The Lost Art of Reading Part 22

There are only a few square inches--of cells and things, no one quite knows what--on a human face, but a man can see more of the world in those few inches, and understand more of the meaning of the world in them, put the world together better there, than in any other few inches that G.o.d has made. Even one or two faces do it, for a man, for most of us, when we have seen them through and through. Not a face anywhere--no one has ever seen one that was not a mirror of a whole world, a poor and twisted one perhaps, but a great one. The man that goes with it may not know it, may not have much to do with it. While he is waiting to die, G.o.d writes on him; but however it is, every man's face (I cannot help feeling it when I really look at it) is helplessly great. It is one man's portrait of the universe as he has found it--his portrait of a Whole. I have caught myself looking at crowds of faces as if they were rows of worlds. Is not everything I can know or guess or cry or sing written on faces? An audience is a kind of universe by itself. I could pray to one--when once the soul is hushed before it. If there were any necessity to select one place rather than another, any particular place to address a G.o.d in, I think I would choose an audience. Praying for it instead of to it is a mere matter of form. I cannot find a face in it that does not lead to a G.o.d, that does not gather a G.o.d in for me out of all s.p.a.ce, that is not one of His a.s.sembling places. Many and many a time when heads were being bowed have I caught a face in a congregation and prayed to it and with it. Every man's face is a kind of prayer he carries around with him. One can hardly help joining in it. It is sacrament to look at his face, if only to take sides in it, join with the G.o.d-self in it and help against the others. Whoever or Whatever He is, up there across all heaven, He is a G.o.d to me because He can be infinitely small or infinitely great as He likes. I will not have a G.o.d that can be shut up into any horizon or shut out of any face. When I have stood before audiences, have really realised faces, felt the still and awful thronging of them through my soul, it has seemed to me as if some great miracle were happening. It's as if--but who shall say it?--Have you never stood, Gentle Reader, alone at night on the frail rim of the earth--spread your heart out wide upon the dark, and let it lie there,--let it be flocked on by stars? It is like that when Something is lifted and one sees faces. Faces are worlds to me. However hard I try, I cannot get a man, somehow, any smaller than a world. He is a world to himself, and G.o.d helping me, when I deal with him, he shall be a world to me. The dignity of a world rests upon him. His face is a sum-total of the universe. It is made by the pa.s.sing of the infinite through his body. It is the mark of all things that are, upon his flesh.

What I like to believe is, that if there is an organic principle of unity like this in a little human life, if there is some way of summing up a universe in a man's face, there must be some way of summing it up, of putting it together in his education. It is this summing a universe up for one's self, and putting it together for one's self, and for one's own use, which makes an education in a universe worth while.

In other words, with a symbol as convenient, as near to him as his own face, a man need not go far in seeking for a principle of unity in focusing education. A man's face makes it seem not unreasonable to claim that the principle of unity in all education is the man, that the single human soul is created to be its own dome of all knowledge. A man's education may be said to be properly laid out in proportion as it is laid out the way he lays out his countenance. The method or process by which a man's countenance is laid out is a kind of daily organic process of world-swallowing. What a man undertakes in living is the making over of all phenomena, outer sights and sounds into his own inner ones, the pa.s.sing of all outside knowledge through himself. In proportion as he is being educated he is making all things that are, into his own flesh and spirit.

When one looks at it in this way it is not too much to say that every man is a world. He makes the tiny platform of his soul in infinite s.p.a.ce, a stage for worlds to come to, to play their parts on. His soul is a little All-show, a kind of dainty pantomime of the universe.

It seemed that I stood and watched a world awake, the great night still upbearing me above the flood of the day. I watched it strangely, as a changed being, the G.o.dlikeness and the might of sleep, the spell of the All upon me. I became as one who saw the earth as it is, in a high noon of its real self. Hung in its mist of worlds, wrapped in its own breath, I saw it--a queer little ball of cooled-off fire, it seemed, still and swift plunging through s.p.a.ce. And when I looked close in my heart, I saw cunning little men on it, nations and things running around on it. And when I looked still nearer, looked at the lighted side of it, I saw that each little man was not what I thought--a dot or fleck on the universe.

