The Lost Art of Reading Part 23

Spiritual Thrift

But perhaps one of the most interesting things about doing up one's knowing in persons is that it is not only the most alive, but the most economical knowledge that can be obtained. On the whole, eleven or twelve people do very well to know the world with, if one can get a complete set, if they are different enough, and one knows them down through. The rest of the people that one sees about, from the point of view of stretching one's comprehension, one's essential sympathy or knowledge, do not count very much. They are duplicates--to be respected and to be loved, of course, but to be kept in the cellar of actual consciousness. There is no other way to do. Everybody was not intended to be used by everybody. It is because we think that they were, mostly, that we have come to our present, modern, heartlessly-cordial fashion of knowing people--knowing people by parlourfuls--whole parlourfuls at a time. "Is thy servant a whale?" said my not unsociable soul to me. "Is one to be fed with one's kind as if they were animalculae, as if they had to be taken in the bulk if one were really to get something?" It is heartless and shallow enough. Who is not weary of it? No one knows anybody nowadays. He merely knows everybody. He falls before The Reception Room. A reception room is a place where we set people up in rows like pickets on a fence to know them. Then like the small boy with a stick, one tap per picket, we run along knowing people. No one comes in touch with any one. It is getting so that there is hardly any possible way left in our modern life for knowing people except by marrying them. One cannot even be sure of that, when one thinks how married people are being driven about by books and by other people.

Society is a crowd of crowds mutually destroying each other and literature is a crowd of books all shutting each other up, and the law seems to be either selection or annihilation, whether in reading or living. The only way to love everybody in this world seems to be to pick out a few in it, delegates of everybody, and use these few to read with, and to love and understand the world with, and to keep close to it, all one's days.

The higher form one's facts are put in in this world the fewer one needs. To know twelve extremely different souls utterly, to be able to borrow them at will, turn them on all knowledge, bring them to bear at a moment's notice on anything one likes, is to be an educated, masterful man in the most literal possible sense. Except in mere matters of physical fact, things which are small enough to be put in encyclopedias and looked up there, a man with twelve deeply loved or deeply pitied souls woven into the texture of his being can flash down into almost any knowledge that he needs, or go out around almost any ignorance that is in his way, through all the earth. The shortest way for an immortal soul to read a book is to know and absorb enough other immortal souls, and get them to help. Any system of education which like our present prevailing one is so vulgar, so unpsychological, as to overlook the soul as the organ and method of knowledge, which fails to see that the knowledge of human souls is itself the method of acquiring all other knowledge and of combining and utilising it, makes narrow and trivial and impotent scholars as a matter of course.

Knowledge of human nature and of one's self is the nervous system of knowledge, the flash and culmination, the final thoroughness of all the knowledge that is worth knowing and of all ways of knowing it.

It is all a theory, I suppose. I cannot prove anything with it. I dare say it is true that neither I nor any one else can get, by reading in this way, what I like to think I am getting, slowly, a cross-section of the universe. But it is something to get as time goes on a cross-section of all the human life that is being lived in it. It is something to take each knowledge that comes, strike all the keys of one's friends on it--clear the keyboard of s.p.a.ce on it. When one really does this, nothing can happen to one which does not or cannot happen to one in the way one likes. Events and topics in this world are determined to a large degree by circ.u.mstances--dandelions, stars, politics, bob-whites, acids, Kant, and domestic science--but personalities, a man's means of seeing things, are determined only by the limits of his imagination. One's knowledge of pictures, or of Kant, of bob-whites or acids, cannot be applied to every conceivable occasion, but nothing can happen in all the world that one cannot see or feel or delight in, or suffer in, through Charles Lamb's soul if one has really acquired it. One can be a Charles Lamb almost anywhere toward almost anything that happens along, or a Robert Burns or a Socrates or a Heine, or an Amiel or a d.i.c.kens or Hugo or any one, or one can hush one's soul one eternal moment and be the Son of G.o.d. To know a few men, to turn them into one's books, to turn them into one another, into one's self, to study history with their hearts, to know all men that live with them, to put them all together and guess at G.o.d with them--it seems to me that knowledge that is as convenient and penetrating, as easily turned on and off, as much like a light as this, is well worth having. It would be like taking away a whole world, if it were taken away from me--the little row of people I do my reading with. And some of them are supposed to be dead--hundreds of years.

