The Lost Art of Reading Part 25

I have said I will not have a faith that I have to get to with a trap-door. I have said that inspiration is for everybody. I have had inspiration myself and I will not clang down a door above my soul and believe that G.o.d has given to me or to any one else what only a few can have. I do not want anything, I will not have anything that any one cannot have. If there is one thing rather than another that inspiration is for, it is that when I have it I know that any man can have it. It is necessary to my selfishness that he shall have it. If a great wonder of a world like this is given to a man, and he is told to live on it and it is not furnished with men to live with, with men that go with it, what is it all for? If one could have one's choice in being d.a.m.ned there would be no way that would be quite so quick and effective as having inspirations that were so little inspired as to make one suppose they were merely for one's self or for a few others. The only way to save one's soul or to keep a corner for G.o.d in it is to believe that He is a kind of G.o.d who has put inspiration in every man. All that has to be done with it, is to get him to stop smothering it.

Inspiration, instead of being an act of going to work in a minute, living a few hundred years at once, an act of making up and creating a new and wonderful soul for one's self, consists in the act of lifting off the lid from the one one has. The mere fact that the man exists who has had both experiences, not having inspiration and having it, gives a basis for knowledge of what inspiration is. A man who has never had anything except inspiration cannot tell us what it is, and a man who has never had it cannot tell us what it is; but a man who has had both of these experiences (which is the case with most of us) const.i.tutes a cross-section of the subject, a symbol of hope for every one. All who have had not-inspirations and inspirations both know that the origin and control and habit of inspiration, are all of such a character as to suggest that it is the common property of all men. All that is necessary is to have true educators or promoters, men who furnish the conditions in which the common property can be got at.

The only difference between men of genius--men of genius who know it--and other men--men of genius who don't know it--is that the men of genius who know it have discovered themselves, have such a headlong habit of self-joy in them, have tasted their self-joys so deeply, that they are bound to get at them whether the conditions are favourable or not. The great fact about the ordinary man's genius, which the educational world has next to reckon with, is that there are not so many places to uncover it. The ordinary man at first, or until he gets the appet.i.te started, is more particular about the conditions.

It is because a man of genius is more thorough with the genius he has, more spiritual and wilful with it than other men, that he grows great. A man's genius is always at bottom religious, at the point where it is genius, a wors.h.i.+pping toward something, a wors.h.i.+pping toward something until he gets it, a supreme covetousness for G.o.d, for being a G.o.d. It is a faith in him, a sense of ident.i.ty and sharing with what seems to be above and outside, a sense of his own latent infinity. I have said that all that real teaching is for, is to say to a man, in countless ways, a countless "You can." And I have said that all real learning is for is to say "I can." When we have enough great "I can's," there will be a great society or nation, a glorious "We can" rising to heaven. This is the ideal that hovers over all real teaching and makes it deathless,--fertile for ever.

If the world could be stopped short for ten years in its dull, sullen round of not believing in itself, if it could be allowed to have, all of it, all over, even for three days, the great solemn joy of letting itself go, it would not be caught falling back very soon, I think, into its stupor of cowardice. It would not be the same world for three hundred years. All that it is going to require to get all people to feel that they are inspired is some one who is strong enough to lift a few people off of themselves--get the idea started. Every man is so busy nowadays keeping himself, as he thinks, properly smothered, that he has not the slightest idea of what is really inside him, or of what the thing that is really inside him would do with him, if he would give it a chance. Any man who has had the experience of not having inspiration and the experience of having it both knows that it is the sense of striking down through, of having the lid of one's smaller consciousness lifted off. In the long run his inspiration can be had or not as he wills. He knows that it is the supreme reasonableness in him, the primeval, underlying naturalness in him, rising to its rights. What he feels when he is inspired is that the larger laws, the laws above the other laws, have taken hold of him. He knows that the one law of inspiration is that a man shall have the freedom of himself. Most problems and worries are based on defective, uninvoked functions. Some organ, vision, taste, or feeling or instinct is not allowed its vent, its chance to qualify.

Something needs lifting away. The common experience of sleeping things off, or walking or working them off, is the daily symbol of inspiration.

More often than not a worry or trouble is moved entirely out of one's path by the simplest possible device, an intelligent or instinctive change of conditions.