And I saw that he was a reflection, a serious, wondrous miniature of all the rest. It all seemed strange to me at first--to a man who lives, as I do, in a rather weary, laborious, painstaking age--that this should be so. As I looked at the little man I wondered if it really could be so.

Then, as I looked, the great light flowed all around the little man, and the little man reflected the great light.

But he did not seem to know it.

I felt like calling out to him--to one of them--telling him out loud to himself, wrapped away as he was, in his haste and dumbness, not knowing, and in the funny little noise of cities in the great still light. And so while the G.o.dlikeness and the might of sleep was upon me, I watched him, longed for him, wanted him for myself. I thought of my great cold, stretched-out wisdom. How empty and bare it was, this staring at stars one by one, this taking notes on creation, this slow painful tour of s.p.a.ce, when after all right down there in this little man, I said "Is not all I can know, or hope to know stowed away and written up?" And when I thought of this--the blur of sleep still upon me--I could hardly help reaching down for him, half-patronising him, half-wors.h.i.+pping him, taking him up to myself, where I could keep him by me, keep him to consult, watch for the sun, face for the infinite.--"Dear little fellow!" I said, "my own queer little fellow! my own little Kosmos, pocket-size!"

I thought how convenient it would be if I could take one in my hand, do my seeing through it, focus my universe with it. And when the strange mood left me and I came to, I remembered or thought I remembered that I was one of Those myself. "Why not be your own little Kosmos-gla.s.s?" I said.

I have been trying it now for some time. It is hard to regulate the focus of course, and it is not always what it ought to be. It has to be allowed for some. I do not claim much for it. But it's better, such as it is, than a sheer bit of Nothing, I think, to look at a universe with.

II

The Human Unit

It matters little that the worlds that are made in this way are very different in detail or emphasis, that some of them are much smaller and more twisted than others. The great point, so far as education is concerned, is for all teachers to realise that every man is a whole world, that it is possible and natural for every man to be a whole world. His very body is, and there must be some way for him to have a whole world in his mind. A being who finds a way of living a world into his face can find a way of reading a world together. If a man is going to have unity, read his world together, possess all-in-oneness in knowledge, he will have to have it the way he has it in his face.

It is superficial to a.s.sume, as scientists are apt to do, that in a world where there are infinite things to know, a man's knowledge must have unity or can have unity, in and of itself. The moment that all the different knowledges of a man are pa.s.sed over or allowed to be pa.s.sed over into his personal qualities, into the muscles and traits and organs and natural expressions of the man, they have unity and force and order and meaning as a matter of course. Infinite opposites of knowledge, recluses and separates of knowledge are gathered and can be seen gathered every day in almost any man, in the glance of his eye, in the turn of his lip, or in the blow of his fist.

It is not the method of science as science, and it is not in any sense put forward as the proper method for a man to use in his mere specialty, but it does seem to be true that if a man wants to know things which he does not intend to know all of, the best and most scientific way for him to know such things is to reach out to them and know them through their human or personal relations. I can only speak for myself, but I have found for one that the easiest and most thorough, practical way for me to get the benefit of things I do not know, is to know a man who does.

If he is an educated man, a man who really knows, who has made what he knows over into himself, I find if I know him that I get it all--the gist of it. The spirit of his knowledge, its att.i.tude toward life, is all in the man, and if I really know the man, absorb his nature, drink deep at his soul, I know what he knows--it seems to me--and what I know besides. It is true that I cannot express it precisely. He would have to give the lecture or diagram of it, but I know it--know what it comes to in life, his life and my life. I can be seen going around living with it afterwards, any day. His knowledge is summed up in him, his whole world is read together in him, belongs to him, and he belongs to me. To know a man is to know what he knows in its best form--the things that have made the man possible.

A great portrait painter, it has always seemed to me, is a kind of G.o.d in his way--knows everything his sitters know. He knows what every man's knowledge has done with the man--the best part of it--and makes it speak. I have never yet found myself looking at great walls of faces (one painter's faces), found myself walking up and down in Sargent's soul, without thinking what a great inhabited, trooped-through man he was--all knowledges flocking to him, showing their faces to him, from the ends of the earth, emptying their secrets silently out to his brush.

