The Lost Art of Reading Part 13

I suppose that the Boston Public Library would say--if it said anything--that I had a mere Old Athenaeum kind of a mind. I am obliged to confess that I dote on the Old Athenaeum. It protects one's optimism. One is made to feel there--let right down in the midst of civilisation, within a stone's throw of the State House--that it is barely possible to keep civilisation off. One feels it rolling itself along, heaping itself up out on Tremont Street and the Common (the very trees cannot live in it), but one is out of reach. When one has to live in civilisation, as most of us do, nearly all of one's time every day in the week, it means a great deal. I can hardly say how much it means to me, in the daily struggle with it, to be able to dodge behind the Athenaeum, to be able to go in and sit down there, if only for a minute, to be behind gla.s.s, as it were, to hear great, hungry Tremont Street chewing men up, hundreds of trainloads at a time, into wood-pulp, smoothing them out into n.o.body or everybody; it makes one feel, while it is not as it ought to be, as if, after all, there might be some way out, as if some provision had been made in this world, or might be made, for letting human beings live on it.

The general sense of unsensitiveness in a modern library, of hurry and rush and efficiency, above all, the kind of moral smugness one feels there, the book-self-consciousness, the unprotected, public-street feeling one has--all these things are very grave and important obstacles which our great librarians, with their great systems--most of them--have yet to reckon with. A little more mustiness, gentlemen, please, silence, slowness, solitude with books, as if they were woods, unattainableness (and oh, will any one understand it?), a little inconvenience, a little old-fashioned, happy inconvenience; a chance to gloat and take pains and love things with difficulties, a chance to go around the corners of one's knowledge, to make modest discoveries all by one's self. It is no small thing to go about a library having books happen to one, to feel one's self sitting down with a book--one's own private Providence--turning the pages of events.

One cannot help feeling that if a part of the money that is being spent carnegieing nowadays, that is, in arranging for a great many books and a great many people to pile up order among a great many books, could be spent in providing hundreds of thousands of small libraries, or small places in large ones, where men who would like to do it would feel safe to creep in sometimes and open their souls--n.o.body looking--it would be no more than fair.

Postscript. One has to be so much of one's time helpless before a librarian in this world, one has to put him on his honour as a gentleman so much, to expose such vast, incredible tracts of ignorance to him, that I know only too well that I, of all men, cannot afford, in these pages or anywhere else, to say anything that will permanently offend librarians. I do hope I have not. It is only through knowing so many good ones that I know enough to criticise the rest. If I am right, it is because I am their spokesman. If I am wrong, I am not a well-informed person, and I do not count anywhere in particular on anything. The best way, I suspect, for a librarian to deal with me is not to try to cla.s.sify me. I ought to be put out of the way on this subject, tucked back into any general pigeon-hole of odds and ends of temperament. If I had not felt that I could be cheerfully sorted out at the end of this page, filed away by everybody,--almost anybody,--as not making very much difference, I would not have spoken so freely. There is not a librarian who has read as far as this, in this book, who, though he may have had moments of being troubled in it, will not be able to dispose of me with a kind of grateful, relieved certainty. However that may be, I can only beg you, Oh, librarians, and all ye kindly learned ones, to be generous with me, wherever you put me. I leave my poor, naked, shivering, miscellaneous soul in your hands.

Book II

Possibilities

I

The Issue

I dreamed I lived in a day when men dared have visions. I lay in a great white Silence as one who waited for something.

And as I lay and waited, the Silence groped toward me and I felt it gathering nearer and nearer about me.

Then it folded me to Itself.

I made Time my bedside.

And it seemed to me, when I had rested my soul with years, and when I had found s.p.a.ce and had stretched myself upon it, I awoke.

I lay in a great white empty place, and the whole world like solemn music came to me.

And I looked, and behold in the shadow of the earth, which came and went, I saw Human Lives being tossed about. On the solemn rhythmic music, back and forth, I saw them lifted across Silence.

And I said to my Spirit, "What is it they are doing?"

"They are living," the Spirit said.

So they floated before me while The Great Shadow came and went.

"O my Soul, hast thou forgotten thy days in the world, when thou didst watch the processional of it, when the faces--day-lighted, night-lighted, faces--trooped before thee, and thou didst look upon them and delight in them? What didst thou see in the world?"

"I saw Two Immeasurable Hands in it," said my Soul, "over every man. I saw that the man did not see the Hands. I saw that they reached out of infinity for him down through the days and the nights. And whether he slept or prayed or wrought, I saw that they still reached out for him, and folded themselves about him."

And I asked G.o.d what The Hands were.

"The man calls them Heredity and Environment," G.o.d said.

And G.o.d laughed.

Words came from far for me and waited in tumult within me. But my mouth was filled with silence.

