The Lost Art of Reading Part 14

Books are more close to the latent infinity in a human being than anything else can be, because the habit of the infinite is their habit.

As books are more independent of s.p.a.ce and time than all other known forces in the lives of men, they seem to make all the men who love them independent also. If a man has not room for his life, he takes a book and makes room for it. When the habit of books becomes the habit of a man he unhands himself at will from s.p.a.ce and time; he finds the universe is his universe. He finds ancestors and neighbours alike flocking to him--doing his bidding. G.o.d Himself says "Yes" to him and delights in him. He has entered into conspiracy with the nature of things. He does not feel that he is being made. He does not feel that he is making himself. The universe is at work on him--under his own supervision.

IV

The Charter of Possibility

In reading to select one's parents and one's self, there seem to be two instincts involved. These instincts may vary more or less according to the book and the mood of the reader, but the object of all live reading--of every live experience with a book--is the satisfying of one or both of them. A man whose reading means something to him is either letting himself go in a book or letting himself come in it. He is either reading himself out or reading himself in. It is as if every human life were a kind of port on the edge of the universe, when it reads,--possible selves outward-bound and inward-bound trooping before It. Some of these selves are exports and some are imports.

If the principle of selection is conceived in a large enough spirit, and is set in operation soon enough, and is continued long enough, there is not a child that can be born on the earth who shall not be able to determine by the use of books, in the course of the years, what manner of man he shall be. He may not be able to determine how soon he shall be that man, or how much of that man shall be fulfilled in himself before he dies, and how much of him shall be left over to be fulfilled in his children, but the fact remains that to an extraordinary degree, through a live use of books, not only a man's education after he is born, but his education before he is born, is placed in his hands. It is the supreme office of books that they do this; that they place the laws of heredity and environment where a man with a determined spirit can do something besides cringing to them. Neither environment nor heredity--taken by itself--can give a man a determined spirit, but it is everything to know that, given a few books and the determined spirit both, a man can have any environment he wants for living his life, and his own a.s.sorted ancestors for living it. It is only by means of books that a man can keep from living a part.i.tioned-off life in the world--can keep toned up to the divine sense of possibility in it. We hear great men every day, across s.p.a.ce and time, halloaing to one another in books, and across all things, as we feel and read, is the call of our possible selves. Even the impossible has been achieved, books tell us, in history, again and again. It has been achieved by several men. This may not prove very much, but if it does not prove anything else, it proves that the possible, at least, is the privilege of the rest of us. It has its greeting for every man. The sense of the possible crowds around him, and not merely in his books nor merely in his life, but in the place where his life and books meet--in his soul. However or wherever a man may be placed, it is the great book that reminds him Who he is. It reminds him who his Neighbour is. It is his charter of possibility.

Having seen, he acts on what he sees, and reads himself out and reads himself in accordingly.

V

The Great Game

It would be hard to say which is the more important, reading for exports or imports, reading one's self out or reading one's self in, but inasmuch as the importance of reading one's self out is more generally overlooked, it may be well to dwell upon it. Most of the reading theories of the best people to-day, judging from the prohibitions of certain books, overlook the importance altogether, in vital and normal persons--especially the young,--of reading one's self out. It is only as some people keep themselves read out, and read out regularly, that they can be kept from bringing evil on the rest of us. If Eve had had a novel, she would have sat down under the Tree and read about the fruit instead of eating it. If Adam had had a morning paper, he would hardly have listened to his wife's suggestion. If the Evil One had come up to Eve in the middle of _Les Miserables_, or one of Rossetti's sonnets, no one would ever have heard of him. The main misfortune of Adam and Eve was that they had no arts to come to the rescue of their religion. If Eve could have painted the apple, she would not have eaten it. She put it into her mouth because she could not think of anything else to do with it, and she had to do something. She had the artistic temperament (inherited from her mother Sleep, probably, or from being born in a dream), and the temptation of the artistic temperament is, that it gets itself expressed or breaks something. She had tried everything--flowers, birds, clouds, and her shadow in the stream, but she found they were all inexpressible. She could not express them. She could not even express herself. Taking walks in Paradise and talking with the one man the place afforded was not a complete and satisfying self-expression. Adam had his limitations--like all men. There were things that could not be said.

