_By R. L. S._
The Editor has somewhat insidiously laid a trap for his correspondents,
the question put appearing at first so innocent, truly cutting so deep. It
is not, indeed, until after some reconnaissance and review that the writer
awakes to find himself engaged upon something in the nature of
autobiography, or, perhaps worse, upon a chapter in the life of that
little, beautiful brother whom we once all had, and whom we have all lost
and mourned, the man we ought to have been, the man we hoped to be. But
when word has been passed (even to an editor), it should, if possible, be
kept; and if sometimes I am wise and say too little, and sometimes weak
and say too much, the blame must lie at the door of the person who
entrapped me.
The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works
of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must
afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson, which
he must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the
lesson of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the
acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, but with a
singular change--that monstrous, consuming _ego_ of ours being, for the
nonce, struck out. To be so, they must be reasonably true to the human
comedy; and any work that is so serves the turn of instruction. But the
course of our education is answered best by those poems and romances where
we breathe a magnanimous atmosphere of thought and meet generous and pious
characters. Shakespeare has served me best. Few living friends have had
upon me an influence so strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. The last
character, already well beloved in the reading, I had the good fortune to
see, I must think, in an impressionable hour, played by Mrs. Scott
Siddons. Nothing has ever more moved, more delighted, more refreshed me;
nor has the influence quite passed away. The dying Lear had a great effect
upon my mind, and was the burthen of my reflections for long, so
profoundly, so touchingly generous did it appear in sense so overpowering
in expression. Perhaps my dearest and best friend outside of Shakespeare
is D'Artagnan--the elderly D'Artagnan of the "Vicomte de Bragelonne." I
know not a more human soul, nor, in his way, a finer; I shall be very
sorry for the man who is so much of a pedant in morals that he cannot
learn from the Captain of Musketeers. Lastly, I must name the "Pilgrim's
Progress," a book that breathes of every beautiful and valuable emotion.
But of works of art little can be said; their influence is profound and
silent, like the influence of nature; they mould by contact; we drink them
up like water, and are bettered, yet know how. It is in books more
specifically didactic that we can follow out the effect, and distinguish
and weigh and compare. A book which has been very influential upon me fell
early into my hands, and so may stand first, though I think its influence
was only sensible later on, and perhaps still keeps growing, for it is a
book not easily outlived; the "Essais" of Montaigne. That temperate and
general picture of life is a great gift to place in the hands of persons
of to-day; they will find in these smiling pages a magazine of heroism and
wisdom, all of an antique strain; they will have their "linen decencies"
and excited orthodoxies fluttered, and will (if they have any gift of
reading) perceive that these have not been fluttered without some excuse
and ground of reason; and (again if they have any gift of reading) they
will end by seeing that this old gentleman was in a dozen ways a finer
fellow, and held in a dozen ways a nobler view of life, than they or their
contemporaries.
The next book, in order of time, to influence me, was the New Testament,
and in particular the Gospel according to St. Matthew. I believe it would
startle and move any one if they could make a certain effort of
imagination and read it freshly like a book, not droningly and dully like
a portion of the Bible. Any one would then be able to see in it those
truths which we are all courteously supposed to know and all modestly
refrain from applying. But upon this subject it is perhaps better to be
silent.
I come next to Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," a book of singular service, a
book which tumbled the world upside down for me, blew into space a
thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion, and, having thus shaken
my tabernacle of lies, set me back again upon a strong foundation of all
the original and manly virtues. But it is, once more, only a book for
those who have the gift of reading. I will be very frank--I believe it is
so with all good books, except, perhaps, fiction. The average man lives,
and must live, so wholly in convention, that gunpowder charges of the
truth are more apt to discompose than to invigorate his creed. Either he
cries out upon blasphemy and indecency, and crouches the closer round that
little idol of part-truths and part-conveniences which is the contemporary
deity, or he is convinced by what is new, forgets what is old, and becomes
truly blasphemous and indecent himself. New truth is only useful to
supplement the old; rough truth is only wanted to expand, not to destroy,
our civil and often elegant conventions. He who cannot judge had better
stick to fiction and the daily papers. There he will get little harm, and,
in the first at least, some good.
