To the one who drinks of the wisdom of Clio, the Muse of history, there
will come manifold riches other than the accrued satisfaction of
well-weighed political judgment. A knowledge of history, in its
broadest sense, may well be said to be the essential foundation of all
cultural education. The movements in science, philosophy, music,
literature and the plastic arts are all inseparably intertwined, and
they have as their controlling background the political actions of men
and the economic forces that move peoples.
It is as impossible to thoroughly understand the poetry of Wordsworth,
Shelley or Byron without having an appreciation of the political and
economic events of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Era, as it is to
conceive of the Epics of Homer without the Trojan War. The music of
Bach and Haydn has as its foundation the reasonableness in religion,
philosophy and political thought of the eighteenth century, as the music
of Wagner and Chopin the unreason and rampant individualism of the early
nineteenth. The books of the Cromwellian period reflect the
illiberality and severity of the Puritan parliaments: the books of the
Restoration reflect the French upbringing of Charles II. Wars and
rumors of war, famine and years of plenty, new discoveries and great
invasions make up the life of the world, and it is of this life that
literature and music are made. We could indefinitely cite instances of
the influence that history has had upon the arts, but in this chapter
let us consider history as an art, history as literature.
No historian who deserves the name should write "dry" histories. The
greatest historian is he who has an inspired passion for delving into
the past, and the ability to interpret it in its living, human aspects.
The "scientific" student who considers his mission that of arriving at
the precise facts is not an historian but a "dry-as-dust" recorder. He
is useful, however, in providing the material that will enable the true
historian to cast illuminating spotlights upon the centuries that have
gone before. Mr. William Roscoe Thayer, one of the most distinguished of
our American historical writers, tells us that "Hi'_story_'--let us not
forget--is five-sevenths _story_." The historians whom we want to read
are those who tell us the dramatic _story_ of the past. Two-sevenths of
their ability should, perhaps, be their infinite patience and
intellectual honesty in gathering, sorting and weighing documents and
other sources of information, but the other five-sevenths must be that
ability which is the genius of the story teller. Someone has said that
every historian must be his own "dry-as-dust," his own bespectacled
investigator of authentic facts,--if the rest of him is an impassioned
teller of tales we have a supreme historian. Gibbon, before the days of
elaborately prepared source books, before the days of thoroughly indexed
libraries, ransacked the learned treasuries of Europe and Asia Minor for
information; to this infinite patience there was added in his character
the gifts of the artist and the dreamer. The result, after ceaseless
labor, was the monumental, yet fascinating and comparatively reliable,
"The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," a book that is acknowledged
the acme of historical perfection.
A few months ago, a woman of intellect, a wide traveller, an omnivorous
reader, a mother of a large family, an efficient manager in whatever she
undertook, was asked the name of the book that had made the most
impression upon her life. Without a moment's hesitation she replied,
Carlyle's "History of the French Revolution." Upon questioning her, we
found that she had read the two large volumes three times, and with each
rereading there had awakened in her the sentiments aroused by the
greatest dramatic tragedy, the most intense human story.
Carlyle was not a scientific historian, he did not write histories for
other historians; he wrote as one whom God directed to put upon pages of
flame the characters, the drama, the magnificent incidents, the
cruelties, the braveries, the cowardices, the heroisms of "the truth
that is stranger than fiction." It is indeed more interesting to read
of what men have done as depicted by the historian, than what they might
have done as depicted by the second-rate novelist!
If you have not read the "French Revolution," read it at once! The
author has taken the most dramatic period in modern times and he has
treated it as it deserves. It has the power of tragedy, whose mission
is, according to Aristotle, "to purify the soul through fear and
terror." Your soul will be enlightened, you will be made to feel, as
all great history makes you feel, that life is played upon a wondrous
highway, and that the sights and works upon the way are of the sort to
make you live in a trembling condition of wonder and expectancy. The
city crowds will have new meaning: men and women, for having once been
participants in the terrible cataclysm of one hundred and twenty year
ago, are still of the stuff to accomplish strange deeds, and to fulfil
undreamed-of destinies.
Has it occurred to you what a relatively small and insignificant number
of familiar acquaintances we are able in our daily life to have? How
many men and women do you know who have guided the destinies of nations,
led great armies into the field, or are to meet death in their attempts
to overthrow the tyranny of a despot or a bigot? In history we may meet
them, and become acquainted with their problems and struggles. The past
is a select drawing-room into which we all may enter. We may derive
inspiration from the same wells that prompted the Crusaders to set out
time after time in their well-nigh fatal effort to drive the Moslems
from Jerusalem; we may absorb the spirit that moved Cromwell's
Ironsides; we may appreciate the pettiness of our own weaknesses and
vexations in comparison with the odds against which some of History's
heroes have fought and conquered. It is pleasant to live in the court
of Louis XIV and to talk with kings and princes through the pages of St.
Simon's "Memoirs"; it is a spiritual tonic and excitement to follow the
careers of the Indian Missionaries through Parkman's glowing pages! It
is in truth more downright "fun" than doing most things!
Undoubtedly it is true that Napoleon's ruthless ambition brought
devastation to the lands that he conquered, and sorrow to the nation
whose young men he led to the cannon's mouth, and yet I sometimes think
that greater than the Code Napoleon, which he instituted, is the
inspiration that his career has been to the young men of all countries.
How many boys have dreamed their vision of the future when following the
work of the little Corsican, who at the age of twenty-seven led the
armies of France across the Alps to crumple in a series of whirlwind
campaigns the proud power of Austria. And there was William Pitt, the
Younger, who at twenty-four became Prime Minister of England, one-armed
and half-blind Nelson at Trafalgar Bay, Lincoln, the rail-splitting
President, Olive, Garibaldi, Hampden, and how many another has been a
light that beckons our future soldiers and statesmen?
