The Lost Art of Reading Part 5

They remove as many of his natural organs as they can, put in Presbyterian ones perhaps, or School-Board ones instead. Those that cannot be removed are numbed. When the time is fulfilled and the youth is cured of enough life at last to like living with the dead, and when it is thought he is enough like every one else to do, he is given his degree and sewed up.

After the sewing up his history is better imagined than described. Not being interesting to himself, he is not apt to be very interesting to any one else, and because of his lack of interest in himself he is called the average man.[1]

[1] A Typical Case: "The brain was cut away neatly and dressed.

A healthy yearling calf was tied down, her skull cut away, and a lobe of brain removed and fitted into the cavity in L's head. The wound was dressed and trephined, and the results awaited. The calf's head was fixed up with half a brain in it. Both the man and the calf have progressed satisfactorily, and the man is nearly as well as before the operation."--Daily Paper.

The main distinction of every greater or more extraordinary book is that it has been written by an extraordinary man--a natural or wild man, a man of genius, who has never been operated on. The main distinction of the man of talent is that he has somehow managed to escape a complete operation. It is a matter of common observation in reading biography that in proportion as men have had lasting power in the world there has been something irregular in their education. These irregularities, whether they happen to be due to overwhelming circ.u.mstance or to overwhelming temperament, seem to sum themselves up in one fundamental and comprehensive irregularity that penetrates them all--namely, every powerful mind, in proportion to its power, either in school or out of it or in spite of it, has educated itself. The ability that many men have used to avoid being educated is exactly the same ability they have used afterward to move the world with. In proportion as they have moved the world, they are found to have kept the lead in their education from their earliest years, to have had a habit of initiative as well as hospitality, to have maintained a creative, selective, active att.i.tude toward all persons and toward all books that have been brought within range of their lives.

II

The Top of the Bureau Principle

The experience of being robbed of a story we are about to read, by the good friend who cannot help telling how it comes out, is an occasional experience in the lives of older people, but it sums up the main sensation of life in the career of a child. The whole existence of a boy may be said to be a daily--almost hourly--struggle to escape from being told things.

It has been found that the best way to emphasise a fact in the mind of a bright boy is to discover some way of not saying anything about it. And this is not because human nature is obstinate, but because facts have been intended from the beginning of the world to speak for themselves, and to speak better than anyone can speak for them. When a fact speaks, G.o.d speaks. Considering the way that most persons who are talking about the truth see fit to rush in and interrupt Him, the wonder is not that children grow less and less interested in truth as they grow older, but that they are interested in truth at all--even lies about the truth.

The real trouble with most men and women as parents is, that they have had to begin life with parents of their own. When the child's first memory of G.o.d is a father or mother interrupting Him, he is apt to be under the impression, when he grows up, that G.o.d can only be introduced to his own children by never being allowed to get a word in. If we as much as see a Fact coming toward a child--most of us--we either run out where the child is, and bring him into the house and cry over him, or we rush to his side and look anxious and stand in front of the Fact, and talk to him about it.

And yet it is doubtful if there has ever been a boy as yet worth mentioning, who did not wish we would stand a little more one side--let him have it out with things. He is very weary--if he really amounts to anything--of having everything about him prepared for him. There has never been a live boy who would not throw a store-plaything away in two or three hours for a comparatively imperfect plaything he had made himself. He is equally indifferent to a store Fact, and a boy who does not see through a store-G.o.d, or a store-book, or a store-education sooner than ninety-nine parents out of a hundred and sooner than most synods, is not worth bringing up.

No just or comprehensive principle can be found to govern the reading of books that cannot be made to apply, by one who really believes it (though in varying degrees), to the genius and to the dolt. It is a matter of history that a boy of fine creative powers can only be taught a true relation to books through an appeal to his own discoveries; but what is being especially contended for, and what most needs to be emphasised in current education, is the fact that the boy of ordinary creative powers can only be taught to read in the same way--by a slower, broader, and more patient appeal to his own discoveries. The boy of no creative powers whatever, if he is ever born, should not be taught to read at all. Creation is the essence of knowing, and teaching him to read merely teaches him more ways of not knowing. It gives him a wider range of places to be a n.o.body in--takes away his last opportunity for thinking of anything--that is, getting the meaning of anything for himself. If a man's heart does not beat for him, why subst.i.tute a hot-water bottle? The less a mind is able to do, the less it can afford to have anything done for it. It will be a great day for education when we all have learned that the genius and the dolt can only be educated--at different rates of speed--in exactly the same way. The trouble with our education now is, that many of us do not see that a boy who has been presented with an imitation brain is a deal worse off than a boy who, in spite of his teachers, has managed to save his real one, and has not used it yet.