Standing as we do on the present height of history, with all the resources of sympathy in the modern world, its countless arts drawing the s.e.xes together, going about understanding people, communing with them, and expressing them, making a community for every man, even in his solitude, it is not hard to see that the comparative failure of the first marriage was a matter of course. The real trouble was that Adam and Eve, standing in their brand-new world, could not express themselves to one another. As there was nothing else to express them, they were bored. It is to Eve's credit that she was more bored than Adam was, and that she resented it more; and while a Fall, under the circ.u.mstances, was as painful as it was inevitable, and a rather extreme measure on Eve's part, no one will deny that it afforded relief on the main point.

It seems to be the universal instinct of all Eve's sons and daughters that have followed since, that an expressive world is better than a dull one. An expressive world is a world in which all the men and women are getting themselves expressed, either in their experiences or in their arts--that is, in other people's experiences.

The play, the picture, and the poem and the novel and the symphony have all been the outgrowth of Eve's infinity. She could not contain herself.

She either had more experience than she could express, or she had more to express than she could possibly put into experience.

One of the worst things that we know about the j.a.panese is that they have no imperative mood in the language. To be able to say of a nation that it has been able to live for thousands of years without feeling the need of an imperative, is one of the most terrible and sweeping accusations that has ever been made against a people on the earth.

Swearing may not be respectable, but it is a great deal more respectable than never wanting to. Either a man is dead in this world, or he is out looking for words on it. There is a great place left over in him, and as long as that place is left over, it is one of the practical purposes of books to make it of some use to him. Whether the place is a good one or a bad one, something must be done with it, and books must do it.

If there were wordlessness for five hundred years, man would seek vast inarticulate words for himself. Cathedrals would rise from the ground undreamed as yet to say we wors.h.i.+pped. Music would be the daily necessity of the humblest life. Orchestras all around the world would be created,--would float language around the dumbness in it. Composers would become the greatest, the most practical men in all the nations.

Viaducts would stretch their mountains of stone across the valleys to find a word that said we were strong. Out of the stones of the hills, the mists of rivers, out of electricity, even out of silence itself, we would force expression. From the time a baby first moves his limbs to when--an old man--he struggles for his last breath, the one imperious divine necessity of life is expression. Hence the artist now and for ever--the ruler of history--whoever makes it. And if he cannot make it, he makes the makers of it. The artist is the man who, failing to find neighbours for himself, makes his neighbours with his own hands. If a woman is childless, she paints Madonnas. It is the inspiration, the despair that rests over all life. If we cannot express ourselves in things that are made, we make things, and if we cannot express ourselves in the things we make, we turn to words, and if we cannot express ourselves in words, we turn to other men's words.

The man who is satisfied with one life does not exist. The suicide does not commit suicide because he is tired of life, but because he wants so many more lives that he cannot have. The native of the tropics buys a book to the North Pole. If we are poor, we grow rich on paper. We roll in carriages through the highway of letters. If we are rich, we revel in a printed poverty. We cry our hearts out over our starving paper-children and hold our s.h.i.+vering, aching magazine hands over dying coals in garrets we live in by subscription at three dollars a year. The Bible is the book that has influenced men most in the world because it has expressed them the most. The moment it ceases to be the most expressive book, it will cease to be the most practical and effective one in human life. There is more of us than we can live. The touch of the infinite through which our spirits wandered is still upon us. The world cries to the poet: "Give me a new word--a word--a word! I will have a word!" It cries to the great man out of all its narrow places: "Give me another life! I will have a new life!" and every hero the world has known is worn threadbare with wors.h.i.+p, because his life says for other men what their lives have tried to say. Every masterful life calls across the world a cry of liberty to pent-up dreams, to the ache of faith in all of us, "Here thou art my brother--this is thy heart that I have lived." A hero is immortalised because his life is every man's larger self. So through the day-span of our years--a tale that is never told--we wander on, the infinite heart of each of us prisoned in blood and flesh and the cry of us everywhere, throughout all being, "Give me room!" It cries to the composer, "Make a high wide place for me!" and on the edge of the silence between life and words, to music we come at last because it is the supreme confidante of the human heart, the confessional, the world-priest between the actual self and the larger self of all of us. With all the multiplying of arts and the piling up of books that have come to us, the most important experience that men have had in this world since they began on it, is that they are infinite, that they cannot be expressed on it. It is not infrequently said that men must get themselves expressed in living, but the fact remains that no one has ever heard of a man as yet who really did it, or who was small enough to do it. There was One who seemed to express Himself by living and by dying both, but if He had any more than succeeded in beginning to express Himself, no one would have believed that He was the Son of G.o.d,--even that He was the Son of Man. It was because He could not crowd all that He was into thirty-three short years and twelve disciples and one Garden of Gethsemane and one Cross that we know who He was.