In every epoch of history we will find new horizons opened that will
enrich and broaden our daily life; in every vital struggle we will find
individuals and peoples who have acted in such a way that we should hope
to be guided by them in our struggles and ambitions; in the failures of
the past we may obtain moral lessons for the present and the future; in
cooerdinating our forces and forming our judgments we will obtain a
training for our minds which will be of use to every man in carrying out
the enterprises in which he is engaged.
Dr. Johnson well said that the traveller brings from his journeys that
which he brings to them. It is indeed pitiful to be in Paris and to see
countless American tourists rushing about "seeing Paris." What a
difference there is between those who bring to the storied city on the
Seine a familiarity with her past, and those who bring nothing but time
and money to spend. For the first, there are human dramas lurking in
the shadows of Notre Dame; Quasimodo, the strange dwarf in Hugo's great
romance, still swings on the bells of the belfry; the narrow streets and
turbulent cafes may still contain the instigators of the Reign of Terror
and their shouting mobs of "sans culottes"; Camille Desmoulins may still
be visualized in the Cafe Royal plucking the leaves to make his tricolor
cockade. At every turn, in every ancient building, there are rich
historic memories that may feed the traveller who has prepared himself.
And the others, to whom history is a closed book! How barren and
incompetent are their wanderings in Paris, London, Vienna, or any other
old world city! To think that one can appreciate the historic gathering
places of the human race without having knowledge of their past is as
absurd as to believe one knows the woods when one cannot appreciate the
beauty and wonder of the wild life that makes of the woods its dwelling
place. Go among the trees some day with one who has studied and
absorbed "the woodnotes varied"! Wander about the Quais of Paris, or
the Temple Inns of London, with a man who has read history with a human
interpretation, and consider upon your return the increased wealth, you
carry in your mind!
We cannot all be travellers, but it is always safe to store up material
against a possible future; although I have never read far into the
history of China, and though there is little possibility of my ever
visiting the land of ancient civilizations, I am sure I could derive
much pleasure and obtain a better understanding of our Occident if I
followed a course of reading upon the varied fortunes of the different
dynasties that have ruled the richly storied Eastern nation.
Our history books teach us valuable lessons in the art of living,--and
this is assuredly the most important of the arts! As a man who brings
something upon his travels besides his pocket-book and luggage comes
home with rich experiences and memories, so does the man who approaches
life with something more than a hungry stomach obtain from life more
than he otherwise would. The greater variety of experiences we have,
the more we know of the affairs of men, the richer our understanding of
the forces that have ruled the world, the more replete with ecstatic
living is our daily life. If the best of life is to be won by living in
the world keen and alive to everything that moves, or thinks, or
glitters, a great share of riches must go to the man who has studied and
thought in other realms than those which immediately surround his own
dwelling house.
In Philadelphia I sometimes watch the hurrying crowds of business men go
scurrying underneath the shadow of Independence Hall. I wonder if these
crowds are in any true sense aware of the important and heroic deeds
that were accomplished in that building. I am sure that if they did
their movements beneath that shadow would be rich in living experience.
At political conventions, I sometimes wonder whether the delegates are
aware of the vast consequence of the long governmental tradition which
they, as delegates, have been called upon to uphold, and I feel sure
that those who do, fulfil their responsibilities with a quickened sense
of their weight and human moment.
On the observation car of a twentieth-century flyer the road-bed is so
smooth, the rails so even, the power so terrific, that the past as an
industrial development that has cast aside the stage coach, the prairie
schooner, the pony express, makes one alive to the romance of the
present. Down on the beach of a popular New Jersey summer resort when
the water is dotted black with bobbing civilized bathers, look out over
the waves and wonder at the change of but four hundred years. In a
moment your mind can travel back to the Spanish castle and see Columbus
begging the gold that would enable him to equip his ships to sail
westward into the unknown sea. Romance cannot be dead so long as men
work, and strive, and play.
There is an art in reading history as there is an art in writing it.
The writer who tells us of a battle with the same lack of imagination as
the recorder who prepares mortality statistics must be compared to the
reader who crams his mind full of dates and uncooerdinated facts without
drawing from them the riches and lessons of experience. The true
historian and the proper reader of history must find in the past a world
of enlightenment, an enrichment that magnifies, clarifies, and makes
living the present. It is better to have studied a minute epoch, the
history of your county or town, with a human understanding than to have
unintelligently digested the careers of a hundred heroes, the military
movements in fifty campaigns.
Do not turn from the eight bulky volumes of Gibbon's masterpiece with
the fear that they are dry and useless, but begin them with the
determination of finding an enlightenment to your vision of inestimable
value in "the art of living." The dates of battles, the names of
individuals, the data about which life revolved, are only of value in
that they are the framework upon which you can hang the true meaning of
the past--the evolving germ of the present. The Song of Solomon is not
to be read because it is the Bible, but rather because it is a love song
of which the world can never grow weary; Motley's "History of the Dutch
Republic" is not to be read because it is recommended in the schools and
colleges, but because in it you will find the unrolling of a human drama
that will quicken your pulse and strengthen your faith in men.
Read the record of the past with the desire of obtaining a deeper
understanding, an enlarged vision, an inspired ideal, a rich experience,
and you will have become proficient in the art of reading history. You
must have often thought upon the difficulty of determining exactly what
you want. What do you desire life and your exertions to give you? In
reading history perhaps you will be helped by finding out what Christ
wanted when he died upon the cross, what the Pilgrims wanted when they
left comfort and sailed to strange lands, what Stanley wanted when he
buried himself in darkest Africa. Clio has had many wooers, from
Thucydides to Carlyle and George Trevelyan, and their offerings form a
treasure trove which must not be neglected.
*CHAPTER VI*
*THE POET AND THE READER*
I myself but write one or two indicative words for
the future,
I but advance a moment, only to wheel and hurry
back in the darkness.
