Still the same pained Boston-Public-Library expression—only turned on a little harder.

"Seems to me," I said, "when a man can't feel superior to other people in this world, he might at least be allowed the privilege of feeling superior to himself once in a while—spells of it."

He intimated that the trouble with me was that I wanted both. I admitted that I had cravings for both. I said I thought I'd be a little easier to get along with, if they were more satisfied.

He intimated that I was easier to get along with than I ought to be, or than I seemed to think I was. He did not put it in so many words. The P. G. S. of M. never says anything that can be got hold of and answered. Finally I determined to answer him whether he had said anything or not.

"Well," I said, "I may feel superior to other people sometimes. I may even feel superior to myself, but I haven't got to the point where I feel superior to a newspaper—to a whole world at once. I don't try to read it in ten minutes. I don't try to make a whole day of a whole world, a foot-note to my oatmeal mush! I don't treat the whole human race, trooping past my breakfast, as a parenthesis in my own mind. I don't try to read a great, serious, boundless thing like a daily newspaper, unfolded out of starlight, gleaner of a thousand sunsets around a world, and talk at the same time. I don't say, 'There's nothing in it,' interrupt a planet to chew my food, throw a planet on the floor and look for my hat.... Nations lunging through space to say good-morning to me, continents flashed around my thoughts, seas for the boundaries of my day's delight ... the great God shining over all! And may He preserve me from ever reading a newspaper in ten minutes!"

I have spent as much time as any one, I think, in my day, first and last, in feeling superior to newspapers. I can remember when I used to enjoy it very much—the feeling, I mean. I have spent whole half-days at it, going up and down columns, thinking they were not good enough for me.

Now when I take up a morning paper, half-dread, half-delight, I take it up softly. My whole being trembles in the balance before it. The whole procession of my soul, shabby, loveless, provincial, tawdry, is passed in review before it. It is the grandstand of the world. The vast and awful Roll-Call of the things I ought to be—the things I ought to love—in the great world voice sweeps over me. It reaches its way through all my thoughts, through the minutes of my days. "Where is thy soul? Oh, where is thy soul?" the morning paper, up and down its columns, calls to me. There are days that I ache with the echo of it. There are days when I dare not read it until the night. Then the voice that is in it grows gentle with the darkness, it may be, and is stilled with sleep.

IV

On Reading a Newspaper in Ten Minutes

I am not saying it does not take a very intelligent man to read a newspaper in ten minutes—squeeze a planet at breakfast and drop it. I think it does. But I am inclined to think that the intelligent man who reads a newspaper in ten minutes is exactly the same kind of intelligent man who could spend a week reading it if he wanted to, and not waste a minute. And he might want to. He simply reads a newspaper as he likes. He is not confined to one way. He does not read it in ten minutes because he has a mere ten-minute mind, but because he merely has the ten minutes. Rapid reading and slow reading are both based, with such a man, on appreciation of the paper—and not upon a narrow, literary, Boston-Public-Library feeling of being superior to it.

The value of reading-matter, like other matter, depends on what a man does with it. All that one needs in order not to waste time in general reading is a large, complete set of principles to stow things away in. Nothing really needs to be wasted. If one knows where everything belongs in one's mind—or tries to,—if one takes the trouble to put it there, reading a newspaper is one of the most colossal, tremendous, and boundless acts that can be performed by any one in the whole course of a human life.

If there's any place where a man needs to have all his wits about him, to put things into,—if there's any place where the next three inches can demand as much of a man as a newspaper, where is it? The moment he opens it he lays his soul open and exposes himself to all sides of the world in a second,—to several thousand years of a world at once.

A book is a comparatively safe, unintelligent place for a mind to be in. There are at least four walls to it—a few scantlings over one, protecting one from all space. A man has at least some remotest idea of where he is, of what may drop on him, in a book. It may tax his capacity of stowing things away. But he always has notice—almost always. It sees that he has time and room. It has more conveniences for fixing things. The author is always there besides, a kind of valet to anybody, to help people along pleasantly, to anticipate their wants. It's what an author is for. One expects it.

But a man finds it is different in a morning paper, rolled out of dreams and sleep into it,—empty, helpless before a day, all the telegraph machines of the world thumping all the night, clicked into one's thoughts before one thinks—no man really has room in him to read a morning paper. No man's soul is athletic or swift enough.... Nations in a sentence.... Thousands of years in a minute, philosophies, religions, legislatures, paleozoics, church socials, side by side; stars and gossip, fools, heroes, comets—infinity on parade, and over the precipice of the next paragraph, head-long—who knows what!

Reading a morning paper is one of the supreme acts of presence of mind in a human life.

V

General Information

"But what is going to become of us?" some one says, "if a man has to go through 'the supreme act of presence of mind in a whole human life,' every morning—and every morning before he goes to business? It takes as much presence of mind as most men have, mornings, barely to get up."

Well, of course, I admit, if a man's going to read a newspaper to toe the line of all his convictions; if he insists on taking the newspaper as a kind of this-morning's junction of all knowledge, he will have to expect to be a rather anxious person. One could hardly get one paper really read through in this way in one's whole life. If a man is always going to read the news of the globe in such a serious, sensitive, suggestive, improving, Atlas-like fashion, it would be better he had never learned to read at all. At all events, if it's a plain question between a man's devouring his paper or letting his paper devour him, of course the only way to do is to begin the day by reading something else, or by reading it in ten minutes and forgetting it in ten more. One would certainly rather be headlong—a mere heedless, superficial globe-trotter with one's mind, than not to have any mind—to be wiped out at one's breakfast table, to be soaked up into infinity every morning, to be drawn off, evaporated into all knowledge, to begin one's day scattered around the edges of all the world. One would do almost anything to avoid this. And it is what always happens if one reads for principles pell-mell.

All that I am claiming for reading for principles is, that if one reads for principles, one really cannot miss it in reading. There is always something there, and a man who treats a newspaper as if it were not good enough for him falls short of himself.

The same is true of desultory reading so-called, of the habit of general information, and of the habit of going about noticing things—noticing things over one's shoulder.

I am inclined to think that desultory reading is as good if not better for a man than any other reading he can do, if he organises it—has habitual principles and swift channels of thought to pour it into. I do not think it is at all unlikely from such peeps as we common mortals get into the minds of men of genius, that their desultory reading (in the fine strenuous sense) has been the making of them. The intensely suggestive habit of thought, the prehensile power in a mind, the power of grasping wide-apart facts and impressions, of putting them into prompt handfuls, where anything can be done with them that one likes, could not possibly be cultivated to better advantage than by the practice of masterful and regular desultory reading.

Certainly the one compelling trait in a work of genius, whether in music, painting, or literature, the trait of untraceableness, the semi-miraculous look, the feeling things give us sometimes, in a great work of art, of being at once impossible together, and inevitable together,—has its most natural background in what would seem at first probably, to most minds, incidental or accidental habits of observation.

One always knows a work of art of the second rank by the fact that one can place one's hand on big blocks of material in it almost everywhere, material which has been taken bodily and moved over from certain places. And one always knows a work of art of the first rank by the fact that it is absolutely defiant and elusive. There is a sense of infinity—a gathered-from-everywhere sense in it—of things which belong and have always belonged side by side and exactly where they are put, but which no one had put there.

It would be hard to think of any intellectual or spiritual habit more likely to give a man a bi-sexual or at least a cross-fertilising mind, than the habit of masterful, wilful, elemental, desultory reading. The amount of desultory reading a mind can do, and do triumphantly, may be said to be perhaps the supreme test of the actual energy of the mind, of the vital heat in it, of its melting-down power, its power of melting everything through, and blending everything in, to the great central essence of life.

No more adequate plan, or, as the architects call it, no better elevation for a man could possibly be found than a daily newspaper of the higher type. For scope, points of view, topics, directions of interest, catholicity, many-sidedness, world-wideness, for all the raw material a large and powerful man must needs be made out of, nothing could possibly excel a daily newspaper. Plenty of smaller artists have been made in the world and will be made again in it—hothouse or parlour artists—men whose work has very little floor-space in it, one- or two-story men, and there is no denying that they have their place, but there never has been yet, and there never will be, I venture to say, a noble or colossal artist or artist of the first rank who shall not have as many stories in him as a daily newspaper. The immortal is the universal in a man looming up. If the modern critic who is looking about in this world of ours for the great artist would look where the small ones are afraid to go, he would stand a fair chance of finding what he is looking for. If one were to look about for a general plan, a rough draft or sketch of the mind of an Immortal, he will find that mind spread out before him in the interests and passions, the giant sorrows and delights of his morning paper.