If a man like Sargent has for one of his sitters a great astronomer, an astronomer who is really great, who knows and absorbs stars, Sargent absorbs the man, and as a last result the stars in the man, and the man in Sargent, and the man's stars in Sargent, all look out of the canvas.

It is the spirit that sums up and unifies knowledge. It is a fact to be reckoned with, in education, that knowledge can be summed up, and that the best summing up of it is a human face.

III

The Higher Cannibalism

It is not unnatural to claim, therefore, that the most immediate and important short-cut in knowledge that the comprehensive or educated man can take comes to him through his human and personal relations. There is no better way of getting at the spirits of facts, of tracing out valuable and practical laws or generalisations, than the habit of trying things on to people in one's mind.

I have always thought that if I ever got discouraged and had to be an editor, I would do this more practically. As it is, I merely do it with books. I find no more satisfactory way of reading most books--the way one has to--through their backs, than reading the few books that one does read, through persons and for persons and with persons. It is a great waste of time to read a book alone. One needs room for rows of one's friends in a book. One book read through the eyes of ten people has more reading matter in it than ten books read in a common, lazy, lonesome fas.h.i.+on. One likes to do it, not only because one finds one's self enjoying a book ten times over, getting ten people's worth out of it, but because it makes a kind of sitting-room of one's mind, puts a fire-place in it, and one watches the ten people enjoying one another.

It may be for better and it may be for worse, but I have come to the point where, if I really care about a book, the last thing I want to do with it is to sit down in a chair and read it by myself. If I were ever to get so low in my mind as to try to give advice to a real live author (any author but a dead one), it would be, "Let there be room for all of us, O Author, in your book. If I am to read a live, happy, human book, give me a bench."

I have noticed that getting at truth on most subjects is a dramatic process rather than an argumentative one. One gets at truth either in a book or in a conversation not so much by logic as by having different people speak. If what is wanted is a really comprehensive view of a subject, two or three rather different men placed in a row and talking about it, saying what they think about it in a perfectly plain way, without argument, will do more for it than two or three hundred syllogisms. A man seems to be the natural or wild form of the syllogism, which this world has tacitly agreed to adopt. Even when he is a very poor one he works better with most people than the other kind. If a man takes a few other men (very different ones), uses them as gla.s.ses to see a truth through, it will make him as wise in a few minutes, with that truth, as a whole human race.

Knowledge which comes to a man with any particular sweep or scope is, in the very nature of things, dramatic.

[I fear, Gentle Reader, I am nearing a conviction. I feel a certain constraint coming over me. I always do, when I am nearing a conviction.

I never can be sure how my soul will take it upon itself to act when I am making the attempt I am making now, to state what is to me an intensely personal belief, in a general, convincing, or impersonal way.

The embarra.s.sing part of a conviction is that it is so. And when a man attempts to state a thing as it is, to speak for G.o.d or everybody,--well, it would not be respectable not to be embarra.s.sed a little--speaking for G.o.d. I know perfectly well, sitting here at my desk, this minute, with this conviction up in my pen, that it is merely a little thing of my own, that I ought to go on from this point cool and straight with it. But it is a conviction, and if you find me, Gentle Reader, in the very next page, swivelling off and speaking for G.o.d, I can only beg that both He and you will forgive me. I solemnly a.s.sure you herewith, that, however it may look, I am merely speaking for myself. I have thought of having a rubber stamp for this book, a stamp with IT SEEMS TO ME on it. A good many of these pages need going over with it afterwards. I do not suppose there is a man living--either I or any other dogmatist--who would not enjoy more speaking for himself (if anybody would notice it) than speaking for G.o.d. I have a hope that if I can only hold myself to it on this subject I shall do much better in speaking for myself, and may speak accidentally for G.o.d besides. I leave it for others to say, but it is hard not to point a little--in a few places.]