Close upon the back of my discovery of Whitman, I came under the influence
of Herbert Spencer. No more persuasive rabbi exists, and few better. How
much of his vast structure will bear the touch of time, how much is clay
and how much brass, it were too curious to inquire. But his words, if dry,
are always manly and honest; there dwells in his pages a spirit of highly
abstract joy, plucked naked like an algebraic symbol, but still joyful;
and the reader will find there a _caput-mortuum_ of piety, with little
indeed of its loveliness, but with most of its essentials; and these two
qualities make his a wholesome, as his intellectual vigour makes him a
bracing, writer. I should be much of a hound if I lost my gratitude to
Herbert Spencer.
"Goethe's Life," by Lewes, had a great importance for me when it first
fell into my hands--a strange instance of the partiality of man's good and
man's evil. I know no one whom I less admire than Goethe; he seems a very
epitome of the sins of genius, breaking open the doors of private life,
and wantonly wounding friends, in that crowning offence of "Werther," and
in his own character a mere pen-and-ink Napoleon, conscious of the rights
and duties of superior talents as a Spanish inquisitor was conscious of
the rights and duties of his office. And yet in his fine devotion to his
art, in his honest and serviceable friendship for Schiller, what lessons
are contained! Biography, usually so false to its office, does here for
once perform for us some of the work of fiction, reminding us, that is, of
the truly mingled tissue of man's nature, and how huge faults and shining
virtues cohabit and persevere in the same character. History serves us
well to this effect, but in the originals, not in the pages of the popular
epitomiser, who is bound, by the very nature of his task, to make us feel
the difference of epochs instead of the essential identity of man, and
even in the originals only to those who can recognize their own human
virtues and defects in strange forms, often inverted and under strange
names, often interchanged. Martial is a poet of no good repute, and it
gives a man new thoughts to read his works dispassionately, and find in
this unseemly jester's serious passages the image of a kind, wise, and
self-respecting gentleman. It is customary, I suppose, in reading Martial,
to leave out these pleasant verses; I never heard of them, at least, until
I found them for myself; and this partiality is one among a thousand
things that help to build up our distorted and hysterical conception of
the great Roman empire.
This brings us by a natural transition to a very noble book--the
"Meditations" of Marcus Aurelius. The dispassionate gravity, the noble
forgetfulness of self, the tenderness of others, that are there expressed
and were practised on so great a scale in the life of its writer, make
this book; a book quite by itself. No one can read it and not be moved.
Yet it scarcely or rarely appeals to the feeling--those very mobile, those
not very trusty parts of man. Its address lies farther 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 royal hand,
looked into brave eyes, and made a noble friend; there is another bond on
you thenceforth, binding you to life and to the love of virtue.
Wordsworth should perhaps come next. Every one has been influenced by
Wordsworth, and it is hard to tell precisely how. A certain innocence, a
rugged austerity of joy, a sight of the stars, "the silence that there is
among the 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. * * * "The Egoist" is a satire; so much
must be allowed; but it is a satire of a singular quality, which tells you
nothing of that obvious mote which is engaged from first to last with that
invisible beam. It is yourself that is haunted down; these are your own
faults that are dragged into the day and numbered, with lingering relish,
with cruel cunning and precision. A young friend of Mr. Meredith's (as I
have the story) came to him in an agony. "This is too bad of you," he
cried. "Willoughby is me!" "No, my dear fellow," said the author, "he is
all of us." I have read "The Egoist" five or six times myself, and I mean
to read it again; for I am like the young friend of the anecdote--I think
Willoughby an unmanly but a very serviceable exposure of myself.
I suppose, when I am done, I shall find that I have forgotten much that
was most influential, as I see already I have forgotten Thoreau, and
Hazlitt, whose paper "On the Spirit of Obligations" was a turning point in
my life, and Penn, whose little book of aphorisms had a brief but strong
effect on me, and Mitford's "Tales of Old Japan," wherein I learned for
the first time the proper attitude of any rational man to his country's
laws--a secret found, and kept, in the Asiatic Islands. That I should
commemorate all is more than I can hope, or the editor could ask. It will
be more to the point, after have 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.