plutarch.[9] Shakespeare
would have laid posterity under still greater obligations, if that were
possible, if in some autobiographic mood he had told us how he read
these books; for never, surely, were books read with greater insight
and with more complete absorption. Indeed, the fruits of this reading
were so rich and ripe that the books from which their juices came
seem but dry husks and shells in comparison. The reader drained the
writer dry of every particle of suggestiveness, and then recreated the
material in new and imperishable forms. The process of reproduction was
individual, and is not to be shared by others; it was the expression
of that rare and inexplicable personal energy which we call genius;
but the process of absorption may be shared by all who care to submit
to the discipline which it involves. It is clear that Shakespeare read
in such a way as to possess what he read; he not only remembered it,
but he incorporated it into himself. No other kind of reading could
have brought the East out of its grave, with its rich and languorous
atmosphere steeping the senses in the charm of Cleopatra, or recalled
the massive and powerfully organized life of Rome about the person
of the great Cæsar. Shakespeare read his books with such insight and
imagination that they became part of himself; and so far as this
process is concerned, the reader of to-day can follow in his steps.
The majority of people have not learned this secret; they read for
information or for refreshment; they do not read for enrichment.
Feeding one's nature at all the sources of life, browsing at will
on all the uplands of knowledge and thought, do not bear the fruit
of acquirement only; they put us into personal possession of the
vitality, the truth, and the beauty about us. A man may know the plays
of Shakespeare accurately as regards their order, form, construction,
and language, and yet remain almost without knowledge of what
Shakespeare was at heart, and of his significance in the history of the
human soul. It is this deeper knowledge, however, which is essential
for culture; for culture is such an appropriation of knowledge that it
becomes a part of ourselves. It is no longer something added by the
memory; it is something possessed by the soul. A pedant is formed by
his memory; a man of culture is formed by the habit of meditation, and
by the constant use of the imagination. An alert and curious man goes
through the world taking note of all that passes under his eyes, and
collects a great mass of information, which is in no sense incorporated
into his own mind, but remains a definite territory outside his own
nature, which he has annexed. A man of receptive mind and heart, on
the other hand, meditating on what he sees, and getting at its meaning
by the divining-rod of the imagination, discovers the law behind the
phenomena, the truth behind the fact, the vital force which flows
through all things, and gives them their significance. The first man
gains information; the second gains culture. The pedant pours out an
endless succession of facts with a monotonous uniformity of emphasis,
and exhausts while he instructs; the man of culture gives us a few
facts, luminous in their relation to one another, and freshens and
stimulates by bringing us into contact with ideas and with life.
To get at the heart of books we must live with and in them; we must
make them our constant companions; we must turn them over and over
in thought, slowly penetrating their innermost meaning; and when
we possess their thought we must work it into our own thought. The
reading of a real book ought to be an event in one's history; it ought
to enlarge the vision, deepen the base of conviction, and add to the
reader whatever knowledge, insight, beauty, and power it contains. It
is possible to spend years of study on what may be called the externals
of the “Divine Comedy,” and remain unaffected in nature by this
contact with one of the masterpieces of the spirit of man as well as
of the art of literature. It is also possible to so absorb Dante's[10]
thought and so saturate one's self with the life of the poem as to add
to one's individual capital of thought and experience all that the poet
discerned in that deep heart of his and wrought out of that intense and
tragic experience. But this permanent and personal possession can be
acquired by those alone who brood over the poem and recreate it within
themselves by the play of the imagination upon it. A visitor was shown
into Mr. Lowell's[11] room one evening not many years ago, and found
him barricaded behind rows of open books; they covered the table and
were spread out on the floor in an irregular but magic circle. “Still
studying Dante?” said the intruder into the workshop of as true a man
of culture as we have known on this continent. “Yes,” was the prompt
reply; “always studying Dante.”
A man's intellectual character is determined by what he habitually
thinks about. The mind cannot always be consciously directed to
definite ends; it has hours of relaxation. There are many hours in
the life of the most strenuous and arduous man when the mind goes
its own way and thinks its own thoughts. These times of relaxation,
when the mind follows its own bent, are perhaps the most fruitful and
significant periods in a rich and noble intellectual life. The real
nature, the deeper instincts of the man, come out in these moments, as
essential refinement and genuine breeding are revealed when the man
is off guard and acts and speaks instinctively. It is possible to be
mentally active and intellectually poor and sterile; to drive the mind
along certain courses of work, but to have no deep life of thought
behind these calculated activities. The life of the mind is rich and
fruitful only when thought, released from specific tasks, flies at
once to great themes as its natural objects of interest and love, its
natural sources of refreshment and strength. Under all our definite
activities there runs a stream of meditation; and the character of that
meditation determines our wealth or our poverty, our productiveness or
our sterility.