But the dramatic principle in education strikes both ways. While it is true that one does not need a very large outfit of people to do one's knowing with, if one has the habit of thinking in persons, it is still more true that one does not need a large outfit of books.

As I sit in my library facing the fire I fancy I hear, sometimes, my books eating each other up. One by one through the years they have disappeared from me--only portraits or t.i.tles are left. The more beautiful book absorbs the less and the greater folds itself around the small. I seldom take down a book that was an enthusiasm once without discovering that the heart of it has fled away, has stealthily moved over, while I dreamed, to some other book. Lowell and Whittier are footnotes scattered about in several volumes, now. J. G. Holland (Sainte-Beuve of my youth!) is digested by Matthew Arnold and Matthew Arnold by Walter Pater and Walter Pater by Walt Whitman. Montaigne and Plato have moved over into Emerson, and Emerson has been distilled slowly into--forty years. Holmes has dissolved into Charles Lamb and Thomas Browne. A big volume of Rossetti (whom I oddly knew first) is lost in a little volume of Keats, and as I sit and wait Ruskin and Carlyle are going fast into a battered copy on my desk--of the Old Testament. Once let the dramatic principle get well started in a man's knowledge and it seems to keep on sending him up new currents the way his heart does, whether he notices it or not. If a man will leave his books and his people to themselves, if he will let them do with him and with one another what they want to do, they all work while he sleeps. If the spirit of knowledge, the dramatic principle in it, is left free, knowledge all but comes to a man of itself, cannot help coming, like the dew on the gra.s.s. With enough reading for persons one need not buy very many books. One allows for unconscious cerebration in books. Books not only have a way of being read through their backs, but of reading one another.

V

The City, the Church, and the College

The greatest event of the nineteenth century was that somewhere in it, at some immense and hidden moment in it, human knowledge pa.s.sed silently over from the emphasis of Persons to the emphasis of Things.

I have walked up and down Broadway when the whole street was like a prayer to me--miles of it--a long dull cry to its little strip of heaven. I have been on the Elevated--the huge shuttle of the great city--hour by hour, had my soul woven into New York on it, back and forth, up and down, until it was hardly a soul at all, a mere ganglion, a quivering, pressed-in nerve of second-story windows, skies of clotheslines, pale faces, mist and rumble and dust. "Perhaps I have a soul," I say. "Perhaps I have not. Has any one a soul?" When I look at the men I say to myself, "Now I will look at the women," and when I look at the women I say, "Now I will look at the men." Then I look at shoes.

Men are cheap in New York. Every little man I see stewing along the street, when I look into his face in my long, slow country way, as if a hill belonged with him or a sc.r.a.p of sky or something, or as if he really counted, looks at me as one would say, "I? I am a millionth of New York--and you?"

I am not even that. The city gathers itself together in a great roar about me, puts its hands to its mouth and bellows in my country ears, "Men are cheap enough, dear boy, didn't you know that? See those dots on Brooklyn Bridge?"

I go on with my walk. I stop and look up at the great blocks. "Who are you?" the great blocks say. I take another step. I am one more shuffle on the street. "Men are cheap. Look at _us_--" a thousand show windows say. Are there not square miles of human countenance drifting up Broadway any day? "And where are they going?" I asked my soul. "To oblivion?"--"They are going from Things," said my soul, "to Things"; and _sotto voce_, "From one set of Things they know they do not want, to another set of Things they do not know they do not want."

One need not wonder very long that nearly every man one knows in New York is at best a mere cheered-up and plucky pessimist. Of course one has to go down and see one's favourite New Yorker, one needs to and wants to, and one needs to get wrought in with him too, but when one gets home, who is there who does not have to get free from his favourite New Yorker, shake himself off from him, save his soul a little longer?

