Racial Experience.
There is a general agreement among men that experience is the most
effective and successful of teachers; that for many men no other form
of education is possible; and that those who enjoy the fullest
educational opportunities miss the deeper processes of training if
they fail of that wide contact with the happenings of life which we
call experience. To touch the world at many points; to come into
relations with many kinds of men; to think, to feel, and to act on a
generous scale,--these are prime opportunities for growth. For it is
not only true, as Browning said so often and in so many kinds of speech,
that a man's greatest good fortune is to have the opportunity of
giving out freely and powerfully all the force that is in him, but it
is also true that almost equal good fortune attends the man who has
the opportunity of receiving truth and instruction through a wide and
rich experience.
But individual experience, however inclusive and deep, is necessarily
limited, and the life of the greatest man would be confined within
narrow boundaries if he were shut within the circle of his own
individual contact with things and persons. If Shakespeare had written
of those things only of which he had personal knowledge, of those
experiences in which he had personally shared, his contribution to
literature would be deeply interesting, but it would not possess that
quality of universality which makes it the property of the race. In
Shakespeare there was not only knowledge of man, but knowledge of men
as well. His greatness rests not only on his own commanding
personality, but on his magical power of laying other personalities
under tribute for the enlargement of his view of things and the
enrichment of his portraiture of humanity. A man learns much from his
own contacts with his time and his race, but one of the most important
gains he makes is the development of the faculty of appropriating the
results of the contacts of other men with other times and races; and
one of the finer qualities of rich experience is the quickening of the
imagination to divine that which is hidden in the experience of other
races and ages.
The man of culture must not only live deeply and intelligently in his
own experience, rationalising and utilising it as he passes through
it; he must also break away from its limitations and escape its
tendency to substitute a part of life, distinctly seen, for the whole
of life, vaguely discerned. The great writer, for instance, must first
make his own nature rich in its development and powerful in harmony of
aim and force, and he must also make this nature sensitive,
sympathetic, and clairvoyant in its relations with the natures of
other men. To become self-centred, and yet to be able to pass entirely
out of one's self into the thoughts, emotions, impulses, and
sufferings of others, involves a harmonising of opposing tendencies
which is difficult of attainment.
It is precisely this poise which men of the highest productive power
secure; for it is this nice adjustment of the individual discovery of
truth to the general discovery of truth which gives a man of
imaginative faculty range, power, and sanity of view. To see, feel,
think, and act strongly and intelligently in our own individual world
gives us first-hand relations to that world, and first-hand knowledge
of it; to pass beyond the limits of this small sphere, which we touch
with our own hands, into the larger spheres which other men touch, not
only widens our knowledge but vastly increases our power. It is like
exchanging the power of a small stream for the general power which
plays through Nature. One of the measures of greatness is furnished by
this ability to pass through individual into national or racial
experience; for a man's spiritual dimensions, as revealed through any
form of art, are determined by his power of discerning essential
qualities and experiences in the greatest number of people. The four
writers who hold the highest places in literature justify their claims
by their universality; that is to say, by the range of their knowledge
of life as that knowledge lies revealed in the experience of the race.
It is the fortune of a very small group of men in any age to possess
the power of divining, by the gift of genius, the world which lies,
nebulous and shadowy, in the lives of men about them, or in the lives
of men of other times; in the nature of things, the clairvoyant vision
of poets like Tennyson, Browning, and Hugo, of novelists like
Thackeray, Balzac, and Tolstoi, is not at the command of all men; and
yet all men may share in it and be enlarged by it. This is one of the
most important services which literature renders to its lover: it
makes him a companion of the most interesting personalities in their
most significant moments; it enables him to break the bars of
individual experience and escape into the wider and richer life of the
race. Within the compass of a very small room, on a very few shelves,
the real story of man in this world may be collected in the books of
life in which it is written; and the solitary reader, whose personal
contacts with men and events are few and lacking in distinction and
interest, may enter, through his books, into the most thrilling life
of the race in some of its most significant moments.
No man can read "In Memoriam" or "The Ring and the Book" without
passing beyond the boundaries of his individual experience into
experiences which broaden and quicken his own spirit; and no one can
become familiar with the novels of Tourguéneff or Tolstoi without
touching life at new points and passing through emotions which would
never have been stirred in him by the happenings of his own life. Such
a story as "Anna Karénina" leaves no reader of imagination or heart
entirely unchanged; its elemental moral and artistic force strikes
into every receptive mind and leaves there a knowledge of life not
possessed before. The work of the Russian novelists has been, indeed,
a new reading in the book of experience; it has made a notable
addition to the sum total of humanity's knowledge of itself. In the
pages of Gogol, Dostoievski, Tourguéneff, and Tolstoi, the majority of
readers have found a world absolutely new to them; and in reading
those pages, so penetrated with the dramatic spirit, they have come
into the possession of a knowledge of life not formal and didactic,
but deep, vital, and racial in its range and significance. To possess
the knowledge of an experience at once so remote and so rich in
disclosure of character, so charged with tragic interest, is to push
back the horizons of our own experience, to secure a real contribution
to our own enrichment and development. Whoever carries that process
far enough brings into his individual experience much of the richness
and splendour of the experience of the race.