This instinctive action of the mind, although largely unconscious, is
by no means irresponsible; it may be directed and controlled; it may
be turned, by such control, into a Pactolian stream,[12] enriching
us while we rest and ennobling us while we play. For the mind may be
trained to meditate on great themes instead of giving itself up to idle
reverie; when it is released from work it may concern itself with the
highest things as readily as with those which are insignificant and
paltry. Whoever can command his meditations in the streets, along the
country roads, on the train, in the hours of relaxation, can enrich
himself for all time without effort or fatigue; for it is as easy and
restful to think about great things as about small ones. A certain
lover of books made this discovery years ago, and has turned it to
account with great profit to himself. He thought he discovered in the
faces of certain great writers a meditative quality full of repose and
suggestive of a constant companionship with the highest themes. It
seemed to him that these thinkers, who had done so much to liberate
his own thought, must have dwelt habitually with noble ideas; that in
every leisure hour they must have turned instinctively to those deep
things which concern most closely the life of men. The vast majority
of men are so absorbed in dealing with material that they appear to be
untouched by the general questions of life; but these general questions
are the habitual concern of the men who think. In such men the mind,
released from specific tasks, turns at once and by preference to these
great themes, and by quiet meditation feeds and enriches the very
soul of the thinker. And the quality of this meditation determines
whether the nature shall be productive or sterile; whether a man shall
be merely a logician, or a creative force in the world. Following
this hint, this lover of books persistently trained himself, in his
leisure hours, to think over the books he was reading; to meditate
on particular passages, and, in the case of dramas and novels, to
look at characters from different sides. It was not easy at first,
and it was distinctively work; but it became instinctive at last, and
consequently it became play. The stream of thought, once set in a given
direction, flows now of its own gravitation; and reverie, instead
of being idle and meaningless, has become rich and fruitful. If one
subjects “The Tempest,”[13] for instance, to this process, he soon
learns it by heart; first he feels its beauty; then he gets whatever
definite information there is in it; as he reflects, its constructive
unity grows clear to him, and he sees its quality as a piece of art;
and finally its rich and noble disclosure of the poet's conception of
life grows upon him until the play belongs to him almost as much as it
belonged to Shakespeare. This process of meditation habitually brought
to bear on one's reading lays bare the very heart of the book in hand,
and puts one in complete possession of it.
This process of meditation, if it is to bear its richest fruit, must
be accompanied by a constant play of the imagination, than which there
is no faculty more readily cultivated or more constantly neglected.
Some readers see only a flat surface as they read; others find the
book a door into a real world, and forget that they are dealing with
a book. The real readers get beyond the book, into the life which it
describes. They see the island in “The Tempest”; they hear the tumult
of the storm; they mingle with the little company who, on that magical
stage, reflect all the passions of men and are brought under the spell
of the highest powers of man's spirit. It is a significant fact that in
the lives of men of genius the reading of two or three books has often
provoked an immediate and striking expansion of thought and power.
Samuel Johnson,[14] a clumsy boy in his father's book-shop, searching
for apples, came upon Petrarch,[15] and was destined henceforth to be
a man of letters. John Keats,[16] apprenticed to an apothecary, read
Spenser's “Epithalamium”[17] one golden afternoon in company with his
friend, Cowden Clarke,[18] and from that hour was a poet by the grace
of God. In both cases the readers read with the imagination, or their
own natures would not have kindled with so sudden a flash. The torch
is passed on to those only whose hands are outstretched to receive it.
To read with the imagination, one must take time to let the figures
reform in his own mind; he must see them with great distinctness and
realize them with great definiteness. Benjamin Franklin[19] tells us,
in that “Autobiography” which was one of our earliest and remains one
of our most genuine pieces of writing, that when he discovered his
need of a larger vocabulary he took some of the tales which he found
in an odd volume of the “Spectator”[20] and turned them into verse;
“and after a time, when I had pretty well forgotten the prose, turned
them back again. I also sometimes jumbled my collections of hints into
confusion, and after some weeks endeavoured to reduce them into the
best order before I began to form the full sentences and compleat the
paper.” Such a patient recasting of material for the ends of verbal
exactness and accuracy suggests ways in which the imagination may deal
with characters and scenes in order to stimulate and foster its own
activity. It is well to recall at frequent intervals the story we read
in some dramatist, poet, or novelist, in order that the imagination may
set it before us again in all its rich vitality. It is well also as we
read to insist on seeing the picture as well as the words.
It is as easy to see the bloodless duke before the portrait of “My
Last Duchess,” in Browning's[21] little masterpiece, to take in all the
accessories and carry away with us a vivid and lasting impression, as
it is to follow with the eye the succession of words. In this way we
possess the poem, and make it serve the ends of culture.
SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS
1. What did Shakespeare gain from the reading of books?
2. What wrong ways of reading does Mr. Mabie point out?
3. What is the difference between a pedant and a man of culture?
4. What does Mr. Mabie mean by the expression, “To get at the heart
of books”?
5. What should a book do for a reader?
6. Why does Mr. Mabie tell the anecdote of Mr. Lowell?
7. Explain the difference between helpful meditation and idle
reverie.
8. What characteristics may be gained from great writers?
9. What does Mr. Mabie mean by saying that one should read
imaginatively?
10. What does the essay show concerning the personality of Mr.
Mabie?
SUBJECTS FOR WRITTEN IMITATION