"Men are cheap," it keeps saying over and over to one,--a New York soul does. It keeps coming back--whispering through all the aisles of thought. New York spreads itself like a vast concrete philosophy over every man's spirit. It reeks with cheapness, human cheapness. How could it be otherwise with a New York man? I never come home from New York, wander through the city with my heart, afterward, look down upon it, see Broadway with this little man on it, fretting up and down between his twenty-story blocks, in his little trough of din under the wide heaven, loomed at by iron and gla.s.s, browbeaten by stone, smothered by smoke, but that he all but seems to me, this little Broadway man, to be slipping off the planet, to barely belong to the planet. I feel like clutching at him, helping him to hold on, pitying him. Then I remember how it really is (if there is any pitying to be done),--this crowded-over, crowded-off, matter-cringing, callous-looking man, pities me.

When I was coming home from New York the last time, had reached a safe distance behind my engine, out in the fields, I found myself listening all over again to the roar (saved up in me) of the great city. I tried to make it out, tried to a.n.a.lyse what it was that the voice of the great city said to me. "The voice of the city is the Voice of Things," my soul said to me. "And the Man?" I said, "where does the Man come in? Are not the Things for the Man?" Then the roar of the great city rose up about me, like a flood, swallowed my senses in itself, numbed and overbore me, swooned my soul in itself, and said: "NO, THE THINGS ARE NOT FOR THE MAN. THE MAN IS FOR THE THINGS."

This is what the great city said. And while I still listened, the roar broke over me once more with its NO! NO! NO! its million voices in it, its million souls in it. All doubts and fears and hates and cries, all deadnesses flowed around me, took possession of me.

Then I remembered the iron and wood faces of the men, great processions of them, I had seen there, the strange, protected-looking, boxed-in faces of the women, faces in crates, I had seen, and I understood. "New York," I said, "is a huge war, a great battle numbered off in streets and houses, every man against every man, every man a shut-in, self-defended man. It is a huge lamp-lighted, sun-lighted, ceaseless struggle, day unto day."

"But New York is not the world. Try the whole world," said my soul to me. "Perhaps you can do better. Are there not churches, men-making, men-gathering places, oases for strength and rest in it?"

Then I went to all the churches in the land at once, of a still Sabbath morning, steeples in the fields and hills, and steeples in cities. The sound of splendid organs praying for the poor emptied people, the long, still, innumerable sound of countless collections being taken, the drone and seesaw of sermons, countless sermons! (Ah, these poor helpless Sundays!) Paper-philosophy and axioms. Chimes of bells to call the people to paper-philosophy and axioms! "Canst thou not," said I to my soul, "guide me to a Man, to a door that leads to a Man--a world-lover or prophet?" Then I fled (I always do after a course of churches) to the hills from whence cometh strength. David tried to believe this. I do sometimes, but hills are great, still, coldly companionable, rather heartless fellows. I know in my heart that all the hills on earth, with all their halos on them, their cities of leaves, and circles of life, would not take the place to me, in mystery, closeness, illimitableness, and wonder--of one man.

And when I turn from the world of affairs and churches, to the world of scholarship, I cannot say that I find relief. Even scholarship, scholarship itself, is under a stone most of it, p.r.o.ne and pale and like all the rest, under The Emphasis of Things. Scholarship is getting to be a mere huge New York, infinite rows and streets of things, taught by rows of men who have made themselves over into things, to another row of men who are trying to make themselves over into things. I visit one after the other of our great colleges, with their forlorn, lonesome little chapels, cosy-corners for G.o.d and for the humanities, their vast Thing-libraries, men like dots in them, their great long, reached-out laboratories, stables for truth, and I am obliged to confess in spirit that even the colleges, in all ages the strongholds of the human past, and the human future, the citadels of manhood, are getting to be great man-blind centres, shambles of souls, places for turning every man out from himself, every man away from other men, making a Thing of him--or at best a Columbus for a new kind of fly, or valet to a worm, or tag or label on Matter.

When one considers that it is a literal, scientific, demonstrable fact that there is not a single evil that can be named in modern life, social, religious, political, or industrial, which is not based on the narrowness and blindness of cla.s.ses of men toward one another, it is very hard to sit by and watch the modern college almost everywhere, with its silent, deadly Thing-emphasis upon it, educating every man it can reach, into not knowing other men, into not knowing even himself.