It is dangerous to give a program for a principle to those who do not believe in the principle, and who do not believe in it instinctively, but if a program were to be given it would be something like this: It would a.s.sume that the best way to do with an uncreative mind is to put the owner of it where his mind will be obliged to create.

First. Decide what the owner of the mind most wants in the world.

Second. Put this thing, whatever it may be where the owner of the mind cannot get it unless he uses his mind. Take pains to put it where he can get it, if he does use his mind.

Third. Lure him on. It is education.

If this principle is properly applied to books, there is not a human being living on the earth who will not find himself capable of reading books--as far as he goes--with his whole mind and his whole body. He will read a printed page as eagerly as he lives, and he will read it in exactly the same way that he lives--with his imagination. A boy lives with his imagination every hour of His life--except in school. The moment he discovers, or is allowed to discover, that reading a book and living a day are very much alike, that they are both parts of the same act, and that they are both properly done in the same way, he will drink up knowledge as Job did scorning, like water.

But it is objected that many children are entirely imitative, and that the imagination cannot be appealed to with them and that they cut themselves off from creativeness at every point.

While it is inevitable in the nature of things that many children should be largely imitative, there is not a child that does not do some of his imitating in a creative way, give the hint to his teachers even in his imitations, of where his creativeness would come if it were allowed to.

His very blunders in imitating, point to desires that would make him creative of themselves, if followed up. Some children have many desires in behalf of which they become creative. Others are creative only in behalf of a few. But there is always a single desire in a child's nature through which his creativeness can be called out.

A boy learns to live, to command his body, through the desires which make him creative with it--hunger, and movement, and sleep--desires the very vegetables are stirred with, and the boy who does not find himself responding to them, who can help responding to them, does not exist.

There may be times when a boy has no desire to fill himself with food, and when he has no desire to think, but if he is kept hungry he is soon found doing both--thinking things into his stomach. A stomach, in the average boy, will all but take the part of a brain itself, for the time being, to avoid being empty. If a human being is alive at all, there is always at least one desire he can be educated with, prodded into creativeness, until he learns the habit and the pleasure of it. The best qualification for a nurse for a child whose creativeness turns on his stomach, is a natural gift for keeping food on the tops of bureaus and shelves just out of reach. The best qualification for a teacher is infinite contrivance in high bureaus. The applying of the Top of the High Bureau to all knowledge and to all books is what true education is for.

It is generally considered a dangerous thing to do, to turn a child loose in a library. It might fairly be called a dangerous thing to do if it were not much more dangerous not to. The same forces that wrought themselves into the books when they were being made can be trusted to gather and play across them on the shelves. These forces are the self-propelling and self-healing forces of the creative mood. The creative mood protects the books, and it protects all who come near the books. It protects from the inside. It toughens and makes supple.

Parents who cannot trust a boy to face the weather in a library should never let him outdoors.

Trusting a boy to the weather in a library may have its momentary embarra.s.sments, but it is immeasurably the shortest and most natural way to bring him into a vital connection with books. The first condition of a vital connection with books is that he shall make the connection for himself. The relation will be vital in proportion as he makes it himself.

The fact that he will begin to use his five reading senses by trying to connect in the wrong way, or by connecting with the wrong books or parts of books, is a reason, not for action on the part of parents and teachers, but for inspired waiting. As a vital relation to books is the most immeasurable outfit for living and the most perfect protection against the dangers of life, a boy can have, the one point to be borne in mind is not the book but the boy--the instinct of curiosity in the boy.

