The Lost Art of Reading Part 18

"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-s.e.xual 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-s.p.a.ce 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sions, 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 G.o.d--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 pa.s.sing of the sermon as a practical working force. A great deal has been said among the literary about the pa.s.sing of the essay.

Much has been said also about the pa.s.sing of poetry and the pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sing 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 gra.s.s 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 a.s.sociations 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, emanc.i.p.ated, emanc.i.p.ating, 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 ill.u.s.trations. 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 ill.u.s.tration. 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d 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 ill.u.s.trated in all the processes of the natural world--the sap of this tree," said he, "for instance,"

brushing the elm-tree off into s.p.a.ce, "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 G.o.d," 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 ill.u.s.trate 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 sh.o.r.e 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