VI

The Outsiders

One cannot but look with deep pleasure at first, and with much relief, upon these healthy objective modern men of ours. The only way out, for spiritual hardihood, after the world-sick Middle Ages, was a Columbus, a vast splendid train of Things after him, of men who emphasised Things,--who could emphasise Things. It is a great spectacle and a memorable one--the one we are in to-day, the spectacle of the wonder that men are doing with Things, but when one begins to see that it is all being turned around, that it is really a spectacle of what Things are doing with men, one wakes with a start. One wonders if there could be such a thing as having all the personalities of a whole generation lost. One looks suspiciously and wistfully at the children one sees in the schools. One wonders if they are going to be allowed, like their fathers and mothers, to have personalities to lose. I have all but caught myself kidnapping children as I have watched them flocking in the street. I have wanted to scurry them off to the country, a few of them, almost anywhere--for a few years. I have thought I would try to find a college to hide them in, some back-county, protected college, a college which still has the emphasis of Persons as well as the emphasis of Things upon it. Then I would wait and see what would come of it. I would at least have a little bevy of great men perhaps, saved out for a generation, enough to keep the world supplied with samples--to keep up the bare idea of the great man, a kind of isthmus to the future.

The test of civilisation is what it produces--its man, if only because he produces all else. If we have all made up our minds to allow the specialist to set the pace for us, either to be specialists ourselves or vulgarly to compete with specialists, for the right of living, or getting a living, there is going to be a crash sometime. Then a sense of emptiness after the crash which will call us to our senses. The specialist's view of the world logically narrows itself down to a race of nonent.i.ties for nothings. And even if a thing is a thing, it is a nothing to a nonent.i.ty. And if it is the one business of the specialist to obtain results, and we are all browbeaten into being specialists, but one result is going to be possible. It is obvious that the man who is willing to sacrifice the most is going to have the most success in the race, crowd out and humiliate or annihilate the others. If this is to be the world, it is only men who are ready to die for nothing in order to create nothing who will be able to secure enough of nothing to rule it.

One wonders how long ruling such a world will be worth while, a world which has accepted as the order of the day success by suicide, the spending of manhood on things which only by being men we can enjoy--the method of forging boilers and getting deaf to buy violins, of having elevated railways for dead men, wireless telegraphs for clods, gigantic printing-presses for men who have forgotten how to read. "Let us all, by all means, make all things for the world." So we set ourselves to our task cheerfully, the task of attaining results for people at large by killing people in particular off. We are getting to be already, even in the arts, men with one sense. We have cla.s.ses even in colour. Schools of painters are founded by men because they have one seventh of a sense of sight. Schools of musicians divide themselves off into fractions of the sense of sound, and on every hand men with a hundred and forty-three million cells in their brains, become noted (n.o.bodies) because they only use a hundred and forty-three. "What is the use of attaining results,"

one asks, "of making such a perfectly finished world, when there is not a man in it who would pay any attention to it as a world?" If the planet were really being improved by us, if the stars shone better by our committing suicide to know their names, it might be worth while for us all to die, perhaps, to make racks of ourselves, frames for souls (one whole generation of us), in one single, heroic, concerted attempt to perfect a universe like this, the use and mastery of it. But what would it all come to? Would we not still be left in the way on it, we and our children, lumbering it up, soiling and disgracing it, making a machine of it? There would be no one to appreciate it. Our children would inherit the curse from us, would be more like us than we are. If any one is to appreciate this world, we must appreciate it and pa.s.s the old secret on.