A boy who has all his good discoveries in books made for him--spoiled for him, if he has any good material in him--will proceed to make bad ones. The vices would be nearly as safe from interference as the virtues, if they were faithfully cultivated in Sunday-schools or by average teachers in day-schools. Sin itself is uninteresting when one knows all about it. The interest of the average young man in many a more important sin to-day is only kept up by the fact that no one stands by with a book teaching him how to do it. Whatever the expression "original sin" may have meant in the first place, it means now that we are full of original sin because we are not given a chance to be original in anything else. A virtue may be defined as an act so good that a religiously trained youth cannot possibly learn anything more about it.

A cla.s.sic is a pleasure hurried into a responsibility, a book read by every man before he has anything to read it with. A cla.s.sical author is a man who, if he could look ahead--could see the generations standing in rows to read his book, toeing the line to love it--would not read it himself.

Any training in the use of books that does not base its whole method of rousing the instinct of curiosity, and keeping it aroused, is a wholesale slaughter, not only of the minds that might live in the books, but of the books themselves. To ignore the central curiosity of a child's life, his natural power of self-discovery in books, is to dispense with the force of gravity in books, instead of taking advantage of it.

The Third Interference: The Unpopularity of the First Person Singular

I

The First Person a Necessary Evil

Great emphasis is being laid at the present time upon the tools that readers ought to have to do their reading with. We seem to be living in a reference-book age. Whatever else may be claimed for our own special generation it stands out as having one inspiration that is quite its own--the inspiration of conveniences. That these conveniences have their place, that one ought to have the best of them there can be no doubt, but it is very important to bear in mind, particularly in the present public mood, that if one cannot have all of these conveniences, or even the best of them, the one absolutely necessary reference book in reading the masters of literature is one that every man has.

It is something of a commonplace--a rather modest volume with most of us, summed up on a tombstone generally, easily enough, but we are bound to believe after all is said and done that the great masterpiece among reference books, for every man,--the one originally intended by the Creator for every man to use,--is the reference book of his own life. We believe that the one direct and necessary thing for a man to do, if he is going to be a good reader, is to make, this reference book--his own private edition of it--as large and complete as possible. Everything refers to it, whatever his reading is. Shakespeare and the New York _World_, Homer and _Harper's Bazar_, Victor Hugo and _The Forum_, _Babyhood_ and the Bible all refer to it,--are all alike in making their references (when they are really looked up) to private editions. Other editions do not work. In proportion as they are powerful in modern life, all the books and papers that we have are engaged in the business of going about the world discovering people to themselves, unroofing first person singulars in it, getting people to use their own reference books on all life. Literature is a kind of vast international industry of comparing life. We read to look up references in our own souls. The immortality of Homer and the circulation of the _Ladies' Home Journal_ both conform to this fact, and it is equally the secret of the last page of _Harper's Bazar_ and of Hamlet and of the grave and monthly lunge of _The Forum_ at pa.s.sing events. The difference of appeal may be as wide as the east and the west, but the east and the west are in human nature and not in the nature of the appeal. The larger selves look themselves up in the greater writers and the smaller selves spell themselves out in the smaller ones. It is here we all behold as in some vast reflection or mirage of the reading world our own souls crowding and jostling, little and great, against the walls of their years, seeking to be let out, to look out, to look over, to look up--that they may find their possible selves.

When men are allowed to follow what might be called the forces of nature in the reading world they are seen to read:

1st. About themselves.

2nd. About people they know.

3rd. About people they want to know.

4th. G.o.d.

Next to their interest in persons is their interest in things:

1st. Things that they have themselves.

2nd. Things that people they know, have.

3rd. Things they want to have.

4th. Things they ought to want to have.

5th. Other things.

6th. The universe--things G.o.d has.

7th. G.o.d.

A scale like this may not be very complimentary to human nature. Some of us feel that it is appropriate and possibly a little religious to think that it is not. But the scale is here. It is mere psychological-matter-of-fact. It is the way things are made, and while it may not be quite complimentary to human nature, it seems to be more complimentary to G.o.d to believe, in spite of appearances, that this scale from I to G.o.d is made right and should be used as it stands. It seems to have been in general use among our more considerable men in the world and among all our great men and among all who have made others great. They do not seem to have been ashamed of it. They have climbed up frankly on it--most of them, in full sight of all men--from I to G.o.d.