I am a man who, sauntering along, without fully
stopping, turns a casual look upon you, and then
averts his face,
Leaving it to you to prove and define it,
Expecting the main things from you.
WALT WHITMAN
What is poetry to you or me, as we rush to make the trolley car or
suburban train? To get to the office on time seems the main chance, and
yet returning home in the evening are we so tired that the funny page of
the evening paper fulfils our entire intellectual and spiritual need?
In asking this let me ask another question. Day in and day out, in work
and play, in sorrow and anxiety, in pleasure and enthusiasm, what is
life worth to you and me? We Americans are not much given to
philosophizing about life, we prefer to live it. Whereas the
intelligent Russian argues about the reason for and the meaning of
action, Americans are prone without thought to throw themselves into the
mill of violent living, to go at top speed until the gears break down,
and then sometimes to say with Kipling's Galley Slave,
--whate'er comes after, I have lived and toiled with Men!
Our answer to the question "What is the meaning of life?" is simply "The
living of it." "Work while you work, and play while you play" may be
considered our national motto. In short, for every minute of our
existence we want to have "sixty seconds' worth of distance run." To
live acutely is our pleasure, to work our hearts out and revel in the
doing of it is our end. It is thus, to use an expressive phrase of the
vernacular, that "we prove something." And it is this fact which
strengthens the paradox that the American, the man of action and bustle,
must draw his greatest source of living in the realization of the spirit
of singers.
The poet is he who has drunk more deeply at the well of experience than
has his fellow men. Many a profound poet never writes a verse, for when
a man of temperament is deeply moved he writes a poem within his own
heart. It is for some to transcribe their emotions into words whereby
their feelings may be communicated from one man to another; but it is
for others to be without the gift of verbal expression and the poems
must remain within. How many times in life is your soul afire with
enthusiasm, drunk with beauty, stricken with sadness, or overflowing
with the meaning or portent of experience? At those times you are a
poet, whether or not you transcribe the reflection of your heart upon
the written page. The man who sings within is a singer whether or not
he gives his song verbal utterance. These hours of poetic ecstasy make
life a thing to be cherished. The sources of such ecstasy are
manifold--the love of man and woman, or parent and children, religious
communion with the Spirit, comradeship, work, pursuance of duty, speed,
health, beauty, the joy of the builder or artist, attainment to a higher
understanding, sadness, hope,--from such springs come the bubbles of the
wine of life, heartening the cherished hours. Our greatest poems are
those that have never been written--true experience is poetry, and
experience is an open door to life.
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untraveled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
The poetry found in books is experience, directly or indirectly, through
the agency of verbal expression, transferred to the printed page. The
great writers of poems are those who have undergone spiritual
experiences of greater intensity than those which come within the range
of us lesser mortals. In their poems we partake of their life, of their
ecstasy in the presence of beauty, of the richness of their imaginings,
of the depth of their spiritual natures.
You and I, when we hear the wood thrush sing, are moved with the music
of the notes, and are possibly carried away into the bosky woods where
the richly patterned bird in his evening song pours his heart to Heaven;
but when Keats hears the melody of the nightingale, his nature so
acutely attuned to the harmony, the message of peace and solitude, is
swept away in such an ecstasy of heartfelt longing for that same peace,
that same solitude, that his own heart pours forth his song, in words no
less musical, in cadences no less rich than the notes of the feathered
songster. His experience is preserved for us in "The Ode to a
Nightingale" and we may read and derive the same fascination that he
felt.
Matthew Arnold somewhere tells us that all great poetry has one or both
of two attributes: "Natural Magic" and "Moral Profundity." Whatever
these two phrases may mean upon first sight, after examining their true
import it will be appreciated that the greatest English critic did not
consider poetry a thing for the closet, or sentimental matter only to be
read by the melancholy lovelorn to his sentimental maid. The effect of
the natural magic of a summer's night, of the sea breaking upon the
wind-swept coast, of the sea gull's flight, is apparent and valued by
everyone. What are most holidays other than periods during which we
absorb appearances and sensations, that enter our personalities and
remain part of ourselves during the succeeding year of work? "Natural
Magic" is that which acts upon us as a holiday influence, compounded
perhaps of beauty, mystery, fear or sentiment, which for the moment or
for eternity gives our minds entrance into a realm of new and
pleasurable things. Read Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" and you
will find the essence of natural magic. You enter a realm, indeed, of
magic and witchery, for
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
Do those lines charm you? They charm most of us and the cadence of the
words, the confused picture of Xanadu, have become our own,--riches with
which we would not care to part.
Every time I read them the blunt edge of life is worn off, living
regains its sharpness, I have to an extent experienced an ecstasy, taken
a holiday.
It is hard to define the exhilaration of a canter across the meadows
upon a crisp October day, or the impulse that surges through you as you
look to the ocean breathing the sea breeze, or the sense of religious
comradeship that grips you when in the midst of a crowd, great with a
single purpose,--but this is all of the true stuff of Natural Magic.
Your sensations are not of the minute, but of all time, as they have
vivified your soul and become part and parcel of your personality.
It is so with the poets who sing you a song or breathe a sentiment that
is not oral, not didactic, not purposeful, but of the stuff that thrills
the spirit of man,--their charm is impossible to define, it must be
felt, and for having felt it, your spirit is of a color different from
what it was before. As Corot's landscapes painted in the forest of
Fontainebleau are said to express the emotion of the painter when in the
presence of nature, so does the lyric poet of magical gift express his
feelings, lay bare his soul with its emotions and vacillations. The
sadness and sensuous mystery of Edgar Allan Poe, the marvellous ability
of Tennyson to fit the most exquisite words to the most subtle
incantations of beauty, the thrill of romance in Shakespearean England
as depicted by our contemporary, Alfred Noyes, the appetite for sensuous
delights of Keats, the tuneful, heartfelt songs of the Cavalier
poets--these are of natural magic, of delight to the human soul, of the
spirit of art.
