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I
“The rarest sort of a book,” says Mr. Bagehot, slyly, is “a book to
read”; and “the knack in style is to write like a human being.” It is
painfully evident, upon experiment, that not many of the books which
come teeming from our presses every year are meant to be read. They are
meant, it may be, to be pondered; it is hoped, no doubt, they may
instruct, or inform, or startle, or arouse, or reform, or provoke, or
amuse us; but we read, if we have the true reader’s zest and plate, not
to grow more knowing, but to be less pent up and bound within a little
circle,—as those who take their pleasure, and not as those who
laboriously seek instruction,—as a means of seeing and enjoying the
world of men and affairs. We wish companionship and renewal of spirit,
enrichment of thought and the full adventure of the mind; and we desire
fair company, and a larger world in which to find them.
No one who loves the masters who may be communed with and read but must
see, therefore, and resent the error of making the text of any one of
them a source to draw grammar from, forcing the parts of speech to
stand out stark and cold from the warm text; or a store of samples
whence to draw rhetorical instances, setting up figures of speech
singly and without support of any neighbor phrase, to be stared at
curiously and with intent to copy or dissect! Here is grammar done
without deliberation: the phrases carry their meaning simply and by a
sort of limpid reflection; the thought is a living thing, not an image
ingeniously contrived and wrought. Pray leave the text whole: it has no
meaning piecemeal; at any rate, not that best, wholesome meaning, as of
a frank and genial friend who talks, not for himself or for his phrase,
but for you. It is questionable morals to dismember a living frame to
seek for its obscure fountains of life!
When you say that a book was meant to be read, you mean, for one thing,
of course, that it was not meant to be studied. You do not study a good
story, or a haunting poem, or a battle song, or a love ballad, or any
moving narrative, whether it be out of history or out of fiction—nor
any argument, even, that moves vital in the field of action. You do not
have to study these things; they reveal themselves, you do not stay to
see how. They remain with you, and will not be forgotten or laid by.
They cling like a personal experience, and become the mind’s intimates.
You devour a book meant to be read, not because you would fill yourself
or have an anxious care to be nourished, but because it contains such
stuff as it makes the mind hungry to look upon. Neither do you read it
to kill time, but to lengthen time, rather, adding to its natural usury
by living the more abundantly while it lasts, joining another’s life
and thought to your own.
There are a few children in every generation, as Mr. Bagehot reminds
us, who think the natural thing to do with any book is to read it.
“There is an argument from design in the subject,” as he says; “if the
book was not meant to be read for that purpose, for what purpose was it
meant?” These are the young eyes to which books yield up great
treasure, almost in spite of themselves, as if they had been penetrated
by some swift, enlarging power of vision which only the young know. It
is these youngsters to whom books give up the long ages of history,
“the wonderful series going back to the times of old patriarchs with
their flocks and herds”—I am quoting Mr. Bagehot again—“the keen-eyed
Greek, the stately Roman, the watching Jew, the uncouth Goth, the
horrid Hun, the settled picture of the unchanging East, the restless
shifting of the rapid West, the rise of the cold and classical
civilization, its fall, the rough impetuous Middle Ages, the vague warm
picture of ourselves and home. When did we learn these? Not yesterday
nor today, but long ago, in the first dawn of reason, in the original
flow of fancy.” Books will not yield to us so richly when we are older.
The argument from design fails. We return to the staid authors we read
long ago, and do not find in them the vital, speaking images that used
to lie there upon the page. Our own fancy is gone, and the author never
had any. We are driven in upon the books meant to be read.
These are books written by human beings, indeed, but with no general
quality belonging to the kind—with a special tone and temper, rather, a
spirit out of the common, touched with a light that shines clear out of
some great source of light which not every man can uncover. We call
this spirit human because it moves us, quickens a like life in
ourselves, makes us glow with a sort of ardor of self-discovery. It
touches the springs of fancy or of action within us, and makes our own
life seem more quick and vital. We do not call every book that moves us
human. Some seem written with knowledge of the black art, set our base
passions aflame, disclose motives at which we shudder—the more because
we feel their reality and power; and we know that this is of the devil,
and not the fruitage of any quality that distinguishes us as men. We
are distinguished as men by the qualities that mark us different from
the beasts. When we call a thing human we have a spiritual ideal in
mind. It may not be an ideal of that which is perfect, but it moves at
least upon an upland level where the air is sweet; it holds an image of
man erect and constant, going abroad with undaunted steps, looking with
frank and open gaze upon all the fortunes of his day, feeling even and
again—
“. . . the joy 1
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused.
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things.”
Say what we may of the errors and the degrading sins of our kind, we do
not willingly make what is worst in us the distinguishing trait of what
is human. When we declare, with Bagehot, that the author whom we love
writes like a human being, we are not sneering at him; we do not say it
with a leer. It is in token of admiration, rather. He makes us like our
humankind. There is a noble passion in what he says, a wholesome humor
that echoes genial comradeships; a certain reasonableness and
moderation in what is thought and said; an air of the open day, in
which things are seen whole and in their right colors, rather than of
the close study or the academic class-room. We do not want our poetry
from grammarians, nor our tales from philologists, nor our history from
theorists. Their human nature is subtly transmuted into something less
broad and catholic and of the general world. Neither do we want our
political economy from tradesmen nor our statesmanship from mere
politicians, but from those who see more and care for more than these
men see or care for.