They have claimed that everybody (including themselves) was identified with G.o.d, and they have made people believe it. It is the few in every generation who have dared to believe in this scale, and who have used it, who have been the leaders of the rest. The measure of a man's being seems to be the swiftness with which his nature runs from the bottom of this scale to the top, the swiftness with which he identifies himself, says "I" in all of it. The measure of his ability to read on any particular subject is the swiftness with which he runs the scale from the bottom to the top on that subject, makes the trip with his soul from his own little I to G.o.d. When he has mastered the subject, he makes the run almost without knowing it, sees it as it is, _i. e._, identifies himself with G.o.d on it. The principle is one which reaches under all mastery in the world, from the art of prophecy even to the art of politeness. Tho man who makes the trip on any subject from the first person out through the second person to the farthest bounds of the third person,--that is, who identifies himself with all men's lives, is called the poet or seer, the master-lover of persons. The man who makes the trip most swiftly from his own things to other men's things and to G.o.d's things--the Universe--is called the scientist, the master-lover of things. The G.o.d is he who identifies his own personal life, with all lives and his own things with all men's things--who says "I" forever everywhere.

The reason that the Hebrew Bible has had more influence in history than all other literatures combined, is that there are fewer emasculated men in it. The one really fundamental and astonis.h.i.+ng thing about the Bible is the way that people have of talking about themselves in it. No other nation that has ever existed on the earth would ever have thought of daring to publish a book like the Bible. So far as the plot is concerned, the fundamental literary conception, it is all the Bible comes to practically--two or three thousand years of it--a long row of people talking about themselves. The Hebrew nation has been the leading power in history because the Hebrew man, in spite of all his faults has always had the feeling that G.o.d sympathised with him, in being interested in himself. He has dared to feel identified with G.o.d. It is the same in all ages--not an age but one sees a Hebrew in it, out under his lonely heaven standing and crying "G.o.d and I." It is the one great spectacle of the Soul this little world has seen. Are not the mightiest faces that come to us flickering out of the dark, their faces? Who can look at the past who does not see--who does not always see--some mighty Hebrew in it singing and struggling with G.o.d? What is it--what else could it possibly be but the Hebrew soul, like a kind of pageantry down the years between us and G.o.d, that would ever have made us guess--men of the other nations--that a G.o.d belonged to us, or that a G.o.d could belong to us and be a G.o.d at all? Have not all the other races, each in their turn sp.a.w.ning in the sun and lost in the night, vanished because they could not say "I" before G.o.d? The nations that are left, the great nations of the modern world, are but the moral pa.s.sengers of the Hebrews, hangers-on to the race that can say "I"--I to the _n^th_ power,--the race that has dared to identify itself with G.o.d. The fact that the Hebrew, instead of saying G.o.d and I, has turned it around sometimes and said I and G.o.d is neither here nor there in the end. It is because the Hebrew has kept to the main point, has felt related to G.o.d (the main point a G.o.d cares about), that he has been the most heroic and athletic figure in human history--comes nearer to the G.o.d-size. The rest of the nations sitting about and wondering in the dark, have called this thing in the Hebrew "religious genius." If one were to try to sum up what religious genius is, in the Hebrew, or to account for the spiritual and material supremacy of the Hebrew in history, in a single fact, it would be the fact that Moses, their first great leader, when he wanted to say "It seems to me," said "The Lord said unto Moses."

The Hebrews may have written a book that teaches, of all others, self-renunciation, but the way they taught it was self-a.s.sertion. The Bible begins with a meek Moses who teaches by saying "The Lord said unto Moses," and it comes to its climax in a lowly and radiant man who dies on a cross to say "I and the Father are one." The man Jesus seems to have called himself G.o.d because he had a divine habit of identifying himself, because he had kept on identifying himself with others until the first person and the second person and the third person were as one to him. The distinction of the New Testament is that it is the one book the world has seen, which dispenses with p.r.o.nouns. It is a book that sums up p.r.o.nouns and numbers, singular and plural, first person, second and third person, and all, in the one great central p.r.o.noun of the universe. The very stars speak it--WE.