I am not coming out in this chapter to defend morning papers. One might as well pop up in one's place on this globe, wherever one is on it, and say a good word for sunrises. What immediately interests me in this connection is the point that if a man reads for principles in this world he will have time and take time to be interested in a great many things in it. The point seems to be that there is nothing too great or too small for a human brain to carry away with it, if it will have a place to put it. All one has to do, to get the good of a man, a newspaper, a book, or any other action, a paragraph, or even the blowing of a wind, is to lift it over to its principle, see it and delight in it as a part of the whole, of the eternal, and of the running gear of things. Reading for principles may make a man seem very slow at first—several years slower than other people—but as every principle he reads with makes it possible to avoid at least one experience, and, at the smallest calculation, a hundred books, he soon catches up. It would be hard to find a better device for reading books through their backs, for travelling with one's mind, than the habit of reading for principles. A principle is a sort of universal car-coupling. One can be joined to any train of thought in all Christendom with it, and rolled in luxury around the world in the private car of one's own mind.

But it is not so much as a luxury as a convenience that reading for principles appeals to a vigorous mind. It is the short-cut to knowledge. The man who is once started in reading for principles is not long in distancing the rest of us, because all the reading that he does goes into growth,—is saved up in a few handy, prompt generalisations. His whole being becomes alert and supple. He has the under-hold in dealing with nature, grips hold the law of the thing and rules it. He is capable of far reaches where others go step by step. In every age of the world of thought he goes about giant-like, lifting worlds with a laugh, doing with the very playing of his mind work which crowds of other minds toiling on their crowds of facts could not accomplish. He is only able to do this by being a master of principles. He has made himself a man who can handle a principle, a sum-total of a thousand facts as easily as other men, men with bare scientific minds, can handle one of the facts. He thinks like a god—not a very difficult thing to do. Any man can do it after thirty or forty years, if he gives himself the chance, if he reads for principles, keeps his imagination—the way Emerson did, for instance—sound and alive all through. He does not need to deny that the bare scientific method, the hugging of the outside of a thing, the being deliberately superficial and literal—the needing to know all of the facts, is a useful and necessary method at times; but outside of his specialty he takes the ground that the scientific method is not the normal method through which a man acquires his knowledge, but a secondary and useful method for verifying the knowledge he has. He acquires knowledge through the constant exercise of his mind with principles. He is full of subtle experiences he never had. He appears to other minds, perhaps, to go to the truth with a flash, but he probably does not. He does not have to go to the truth. He has the truth on the premises right where he can get at it, in its most convenient, most compact and spiritual form. To write or think or act he has but to strike down through the impressions, the experiences,—the saved-up experiences,—of his life, and draw up their principles.

A great deal has been said from time to time among the good of late about the passing of the sermon as a practical working force. A great deal has been said among the literary about the passing of the essay. Much has been said also about the passing of poetry and the passing of religion in our modern life. It would not be hard to prove that what has been called, under the pressure of the moment, the passing of religion and poetry, and of the sermon and the essay, could fairly be traced to the temporary failure of education, the disappearance in the modern mind of the power of reading for principles. The very farm-hands of New England were readers for principles once—men who looked back of things—philosophers. Philosophers grew like the grass on a thousand hills. Everybody was a philosopher a generation ago. The temporary obscuration of religion and poetry and the sermon and the essay at the present time is largely due to the fact that generalisation has been trained out of our typical modern minds. We are mobbed with facts. We are observers of the letter of things rather than of the principles and spirits of things. The letter has been heaped upon us. Poetry and religion and the essay and the sermon are all alike, in that they are addressed to what can be taken for granted in men—to sum-totals of experience—the power of seeing sum-totals. They are addressed to generalising minds. The essayist of the highest rank induces conviction by playing upon the power of generalisation, by arousing the associations and experiences that have formed the principles of his reader's mind. He makes his appeal to the philosophic imagination.

It is true that a man may not be infallible in depending upon his imagination or principle-gathering organ for acquiring knowledge, and in the nature of things it is subject to correction and verification, but as a positive, practical, economical working organ in a world as large as this, an imagination answers the purpose as well as anything. To a finite man who finds himself in an infinite world it is the one possible practicable outfit for living in it.

Reading for principles is its most natural gymnasium.

VI

But——

I had finished writing these chapters on the philosophic mind, and was just reading them over, thinking how true they were, and how valuable they were for me, and how I must act on them, when I heard a soft "Pooh!" from somewhere way down in the depths of my being. When I had stopped and thought, I saw it was my Soul trying to get my attention. "I do not want you always reading for principles," said my Soul stoutly, "reading for a philosophic mind. I do not want a philosophic mind on the premises."

"Very well," I said.

"You do not want one yourself," my Soul said, "you would be bored to death with one—with a mind that's always reading for principles!"

"I'm not so sure," I said.

"You always are with other people's."

"Well, there's Meakins," I admitted.

"You wouldn't want a Meakins kind of a mind, would you?" (Meakins is always reading for principles.)

I refused to answer at once. I knew I didn't want Meakins's, but I wanted to know why. Then I fell to thinking. Hence this chapter.

Meakins has changed, I said to myself. The trouble with him isn't that he reads for principles, but he is getting so he cannot read for anything else. What a man really wants, it seems to me, is the use of a philosophic mind. He wants one where he can get at it, where he can have all the benefit of it without having to live with it. It's quite another matter when a man gives his mind up, his own everyday mind—the one he lives with—lets it be coldly, deliberately philosophised through and through. It's a kind of disease.

When Meakins visits me now, the morning after he is gone I take a piece of paper and sum his visit up in a row of propositions. When he came before five years ago—his visit was summed up in a great desire in me, a lift, a vow to the universe. He had the same ideas, but they all glowed out into a man. They came to me as a man and for a man—a free, emancipated, emancipating, world-loving, world-making man—a man out in the open, making all the world his comrade. His appeal was personal.

Visiting with him now is like sitting down with a stick or pointer over you and being compelled to study a map. He doesn't care anything about me except as one more piece of paper to stamp his map on. And he doesn't care anything about the world he has the map of, except that it is the world that goes with his map. When a man gets into the habit of always reading for principles back of things—back of real, live, particular things—he becomes inhuman. He forgets the things. Meakins bores people, because he is becoming inhuman. He treats human beings over and over again unconsciously, when he meets them, as mere generalisations on legs. His mind seems a great sea of abstractions—just a few real things floating palely around in it for illustrations. When I try to rebuke him for being a mere philosopher or man without hands, he is "setting his universe in order," he says—making his surveys. He may be living in his philosophic mind now, breaking out his intellectual roads but he is going to travel on them later, he explains.

In the meantime I notice one thing about the philosophic mind. It not only does not do things. It cannot even be talked with. It is not interested in things in particular. There is something garrulously, pedagogically unreal about it,—at least there is about Meakins's. You cannot so much as mention a real or particular thing to Meakins but he brings out a row of fifteen or twenty principles that go with it, which his mind has peeked around and found behind it. By the time he has floated out about fifteen of them—of these principles back of a thing—you begin to wonder if the thing was there for the principles to be back of. You hope it wasn't.

As fond as I am of him, I cannot get at him nowadays in a conversation. He is always just around back of something. He is a ghost. I come home praying Heaven, every time I see him, not to let me evaporate. He talks about the future of humanity by the week, but I find he doesn't notice humanity in particular. You cannot interest him in talking to him about himself, or even in letting him do his own talking about himself. He is a mere detail to himself. You are another detail. What you are and what he is are both mere footnotes to a philosophy. All history is a footnote to it—or at best a marginal illustration. There is no such thing as communing with Meakins unless you use (as I do) a torpedo or battering-ram as a starter. If you let him have his way he sits in his chair and in his deep, beautiful voice addresses a row of remarks to The Future in General—the only thing big enough or worth while to talk to. He sits perfectly motionless (except the whites of his eyes) and talks deeply and tenderly and instructively to the Next Few Hundred Years—to posterity, to babes not yet in their mothers' wombs, while his dearest friends sit by.

If ever there was a man who could take a whole roomful of warm, vital people, sitting right next to him, pulsing and glowing in their joys and their sins, and with one single heroic motion of an imperious hand drop them softly and lovingly over into Fatuity and Oblivion in five minutes and leave them out of the world before their own eyes, it is Theophilus Meakins. I try sometimes—but I cannot really do it.