No one seems to believe in appreciating--appreciating more than one thing, at least. The practical disappearance in any vital form of the lecture-lyceum, the sermon, the essay, and the poem, the annihilation of the imagination or organ of comprehension, the disappearance of personality, the abolition of the editorial, the temporary decline of religion, of genius, of the artistic temperament, can all be summed up and symbolised in a single trait of modern life, its separated men, interested in separate things. We are getting to be lovers of contentedly separate things, little things in their little places all by themselves. The modern reader is a skimmer, a starer at pictures, like a child, while he reads, never thinking a whole thought, a lover of peeks and paragraphs, as a matter of course. Except in his money-making, or perhaps in the upper levels of science, the typical modern man is all paragraphs, not only in the way he reads, but in the way he lives and thinks. Outside of his specialty he is not interested in anything more than one paragraph's worth. He is as helpless as a bit of protoplasm before the sight of a great many very different things being honestly put together. Putting things together tires him. He has no imagination, because he has the daily habit of contentedly seeing a great many things which he never puts together. He is neither artistic nor original nor far-sighted nor powerful, because he has a paragraph way of thinking, a sc.r.a.p-bag of a soul, because he cannot concentrate separate things, cannot put things together. He has no personality because he cannot put himself together.

It is significant that in the days when personalities were common and when very powerful, interesting personalities could be looked up, several to the mile, on almost any road in the land, it was not uncommon to see a business letter-head like this:

---------------------------------------------- | General Merchandise, | | Dry Goods, Notions, Hats, | | Shoes, Groceries, Hardware, Coffins | | and Caskets, Livery and | | Feed Stable. | | Physician and Surgeon. | | Justice of the Peace, Licensed to Marry. | ----------------------------------------------

If, as it looks just at present, the nation is going to believe in arbitration as the general modern method of adjustment, that is, in the all-siding up of a subject, the next thing it will be obliged to believe in will be some kind of an inst.i.tution of learning which will produce arbitrators, men who have two or three perfectly good, human sides to their minds, who have been allowed to keep minds with three dimensions.

The probabilities are that if the mind of Socrates, or any other great man, could have an X-ray put on it, and could be thrown on a canvas, it would come out as a hexagon, or an almost-circle, with lines very like spokes on the inside bringing all things to a centre.

It is not necessary to deny, in the present emphasis of Things, that we are making and inspiring all Things except ourselves in a way that would make the Things glad. The trouble is that Things are getting too glad.

They are turning around and making us. Nearly every man in college is being made over, mind and body, into a sort of machine. When the college has finished him, and put him on the market, and one wonders what he is for, one learns he is to do some very little part, of some very little thing, and nothing else. The local paper announces with pride that in the new factory we have for the manufacture of shoes it takes one hundred and sixty-three machines to make one shoe--one man to each machine. I ask myself, "If it takes one hundred and sixty-three machines to make one shoe, how many machines does it take to make one man?"

The Infinite Face of The Street goes by me night and day. To and fro, its innumerable eyes, always the sound of footsteps in my ears, out of all these--jostling our shoulders, hidden from our souls, there waits an All-man, a great man, I know, as always great men wait, whose soul shall be the signal to the latent hero in us all, who, standing forth from the machines of learning and the machines of worship, that spread their noise and network through all the living of our lives, shall start again the old sublime adventure of keeping a Man upon the earth. He shall rouse the glowing crusaders, the darers of every land, who through the proud and dreary temples of the wise shall go, with the cry from Nazareth on their lips, "Woe unto you ye men of learning, ye have taken away the key of knowledge, ye have entered not in yourselves and them that were entering in, ye have hindered," and the mighty message of the one great scholar of his day who knew a G.o.d: "Whether there be prophecies they shall fail, whether there be tongues they shall cease, whether there be knowledge it shall vanish away. Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding bra.s.s and tinkling cymbal,..."

I do not forget of Him, whose "I, IF I BE LIFTED UP" is the hail of this modern world, that there were men of letters in those far-off days, when once He walked with us, who, sounding their bra.s.s and tinkling their cymbals, asked the essentially ignorant question of all outsiders of knowledge in every age--"How knoweth this man letters, never having learned?"

As I lay on my bed in the night They came Pale with sleep-- The faces of all the living As though they were dead; "What is Power?" they cried, Souls that were lost from their masters while they slept-- Trooping through my dream, "What is Power?"

Now these nineteen hundred years since the Boy In the temple with The Doctors Still the wind of faces flying Through the s.p.a.ces of my dream, "WHAT IS POWER?" they cried.