But here is the conviction. As I was going to say, knowledge which comes to a man with any particular sweep or scope is in the very nature of things dramatic. If the minds of two men expressing opinions in the dark could be flashed on a canvas, if there could be such a thing as a composite photograph of an opinion--a biograph of it,--it would prove to be, with nine men out of ten, a dissolving view of faces. The unspoken sides of thought are all dramatic. The palest generalisation a man can express, if it could be first stretched out into its origins, and then in its origins could be crowded up and focused, would be found to be a long unconscious procession of human beings--a murmur of countless voices. All our knowledge is conceived at first, taken up and organised in actual men, flashed through the delights of souls and the music of voices upon our brains. If it is true even in the business of the street that the greatest efficiency is reached by dealers who mix with the knowledge of their subject a keen appreciation and mastery of men, it is still more true of the business of the mind that the greatest, most natural and comprehensive results are reached through the dramatic or human insights.

All our knowledge is dead drama. Wisdom is always some old play faded out, blurred into abstractions. A principle is a wonderful disguised biograph. The power of Carlyle's _French Revolution_ is that it is a great spiritual play, a series of pictures and faces.

It was the French Revolution all happening over again to Carlyle, and it was another French Revolution to every one of his readers. It was dynamic, an induced current from Paris via Craigenputtock, because it was dramatic--great abstractions, playing magnificently over great concretes. Every man in Carlyle's history is a philosophy, and every abstraction in it a man's face, a beckoning to us. He always seems to me a kind of colossus of a man stalking across the dark, way out in The Past, using men as search-lights. He could not help doing his thinking in persons, and everything he touches is terribly and beautifully alive.

It was because he saw things in persons, that is, in great, rapid, organised sum-totals of experience and feeling, that he was able to make so much of so little as a historian, and what is quite as important (at least in history), so little of so much.

The true criticism of Carlyle as a historian is not a criticism of his method, that he went about in events and eras doing his seeing and thinking with persons, but that there were certain sorts of persons that Carlyle, with his mere lighted-up-brute imagination, could never see with. They were opaque to him. Every time he lifted one of them up to see ten years with, or a bevy of events or whatever it might be, he merely made blots or sputters with them, on his page. But it was his method that made it a great page, wider and deeper and more splendid than any of the others, and the blots were always obvious blots, did no harm there--no historical harm--almost any one could see them, and if they could not, were there not always plenty of little chilled-through historians, pattering around after him, tracking them out? But the great point of Carlyle's method was that he kept his perspective with it.

Never flattened out like other historians, by tables of statistics, unbewildered by the blur of n.o.bodies, he was able to have a live, glorious giant's way of writing, a G.o.dlike method of handling great handfuls of events in one hand, of unrolling great stretches of history with a look, of seeing things and making things seen, in huge, broad, focussed, vivid human wholes. It was a historical method of treating great ma.s.ses, which Thomas Carlyle and Shakespeare and Homer and the Old Testament all have in common.

The fact that it fails in the letter and with hordes of literal persons, that it has great gaps of temperament left over in it, is of lesser weight. The letter pa.s.ses by (thank Heaven!) in the great girths of time and s.p.a.ce. In all lasting or real history, only the spirit has a right to live. Temperaments in histories even at the worst are easily allowed for, filled out with temperaments of other historians--that is, they ought to be and are going to be if we ever have real historians any more, historians great enough and alive enough to have temperaments, and with temperaments great enough to write history the way G.o.d does--that can be read.

History can only be truly written by men who have concepts of history, and "Every concept," says Hegel, "must be universal, concrete, and particular, or else it cannot be a concept." That is, it must be dramatic.

And what is true of a great natural man or man of genius like Carlyle is equally true of all other natural persons whether men of genius or not.

A stenographic report of all the thoughts of almost any man's brain for a day would prove to almost any scientist how spiritually organised, personally conducted a human being's brain is bound to be, almost in spite of itself--even when it has been educated, artificially numbed and philosophised. A man may not know the look of the inside of his mind well enough to formulate or recognise it, but nearly every man's thinking is done, as a matter of course, either in people, or to people, or for people, or out of people. It is the way he grows, the way the world is woven through his being, the way of having life more abundantly.