He does not really commune with things or with persons at all. He gets what he wants out of them. You feel him putting people, when he meets them, through his philosophy. He makes them over while they wait, into extracts. A man may keep on afterward living and growing, throbbing and being, but he does not exist to Meakins except in his bottle. A man cannot help feeling with Meakins afterward the way milk feels probably, if it could only express it, when it's been put through one of these separators, had the cream taken off of it. Half the world is skim-milk to him. But what does it matter to Meakins? He has them in his philosophy. He does the same way with things as with people. He puts in all nature as a parenthesis, and a rather condescending, explanatory one at that, a symbol, a kind of beckoning, an index-finger to God. He never notices a tree for itself. A great elm would have to call out to him, fairly shout at him, right under its arms: "Oh, Theophilus Meakins, author of The Habit of Eternity, author of The Evolution of the Ego look at ME, I also am alive, even as thou art. Canst thou not stop one moment and be glad with me? Have I not a thousand leaves glistening and glorying in the great sun? Have I not a million roots feeling for the stored-up light in the ground, reaching up God to me out of the dark? Have I not"—"It is one of the principles of the flux of society," breaks in Theophilus Meakins, "as illustrated in all the processes of the natural world—the sap of this tree," said he, "for instance," brushing the elm-tree off into space, "that the future of mankind depends and always must depend upon——"

"The flux of society be ——," said I in holy wrath. I stopped him suddenly, the elm-tree still holding its great arms above us. "Do you suppose that God," I said, "is in any such small business as to make an elm-tree like this—like THIS (look at it, man!), and put it on the earth, have it waving around on it, just to illustrate one of your sermons? Now, my dear fellow, I'm not going to have you lounging around in your mind with an elm-tree like this any longer. I want you to come right over to it," said I, taking hold of him, "and sit down on one of its roots, and lean up against its trunk and learn something, live with it a minute—get blessed by it. The flux of society can wait," I said.

Meakins is always tractable enough, when shouted at, or pounded on a little. We sat down under the tree for quite a while, perfectly still. I can't say what it did for Meakins. But it helped me—just barely leaning against the trunk of it helped me, under the circumstances, a great deal.

No one will believe it, I suppose, but we hadn't gotten any more than fifteen feet away from the shadow of that tree when "The principles of the flux of society," said he, "demand——"

"Now, my dear fellow," I said, "there are a lot more elm-trees we really ought to take in, on this walk. We——"

"I SAY!" said Meakins, his great voice roaring on my little polite, opposing sentence like surf over a pebble, "that the principles——"

Then I grew wroth. I always do when Meakins treats what I say just as a pebble to get more roar out of, on the great bleak shore of his thoughts. "No one says anything!" I cried; "if any one says anything—if you say another word, my dear fellow, on this walk, I will sing Old Hundred as loud as I can all the way home."

He promised to be good—after a half-mile or so. I caught him looking at me, harking back to an old, wonderfully sweet, gentle, human, understanding smile he has—or used to have before he was a philosopher.

Then he quietly mentioned a real thing and we talked about real things for four miles.

I remember we sat under the stars that night after the world was folded up, and asleep, and I think we really felt the stars as we sat there—not as a roof for theories of the world, but we felt them as stars—shared the night with them, lit our hearts at them. Then we silently, happily, at last, both of us, like awkward, wondering boys, went to bed.



III—Reading Down Through

I

Inside

It is always the same way. I no sooner get a good, pleasant, interesting, working idea, like this "Reading for Principles," arranged and moved over, and set up in my mind, than some insinuating, persistent, concrete human being comes along, works his way in to illustrate it, and spoils it. Here is Meakins, for instance. I have been thinking on the other side of my thought every time I have thought of him. I have no more sympathy than any one with a man who spends all his time going round and round in his reading and everything else, swallowing a world up in principles. "Why should a good, live, sensible man," I feel like saying, "go about in a world like this stowing his truths into principles, where, half the time, he cannot get at them himself, and no one else would want to?" Going about swallowing one's experience up in principles is very well so far as it goes. But it is far better to go about swallowing up one's principles into one's self.

A man who has lived and read into himself for many years does not need to read very many books. He has the gist of nine out of ten new books that are published. He knows, or as good as knows, what is in them, by taking a long, slow look at his own heart. So does everybody else.

II

On Being Lonely with a Book

The P. G. S. of M. said that as far as he could make out, judging from the way I talked, my main ambition in the world seemed to be to write a book that would throw all publishers and libraries out of employment. "And what will your book amount to, when you get it done?" he said. "If it's convincing—the way it ought to be—it will merely convince people they oughtn't to have read it."

"And that's been done before," I said. "Almost any book could do it." I ventured to add that I thought people grew intelligent enough in one of my books—even in the first two or three chapters, not to read the rest of it. I said all I hoped to accomplish was to get people to treat other men's books in the same way that they treated mine—treat everything that way—take things for granted, get the spirit of a thing, then go out and gloat on it, do something with it, live with it—anything but this going on page after page using the spirit of a thing all up, reading with it.

"Reading down through in a book seems a great deal more important to me than merely reading the book through."

I expected that The P. G. S. of M. would ask me what I meant by reading down through, but he didn't. He was still at large, worrying about the world. "I have no patience with it—your idea," he broke out. "It's all in the air. It's impractical enough, anyway, just as an idea, and it's all the more impractical when it's carried out. So far as I can see, at the rate you're carrying on," said The P. G. S. of M., "what with improving the world and all with your book, there isn't going to be anything but You and your Book left."

"Might be worse," I said. "What one wants in a book after the first three or four chapters, or in a world either, it seems to me, is not its facts merely, nor its principles, but one's self—one's real relation of one's real self, I mean, to some real fact. If worst came to worst and I had to be left all alone, I'd rather be alone with myself, I think, than with anybody. It's a deal better than being lonely the way we all are nowadays—with such a lot of other people crowding round, that one has to be lonely with, and books and newspapers and things besides. One has to be lonely so much in civilisation, there are so many things and persons that insist on one's coming over and being lonely with them, that being lonely in a perfectly plain way, all by one's self—the very thought of it seems to me, comparatively speaking, a relief. It's not what it ought to be, but it's something."

I feel the same way about being lonely with a book. I find that the only way to keep from being lonely in a book—that is, to keep from being crowded on to the outside of it, after the first three or four chapters—is to read the first three or four chapters all over again—read them down through. I have to get hold of my principles in them, and then I have to work over my personal relation to them. When I make sure of that, when I make sure of my personal relation to the author, and to his ideas, and there is a fairly acquainted feeling with both of us, then I can go on reading for all I am worth—or all he is worth anyway, whichever breaks down first—and no more said about it. Everything means something to everybody when one reads down through. The only way an author and reader can keep from wasting each other's time, it seems to me, at least from having spells of wasting it, is to begin by reading down through.

III

Keeping Other Minds Off

What I really mean by reading down through in a book, I suppose, is reading down through in it to myself. I dare say this does not seem worthy. It is quite possible, too, that there is no real defence for it—I mean for my being so much interested in myself in the middle of other people's books. My theory about it is that the most important thing in this world for a man's life is his being original in it. Being original consists, I take it, not in being different, but in being honest—really having something in one's own inner experience which one has anyway, and which one knows one has, and which one has all for one's own, whether any one else has ever had it or not. Being original consists in making over everything one sees and reads, into one's self.

Making over what one reads into one's self may be said to be the only way to have a really safe place for knowledge. If a man takes his knowledge and works it all over into what he is, sense and spirit, it may cost more at first, but it is more economical in the long run, because none of it can possibly be lost. And it can all be used on the place.

I do not know how it is with others nowadays, but I find that this feeling of originality in an experience, in my own case, is exceedingly hard to keep. It has to be struggled for.

Of course, one has a theory in a general way that one does not want an original mind if he has to get it by keeping other people's minds off, and yet there is a certain sense in which if he does not do it at certain times—have regular periods of keeping other people's minds off, he would lose for life the power of ever finding his own under them. Most men one knows nowadays, if they were to spend all the rest of their lives peeling other men's minds off, would not get down to their own before they died. It seems to be supposed that what a mind is for—at least in civilisation—is to have other men's minds on top of it.

It is the same way in books—at least I find it so myself when I get to reading in a book, reading so fast I cannot stop in it. Nearly all books, especially the good ones, have a way of overtaking a man—riding his originality down. It seems to be assumed that if a man ever did get down to his own mind by accident, whether in a book or anywhere else, he would not know what to do with it.