When Shakespeare wrote,
Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cowslip's bell I lie,
he had no moral to expound, he merely sung from his heart with the
beauties of nature and the ways of fairy-land as an open book before
him. If we wish (and there is no rightful reason why we should not) to
drain the very dregs of living for the richest drops of wine, let us
enrich, make more virile our enjoyment by seeking nourishing draughts of
experience from the poets who have expressed those sweetest joys on
earth in poems that have cleansed the souls of men for generation upon
generation.
There is the other phrase of Matthew Arnold, "Moral Profundity." It is
when we seek wisdom from the poets that we find this attribute. When
the greatest of them give us their innermost thought, not the record of
experiences, but the essential deductions from all their experiences, we
have their true wisdom. When Wordsworth in "The Lines Composed a Few
Miles Above Tintern Abbey." wrote the words,
Therefore am I still
.....well pleased to recognize,
In Nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian, of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being;
or when, in his "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality," he wrote,
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
and when Shelley wrote,
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
or when Tennyson, in "Locksley Hall," wrote,
This is truth the poet sings,
That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.
those men formulated in exquisite language truths that have never been
more intensively expressed.
Probably most readers of poetry have already considered these two
phrases, and those who have, I feel sure, will agree that they are
useful in making for a clearer understanding in our estimation of
values. To read intelligently, to get the most out of our books, we
should certainly attempt to formulate the various aspects of life the
different poets represent, their relation to the time in which they
live, and their excellencies when they stand before the bar of the
reader's judgment.
Very few great poets produce poetry of but a single aspect. Shakespeare
wrote the magical fairy jingles and yet created the stupendously
profound character of "woe-entangled Hamlet"; Tennyson composed many a
lilting tune in words, yet as a moralist he presented the most sincere
thought of his generation. When we feel philosophic and thoughtful, we
turn to the poems containing solemn truths; when weary, jaded, and off
color, we turn to the honey of romance, the witcheries of sensuous
beauty,--and regain our lost edge.
A single phrase may have natural magic, and yet may express a thought
for which during years of our life we have been vainly groping. The
poetry of thoughtful content is probably that which has meant the most
to men, as upon the philosophy of such religious poets as Dante or
Whitman many a man has braced his faith; yet we must remember that much
of the wisdom of sages is expressed in as magical language as we have in
our cherished heritage.
Let us not, however, be academic about our poets, let us not balance one
against the other, let us not be carping about metre, subject matter and
critical phrases, let us go to them for what they can give towards
making this world a more marvellous place in which to dwell.
If Kipling makes you feel the glory of work, of the hard, terrific work
in which we rejoice, if he gives you the call of the road, the
wanderlust, and you hear,
--the song--how long! how long!
Pull out on the trail again!
if Bobbie Burns with his songs of Scotia gives you a human sympathy with
mankind, an appreciation that for all his foibles and impossibilities "a
man's a man for a' that"; if Byron fills your heart with the divine
discontent that in a sweep of glory lands you above and beyond the
commonplaces of every-day existence; if Wordsworth makes you see Nature
as you have never seen her before, if he makes a meadow of buttercups
appear in a new light, with unsuspected meaning, with hitherto unseen
color and grace; if Keats attunes your heart to a deeper appreciation of
a form, a fragrance, a musical harmony; if Milton's solemn cadences
inspire you with the depth of that great Puritan's spirit; if
Shakespeare unbares your own character in revealing the inner springs of
his eternal heroes; if Longfellow in "My Lost Youth" brings back to you
the home of your boyhood, and you see again
The sheen of the far-surrounding seas,
And islands that were the Hesperides
Of all my boyish dreams;--
if you can say with Walt Whitman,
Logic and sermons never convince;
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul;
or if there is a man unknown except for one poem that still stirs you
with the sentiments that you love and honor--if these, I say, have thus
met your requirements, each and all of them are _great_ poets to you,
they have opened a door to a life richer in content, deeper in import,
more vastly worth living.
There is no danger that the poets will ever be in need of readers. The
musical expression of thought or sentiment is as old and fundamental as
is human nature. The sailors singing their chants as they pull in their
anchor, the negro laborers whom we have seen singing a song as they
unload the railroad ties, or put the heavy rails in place, the Western
range rider calming the steers, and quieting his own nerves through the
lone night watches, the sagas and harvest songs of simple people in all
lands, are facts that establish the part that poetry plays in the
workings of the human heart. In reading poetry you will obtain no
credit for upholding a tradition, as the tradition will stand of its own
vitality; but in _not_ reading it you will miss one of the most
bounteous sources of inspiration, you will pass by the richest treasure
house, you will neglect the supreme opportunity for a thorough life that
the art of man has put within your reach. When you do read, do it for
all time, not for a moment. If the muse is to give you of her best, you
must feel after sharing her store as did Wordsworth when he heard the
Highland Reaper singing,
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
as he tells us,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.
The poem but begins after you have read it--the experiences that come
after are the ones that count. Let us remember the simile and hold the
music in our hearts as a reservoir of powerful beauty that will carry us
over the stupid, the heavy, the unpoetic bumps of the days' doings.
*CHAPTER VII*
*THE CHILDREN OF PAN*
For I'd rather be thy child
And pupil, in the forest wild,
Than be the king of men elsewhere,
And most sovereign slave of care;
To have one moment of thy dawn,
Than share the city's year forlorn.
THOREAU
The enthusiastic nature poetry of James Thompson, called "The Seasons,"
came as a shock to that inbred lover of the city streets, the taverns
and town activities, Doctor Samuel Johnson. In these poems, the Doctor
found that natural objects which before had hardly been worthy of
attention were made to appear beautiful. We must believe that after
having read "Spring," "Summer," "Autumn," and "Winter," upon his
infrequent excursions beyond the environs of the great metropolis he saw
new beauties in the hitherto common-place landscapes, responded to the
color in the fields and hedgerows, became interested in fantastic cloud
effects, heard music in the streams, the waterfalls and in the songs of
birds. For how many of us have arisen new sources of joy in Nature's
beauteous wonderland at the instigation of poets, essayists and
novelists who have seen and read with loving eyes
Of this fair volume which we World do name.