I know that I do not know the world, but out of my little corner of time and s.p.a.ce I have watched in it,--watched men and truths struggling in it, and in the struggle it has seemed to me I have seen three kinds of men. I have seen the man who feels that he is being made, and the man who feels that he is making himself. But I have seen also another kind of man--the man who feels that the Universe is at work on him, but (within limits) under his own supervision.

I have made a compact in my soul with this man, for a new world. He is not willing to be a mere manufactured man--one more being turned out from The Factory of Circ.u.mstance--neither does he think very much of the man who makes himself--who could make himself. If he were to try such a thing--try to make a man himself, he would really rather try it, if the truth must be told, on some one else.

As near as he can define it, life seems to be (to the normal or inspired man) a kind of alternate grasping and being grasped. Sometimes he feels his destiny tossed between the Two Immeasurable Hands. Sometimes he feels that they have paused--that the Immeasurable Hands have been lent to him, that the toss of destiny is made his own.

He watches these two great forces playing under heaven, before his eyes, with his immortal life, every day. His soul takes these powers of heaven, as the mariner takes the winds of the sea. He tacks to destiny.

He takes the same att.i.tude toward the laws of heredity and environment that the Creator took when He made them. He takes it for granted that a G.o.d who made these laws as conveniences for Himself, in running a Universe, must have intended them for men as conveniences in living in it. In proportion as men have been like G.o.d they have treated these laws as He does--as conveniences. Thousands of men are doing it to-day. Men did it for thousands of years before they knew what the laws were, when they merely followed their instincts with them. In a man's answer to the question, How can I make a convenience of the law of heredity and environment?--education before being born and education after being born--will be found to lie always the secret glory or the secret shame of his life.

II

The First Selection

If the souls of the unborn could go about reconnoitering the earth a little before they settled on it, selecting the parents they would have, the places where it pleased them to be born, nine out of ten of them (judging from the way they conduct themselves in the flesh) would spend nearly all their time in looking for the best house and street to be born in, the best things to be born to. Such a little matter as selecting the right parents would be left, probably, to the last moment, or they would expect it to be thrown in.

We are all of us more or less aware, especially as we advance in life, that overlooking the importance of parents is a mistake. There have been times in the lives of some of us when having parents at all seemed a mistake. We can remember hours when we were sure we had the wrong ones.

After our first disappointment,--that is, when we have learned how unmanageable parents are,--we have our time--most of us--of making comparisons, of trying other people's parents on. This cannot be said to work very well, taken as a whole, and it is generally admitted that people who are most serious about it, who take unto themselves fathers- and mothers-in-law seldom do any better than at first. The conclusion of the whole matter would seem to be: Since a man cannot select his parents and his parents cannot select him, he must select himself. That is what books are for.

III

Conveniences

It is the first importance of a true book that a man can select his neighbours with it,--can overcome s.p.a.ce, riches, poverty, and time with it,--and the grave, and break bread with the dead. A book is a portable miracle. It makes a man's native place all over for him, for a dollar and a quarter; and many a man in this somewhat hard and despairing world has been furnished with a new heaven and a new earth for twenty-five cents. Out of a public library he has felt reached down to him the grasp of heroes. Hurrying home in the night, perhaps, with his tiny life hid under stars, but with a Book under his arm, he has felt a Greeting against his breast and held it tight. "Who art thou, my lad?" it said; "who art thou?" And the saying was not forgotten. If it is true that the spirits of the mighty dead are abroad in the night they are turning the leaves of books.

There are other inspiring things in the world, but there is nothing else that carries itself among the sons of men like the book. With such divine plenteousness--seeds of the worlds in it--it goes about flocking on the souls of men. There is something so broadcast, so universal about the way of a book with a man: boundless, subtle, ceaseless, irresistible, following him and loving him, renewing him, delighting in him and hoping for him--like a G.o.d. It is as the way of Nature herself with a man. One cannot always feel it, but somehow, when I am really living a real day, I feel as if some Great Book were around me--were always around me. I feel myself all-enfolded, penetrated, surrounded with it--the vast, gentle force of it--sky and earth of it. It is as if I saw it, sometimes, building new boundaries for me, out there--softly, gently, on the edges of the night--for me and for all human life.

Other inspiring things seem to be less steadfast for us. They cannot always free themselves and then come and free us. Music cannot be depended upon. It sings sometimes for and sometimes against us.

Sometimes, also, music is still--absolutely still, all the way down from the stars to the gra.s.s. At best it is for some people and for others not, and is addicted to places. It is a part of the air--part of the climate in Germany, but there is but one country in the world made for listening in--where any one, every one listens, the way one breathes.

The great pictures inspire, on the whole, but few people--most of them with tickets. Cathedrals cannot be unmoored, have never been seen by the majority of men at all, except in dreams and photographs. Most mountains (for all practical purposes) are private property. The sea (a look at the middle of it) is controlled by two or three syndicates. The sky--the last stronghold of freedom--is rented out for the most part, where most men live--in cities; and in New York and London the people who can afford it pay taxes for air, and gra.s.s is a dollar a blade. Being born is the only really free thing--and dying. Next to these in any just estimate of the comparatively free raw material that goes to the making of a human life comes the printed book.