And this is not an unreasonable assumption. Even the man who gets down to his mind regularly hardly knows what to do with it part of the time. But it makes having a mind interesting. There's a kind of pleasant, lusty feeling in it—a feeling of reality and honesty that makes having a mind—even merely one's own mind—seem almost respectable.

IV

Reading Backwards

Sir Joshua Reynolds gives the precedence to the Outside, to authority instead of originality, in the early stages of education, because when he went to Italy he met the greatest experience of his life. He found that much of his originality was wrong.

If Sir Joshua Reynolds had gone to Italy earlier he would never have been heard of except as a copyist, lecturer, or colour-commentator. The real value of Sir Joshua Reynolds's "Discourses on Art" is the man in spite of the lecturer. What the man stands for is,—Be original. Get headway of personal experience, some power of self-teaching. Then when you have something to work on, organs that act and react on what is presented to them, confront your Italy—whatever it may be—and the Past, and give yourself over to it. The result is paradox and power, a receptive, creative man, an obeying and commanding, but self-centred and self-poised man, world-open, subject to the whole world and yet who has a whole world subject to him, either by turns or at will.

What Sir Joshua conveys to his pupils is not his art, but his mere humility about his art—i. e., his most belated experience, his finishing touch, as an artist.

The result is that having accidentally received an ideal education, having begun his education properly, with self-command, he completed his career with a kind of Reynoldsocracy—a complacent, teachery, levelling-down command of others. While Sir Joshua Reynolds was an artist, he became one because he did not follow his own advice. The fact that he would have followed it if he had had a chance shows what his art shows, namely, that he did not intend to be any more original than he could help. It is interesting, however, that having acquired the blemish of originality in early youth, he never could get rid of enough of it before he died, not to be tolerated among the immortals.

His career is in many ways the most striking possible illustration of what can be brought to pass when a human being without genius is by accident brought up with the same principles and order of education and training that men of genius have—education by one's self; education by others, under the direction of one's self. Sir Joshua Reynolds would have been incapable of education by others under direction of himself, if he had not been kept ignorant and creative and English, long enough to get a good start with himself before he went down to Italy to run a race with Five Hundred Years. In his naive, almost desperate shame over the plight of being almost a genius, he overlooks this, but his fame is based upon it. He devoted his old age to trying to train young men into artists by teaching them to despise their youth in their youth, because, when he was an old man, he despised his.

What seems to be necessary is to strike a balance, in one's reading.

It's all well enough; indeed, there's nothing better than having one's originality ridden down. One wants it ridden down half the time. The trouble comes in making provision for catching up, for getting one's breath after it. I have found, for instance, that it has become absolutely necessary so far as I am concerned, if I am to keep my little mind's start in the world, to begin the day by not reading the newspaper in the morning. Unless I can get headway—some thought or act or cry or joy of my own—something that is definitely in my own direction first, there seems to be no hope for me all day long. Most people, I know, would not agree to this. They like to take a swig of all-space, a glance at everybody while the world goes round, before they settle down to their own little motor on it. They like to feel that the world is all right before they go ahead. So would I, but I have tried it again—and again. The world is too much for me in the morning. My own little motor comes to a complete stop. I simply want to watch the Big One going round and round. I cannot seem to stop somehow—begin puttering once more with my Little One. If I begin at all, I have to begin at once. In my heart I feel the Big One over me all the while, circling over me, blessing me. But I keep from noticing. I know no other way, and drive on. The world is getting to be—has to be—to me a purely afternoon or evening affair. I have a world of my own for morning use. I hold to it, one way or the other, with a cheerful smile or like grim death, until the clock says twelve and the sun turns the corner, and the book drops. It does not seem to make very much difference what kind of a world I am in, or what is going on in it, so that it is all my own, and the only way I know to do, is to say or read or write or use the things first in it which make it my own the most. The one thing I want in the morning is to let my soul light its own light, appropriate some one thing, glow it through with itself. When I have satisfied the hunger for making a bit of the great world over into my world, I am ready for the world as a world—streets and newspapers of it,—silent and looking, in it, until sleep falls.

It is because men lie down under it, allow themselves to be rolled over by it, that the modern newspaper, against its will, has become the great distracting machine of modern times. As I live and look about me, everywhere I find a great running to and fro of editors across the still earth. Every editor has his herd, is a kind of bell-wether, has a great paper herd flocking at his heels. "Is not the world here?" I say, "and am I not here to look at it? Can I really see a world better by joining a Cook's Excursion on it, sweeping round the earth in a column, seeing everything in a column, looking over the shoulder of a crowd?" Sometimes it seems as if the whole modern, reading, book-and-paper outfit were simply a huge, crunching Mass-Machine—a machine for arranging every man's mind from the outside.

Originality may be said to depend upon a balance of two things, the power of being interested in other people's minds and the power of being more interested in one's own. In its last analysis, it is the power a man's mind has of minding its own business, which, even in another man's book, makes the book real and absorbing to him. It is the least compliment one can pay a book. The only honest way to commune with a real man either in a book or out of it is to do one's own share of talking. Both the book and the man say better things when talked back to. In reading a great book one finds it allows for this. In reading a poor one the only way to make it worth while, to find anything in it, is to put it there. The most self-respecting course when one finds one's self in the middle of a poor book is to turn right around in it, and write it one's self. As has been said by Hoffentotter (in the fourteenth chapter of his great masterpiece): "If you find that you cannot go on, gentle reader, in the reading of this book, pray read it backwards."

The original man, the man who insists on keeping the power in a mind of minding its own business, is much more humble than he looks. All he feels is, that his mind has been made more convenient to him than to anybody else and that if anyone is going to use it, he must. It is not a matter of assuming that one's own mind is superior. A very poor mind, on the premises, put right in with one's own body, carefully fitted to it, to one's very nerves and senses, is worth all the other minds in the world. It may be conceit to believe this, and it may be self-preservation. But, in any case, keeping up an interest in one's own mind is excusable. Even the humblest man must admit that the first, the most economical, the most humble, the most necessary thing for a man to do in reading in this world (if he can do it) is to keep up an interest in his own mind.



IV—Reading for Facts

I

Calling the Meeting to Order

Reading for persons makes a man a poet or artist, makes him dramatic with his mind—puts the world-stage into him.

Reading for principles makes a man a philosopher. Reading for facts makes a man——

"It doesn't make a man," spoke up the Mysterious Person.

"Oh, yes," I said, "if he reads a few of them—if he takes time to do something with them—he can make a man out of them, if he wants to, as well as anything else."

The great trouble with scientific people and others who are always reading for facts is that they forget what facts are for. They use their minds as museums. They are like Ole Bill Spear. They take you up into their garret and point to a bushel-basketful of something and then to another bushel-basket half-full of some more. Then they say in deep tones and with solemn faces: "This is the largest collection of burnt matches in the world."

It's what reading for facts brings a man to, generally—fact for fact's sake. He lunges along for facts wherever he goes. He cannot stop. All an outsider can do in such cases, with nine out of ten scientific or collecting minds, is to watch them sadly in a dull, trance-like, helpless inertia of facts, sliding on to Ignorance.

What seems to be most wanted in reading for facts in a world as large as this is some reasonable principle of economy. The great problem of reading for facts—travelling with one's mind—is the baggage problem. To have every fact that one needs and to throw away every fact that one can get along without, is the secret of having a comfortable and practicable, live, happy mind in modern knowledge—a mind that gets somewhere—that gets the hearts of things.

The best way to arrange this seems to be to have a sentinel in one's mind in reading.

Every man finds in his intellectual life, sooner or later, that there are certain orders and kinds of facts that have a way of coming to him of their own accord and without being asked. He is half amused sometimes and half annoyed by them. He has no particular use for them. He dotes on them some, perhaps, pets them a little—tells them to go away, but they keep coming back. Apropos of nothing, in the way of everything, they keep hanging about while he attends to the regular business of his brain, and say: "Why don't you do something with Me?"

What I would like to be permitted to do in this chapter is to say a good word for these involuntary, helpless, wistful facts that keep tagging a man's mind around. I know that I am exposing myself in standing up for them to the accusation that I have a mere irrelevant, sideways, intellectually unbusinesslike sort of a mind. I can see my championship even now being gently but firmly set one side. "It's all of a piece—this pleasant, yielding way with ideas," people say. "It goes with the slovenly, lazy, useless, polite state of mind always, and the general ball-bearing view of life."