In an ardent conversation upon the power of certain poets a friend told
me that the Anglo-Saxon world looked at Nature through Wordsworth's
spectacles. He maintained that the reaction of nature upon even those
who have never read a poem by this poet was influenced by his poetry;
Wordsworth's interpretation of Nature had so permeated nineteenth
century religion and literature that it was impossible for even the
casual newspaper reader to escape it. We do not directly acknowledge
our debt, but the garden clubs, the bird-study societies, the
surburbanite who throughout the year will spend an hour and a half in
the train, in order, on the way to the station in the early morning, to
obtain the pleasures of Nature's awakening, and her retirement upon his
return at twilight, and the Saturday afternoon golfer who, after holing
his ball, looks beyond the course at the green whispering woods and
rolling hills, expands his chest and murmurs "This is the life," are all
unconsciously paying part tribute to the poet who wrote,
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours.
We need a love of nature to-day, as we have never needed it before. In
the terrific complexity and speed of our external existence we crave the
quiet, internal stimulus to meditation and dreams that comes from the
Great Mother's intricate, manifold, yet untempestuous method of doing
things. From the close hatches of the city where the noise, the smells,
and the turmoil seem all man-made, we must get away to the fields and
blossoming pastures to find our souls alone with ourselves and the Great
God Pan. To those who answer the call of the wild, or even the call of
the suburban garden, there come new strength and new conceptions of
beauty, to apply to the work of the world to which we have lent our
hand. The call is being answered,--man goes back to his own. We see it
on every side: no one in any walk of life seems so humble or satisfied
not to desire some day to own a farm; most summer resorts where there
were formerly many a "flanneled fool" have now become "Adamless Edens,"
for our young men have answered the call of the Red Gods, and have
packed their kits for the trail that leads to the tall timbers of
solitude, of balsam, of camp fires and dreams.
Any book or poem that gives you a keener appreciation of the crimson of
the sumach, the whispers of the wild things, the glory of the sunrise or
of the all-embracing broadmindness of Nature, will have done its part
towards bringing literature into perfect accord with life. If my friend
speaks truly in saying that Wordsworth has influenced two nations'
outlook upon the world, those poems, laughed at by some for their quiet
simplicity, have indeed arisen to the highest realm of literature and
have become soul of our soul, mind of our mind, flesh of our flesh.
There are others--Wordsworth is not alone in his glory.
Henry David Thoreau, the perfect child of a cross country ramble, is my
favorite. To write immortal words, it is said that a man must have an
immortal passion, whether it be for beauty, or his God, his neighbor,
his country, his lady, or himself. Thoreau sunk the love of all else in
his passionate devotion to Nature. His Journals, kept year by year with
ever a spontaneous freshness, are little else than an ecstatic love song
dedicated to his mate,--the lake, the woods, the fields, the apple
orchards, the winds, the colors, the birds, and all that lived and grew
about his haunts near Walden. A lover sees a beauty in his lady's eye
to which all the world is blind, and Thoreau senses a magic in an
awakening Spring to which the senses of us lesser mortals are
comparatively blunt.
His sincerity of appreciation was one with his marvellous power of
observation. He did not have the scientific attitude of mind as had
that fascinating Frenchman, Fabre, who wrote the biographies of insects
in a way that makes you tremble at the wonders that go into the making
of the life of a fly. Thoreau would have scorned the aquarium and cage
methods of Fabre, not because of the lack of interest in the results,
but rather on account of his love of Nature, naked, wild, and free.
Upon the shortest ramble he saw myriad happenings, from the unusual
frost crystal upon the web of a spider to the most subtle changing with
the varying temperature of a bird's note; but it is all discovered
without the microscope, without thought of entomological or
ornithological records. A man should be afraid to say that the woods
are a dreary place in which to walk upon a winter's day--let him read a
page from the Winter Journal of our author and he will find that the
book of Nature is never closed for him who has an eye in focus for her
mystic letterings.
I say that Thoreau is my favorite and how could I deny it, since there
is many a winter's day in the city when I am sick of the asphalt and the
bricks, and yet unable to leave them, that I can turn to any one of his
pages and be carried by his words to my favorite woods or stream, to the
longed-for fields and roadways? And in other seasons when time is more
prodigal, and nature so bounteous that there seems to be a glut upon the
market, my senses, that might grow befogged, are given a tonic in a
paragraph that makes the drowsy summer atmosphere seem pregnant with
beauty and fascination. If you are cooped among the chimneys and
elevated trains, Thoreau will bring you to the country--if in the
country, he will multiply the pleasures of your walk, your ride, or
fishing trip. He stimulates the best of life that is in you, and that
is all we can ask of any literature.
Nature from one point of view or another has always been one of the
chief inspirations of the poets. If you examine the literature of the
human race since the days when Solomon sang "And the voice of the turtle
is heard through the land," you will find the various aspects of the
seasons, the songs of the individual birds, the beauty and sentiment of
flowers, and even the habits of the different species of fish,
continually reflected in prose and verse. America has been especially
blest with men we must term literary naturalists. We have spoken of
Thoreau, but there are also Audubon, Wilson and our elderly
contemporary, John Burroughs.