Riveted down to its little place with iron circ.u.mstance, the actual self in every man depends upon the larger possible self for the something that makes the actual self worth while. It is hard to be held down by circ.u.mstance, but it would be harder to be contented there, to live without those intimations of our diviner birth that come to us in books--books that weave some of the glory we have missed in our actual lives, into the glory of our thoughts. Even if life be to the uttermost the doing of what are called practical things, it is only by the occasional use of his imagination in reading or otherwise, that the practical man can hope to be in physical or mental condition to do them.

He needs a rest from his actual self. A man cannot even be practical without this imaginary or larger self. Unless he can work off his unexpressed remnant, his limbs are not free. Even down to the meanest of us, we are incurably larger than anything we can do.

Reading a book is a game a man plays with his own infinity.

VI

Outward Bound

If there could only be arranged some mystical place over the edge of human existence, where we all could go and practise at living, have full-dress rehearsals of our parts, before we are hustled in front of the footlights in our very swaddling clothes, how many people are there who have reached what are fabulously called years of discretion, who would not believe in such a place, and who would not gladly go back to it and spend most of the rest of their lives there?

This is one of the things that the world of books is for. Most of us would hardly know what to do without it, the world of books, if only as a place to make mistakes and to feel foolish in. It seems to be the one great un.o.bserved retreat, where all the sons of men may go, may be seen flocking day and night, to get the experiences they would not have, to be ready for those they cannot help having. It is the Rehearsal Room of History. The G.o.ds watch it--this Place of Books--as we who live go silent, trooping back and forth in it--the ceaseless, heartless, awful, beautiful pantomime of life.

It seems to be the testimony of human nature, after a somewhat immemorial experience, that some things in us had better be expressed by being lived, and that other things had better be expressed--if possible--in some other way.

There are a great many men, even amongst the wisest and strongest of us, who benefit every year of their lives by what might be called the purgative function of literature,--men who, if they did not have a chance at the right moment to commit certain sins with their imaginary selves, would commit them with their real ones. Many a man of the larger and more comprehensive type, hungering for the heart of all experience, bound to have its spirit, if not itself, has run the whole gamut of his possible selves in books, until all the sins and all the songs of men have coursed through his being. He finds himself reading not only to fill his lungs with ozone and his heart with the strength of the G.o.ds, but to work off the humour in his blood, to express his underself, and get it out of the way. Women who never cry their tears out--it is said--are desperate, and men who never read their sins away are dangerous. People who are tired of doing wrong on paper do right. To be sick of one's sins in a book saves not only one's self but every one else a deal of trouble. A man has not learned how to read until he reads with his veins as well as his arteries.

It would be useless to try to make out that evil pa.s.sions in literature accomplish any absolute good, but they accomplish a relative good which the world can by no means afford to overlook. The amount of crime that is suggested by reading can be more than offset by the extraordinary amount of crime waiting in the hearts of men, aimed at the world and glanced off on paper.

There are many indications that this purgative function of literature is the main thing it is for in our present modern life. Modern life is so const.i.tuted that the majority of people who live in it are expressing their real selves more truly in their reading than they are in their lives. When one stops to consider what these lives are--most of them--there can be but one conclusion about the reading of the people who have to live them, and that is that while sensational reading may be an evil, as compared with the evil that has made it necessary, it is an immeasurable blessing.

The most important literary and artistic fact of the nineteenth century is the subdivision of labour--that is, the subdividing of every man's life and telling him he must only be alive in a part of it. In proportion as an age takes sensations out of men's lives it is obliged to put them into their literature. Men are used to sensations on the earth as long as they stay on it and they are bound to have them in one way or another. An age which narrows the actual lives of men, which so adjusts the labour of the world that nearly every man in it not only works with a machine, spiritual or otherwise, but is a machine himself, and a small part of a machine, must not find fault with its art for being full of hysterics and excitement, or with its newspapers for being sensational. Instead of finding fault it has every reason to be grateful--to thank a most merciful Heaven that the men in the world are still alive enough in it to be capable of feeling sensation in other men's lives, though they have ceased to be capable of having sensations in their own, or of feeling sensations if they had them. It was when the herds of her people were buried in routine and peace that Rome had bull-fights. New York, with its hordes of drudges, ledger-slaves, machinists, and clerks, has the New York _World_. It lasts longer than a bull-fight and it can be had every morning before a man starts off to be a machine and every evening when he gets back from being a machine--for one cent. On Sunday a whole Colosseum fronts him and he is glutted with gore from morning until night. To a man who is a penholder by the week, or a linotype machine, or a ratchet in a factory, a fight is infinite peace. Obedience to the command of Scripture, making the Sabbath a day of rest, is entirely relative. Some of us are rested by taking our under-interested lives to a Sunday paper, and others are rested by taking our over-interested lives to church. Men read dime novels in proportion as their lives are staid and mechanical. Men whose lives are their own dime novels are bored by printed ones. Men whose years are crowded with crises, culminations, and events, who run the most risks in business, are found with the steadiest papers in their hands. The train-boy knows that the people who buy the biggest headlines are all on salaries and that danger and blood and thunder are being read nowadays by effeminately safe men, because it is the only way they can be had.

