The Lost Art of Reading Part 19

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 ill.u.s.trate 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 a.s.sumed 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 a.s.sumption. 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, l.u.s.ty 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 ill.u.s.tration of what can be brought to pa.s.s 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-s.p.a.ce, 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 Ma.s.s-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 a.n.a.lysis, 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 a.s.suming 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."