Wilson and Audubon are especially famous for their magnificent colored
plates of the birds of North America, but I ask all nature lovers to go
to a public library and secure the prose works of these two great
ornithologists. There you will find as interesting reading as will come
to your hand in many a day. They were both pioneers in science, art and
exploration; both children of nature, more at home in the forest than in
the city; both enthusiastic, thrilled worshippers of their feathered
friends whom they have so brilliantly preserved in their cherished
portfolios. Because their work was accomplished one hundred years ago,
before our birds were charted and when journeys of scientific
exploration, even into the mountains of Pennsylvania, were made with
almost the same difficulty as is now caused in the exploration of the
most jungled South American river, the naive spirit of the explorer, of
the elemental pioneer, is in their every page. There is ever the
surprise, the uncertainty, the joy of life and study among unknown and
untrammelled things. Theirs was the joy of children who for the first
time discover a blackbird's nest in the far-off meadow and their joy is
communicated to us; we become children of delight, as when lying upon
bur backs on the edge of a flowery field of clover we watch with
fascination the darts of kingbirds dashing from the top of the nearby
chestnut after the myriad insects.
John Burroughs, whose essays have been a joy upon many an evening and a
stimulating remembrance upon many a tramp, with a similar freshness and
unworldliness carried on the tradition of the earlier men. From his
fruit farm upon the Hudson he continually sends us messages to forget
our tea parties, our moving pictures, our country clubs, and really to
find ourselves in the discoveries of beauties and life in the growing,
nesting, and flowering things about us. One of the happy thoughts that
we derive from him is the knowledge that to obtain the beneficence to
soul and mind we (poor suburbanites tied to the necessity of earning our
daily bread in the city) need not follow the "Long Trail" to the ends of
the world of the furious globe trotter, Rudyard Kipling, but must only
take store of the things at hand, find the same happiness in the quiet,
civilized, thoroughbred-cattled meadow as we would hope to find up
against a rugged blow in the Northern Seas off the coast of which
"you've lost the chart of overside." You do not have to go so far from
home to know the world. Thoroughly know the garden that you cultivate,
study all that happens along the hedgerow upon the way to the station,
and you will be richer than he who has racketed with half blind eyes
from the Yukon to Patagonia,
Or East all the way into Mississippi Bay,
Or West to the Golden Gate.
In conjunction with the reflection of nature in books, I mentioned our
scaly friends, the fish, without paying due homage to the king of all
philosophic fishermen, Izaak Walton. How many devotees of the gentle
art of angling have made of their own the wisdom, the beauty, the
thoughtful content of the fisherman's classic, "The Compleat Angler"? A
man once said to me that the next best thing to taking a walk was to
read the accounts of Walt Whitman's rambles upon Timber Creek. I
answered that upon the days you could not go a-fishing, you had best
read "The Compleat Angler." I hold to this! Will not the men who stand
by the trout, the bass, the salmon, the weak fish, or the gallant tuna
and tarpon, and the boys who put their faith in the catfish, the sucker,
the eel, or the perch, fall in together and be one in believing as the
Venerable Izaak believed,
O the gallant fisher's life,
It is the best of any!
'Tis full of pleasure, void of strife,
And 'tis beloved by many;
Other joys
Are but toys;
Only this
Lawful is;
For our skill
Breeds no ill,
But content and pleasure.
There is many another writer who opens the door to the traveller who
wishes to enrich his enjoyment of Nature as it is to be seen along
life's highway. I mention but a few who may give you new worlds for
which you would not trade a mint of silver. Have you ever gone with
Stevenson upon his walking trips? If not, do so, and perhaps you will
agree with him that it is pleasant to have a companion upon your
journeys; as Lawrence Sterne expresses it: "Let me have a companion of
my way were it but to remark how the shadows lengthen as the sun
declines." If you prefer to be alone, Hazlitt will tell you that no
companion is necessary, as thoughts need no companions: "I want to see
my vague notions float like the down of the thistle before the breeze,
and not to have them entangled in the briars and thorns of controversy."
Or have you read the books of the Homer of the Insects, the Frenchman I
have mentioned, Fabre? There is a treat ahead of you--he wrote of the
crawling, burrowing and flying things of his beloved Provence, and if
there is anything in this realm more interesting than his records of
observing the daily lives of the House Fly, the Praying Mantis, and many
another beetle, cricket and creeper, I have yet to find it. To say that
you must immediately line your room with aquariums, jars, and boxes, in
which to preserve and watch the births, loves and deaths of all the
spiders, whirligigs, and butterflies that come within your reach is
relating the result in its mildest form that this author has had upon
me. Such books introduce you to a thousandfold intensity of existence,
as every great book must.
Intensive agriculture is heralded as the saving factor of human
progress. Let us make a plea for truly intensive living. As the crops
that come from a rich, well-cultivated soil are bountiful, so is the
life that is the product of a fertile mind. A poor crop is a
superficial existence of discontented pleasures and shallow unhappiness;
a rich crop is a life in which the heart and mind are at least attune to
the joy which may be derived from the living of it,--brave when courage
is needed, patient when patience is a virtue. The word "culture" is
sometimes derided as a synonym for pretentious high-browism, but let us
remember that the farmer respects the word "cultivate," as he knows that
it is necessary if he wishes to make the harvest a season of happiness
and rich reward. A man's harvest season is his every minute of
existence--his bounty is the depth and pleasure of that existence. Our
future life is or is not a "great perhaps," but our present life is
assuredly a reality. It is _here_--what are you going to do with it?
If you can make every day a day of intense interest you have won the
greatest battle! You have stormed the world's richest citadel! The
Children of Pan, who have loved and written of Nature, charm and
transport you to a world of infinite interest. They offer rich
fertilizer that gives promise of a bumper crop--Open that Door into
their Realm.
*CHAPTER VIII*
*MEN BEHIND BOOKS*
Every word man's lips have uttered
Echoes in God's Skies.