It seems to me that if a man has a few involuntary, instinctive facts about him, facts that fasten themselves on to his thoughts whether he wants them there or not, facts that keep on working for him of their own accord, down under the floor of his mind, passing things up, running invisible errands for him, making short-cuts for him—it seems to me that if a man has a few facts like this in him, facts that serve him like the great involuntary servants of Nature, whether they are noticed or not, he ought to find it worth his while to do something in return, conduct his life with reference to them. They ought to have the main chance at him. It seems reasonable also that his reading should be conducted with reference to them.

It is no mere literary prejudice, and it seems to be a truth for the scientist as well as for the poet, that the great involuntary facts in a man's life, the facts he does not select, the facts that select him, the facts that say to him, "Come thou and live with us, make a human life out of us that men may know us," are the facts of all others which ought to have their way sooner or later in the great struggling mass-meeting of his mind. I have read equally in vain the lives of the great scientists and the lives of the great artists and makers, if they are not all alike in this, that certain great facts have been yielded to, have been made the presiding officers, the organisers of their minds. In so far as they have been great, no facts have been suppressed and all facts have been represented; but I doubt if there has ever been a life of a powerful mind yet in which a few great facts and a great man were not seen mutually attracted to each other, day and night,—getting themselves made over into each other, mutually mastering the world.

Certainly, if there is one token rather than another of the great scientist or poet in distinction from the small scientist or poet, it is the courage with which he yields himself, makes his whole being sensitive and free before his instinctive facts, gives himself fearless up to them, allows them to be the organisers of his mind.

It seems to be the only possible way in reading for facts that the mind of a man can come to anything; namely, by always having a chairman (and a few alternates appointed for life) to call the meeting to order.

II

Symbolic Facts

If the meeting is to accomplish anything before it adjourns sine die, everything depends upon the gavel in it, upon there being some power in it that makes some facts sit down and others stand up, but which sees that all facts are represented.

In general, the more facts a particular fact can be said to be a delegate for, the more a particular fact can be said to represent other facts, the more of the floor it should have. The power of reading for facts depends upon a man's power to recognise symbolic or sum-total or senatorial facts and keep all other facts, the general mob or common run of facts, from interrupting. The amount of knowledge a man is going to be able to master in the world depends upon the number of facts he knows how to avoid.

This is where our common scientific training—the manufacturing of small scientists in the bulk—breaks down. The first thing that is done with a young man nowadays, if he is to be made into a scientist, is to take away any last vestige of power his mind may have of avoiding facts. Everyone has seen it, and yet we know perfectly well when we stop to think about it that when in the course of his being educated a man's ability to avoid facts is taken away from him, it soon ceases to make very much difference whether he is educated or not. He becomes a mere memory let loose in the universe—goes about remembering everything, hit or miss. I never see one of these memory-machines going about mowing things down remembering them, but that it gives me a kind of sad, sudden feeling of being intelligent. I cannot quite describe the feeling. I am part sorry and part glad and part ashamed of being glad. It depends upon what one thinks of, one's own narrow escape or the other man, or the way of the world. All one can do is to thank God, silently, in some safe place in one's thoughts, that after all there is a great deal of the human race—always is—in every generation who by mere circumstance cannot be educated—bowled over by their memories. Even at the worst only a few hundred persons can be made over into reductio-ad-absurdum Stanley Halls (that is, study science under pupils of the pupils of Stanley Hall) and the chances are even now, as bad as things are and are getting to be, that for several hundred years yet, Man, the Big Brother of creation, will insist on preserving his special distinction in it, the thing that has lifted him above the other animals—his inimitable faculty for forgetting things.

III

Duplicates: A Principle of Economy

I do not suppose that anybody would submit to my being admitted—I was black-balled before I was born—to the brotherhood of scientists. And yet it seems to me that there is a certain sense in which I am as scientific as anyone. It seems to me, for instance, that it is a fairly scientific thing to do—a fairly matter-of-fact thing—to consider the actual nature of facts and to act on it. When one considers the actual nature of facts, the first thing one notices is that there are too many of them. The second thing one notices about facts is that they are not so many as they look. They are mostly duplicates. The small scientist never thinks of this because he never looks at more than one class of facts, never allows himself to fall into any general, interesting, fact-comparing habit. The small poet never thinks of it because he never looks at facts at all. It is thus that it has come to pass that the most ordinary human being, just living along, the man who has the habit of general information, is the intellectual superior of the mere scientists about him or the mere poets. He is superior to the mere poet because he is interested in knowing facts, and he is superior to the minor scientist because he does not want to know all of them, or at least if he does, he never has time to try to, and so keeps on knowing something.

When one considers the actual nature of facts, it is obvious that the only possible model for a scientist of the first class or a poet of the first class in this world, is the average man. The only way to be an extraordinary man, master of more of the universe than any one else, is to keep out of the two great pits God has made in it, in which The Educated are thrown away—the science-pit and the poet-pit. The area and power and value of a man's knowledge depend upon his having such a boundless interest in facts that he will avoid all facts he knows already and go on to new ones. The rapidity of a man's education depends upon his power to scent a duplicate fact afar off and to keep from stopping and puttering with it. Is not one fact out of a thousand about a truth as good as the other nine hundred and ninety-nine to enjoy it with? If there were not any more truths or if there were not so many more things to enjoy in this world than one had time for, it would be different. It would be superficial, I admit, not to climb down into a well and collect some more of the same facts about it, or not to crawl under a stone somewhere and know what we know already—a little harder. But as it is—well, it does seem to me that when a man has collected one good, representative fact about a thing, or at most two, it is about time to move on and enjoy some of the others. There is not a man living dull enough, it seems to me, to make it worth while to do any other way. There is not a man living who can afford, in a world made as this one is, to know any more facts than he can help. Are not facts plenty enough in the world? Are they not scattered everywhere? And there are not men enough to go around. Let us take our one fact apiece and be off, and be men with it. There is always one fact about everything which is the spirit of all the rest, the fact a man was intended to know and to go on his way rejoicing with. It may be superficial withal and merely spiritual, but if there is anything worth while in this world to me, it is not to miss any part of being a man in it that any other man has had. I do not want to know what every man knows, but I do want to get the best of what he knows and live every day with it. Oh, to take all knowledge for one's province, to have rights with all facts, to be naive and unashamed before the universe, to go forth fearlessly to know God in it, to make the round of creation before one dies, to share all that has been shared, to be all that is, to go about in space saying halloa to one's soul in it, in the stars and in the flowers and in children's faces, is not this to have lived,—that there should be nothing left out in a man's life that all the world has had?



V—Reading for Results

I

The Blank Paper Frame of Mind

The P. G. S. of M. read a paper in our club the other day which he called "Reading for Results." It was followed by a somewhat warm discussion, in the course of which so many things were said that were not so that the entire club (before any one knew it) had waked up and learned something.

The P. G. S. of M. took the general ground that most of the men one knows nowadays had never learned to read. They read wastefully. Our common schools and colleges, he thought, ought to teach a young man to read with a purpose. "When an educated young man takes up a book," he said, "he should feel that he has some business in it, and attend to it."

I said I thought young men nowadays read with purposes too much. Purposes were all they had to read with. "When a man feels that he needs a purpose in front of him, to go through a book with, when he goes about in a book looking over the edge of a purpose at everything, the chances are that he is missing nine tenths of what the book has to give."

The P. G. S. of M. thought that one tenth was enough. He didn't read a book to get nine tenths of an author. He read it to get the one tenth he wanted—to find out which it was.

I asked him which tenth of Shakespeare he wanted. He said that sometimes he wanted one tenth and sometimes another.

"That is just it," I said. "Everybody does. It is at the bottom and has been at the bottom of the whole Shakespeare nuisance for three hundred years. Every literary man we have or have had seems to feel obliged somehow to read Shakespeare in tenths. Generally he thinks he ought to publish his tenth—make a streak across Shakespeare with his soul—before he feels literary or satisfied or feels that he has a place in the world. One hardly knows a man who calls himself really literary, who reads Shakespeare nowadays except with a purpose, with some little side-show of his own mind. It is true that there are still some people—not very many perhaps—but we all know some people who can be said to understand Shakespeare, who never get so low in their minds as to have to read him with a purpose; but they are not prominent.

