The Editor[2] 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,[3] 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.[4] Nothing has ever
more moved, more delighted, more refreshed me; nor has the influence
quite passed away. Kent's brief speech[5] 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_.[6] 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_,[7] 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.[8] 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"[9] 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_,[10] 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.[11] 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 gun-powder 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.[12] No more persuasive rabbi exists. 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_[13] 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,[14] 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[15] 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.[16] 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[17] 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 night 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;[18] 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_[19] 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,[20] 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[21] 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.