ADELAIDE A. PROCTER
Books contain the accumulated store of human thought and scientific
attainment--this is a treasure without which there would be no
civilization--yet in addition, we may say that the most potent
inheritance, that books vouchsafe, is the personalities of the great
authors who have inscribed their souls within them. Personal character
affects our lives as does nothing else. In the back of the mind of
every one there are men and women who, we appreciate, have been the
makers of our souls. Most often it is a mother or a father, sometimes a
teacher of our youth, or a friend and fellow worker of whose nature we
realize we have absorbed a part. Contact between human personalities is
the most profound mover for good and evil. A preacher may declaim
against sin for ever and a day, but you know that your great friend who
scorns sin has infinitely more influence upon you. The greatest doers of
good are men and women who lead others by the examples of their own
lives. It is unfortunately not given to many to come into intimate
personal contact with the most supreme human souls, but fortunate we are
that many have extended their personalities without limit into the
future, by truly encasing themselves in books that will remain as the
leaven and inspiration of all ages and all peoples.
I have a number of volumes upon my shelves that I choose to consider not
as books, but as men. Instead of printed pages, cloth bindings, and
labels, they are living personalities with whom I can pass an evening.
The reading is over, and I have within me the character of a great human
being. As have my Mother and Father and the old fisherman, whose
knowledge of the sea and storm beaten coast fed my boyish spirit, they
have become part of me. The greatest books are those that present the
greatest men. It is not the artistry of telling a story or writing a
poem that really counts; the sincerity and intensity with which a man,
whom we may call our "guide, philosopher and friend," is revealed forms
the most cherished treasure of our bookshelf. In sorrow, in dejection,
in need of mental or spiritual sustenance, when the joy of living is
blunted, when lazy, discouraged or annoyed, you can go to these great
fellows, converse with them and return again to the world with a
bird's-eye view, an enlarged vision, a quickened spirit.
Have you read Walt Whitman? _There_ is a glorious human being--so
magnificent, so all-embracing in his love, so turbulent, so large in his
personality that to know him, to feed upon him, you must become
submerged in his book, his soul,--"The Leaves of Grass." Of this volume
containing his poems he himself said,
This is no book;
Who touches this, touches a man.
You do indeed touch a man! A great spirit who saw in all things God; a
Democrat who saw in all men the spark of the divine; a leader who raced
out to the farthest reaches of the soul and beckons and begs you to
follow; a lover who embraced all, the prostitute, the poet, the lowly,
the exultant, Christ himself, in a spirit of human fellowship; a
physical giant who gloried in his sex and makes you consider sacred the
relationship of the sexes; a nurse who brought upon himself paralysis by
caring for the wounded in the Civil War; a prophet who could no more
believe that the spirit of an individual man could die than that it had
never been born. Perhaps you think I write extravagantly--I do not--I
but attempt to present what the personality of Walt Whitman has meant to
me, and to many, many others. I but ask that you go to the "Leaves of
Grass," and come in contact with that man to whom so many look and
say--"A great part of myself is you, Walt Whitman! My life has been
renewed since first I touched your hand."
Tolstoy! There is another one who believed in humanity and God,--there
is another who has put a huge, rugged, loving soul within books.
Probably no one has so influenced the humanitarianism of our day as did
this bearded old warrior from Russia; but it was the deep human sympathy
of the actual living Tolstoy that moved the world, not the arguments he
deduced nor the warnings he gave. He was always a moralist,--even in
his masterpiece "Anna Karenina" it is not the story he tells, but the
human love which he reveals that has made the eternal monument. Afraid
of nothing,--the Czar, convention, hatred, oppression,--he lived his
life according to the dictates of his own conscience, the most punishing
conscience that has ever been the attribute of a master soul. If you do
not know him, read his short story "Master and Man." There you will
find enunciated, in a manner as poignant, as powerful, as even that of
the Sermon on the Mount, the doctrine of happiness found in living your
life for others. Selfishness, pride, materialism, the sins that spoil
the world, cannot stand in the way of the burning words of Tolstoy.
Your conscience will receive a stiffening medicine, your sympathies for
the sins and sufferings of your neighbors will deepen to bed rock, and
your life will become proportionately more true, more happy, more
Christian. Six years ago in the lowly hut near the Caucasus, when the
mighty soul of Tolstoy left the body, the World missed a leader, a
lover, a prophet--but his word still remains, and the doctrine as told
by him of universal betterment through love and human sympathy will
reach mankind whilst there are men left to read, and to communicate.
We all know the poems of Robert Burns, most of us know something of his
life. His life and character are revealed in his poetry. He too was a
lover, but a weak rather than a rugged one. We love him for his very
weakness. His heart was his strength and his undoing. He loved until
his heart would break, ruthlessly and impetuously, and of his
sufferings, his remorses, regrets, and forlorn hopes he sang. In this
cruel world, where might so often makes right, what a benediction it is
to read a poem written from the depth of a simple, sorrowing, yet deeply
human heart upon the suffering that he has caused the "wee sleekit,
cow'rin, tim'rous beastie" in turning up her nest with the plowshare.
As with all the personalities that are "great" in the deepest sense, his
was one that felt a companionship for all that lives upon the earth, and
from his sympathy for the drunken, the heart-broken, and the meadow
mice, and his joy in patriotism, true lovers, and beauteous roses, we
derive a depth of sentiment that needs must mellow our hearts. A brave
spirit in a weak body had Bobbie Burns--he drank and was unfaithful, but
he felt deeply. We love him for his depth, we sympathize with him in
his weaknesses. As a friend he purifies rather than stimulates our
souls, but he is a true friend and a loving one.