"And yet there is hardly any man who would deny that at best his reading with a purpose is almost always his more anaemic, official, unresourceful, reading. It is like putting a small tool to a book and whittling on it, instead of putting one's whole self to it. One might as well try to read most of Shakespeare's plays with a screw-driver or with a wrench as with a purpose. There is no purpose large enough, that one is likely to find, to connect with them. Shakespeare himself could not have found one when he wrote them in any small or ordinary sense. The one possible purpose in producing a work of art—in any age—is to praise the universe with it, love something with it, talk back to life with it, and the man who attempts to read what Shakespeare writes with any smaller or less general, less overflowing purpose than Shakespeare had in writing it should be advised to do his reading with some smaller, more carefully fitted author,—one nearer to his size. Of course if one wants to be a mere authority on Shakespeare or a mere author there is no denying that one can do it, and do it very well, by reading him with some purpose—some purpose that is too small to have ever been thought of before; but if one wants to understand him, get the wild native flavour and power of him, he must be read in a larger, more vital and open and resourceful spirit—as a kind of spiritual adventure. Half the joy of a great man, like any other great event, is that one can well afford—at least for once—to let one's purposes go.

"To feel one's self lifted out, carried along, if only for a little time, into some vast stream of consciousness, to feel great spaces around one's human life, to float out into the universe, to bathe in it, to taste it with every pore of one's body and all one's soul—this is the one supreme thing that the reading of a man like William Shakespeare is for. To interrupt the stream with dams, to make it turn wheels,—intellectual wheels (mostly pin-wheels and theories) or any wheels whatever,—is to cut one's self off from the last chance of knowing the real Shakespeare at all. A man knows Shakespeare in proportion as he gives himself, in proportion as he lets Shakespeare make a Shakespeare of him, a little while. As long as he is reading in the Shakespeare universe his one business in it is to live in it. He may do no mighty work there,—pile up a commentary or throw on a footnote,—but he will be a mighty work himself if he let William Shakespeare work on him some. Before he knows it the universe that Shakespeare lived in becomes his universe. He feels the might of that universe being gathered over to him, descending upon him being breathed into him day and night—to belong to him always.

"The power and effect of a book which is a real work of art seems always to consist in the way it has of giving the nature of things a chance at a man, of keeping things open to the sun and air of thought. To those who cannot help being interested, it is a sad sight to stand by with the typical modern man—especially a student—and watch him go blundering about in a great book, cooping it up with purposes."

The P. G. S. of M. remarked somewhere at about this point that it seemed to him that it made a great difference who an author or reader was. He suggested that my theory of reading with a not-purpose worked rather better with Shakespeare than with the Encyclopedia Britannica or the Hon. Carroll D. Wright, Commissioner of Statistics, or Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

I admitted that in reading dictionaries, statistics, or mere poets or mere scientists it was necessary to have a purpose to fall back upon to justify one's self. And there was no denying that reading for results was a necessary and natural thing. The trouble seemed to be, that very few people could be depended on to pick out the right results. Most people cannot be depended upon to pick out even the right directions in reading a great book. It has to be left to the author. It could be categorically proved that the best results in this world, either in books or in life, had never been attained by men who always insisted on doing their own steering. The special purpose of a great book is that a man can stop steering in it, that one can give one's self up to the undertow, to the cross-current in it. One feels one's self swept out into the great struggling human stream that flows under life. One comes to truths and delights at last that no man, though he had a thousand lives, could steer to. Most of us are not clear-headed or far-sighted enough to pick out purposes or results in reading. We are always forgetting how great we are. We do not pick out results—and could not if we tried—that are big enough.

II

The Usefully Unfinished

The P. G. S. of M. remarked that he thought there was such a thing as having purposes in reading that were too big. It seemed to him that a man who spent nearly all his strength when he was reading a book, in trying to use it to swallow a universe with, must find it monotonous. He said he had tried reading a great book without any purpose whatever except its tangents or suggestions, and he claimed that when he read a great book in that way—the average great book—the monotone of innumerable possibility wore on him. He wanted to feel that a book was coming to something, and if he couldn't feel in reading it that the book was coming to something he wanted to feel at least that he was. He did not say it in so many words, but he admitted he did not care very much in reading for what I had spoken of as a "stream of consciousness." He wanted a nozzle on it.

I asked him at this point how he felt in reading certain classics. I brought out quite a nice little list of them, but I couldn't track him down to a single feeling he had thought of—had had to think of, all by himself, on a classic. I found he had all the proper feelings about them and a lot of well-regulated qualifications besides. He was on his guard. Finally I asked him if he had read (I am not going to get into trouble by naming it) a certain contemporary novel under discussion.

He said he had read it. "Great deal of power in it," he said. "But it doesn't come to anything. I do not see any possible artistic sense," he said, "in ending a novel like that. It doesn't bring one anywhere."

"Neither does one of Keats's poems," I said, "or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The odour of a rose doesn't come to anything—bring one anywhere. It would be hard to tell what one really gets out of the taste of roast beef. The sound of the surf on the Atlantic doesn't come to anything, but hundreds of people travel a long way and live in one-windowed rooms and rock in somebody else's bedroom rocker, to hear it, year after year. Millions of dollars are spent in Europe to look at pictures, but if a man can tell what it is he gets out of a picture in so many words there is something very wrong with the picture."

The P. G. S. of M. gave an impatient wave of his hand. (To be strictly accurate, he gave it in the middle of the last paragraph, just before we came to the Atlantic. The rest is Congressional Record.) And after he had given the impatient wave of his hand he looked hurt. I accordingly drew him out. He was still brooding on that novel. He didn't approve of the heroine.

"What was the matter?" I said; "dying in the last chapter?" (It is one of those novels in which the heroine takes the liberty of dying, in a mere paragraph, at the end, and in what always has seemed and always will, to some people, a rather unsatisfactory and unfinished manner.)

"The moral and spiritual issues of a book ought to be—well, things are all mixed up. She dies indefinitely."

"Most women do," I said. I asked him how many funerals of women—wives and mothers—he had been to in the course of his life where he could sit down and really think that they had died to the point—the way they do in novels. I didn't see why people should be required by critics and other authorities, to die to the point in a book more than anywhere else. It is this shallow, reckless way that readers have of wanting to have everything pleasant and appropriate when people die in novels which makes writing a novel nowadays as much as a man's reputation is worth.

The P. G. S. of M. explained that it wasn't exactly the way she died but it was the way everything was left—left to the imagination.

I said I was sorry for any human being who had lived in a world like this who didn't leave a good deal to the imagination when he died. The dullest, most uninteresting man that any one can ever know becomes interesting in his death. One walks softly down the years of his life, peering through them. One cannot help loving him a little—stealthily. One goes out a little way with him on his long journey—feels bound in with him at last—actually bound in with him (it is like a promise) for ever. The more one knows about people's lives in this world, the more indefinitely, the more irrelevantly,—sometimes almost comically, or as a kind of an aside, or a bit of repartee,—they end them. Suddenly, sometimes while we laugh or look, they turn upon us, fling their souls upon the invisible, and are gone. It is like a last wistful haunting pleasantry—death is—from some of us, a kind of bravado in it—as one would say, "Oh, well, dying is really after all—having been allowed one look at a world like this—a small matter."

It is true that most people in most novels, never having been born, do not really need to die—that is, if they are logical,—and they might as well die to the point or as the reader likes as in any other way, but if there is one sign rather than another that a novel belongs to the first class, it is that the novelist claims all the privileges of the stage of the world in it. He refuses to write a little parlour of a book and he sees that his people die the way they live, leaving as much left over to the imagination as they know how.

That there are many reasons for the habit of reading for results, as it is called, goes without saying. It also goes without saying—that is, no one is saying very much about it—that the habit of reading for results, such as it is, has taken such a grim hold on the modern American mind that the greatest result of all in reading, the result in a book that cannot be spoken in it, or even out of it, is being unanimously missed.

The fact seems to need to be emphasised that the novel which gives itself to one to be breathed and lived, the novel which leaves a man with something that he must finish himself, with something he must do and be, is the one which "gets a man somewhere" most of all. It is the one which ends the most definitely and practically.

When a novel, instead of being hewn out, finished, and decorated by the author,—added as one more monument or tomb of itself in a man's memory,—becomes a growing, living daily thing to him, the wondering, unfinished events of it, and the unfinished people of it, flocking out to him, interpreting for him the still unfinished events and all the dear unfinished people that jostle in his own life,—it is a great novel.