VII

Reading the World Together

It is not necessary to decry science, but it should be cried on the housetops of education, the world around in this twentieth century, that science is in a rut of dealing solely with things and that the p.r.o.noun of science is It. While it is obvious that neuter knowledge should have its place in any real scheme of life, it is also obvious that most of us, making locomotives, playing with mist, fire and water and lightning, and the great game with matter, should be allowed to have s.e.x enough to be men and women a large part of the time, the privilege of being persons, perchance G.o.ds, surmounting this matter we know so much about, rather than becoming like it.

The next great move of education--the one which is to be expected--is that the educated man of the twentieth century is going to be educated by selecting out of all the bare knowledges the warm and human elements in them. He is going to work these over into a relation to himself and when he has worked them over into relation to himself, he is going to work them over through himself into every one else and read the world together.

It is because the general habit of reading for persons, acquiring one's knowledge naturally and vitally and in its relation to life, has been temporarily swept one side in modern education that we are obliged to face the divorced condition of the educated world to-day. There seem to be, for the most part, but two kinds of men living in it, living on opposite sides of the same truths glaring at each other. On the one hand the anaemically spiritual, broad, big, pallid men, and on the other the funny, infinitesimal, provincial, matter cornered, matter-of-fact ones.

However useless it may seem to be there is but one way out. Some man is going to come to us, must come to us, who will have it in him to challenge these forces, do battle with them, fight with fog on one hand and desert on the other. There never will be one world in education until we have one man who can emphasise persons and things together, and do it every day, side by side, in his own mind. When there is one man who is an all-man, an epitome of a world, there shall be more all-men.

He cannot help attracting them, drawing them out, creating them. With enough men who have a whole world in their hearts, we shall soon have a whole world.

Whether it is true or not that the universe is most swiftly known, most naturally enjoyed as related to one Creator or Person, as the self-expression of one Being who loved all these things enough to gather them together, it is generally admitted that the natural man seems to have been created to enjoy a universe as related to himself. His most natural and powerful way of enjoying it is to enjoy it in its relation to persons. A Person may not have created it, but it seems for the time being at least, and so far as persons are concerned, to have been created for persons. To know the persons and the things together, and particularly the things in relation to the persons, is the swiftest and simplest way of knowing the things. Persons are the nervous system of all knowledge. So far as man is concerned all truth is a sub-topic under his own soul, and the universe is the tool of his own life. Reading for different topics in it gives him a superficial knowledge of the men who write about them. Reading to know the men gives him a superficial knowledge, in the technical sense, of the things they write about. Let him stand up and take his choice like a man between being superficial in the letter and superficial in the spirit. Outside of his specialty, however, being superficial in the letter will lead him to the most knowledge. Man is the greatest topic. All other knowledge is a sub-topic under a Man, and the stars themselves are as footnotes to the thoughts of his heart.

"Things are not only related to other things," the soul of the man says, "they are related to me." This relation of things to me is a mutual affair, partly theirs and partly mine, and I am going to do my knowing, act on my own knowledge, as if I were of some importance in it. Shall I reckon with alkalis and acids and not reckon with myself? I say, "O great Nature, O infinite Things, by the charter of my soul (and whether I have a soul or not), I am not only going to know things, but things shall know _me_. I stamp myself upon them. I shall receive from them and love them and belong to them, but they shall be my things because they are things, and they shall be to me, what I make them." "The sun is thy plaything," my soul says to me, "O, mighty Child, the stars thy companions. Stand up! Come out in the day! laugh the great winds to thy side. The sea, if thou wilt have it so, is thy frog-pond and thou shalt play with the lightnings in thy breast."

"Aye, aye," I cry, "I know it! The youth of the world seizes my whole being. I hurrah like a child through all knowledge. I have taken all heaven for my nursery. The world is my rocking-horse. Things are not only for things, and my body in the end for things, but now I _live_, I _live_, and things are for me!" "Aye, aye, and they shall be to thee,"

said my soul, "what thou biddest them."

And now I go forth quietly. "Do you not see, O mountains, that you must reckon with me? I am the younger brother of the stars. I have faced nations in my heart. Great bullying, hulking, half-dead centuries I have faced. I have made them speak to me, and have dared against them. If there is history, I also am history. If there are facts, I also am a fact. If there are laws, it is one of the laws that I am one of the laws."