Francois Villon, the greatest ballad singer of all time, the tavern
lover, the vagabond, the heavy-hearted sorrower, the lighted-hearted
laugher, the bosom companion of thieves, cut-throats, chattering
grisettes, old courtesans, rioters, and brawlers of the narrow streets,
Cathedral shadows, Seine banks of mediaeval Paris, was another of those
great-hearted human lovers who had the gift of telling his heart secrets
in words of wondrous beauty. By twentieth century standards Villon's
actions, thieveries, and suspected murder, would have been neither moral
nor proper, but by the standard of all ages, in all true hearts, his
feelings towards the people among whom he moved will stand the test of
the most austere morality. He loved all men and women for the best that
was in them, he did not scorn them for the worst. He was unselfish and
true to his friends, and more than that we cannot desire. Where there
is hypocrisy there is vice; where there is selfishness there is lack of
Christianity and humanity; our tavern poet, Francois Villon, had neither
of these, and if you want a friend who will make you see the good in the
bad, the beautiful in the ugly, go to your bookshelf and become
acquainted with the fervid soul of this ancient ballad singer.
When you are too contented, when your mind feels squidgy with good
living, or sultry from the summer heat, go to another man,--George
Gordon, Lord Byron. They say that Byron (with Scott) is nowadays out of
fashion. "They" are mistaken. The author of Childe Harold and Don Juan
will never be truly out of fashion, so long as there is a flare in
youthful hearts, a discontent in ambitious minds. He is the poet of a
great revolt, a kicker at the traces, and then again he is the singer of
the bleeding heart, of lost causes; he hurries you across the seas upon
his speeding bark; he tops the crags of human loneliness and leaves you
desolate. His songs are of the rollicking wine of life with its
excitements, its depressions, its sentiments of hatred, beauty, joy.
For youth he is the poet of liberty, of intense individualism; for age
the poet of thwarted desires, for everyone he has a chestnut burr to put
beneath dull content; his mockery is for stupidity, dryness, stagnation.
Get under the crust of his effusive egotism and you will meet a sombre,
lonely, sensitive individual, who needs you as a friend and who will be
to you a hypodermic stimulative.
How different a one from this poet is his contemporary, the essayist,
Charles Lamb. The essays we love the best are those that reveal the
point of view, the little personalities of the writer, and no man of
letters ever had a more magnetic personality, or knew better how to
preserve himself in little literary gems, than did the author of "The
Essays of Elia." Lamb spent his days in the South Sea Counting House
transferring figures from one great ledger to another. But his evenings
with his books, his family and his friends! Ah!--there was a companion!
A booklover whose enthusiasm, for musty duodecimos has become a classic
allusion, a punster whose puns are sometimes good and sometimes bad, but
always original, a relisher of good conversation, a man of many petty
weaknesses, a lover of good food, with a taste for old wine, and with an
infinite appreciation of the fads and foibles of himself and others, he
seems to have been altogether the most lovable individual with whom it
would be possible to scrape up an acquaintance. Read but one hundred
pages of his essays and he becomes your chuckling, appreciative,
inimitable companion. Every old book shop, every roast pig, every glass
of rich wine, every threadbare clerk stooping over his ledger--these and
many such will take on fresh and romantic aspects for the friend of
Elia.
Thomas Carlyle was an historian and philosopher who wrote his name over
every page of his work. His was the voice and the soul of the Old
Testament prophets, who railed at men from the depths of their bitter
yet anxious hearts. The Preacher of the Nineteenth Century, when he
spoke the world listened! Have you read "Sartor Resartus"? Among his
works this is even the most personal. It is rough and jagged in style,
turbulent and confused in arrangement, but behind it all, or rather
under it all, is revealed the spiritual message to his age. The message
is Carlyle's own personality: his bravery, his sincerity, his fine
hatred of muddle-headed thinking, of credulity, of cant; his love and
admiration for the fundamental greatnesses of human nature, his belief
in an omnipotent God. He wished men to believe, and the thunder he
bellowed in his endeavor still resounds. His soul was a battery of
twelve-inch guns directed against the forces of ignorance and hypocrisy.
It is to the reading of "Sartor Resartus" that many men point as the
turning stake in their spiritual lives. It was not in the book that
they found their spiritual bulwarks, but in the soul of the great
Scotchman with whom they came in contact.
There is our own Emerson, whose admiration for Carlyle was probably only
outdone by Carlyle's admiration for him! "Self Realization," "The
American Scholar," "Friendship," "Politics"--how many of his essays have
become part and parcel of America's loftiest thought and action. The
metallic acuteness of his personality was not of the kind with which you
can become familiar, but its very aloofness holds our respect and
devotion. The austerity of George Washington in public life can only be
compared with the cold distance at which this philosopher holds us, and
yet upon their pedestals we recognize them as men from whom the best in
American character has derived nourishment. In every sentence of his
every essay, we feel the soul at peace, the intellect enthroned, the
power of will predominant.
A man without friends is a man without life, and I have but told you of
some of my boon companions. Never to have shared in the fellowship of
the great spirits who are preserved for us in books is to cut one's self
off from the most rewarding of human relationships. The chums of our
boyhood, our companions at college, too often drift away to distant
parts, or diverge from us in pursuits other than our own; although
remembrances of our times together are sacred and of sweet recalling,
too often they are of the past and renewal forever impossible. The
friends of our books, however, are forever with us, they cannot die,
they cannot depart, they remain fresh and vigorous, hearty sojourners
upon our road, forever willing to lend a hand over the rocks and bumpy
places. Without disparaging those with whom I sit before the fire, and
chat, and smoke, I must confess that I value equally with them the
friends of eternal character that exist there in the book-case. They
lighten the path of life; they are ready for converse when my spirit
calls.
Go to the greatest books for your most enduring friends, but upon having
formed their friendship do not leave them in the study, but carry them
within your spirit to your business and the marts of men, and in holding
their confidences burning in your heart you will find yourself a more
thorough human being.
*CHAPTER IX*
*KEEPING UP WITH LIFE*
Reading is the key which admits us to the whole world of thought and
fancy and imagination, to the company of saint and sage, of the wisest
and wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moments. It enables us to see
with the keenest eyes, to hear with the finest ears, and to listen to
the sweetest voices of all time.