It seems to need to be recalled that the one possible object of a human being's life in a novel (as out of it) is to be loved. This is definite enough. It is the novel in which the heroine looks finished that does not come to anything. I always feel a little grieved and frustrated—as if human nature had been blasphemed a little in my presence—if a novel finishes its people or thinks it can. It is a small novel which finishes love—and lays it away; which makes me love say one brave woman or mother in a book, and close her away for ever. The greater novel makes me love one woman in a book in such a way that I go about through all the world seeking for her—knowing and loving a thousand women through her. I feel the secret of their faces—through her—flickering by me on the street. This intangible result, this eternal flash of a life upon life is all that reading is for. It is practical because it is eternal and cannot be wasted and because it is for ever to the point.

Life is greater than art and art is great only in so far as it proves that life is greater than art, interprets and intensifies life and the power to taste life—makes us live wider and deeper and farther in our seventy years.

III

Athletics

"The world is full," Ellery Charming used to say, "of fools who get a-going and never stop. Set them off on another tack, and they are half-cured." There are grave reasons to believe that, if an archangel were to come to this earth and select a profession on it, instead of taking up some splendid, serious, dignified calling he would devote himself to a comparatively small and humble-looking career—that of jogging people's minds. This might not seem at first sight to be a sufficiently large thing for an archangel to do, but if it were to be done at all (those who have tried it think) it would take an archangel to do it.

The only possible practical or businesslike substitute one can think of in modern life for an archangel would have to be an Institution of some kind. Some huge, pleasant Mutual Association for Jogging People's Minds might do a little something perhaps, but it would not be very thorough. The people who need it most, half or three-quarters of them, the treadmill-conscientious, dear, rutty, people of this world, would not be touched by it. What is really wanted, if anything is really to be done in the way of jogging, is a new day in the week.

I have always thought that there ought to be a day, one day in the week, to do wrong in—not very wrong, but wrong enough to answer the purpose—a perfectly irresponsible, delectable, inconsequent day—a sabbath of whims. There ought to be a sort of sabbath for things that never get done because they are too good or not good enough. Letters that ought to be postponed until others are written, letters to friends that never dun, books that don't bear on anything, books that no one has asked one to read, calls on unexpecting people, bills that might just as well wait, tinkering around the house on the wrong things, the right ones, perfectly helpless, standing by. Sitting with one's feet a little too high (if possible on one's working desk), being a little foolish and liking it—making poor puns, enjoying one's bad grammar—a day, in short, in which, whatever a man is, he rests from himself and play marbles with his soul.

Most people nowadays—at least the intellectual, so-called, and the learned above all others—are so far gone under the reading-for-results theory that they have become mere work-worshippers in books, worshippers of work which would not need to be performed at all—most of it—by men with healthy natural or fully exercised spiritual organs. One very seldom catches a man in the act nowadays of doing any old-fashioned or important reading. The old idea of reading for athletics instead of scientifics has almost no provision made for it in the modern intellectual man's life. He does not seem to know what it is to take his rest like a gentleman. He lunges between all-science and all-vaudeville, and plays in his way, it is true, but he never plays with his mind. He never takes playing with a mind seriously, as one of the great standard joys and powers and equipments of human life. He does not seem to love his mind enough to play with it. Above all, he does not see that playing with a mind (on great subjects, at least) is the only possible way to make it work. He entirely overlooks the fact, in his little round of reading for results, that the main thing a book is in a man's hands for is the man—that it is there to lift him over into a state of being, a power of action. A man who really reads a book and reads it well, reads it for moral muscle, spiritual skill, for far-sightedness, for catholicity—above all for a kind of limberness and suppleness, a swift sure strength through his whole being. He faces the world with a new face when he has truly read a true book, and as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, he rejoices as a strong man to run a race.

As between reading to heighten one's senses, one's suggestibility, power of knowing and combining facts, the multum-in-parvo method in reading, and the parvum-in-multo method, a dogged, accumulating, impotent, callous reading for results, it is not hard to say which, in the equipment of the modern scientist, is being overlooked.

It is doubtless true, the common saying of the man of genius in every age, that "everything is grist to his mill," but it would not be if he could not grind it fine enough. And he is only able to grind it fine enough because he makes his reading bring him power as well as grist. Having provided for energy, stored-up energy for grinding, he guards and preserves that energy as the most important and culminating thing in his intellectual life. He insists on making provision for it. He makes ready solitude for it, blankness, reverie, sleep, silence. He cultivates the general habit not only of rejecting things, but of keeping out of their way when necessary, so as not to have to reject them, and he knows the passion in all times and all places for grinding grist finer instead of gathering more grist. These are going to be the traits of all the mighty reading, the reading that achieves, in the twentieth century. The saying of the man of genius that everything is grist to his mill merely means that he reads a book athletically, with a magnificent play of power across it, with an heroic imagination or power of putting together. He turns everything that comes to him over into its place and force and meaning in everything else. He reads slowly and organically where others read with their eyes. He knows what it is to tingle with a book, to blush and turn pale with it, to read his feet cold. He reads all over, with his nerves and senses, with his mind and heart. He reads through the whole tract of his digestive and assimilative nature. To borrow the Hebrew figure, he reads with his bowels. Instead of reading to maintain a theory, or a row of facts, he reads to sustain a certain state of being. The man who has the knack, as some people seem to think it, of making everything he reads and sees beautiful or vigorous and practical, does not need to try to do it. He does it because he has a habit of putting himself in a certain state of being and cannot help doing it. He does not need to spend a great deal of time in reading for results. He produces his own results. The less athletic reader, the smaller poet or scientist, confines himself to reading for results, for ready-made beauty and ready-made facts, because he is not in condition to do anything else. The greater poet or scientist is an energy, a transfigurer, a transmuter of everything into beauty and truth. Everything having passed through the heat and light of his own being is fused and seen where it belongs, where God placed it when He made it, in some relation to everything else.

I fear that I may have come, in bearing down on this point, to another of the of-course places in this book. It is not just to assume that because people are not living with a truth that they need to be told it. It is of little use, when a man has used his truth all up boring people with it, to try to get them (what is left of the truth and the people) to do anything about it. But if I may be allowed one page more I would like to say in the present epidemic of educating for results, just what a practical education may be said to be.

The indications are that the more a man spends, makes himself able to spend, a large part of his time, as Whitman did, in standing still and looking around and loving things, the more practical he is. Even if a man's life were to serve as a mere guide-board to the universe, it would supply to all who know him the main thing the universe seems to be without. But a man who, like Walt Whitman, is more than a guide-board to the universe, who deliberately takes time to live in the whole of it, who becomes a part of the universe to all who live always, who makes the universe human to us—companionable,—such a man may not be able to fix a latch on a kitchen door, but I can only say for one that if there is a man who can lift a universe bodily, and set it down in my front yard where I can feel it helping me do my work all day and guarding my sleep at night, that man is practical. Who can say he does not "come to anything"? To have heard it rumoured that such a man has lived, can live, is a result—the most practical result of all to most of the workers of the world. A bare fact about such a man is a gospel. Why work for nothing (that is, with no result) in a universe where you can play for nothing—and by playing earn everything?

Such a man is not only practical, serving those who know him by merely being, but he serves all men always. They will not let him go. He becomes a part of the structure of the world. The generations keep flocking to him the way they flock to the great sane silent ministries of the sky and of the earth. Their being drawn to them is their being drawn to him. The strength of clouds is in him, and the spirit of falling water, and he knoweth the way of the wind. When a man can be said by the way he lives his life to have made himself the companion of his unborn brothers and of God; when he can be said to have made himself, not a mere scientist, but a younger brother, a real companion of air, water, fire, mist, and of the great gentle ground beneath his feet—he has secured a result.



VI—Reading for Feelings

I

The Passion of Truth

Reading resolves itself sooner or later into two elements in the reader's mind:

1. Tables of facts. (a) Rows of raw fact; (b) Principles, spiritual or sum-total facts.

2. Feelings about the facts.

But the Man with the Scientific Method, who lives just around the corner from me, tells me that reading for feelings is quite out of the question for a scientific mind. It is foreign to the nature of knowledge to want knowledge for the feelings that go with it. Feelings get in the way.