The fundamental heresy of modern education is that it does not believe this--does not believe in making deliberate arrangements for the originality of the average man. It does not see that the extraordinary man is simply the ordinary man keyed-up, writ large or moving more rapidly. What the average man is now, the great men were once. When we begin to understand that a man of genius is not supernatural, that he is simply more natural than the rest of us, that all the things that are true for him are true for us, except that they are true more slowly, the educational world will be a new world. The very essence of the creative power of a man of genius over other men, is that he believes in them more than they do. He writes, paints, or sings as if all other men were men of genius, and he keeps on doing it until they are. All modern human nature is annexed genius. The whole world is a great gallery of things, that men of genius have seen, until they make other men see them too, and prove that other men can see them. What one man sees with travail or by being born again, whole generations see at last without trying, and when they are born the first time. The great cosmic process is going on in the human spirit. Ages flow down from the stars upon it. No one man shall guess, now or ever, what a man is, what a man shall be. But it is to be noticed that when the world gets its greatest man--the One who guesses most, generations are born and die to know Him, all with awe and gentleness in their hearts. One after the other as they wheel up to the Great Sun to live,--they call Him the Son of G.o.d because He thought everybody was.

The main difference between a great man and a little one is a matter of time. If the little man could keep his organs going, could keep on experiencing, acting, and reacting on things for four thousand years, he would have no difficulty in being as great as some men are in their threescore and ten. All genius is inherited time and s.p.a.ce. The imagination, which is the psychological subst.i.tute for time and s.p.a.ce, is a fundamental element in all great power, because, being able to reach results without pacing off the processes, it makes it possible for a man to crowd more experience in, and be great in a shorter time.

The idea of educating the little man in the same way as the great man, from the inside, or by drawing out his originality, meets with many objections. It is objected that inasmuch as no little men could be made into great men in the time allotted, there would be no object in trying to do it, and no result to show for it in the world, except row after row of spoiled little men, drearily waiting to die. The answer to this is the simple a.s.sertion that if a quart-cup is full it is the utmost a quart-cup can expect. A hogshead can do no more. So far as the man himself is concerned, if he has five sound, real senses in him, all of them acting and reacting on real things, if he is alive, i. e., sincere through and through, he is educated. True education must always consist, not in how much a man has, but in the way he feels about what he has.

The kingdom of heaven is on the inside of his five senses.

V

Every Man his Own Genius

I do not mean by the man of genius in this connection the great man of genius, who takes hold of his ancestors to live, rakes centuries into his life, burns up the phosphorus of ten generations in fifty years, and with giant masterpieces takes leave of the world at last, bringing his family to a full stop in a blaze of glory, and a spindling child or so.

I am merely contending for the principle that the extraordinary or inspired man is the normal man (at the point where he is inspired) and that the ordinary or uninspired boy can be made like him, must be educated like him, led out through his self-delight to truth, that, if anything, the ordinary or uninspired boy needs to be educated like a genius more than a genius does.

I know of a country house which reminds me of the kind of mind I would like to have. In the first place, it is a house that grew. It could not possibly have been thought of all at once. In the second place, it grew itself. Half inspiration and half common-sense, with its mistakes and its delights all in it, gloriously, frankly, it blundered into being, seven generations tumbled on its floors, filled it with laughter and love and tears. One felt that every life that had come to it had written itself on its walls, that the old house had broken out in a new place for it, full of new little joys everywhere, and jogs and bays and afterthoughts and forethoughts, old roofs and young ones chumming together, and old chimneys (three to start with and four new ones that came when they got ready). Everything about it touched the heart and said something. I have never managed to see it yet, whether in sunlight, cloud-light, or starlight, or the light of its own lamps, but that it stood and spoke. It is a house that has genius. The genius of the earth and the sky around it are all in it, of motherhood, of old age, and of little children. It grew out of a spirit, a loving, eager, putting-together, a making of relations between things that were apart,--the portrait of a family. It is a very beautiful, eloquent house, and hundreds of nights on the white road have I pa.s.sed it by, in my lonely walk, and stopped and listened to it, standing there in its lights, like a kind of low singing in the trees, and when I have come home, later, on the white road, and the lights were all put out, I still feel it speaking there, faint against heaven, with all its sleep, its young and old sleep, its memories and hopes of birth and death, lifting itself in the night, a prayer of generations.

Many people do not care for it very much. They would wonder that I should like a mind like it. It is a wandering-around kind of a house, has thirty outside doors. If one doesn't like it, it is easy to get out (which is just what I like in a mind). Stairways almost anywhere, only one or two places in the whole building where there is not a piazza, and every inch of piazza has steps down to the gra.s.s and there are no walks.