A library, on the whole, is the purest and most perfect form of power that exists, because it is a lever on the nature of things. If a man is born with the wrong neighbours it brings the right ones flocking to him.

It is the universe to order. It makes the world like a globe in a child's hands. He turns up the part where he chooses to live--now one way and now another, that he may delight in it and live in it. If he is a poet it is the meaning of life to him that he can keep on turning it until he has delighted and tasted and lived in all of it.

The second importance of true books is that they are not satisfied with the first. They are not satisfied to be used to influence a man from the outside--as a kind of house-furnishing for his soul. A true book is never a mere contrivance for arranging the right bit of sky for a man to live his life under, or the right neighbours for him to live his life with. It goes deeper than this. A mere playing upon a man's environment does not seem to satisfy a true book. It plays upon the latent infinity in the man himself. The majority of men are not merely conceived in sin and born in lies, but they are the lies; and lies as well as truths flow in their veins. Lies hold their souls back thousands of years. When one considers the actual facts about most men, the law of environment seems a clumsy and superficial law enough. If all that a book can do is to appeal to the law of environment for a man, it does not do very much.

The very trees and stones do better for him, and the little birds in their nests. No possible amount of environment crowded on their frail souls would ever make it possible for most men to catch up--to overtake enough truth before they die to make their seventy years worth while.

The majority of men (one hardly dares to deny) can be seen, sooner or later, drifting down to death either bitterly or indifferently. The shadows of their lives haunt us a little, then they vanish away from us and from the sound of our voices. Oh, G.o.d, from behind Thy high heaven--from out of Thy infinite wealth of years, hast Thou but the one same pittance of threescore and ten for every man? Some of us are born with the handicap of a thousand years woven in the nerves of our bodies, the swiftness of our minds, and the delights of our limbs. Others of us are born with the thousand years binding us down to blindness and hobbling, holding us back to disease, but all with the same Imperious Timepiece held above us, to run the same race, to overtake the same truth--before the iron curtain and the dark. Some of us--a few men in every generation--have two or three hundred years given to us outright the day we are born. Then we are given seventy more. Others of us have two hundred years taken away from us the day we are born. Then we are given seventy years to make them up in, and it is called life.

If we are to shut ourselves up with one law, either the law of environment or the law of heredity, it is obvious that the best a logical man could do, would be to be ashamed of a universe like this and creep out of it as soon as he could. The great glory of a great book is, that it will not let itself be limited to the law of environment in dealing with a man. It deals directly with the man himself. It appeals to the law of heredity. It reaches down into the infinite depth of his life. If a man has started a life with parents he had better not have (for all practical purposes), it furnishes him with better ones. It picks and chooses in behalf of his life out of his very grandfathers, for him. It not only supplies him with a new set of neighbours as often as he wants them. It sees that he is born again every morning on the wide earth and that he has a new set of parents to be born to. It is a part of the infinite and irrepressible hopefulness of this mortal life that each man of us who dwells on the earth is the child of an infinite marriage. We are all equipped, even the poorest of us, from the day we begin, with an infinite number of fathers and an infinite number of mothers--no telling, as we travel down the years, which shall happen to us next. If what we call heredity were a matter of a few months,--a narrow, pitiful, two-parent affair,--if the fate of a human being could be shut in with what one man and one woman, playing and working, eating and drinking, under heaven, for a score of years or more, would be likely to have to give him from out of their very selves, heredity would certainly be a whimsical, unjust, undignified law to come into a world by, to don an immortal soul with. A man who has had his life so recklessly begun for him could hardly be blamed for being reckless with it afterward. But it is not true that the principle of heredity in a human life can be confined to a single accident in it. We are all infinite, and our very accidents are infinite. In the very flesh and bones of our bodies we are infinite--brought from the furthest reaches of eternity and the utmost bounds of created life to be ourselves. If we were to do nothing else for threescore years, it is not in our human breath to recite our fathers' names upon our lips. Each of us is the child of an infinite mother, and from her breast, veiled in a thousand years, we draw life, glory, sorrow, sleep, and death. The ones we call fathers and mothers are but amba.s.sadors to us--delegates from a million graves--appointed for our birth. Every boy is a summed-up mult.i.tude. The infinite crowd of his fathers beckons for him. As in some vast amphitheatre he lives his life, before the innumerable audience of the dead--each from its circle of centuries--calls to him, contends for him, draws him to himself.

Inasmuch as every man who is born in the world is born with an infinite outfit for living in it, it is the office of all books that are true and beautiful books--true to the spirit of a man--that they shall play upon the latent infinity in him; that they shall help him to select his largest self; that they shall help him to give, as the years go on, the right accent to the right fathers, in his life.