But it is not only the things that are left out of men's lives but the things they have too much of, which find their remedy in books. They are the levers with which the morbid is controlled. _Similia similibus curantur_ may be a dangerous principle to be applied by everybody, but thousands of men and women mulling away on their lives and worrying themselves with themselves, cutting a wide swath of misery wherever they go, have suddenly stopped in a book--have purged away jealousy and despair and pa.s.sion and nervous prostration in it. A paper-person with melancholia is a better cure for gloom than a live clown can be--who merely goes about reminding people how sad they are.

A man is often heard to say that he has tragedy enough in his own life not to want to go to a play for more, but this much having been said and truly said, he almost always goes to the play--to see how true it is.

The stage is his huge confidante. Pitying one's self is a luxury, but it takes a great while, and one can never do it enough. Being pitied by a five-thousand-dollar house, and with incidental music, all for a dollar and a half, is a sure and quick way to cheer up. Being pitied by Victor Hugo is a sure way also. Hardy can do people's pitying for them much better than they can do it, and it's soon over and done with. It is noticeable that while the impressive books, the books that are written to impress people, have a fair and nominal patronage, it is the expressive books, the books that let people out, which have the enormous sales. This seems to be true of the big-sale books whether the people expressed in them are worth expressing (to any one but themselves) or not. The principle of getting one's self expressed is so largely in evidence that not only the best but the worst of our books ill.u.s.trate it. Our popular books are carbuncles mostly. They are the inevitable and irrepressible form of the instinct of health in us, struggling with disease. On the whole, it makes being an optimist in modern life a little less of a tight-rope-walk. If even the bad elements in current literature--which are discouraging enough--are making us better, what shall be said of the good?

Book III

Details. The Confessions of an Unscientific Mind

I--Unscientific

I

On Being Intelligent in a Library

I have a way every two or three days or so, of an afternoon, of going down to our library, sliding into the little gate by the shelves, and taking a long empty walk there. I have found that nothing quite takes the place of it for me,--wandering up and down the aisles of my ignorance, letting myself be loomed at, staring doggedly back. I always feel when I go out the great door as if I had won a victory. I have at least faced the facts. I swing off to my tramp on the hills where is the sense of s.p.a.ce, as if I had faced the bully of the world, the whole a.s.sembled world, in his own den, and he had given me a license to live.

Of course it only lasts a little while. One soon feels a library nowadays pulling on him. One has to go back and do it all over again, but for the time being it affords infinite relief. It sets one in right relations to the universe, to the original plan of things. One suspects that if G.o.d had originally intended that men on this planet should be crowded off by books on it, it would not have been put off to the twentieth century.

I was saying something of this sort to The Presiding Genius of the State of Ma.s.sachusetts the other day, and when I was through he said promptly: "The way a man feels in a library (if any one can get him to tell it) lets out more about a man than anything else in the world."

It did not seem best to make a reply to this. I didn't think it would do either of us any good.

Finally, in spite of myself, I spoke up and allowed that I felt as intelligent in a library as anybody.

He did not say anything.

When I asked him what he thought being intelligent in a library was, he took the general ground that it consisted in always knowing what one was about there, in knowing exactly what one wanted.

I replied that I did not think that that was a very intelligent state of mind to be in, in a library.

Then I waited while he told me (fifteen minutes) what an intelligent mind was anywhere (nearly everywhere, it seemed to me). But I did not wait in vain, and at last, when he had come around to it, and had asked me what I thought the feeling of intelligence consisted in, in libraries, I said it consisted in being pulled on by the books.

I said quite a little after this, and of course the general run of my argument was that I was rather intelligent myself. The P. G. S. of M.