It is not at all an exaggeration to say that if Shakespeare had not created his characters they would have created him. One need not wonder so very much that Shakespeare grew so masterfully in his later plays and as the years went on. Such a troop of people as flocked through Shakespeare's soul would have made a Shakespeare (allowing more time for it) out of almost anybody.

The essential wonder of Shakespeare, the greatness which has made men try to make a dozen specialists out of him, is not so very wonderful when one considers that he was a dramatist. A dramatist cannot help growing great. At least he has the outfit for it if he wants to. One hardly wants to be caught giving a world recipe,--a prescription for being a great man; but it does look sometimes as if the habit of reading for persons, of being a sort of spiritual cannibal, or man-eater, of going about through all the world absorbing personalities the way other men absorb facts, would gradually store up personality in a man, and make him great--almost inconveniently great, at times, and in spite of himself. The probabilities seem to be that it was because Shakespeare instinctively picked out persons in the general scheme of knowledge more than facts; it was because persons seemed to him, on the whole in every age, to be the main facts the age was for, summed the most facts up; it was because they made him see the most facts, helped him to feel and act on facts, made facts experiences to him, that William Shakespeare became so supreme and masterful with facts and men both.

To learn how to be _pro tem_. all kinds of men, about all things, to enjoy their joys in the things, is the greatest and the livest way of learning the things.

To learn to be a Committee of the Temperaments all by one's self (which is what Shakespeare did) is at once the method and the end of education--outside of one's specialty.

There could be no better method of doing this (no method open to everybody) than the method,--outside of one's specialty,--of reading for persons and with persons. It makes all one's life a series of spiritual revelations. It is like having regular habits of being born again, of having new experiences at will. It mobilises all love and pa.s.sion and delight in the world and sends it flowing past one's door.

In this day of immeasurable exercises, why does not some one put in a word for the good old-fas.h.i.+oned exercise of being born again? It is an exercise which few men seem to believe in, not even once in a lifetime, but it is easily the best all-around drill for living, and even for reading, that can be arranged. And it is not a very difficult exercise if one knows how, does it regularly enough. It is not at all necessary to go off to another world to believe in reincarnations, if one practises on them every day. Women have always seemed to be more generally in the way of being born again than men, but they have less scope and sometimes there is a certain feverish smallness about it, and when men once get started (like Robert Browning in distinction from Mrs.

Browning) they make the method of being born again seem a great triumphant one. They seem to have a larger repertoire to be born to, and they go through it more rapidly and justly. At the same time it is true that nearly all women are more or less familiar with the exercise of being born again--living _pro tem_. and at will--in others, and only a few men do it--merely the greatest ones, statesmen, diplomats, editors, poets, great financiers, and other prophets--all men who live by seeing more than others have time for. They are found to do their seeing rather easily on the whole. They do it by the perfectly normal exercise of being born into other men, looking out of their eyes a minute, whenever they like. All great power in its first stage is essentially dramatic, a man-judging, man-illuminating power, the power of guessing what other people are going to think and do.

When the world points out to the young man, as it is very fond of doing, that he must learn from experience, what it really means is, that he must learn from his dramatic drill in human life, his contact with real persons, his slow, compulsory scrupulous going the rounds of his heart, putting himself in the place of real persons.

Probably every man who lives, in proportion as he covets power or knowledge, would like to be (at will at least) a kind of focused everybody. It is true that in his earlier stages, and in his lesser moods afterward, he would probably seem to most people a somewhat teetering person, diffused, chaotic, or contradictory. It could hardly be helped--with the raw materials of a great man all scattered around in him, great unaccounted-for insights, idle-looking powers all as yet unfused. But a man in the long run (and longer the better) is always worth while, no matter how he looks in the making, and it certainly does seem reasonable, however bad it may look, that this is the way he is made, that in proportion as he does his knowing spiritually and powerfully, he will have to do it dramatically. It sometimes seems as if knowing, in the best sense, were a kind of rotary-person process, a being everybody in a row, a state of living symposium. The interpenetrating, blending-in, digesting period comes in due course, the time of settling down into himself, and behold the man is made, a unified, concentrated, individual, universal man--a focused everybody.

This is not quite being a G.o.d perhaps, but it is as near to it, on the whole, as a man can conveniently get.

IV