A great central fireplace, big as a room, little groups of rooms that keep coming on one like surprises, and little groups of houses around outside that have sprung up out of the ground themselves. A flower garden that thought of itself and looks as if it took care of itself (but doesn't). Everything exuberant and hospitable and free on every side and full of play,--a high stillness and seriousness over all.

I cannot quite say what it is, but most country houses look to me as if they had forgotten they were really outdoors, in a great, wide, free, happy place, where winds and suns run things, where not even G.o.d says nay, and everything lives by its inner law, in the presence of the others, exults in its own joy and plays with G.o.d. Most country homes forget this. They look like little isles of glare and showing off, and human joylessness, dotting the earth. People's minds in the houses are like the houses: they reek with propriety. That is, they are all abnormal, foreign to the spirit, to the pa.s.sion of self-delight, of life, of genius. Most of them are fairly hostile to genius or look at it with a lorgnette.

I like to think that if the principles and habits of freedom that result in genius were to be gauged and adjusted toward bringing out the genius of ordinary men, they would result in the following:

Recipe to make a great man (or a live small one): Let him be made like a great work of art. In general, follow the rule in Genesis i.

1. Chaos.

2. Enough Chaos; that is, enough kinds of Chaos. Pouring all the several parts of Chaos upon the other parts of Chaos.

3. Watch to see what emerges and what it is in the Chaos that most belongs to all the rest, what is the Unifying Principle.

4. Fertilise the Chaos. Let it be impregnated with desire, will, purpose, personality.

5. When the Unifying Principle is discovered, refrain from trying to force everything to attach itself to it. Let things attach themselves in their way as they are sure to do in due time and grow upon it. Let the mind be trusted. Let it not be always ordered around, thrust into, or meddled with. The making of a man, like the making of a work of art, consists in giving the nature of things a chance, keeping them open to the sun and air and the springs of thought. The first person who ever said to man, "You press the b.u.t.ton and I will do the rest," was G.o.d.

The emphasis of art in our modern education, of the knack or science or how of things, is to be followed next by the emphasis of the art that conceals art, genius, the norm and climax of human ability. Any finis.h.i.+ng-school girl can out-sonnet Keats. The study of appearances, the pa.s.sion for the outside has run its course. The next thing in education is going to be honesty, fearless naturalness, upheaval, the freedom of self, self-expectancy, all-expectancy, and the pa.s.sion for possessing real things. The personalities, persons with genius, persons with free-working, uncramped minds, are all there, ready and waiting, both in teachers and pupils, all growing _sub rosa_, and the main thing that is left to do is to lift the great roof of machinery off and let them come up. The days are already upon us when education shall be taken out of the hands of anaemic, abstracted men--men who go into everything theory-end first. There is already a new atmosphere in the educated world. The thing that shall be taught shall be the love of swinging out, of swinging up to the light and the air. Let every man live, the world says next, a little less with his outside, with his mere brain or logic-st.i.tching machine. Let him swear by his instincts more, and live with his medulla oblongata.

VI

An Inclined Plane

"This is a very pleasant and profitable ideal you have printed in this book, but teachers and pupils and inst.i.tutions being what they are, it is not practical and nothing can be done about it," it is objected.

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED

1. There is nothing so practical as an ideal, for if through his personality and imagination a man can be made to see an ideal, the ideal does itself; that is, it takes hold of him and inspires him to do it and to find means for doing it. This is what has been aimed at in this book.

2. The first and most practical thing to do with an ideal is to believe it.

3. The next most practical thing is to act as if one believed it. This makes other people believe it. To act as if one believed an ideal is to be literal with it, to a.s.sume that it can be made real, that something--some next thing--can be done with it.

4. It is only people who believe an ideal who can make it practical.

Educators who think that an ideal is true and who do not think it is practical do not think it is true, do not really know it. The process of knowing an ideal, of realising it with the mind, is the process of knowing that it can be made real. This is what makes it an ideal, that it is capable of becoming real, and if a man does not realise an ideal, cannot make it real in his mind, it is not accurate for him to say that it is not practical. It is accurate for him to say that it is not practical to him. The ideal presented in this book is not presented as practical except to teachers who believe it.

5. Every man has been given in this world, if he is allowed to get at them, two powers to make a man out of. These powers are Vision and Action. (1) Seeing, and (2) Being or Doing what one sees. What a man sees with, is quite generally called his imagination. What he does with what he sees, is called his character or personality. If it is true, as has been maintained in the whole trend of this book, that the most important means of education are imagination and personality, the power of seeing things and the power of living as if one saw them, imagination and personality must be accepted as the forces to teach with, and the things that must be taught. The persons who have imagination and personality in modern life must do the teaching.