I find it impossible not to admit that there is a certain force in this, but I notice that when the average small scientist, the man around the corner, for instance, says to me what he is always saying, "Science requires the elimination of feelings,"—says it to me in his usual chilled-through, ophidian, infallible way,—I never believe it, or at least I believe it very softly and do not let him know it. But when a large scientist, a man like Charles Darwin, makes a statement like this, I believe it as hard, I notice, as if I had made it all up myself. The statement that science requires the elimination of the feelings is true or not true, it seems to me, according to the size of the feelings. Considering what most men's feelings are, a man like Darwin feels that they had better be eliminated. If a man's feelings are small feelings, they are in the way in science, as a matter of course. If he has large noble ones, feelings that match the things that God has made, feelings that are free and daring, beautiful enough to belong with things that a God has made, he will have no trouble with them. It is the feelings in a great scientist which have always fired him into being a man of genius in his science, instead of a mere tool, or scoop, or human dredge of truth. All the great scientists show this firing-process down underneath, in their work. The idea that it is necessary for a scientific man to give up his human ideal, that it is necessary for him to be officially brutal, in his relation to nature, to become a professional nobody in order to get at truth, to make himself over into matter in order to understand matter, has not had a single great scientific achievement or conception to its credit. All great insight or genius in science is a passion of itself, a passion of worshipping real things. Science is a passion not only in its origin, but in its motive power and in its end. The real truth seems to be that the scientist of the greater sort is great, not by having no emotions, but by having disinterested emotions, by being large enough to have emotions on both sides and all sides, all held in subjection to the final emotion of truth. Having a disinterested, fair attitude in truth is not a matter of having no passions, but of having passions enough to go around. The temporary idea that a scientist cannot be scientific and emotional at once is based upon the experience of men who have never had emotions enough. Men whose emotions are slow and weak, who have one-sided or wavering emotions, find them inconvenient as a matter of course. The men who, like Charles Darwin or some larger Browning, have the passion of disinterestedness are those who are fitted to lead the human race, who are going to lead it along the paths of space and the footsteps of the worlds into the Great Presence.

The greatest astronomer or chemist is the man who glows with the joy of wrestling with God, of putting strength to strength.

To the geologist who goes groping about in stones, his whole life is a kind of mind-reading of the ground, a passion for getting underneath, for communing flesh to flesh with a planet. What he feels when he breaks a bit of rock is the whole round earth—the wonder of it—the great cinder floating through space. He would all but risk his life or sell his soul for a bit of lava. He is studying the phrenology of a star. All the other stars watch him. The feeling of being in a kind of eternal, invisible, infinite enterprise, of carrying out a world, of tracking a God, takes possession of him. He may not admit there is a God, in so many words, but his geology admits it. He devotes his whole life to appreciating a God, and the God takes the deed for the word, appreciates his appreciation, whether he does or not. If he says that he does not believe in a God, he merely means that he does not believe in Calvin's God, or in the present dapper, familiar little God or the hero of the sermon last Sunday. All he means by not believing in a God is that his God has not been represented yet. In the meantime he and his geology go sternly, implacably on for thousands of years, while churches come and go. So does his God. His geology is his own ineradicable worship. His religion, his passion for the all, for communing through the part with the Whole, is merely called by the name of geology. In so far as a man's geology is real to him, if he is after anything but a degree in it, or a thesis or a salary, his geology is an infinite passion taking possession of him, soul and body, carrying him along with it, sweeping him out with it into the great workroom, the flame and the glow of the world-shop of God.

It would not seem necessary to say it if it were not so stoutly denied, but living as we do, most of us, with a great flock of little scientists around us, pecking on the infinite most of them, each with his own little private strut, or blasphemy, bragging of a world without a God, it does seem as if it were going to be the great strategic event of the twentieth century, for all men, to get the sciences and the humanities together once more, if only in our own thoughts, to make ourselves believe as we must believe, after all, that it is humanity in a scientist, and not a kind of professional inhumanity in him, which makes him a scientist in the great sense—a seer of matter. The great scientist is a man who communes with matter, not around his human spirit, but through it.

The small scientist, violating nature inside himself to understand it outside himself, misses the point.

At all events if a man who has locked himself out of his own soul goes around the world and cannot find God's in it, he does not prove anything. The man who finds a God proves quite as much. And he has his God besides.

II

Topical Point of View

If it is true that reading resolves itself sooner or later into two elements in the reader's mind, tables of facts and feelings about the facts, that is, rows of raw fact, and spiritualised or related facts, several things follow. The most important of them is one's definition of education. The man who can get the greatest amount of feeling out of the smallest number and the greatest variety of facts is the greatest and most educated man—comes nearest to living an infinite life. The purpose of education in books would seem to be to make every man as near to this great or semi-infinite man as he can be made.

If men were capable of becoming infinite by sitting in a library long enough, the education-problem would soon take care of itself. There is no front or side door to the infinite. It is all doors. And if the mere taking time enough would do it, one could read one's way into the infinite as easily as if it were anything else. One can hardly miss it. One could begin anywhere. There would be nothing to do but to proceed at once to read all the facts and have all the feelings about the facts and enjoy them forever. The main difficulty one comes to, in being infinite, is that there is not time, but inasmuch as great men or semi-infinite men have all had to contend with this same difficulty quite as much as the rest of us, it would seem that in getting as many of the infinite facts, and having as many infinite feelings about the facts, as they do, great men must employ some principle of economy or selection, that common, that is, artificial men, are apt to overlook.

There seem to be two main principles of economy open to great men and to all of us, in the acquiring of knowledge. One of these, as has been suggested, may be called the scientist's principle of economy, and the other the poet's or artist's. The main difference between the scientific and the artistic method of selection seems to be that the scientist does his selecting all at once and when he selects his career, and the artist makes selecting the entire business of every moment of his life. The scientist of the average sort begins by partitioning the universe off into topics. Having selected his topic and walled himself in with it, he develops it by walling the rest of the universe out. The poet (who is almost always a specialist also, a special kind of poet), having selected his specialty, develops it by letting all the universe in. He spends his time in making his life a cross section of the universe. The spirit of the whole of it, something of everything in it, is represented in everything he does. Whatever his specialty may be in poetry, painting, or literature, he produces an eternal result by massing the infinite and eternal into the result. He succeeds by bringing the universe to a point, by accumulating out of all things—himself. It is the tendency of the scientist to produce results by dividing the universe and by subdividing himself. Unless he is a very great scientist he accepts it as the logic of his method that he should do this. His individual results are small results and he makes himself professedly small to get them.

All questions with regard to the reading habit narrow themselves down at last: "Is the Book to be divided for the Man, or is the Man to be divided for the Book? Shall a man so read as to lose his soul in a subject, or shall he so read that the subject Loses itself in him—becomes a part of him?" The main fact about our present education is that it is the man who is getting lost. And not only is every man getting lost to himself, but all men are eagerly engaged in getting lost to each other. The dead level of intelligence, being a dead level in a literal sense, is a spiritless level—a mere grading down and grading up of appearances. In all that pertains to real knowledge of the things that people appear to know, greater heights and depths of difference in human lives are revealed to-day than in almost any age of the world. What with our steam-engines (machines for our hands and feet) and our sciences (machines for our souls) we have arrived at such an extraordinary division of labour, both of body and mind, that people of the same classes are farther apart than they used to be in different classes. Lawyers, for instance, are as different from one another as they used to be from ministers and doctors. Every new skill we come to and every new subdivision of skill marks the world off into pigeon-holes of existence, into huge, hopeless, separate divisions of humanity. We live in different elements, monsters of the sea wondering at the air, air-monsters peering curiously down into the sea, sailors on surfaces, trollers over other people's worlds. We commune with each other with lines and hooks. Some of us on the rim of the earth spend all our days quarrelling over bits of the crust of it. Some of us burrow and live in the ground, and are as workers in mines. The sound of our voices to one another is as though they were not. They are as the sound of picks groping in rocks.

The reason that we are not able to produce or even to read a great literature is that a great book can never be written, in spirit at least, except to a whole human race. The final question with regard to every book that comes to a publisher to-day is what mine shall it be written in, which public shall it burrow for? A book that belongs to a whole human race, which cannot be classified or damned into smallness, would only be left by itself on the top of the ground in the sunlight. The next great book that comes will have to take a long trip, a kind of drummer's route around life, from mind to mind, and now in one place and now another be let down through shafts to us. There is no whole human race. A book with even forty-man power in it goes begging for readers. The reader with more than one-, two-, or three-man power of reading scarcely exists. We shall know our great book when it comes by the fact that crowds of kinds of men will flock to the paragraphs in it, each kind to its own kind of paragraph. It will hardly be said to reach us, the book with forty-man power in it, until it has been broken up into fortieths of itself. When it has been written over again—broken off into forty books by forty men, none of them on speaking terms with each other—it shall be recognised in some dim way that it must have been a great book.