6. Parents and others who believe in imagination and personality as the supreme energies of human knowledge and the means of education, and who have children they wish taught in this way, are going to make connections with such teachers and call on them to do it.

7. Inasmuch as the best way to make an ideal that rests on persons practical is to find the persons, the next thing for persons who believe in an ideal to do is to find each other out. All persons, particularly teachers and parents, in their various communities and in the nation, who believe that the ideal is practical in education should be social with their ideal, group themselves together, make themselves known and felt.

8. Some of us are going to act through the schools we have. We are going to make room in our present over-managed, morbidly organised inst.i.tutions, with ordered-around teachers, for teachers who cannot be ordered around, who are accustomed to use their imaginations and personalities to teach with, instead of superintendents. We are going to have superintendents who will desire such teachers. The reason that our over-organised and over-superintended schools and colleges cannot get the teachers they want, to carry out their ideals, is a natural one enough. The moment ideal teachers are secured it is found that they have ideals of their own and that they will not teach without them. When vital and free teachers are attracted to the schools and allowed fair conditions there, they will soon crowd others out. The moment we arrange to give good teachers a chance good teachers will be had.

9. Others will find it best to act in another way. Instead of reforming schools from the inside, they are going to attack the problem from the outside, start new schools which shall stand for live principles and outlive the others. As good teachers can arrange better conditions for themselves to teach in their own schools, wherever practicable this would seem to be the better way. They are going to organise colleges of their own. They are going to organise unorganised colleges (for such they would be called at first), a.s.semblings of inspired teachers, men grouping men about them each after his kind.

Every one can begin somewhere. Teachers who are outside can begin outside and teachers who are within can begin within. Certainly if every teacher who believes something will believe deeply, will free himself, let himself out with his belief, act on it, the day is not long hence when the great host of ordered-around teachers with their ordered-around pupils will be a memory. Copying and appearing to know will cease.

Self-delight and genius will again be the habit of the minds of men and the days of our present poor, pale, fuddling, unbelieving, Simon-says-thumbs-up education will be numbered.

Sometimes it seems as if this globe, this huge cyclorama of nations whirling in sunlight through stars, were a mere empty, mumbled repet.i.tion, a going round and round of the same stupendous stupidities and the same heroisms in human life. One is always feeling as if everything, arts, architecture, cables, colleges, nations, had all almost literally happened before, in the ages dark to us, gone the same round of beginning, struggling, and ending. Then the globe was wiped clean and began again.

One of the great advantages in emphasising individuals,--the main idea of this book,--in picking out particular men as forces, centres of energy in society, as the basis for one's programme for human nature, is the sense it gives that things really can begin again--begin anywhere--where a man is. One single human being, deeply believed in, glows up a world, casts a kind of speculative value, a divine wager over all the rest. I confess that most men I have seen seem to me phantasmagorically walking the earth, their lives haunting them, hanging intangibly about them--indefinitely postponed. But one does not need, in order to have a true joyous working-theory of life, to believe verbatim, every moment, in the ma.s.s of men--as men. One needs to believe in them very much--as possible men--larvae of great men, and if, in the meantime, one can have (what is quite practicable) one sample to a square mile of what the ma.s.s of men in that mile might be, or are going to be, one comes to a considerable degree of enthusiasm, a working and sharing enthusiasm for all the rest.

VII

Allons

I thought when I began to make my little visit in civilisation--this book--that perhaps I ought to have a motto to visit a civilisation with.

So the motto I selected (a good one for all reformers, viewers of inst.i.tutions and things) was, "Do not shoot the organist. He is doing the best he can." I fear I have not lived up to it. I am an optimist. I cannot believe he is doing the best he can. Before I know it, I get to hoping and scolding. I do not even believe he is enjoying it. Most of the people in civilisation are not enjoying it. They are like people one sees on tally-hos. They are not really enjoying what they are doing.

They enjoy thinking that other people think they are enjoying it.

The great characteristic enthusiasm of modern society, of civilisation, the fad of showing off, of exhibiting a life instead of living it, very largely comes, it is not too much to say, from the lack of normal egoism, of self-joy in civilised human beings. It has come over us like a kind of moral anaemia. People cannot get interested enough in anything to be interested in it by themselves. Hence no great art--merely the art which is a trick or knack of appearance. We lack great art because we do not believe in great living.