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The Lost Art
of Read i TIP

Gerald Stanley Lee

By GERALD STANLEY LEE

THE LOST ART OF READING

Mount Tom Edition
New Edition in Two Volumes

I. The Child and the Book :

A Manual for Parents and for Teachers in
Schools and Colleges

II. The Lost Art of Reading ;

or, THE MAN AND THE BOOK

Two Volumes, Svo. Sold separately. Each, net.

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

NEW YORK LONDON

Mount Tom Edition

The
Lost Art of Reading

Gerald Stanley Lee

Author of " The Child and The Book," " The Shadow Christ," and " The
Voice of the Machine)."

G. P. Putnam's Sons

New York and London

Gbe fmicfcerbocfcer press

1907

OFTHE

UNIVERSITY

BY
GERALD STANLEY LEE

•Cbe -Rnicfeerbocfeet prcse, flew

JENNETTE LEE

210373

Preface

IN publishing this new edition of THE LOST
ART OF READING, the author feels that it
ought to be understood that there is noth-
ing really new in it except a vacuum a hundred
and sixty pages long.

It has been thought best to accommodate
a special demand for that section of THE LOST
ART OF READING which especially deals with
the reading problem of children and young
people by separating it and reprinting it in
a short and handy volume under the title of
THE CHILD AND THE BOOK, a manual for
parents and for teachers and for those who are
especially interested in the practical difficulties
and opportunities of schools and colleges.

The major part of THE LOST ART OF READ-
ING, however, which deals with the more per-
sonal, private, grown-up joys and sorrows of
the modern reader — those which belong to all
of us, struggling to save our souls among the
books, is herewith published in a volume by
itself unencumbered by the treatment of the
special problems of the home and the school.

GERALD STANLEY LEE.
MOUNT TOM,

NORTHAMPTON MASSACHUSETTS,
September, 1906.

preface

Vlll

Contents

Ube Cons
f essions of

unscfens
tiflc mint)

BOOK II

PACE

THE MODERN READER'S INSPIRA-
TIONS

DETAILS: THE CONFESSIONS OF AN UN-
SCIENTIFIC MIND .... 89

I— UNSCIENTIFIC .... 91

I — On Being Intelligent in a library . 91

II — How It Feels 95

III — How a Specialist Can Be an Educated

Man . . . . .96

IV — On Reading Books Through their Backs loo

V — On Keeping Each Other in Countenance 103

VI — The Romance of Science . . . 106

VII — Monads . . 109

VIII — Multiplication Tables . . . .119

H— READING FOR PRINCIPLES . 121

I — On Changing One's Conscience . .121

II — On the Intolerance of Experienced People 124

III — On Having One's Experience Done Out . 127

IV — On Reading a Newspaper in Ten Minutes 131

V — General Information .... 133

VI — But — 141

m— READING DOWN THROUGH . 149

I — Inside ....... 149

II — On Being Lonely with a Book . . 150

vii

Contents

BOOK I

THE MODERN READER'S DIFFICUL-

PAGE

ttbe

TIES

modern

reafcer'0

I— CIVILIZATION ....

bffficutties

I— Dust

II — Dust

Ill — Dust to Dust . ...

IV— Ashes

V — The Literary Rush ....

VI — Parenthesis — To the Gentle Reader

VII — More Parenthesis — But More to the

Point

VIII — More Literary Rush ....

IX — The Bugbear of Being Well Informed —

A Practical Suggestion

X — The Dead Level of Intelligence .

XI — The Art of Reading as One Likes .

II— LIBRARIES.

libraries.

WANTED : AN OLD-FASHIONED LIBRARIAN

Hn ofc»

I yjz

fasbtone&

librarian

II— Cf.

Ill— Btal

*7 A

IV— Etc

V— 0

Contents

III— Keeping Other Minds Off
IV — Reading Backwards

IV— READING FOR FACTS .

I — Calling the Meeting to Order
II — Symbolic Facts ....
Ill — Duplicates : A Principle of Economy

V— READING FOR RESULTS

I — The Blank Paper Frame of Mind
II— The Usefully Unfinished
III— Athletics

VI— READING FOR FEELINGS

I— The Passion of Truth .
II — The Topical Point of View .

PAGE
153
155

161

161
165
167

171

171
176
182

189

189
194

VII— READING THE WORLD TOGETHER 201

I — Focusing .....
II — The Human Unit ....
Ill — The Higher Cannibalism
IV — Spiritual Thrift ....

V— The City, the Church, and the College
VI— The Outsiders ....
VII — Reading the World Together

201
206
209

220
226
23I
239

Ube dona

feesions of

unscicna
tiflc mind

Contents

TJClbat to
5>o nert

BOOK III

WHAT TO DO NEXT .

I — See Next Chapter
II — Diagnosis
III— Eclipse
IV — Apocalypse .
V — Every Man His Own Genius
VI — An Inclined Plane
VII— Allons .

PAGE
245

247
252

254
26l
268
272

277

Book I
ZTbe /IDofcern IReafcer's Difficulties

Civilisation

Bust

" I SEE the ships," said The Eavesdropper,

1 as he stole round the world to me, " on
a dozen sides of the world. I hear them fight-
ing with the sea."

"And what do you see on the ships?" I
said.

" Figures of men and women — thousands of
figures of men and women."

" And what are they doing ? "

" The}*- are walking fiercely," he said, —
" some of them, — walking fiercely up and down
the decks before the sea."

"Why?" said I.

" Because they cannot stand still and look at

S>U0t

3Lost Hrt of

s>ust it. Others are reading in chairs because they
cannot sit still and look at it."

' ' And there are some, ' ' said The Eaves-
dropper, " with roofs of boards above their
heads (to protect them from Wonder) — down
in the hold — playing cards."

There was silence.

' ' What are you seeing now ? " I said.

' ( Trains, ' ' he said — ' ' a globe full of trains.
They are on a dozen sides of it. They are
clinging to the crusts of it — mountains — rivers
—prairies — some in the light and some in the
dark — creeping through space."

' ' And what do you see in the trains ? ' '

"Miles of faces."

"And the faces?"

" They are pushing on the trains."

' ' What are you seeing now ? " I said.

' ( Cities, ' ' he said — ' ' streets of cities — miles
of streets of cities."

' ' And what do you see in the streets of
cities?"

" Men, women, and smoke."

* * And what are the men and women doing ? ' '

" Hurrying," said he.

"Where?" said I.

"God knows."

The population of the civilised world to- 2?ust
day may be divided into two classes, — mil-
lionaires and those who would like to be
millionaires. The rest are artists, poets,
tramps, and babies — and do not count. Poets
and artists do not count until after they are
dead. Tramps are put in prison. Babies are
expected to get over it. A few more summers,
a few more winters — with short skirts or with
down on their chins — they shall be seen bur-
rowing with the rest of us.

One almost wonders sometimes, why it is
that the sun keeps on year after year and day
after day turning the globe around and around,
heating it and lighting it and keeping things
growing on it, when after all, when all is said
and done (crowded with wonder and with
things to live with, as it is), it is a compara-
tively empty globe. No one seems to be using
it very much, or paying very much attention
to it, or getting very much out of it. There
are never more than a very few men on it at a
time, who can be said to be really living on it.
They are engaged in getting a living and in
hoping that they are going to live sometime.
They are also going to read sometime.

When one thinks of the wasted sunrises and
sunsets — the great free show of heaven — the

SLost Hrt ot 1ReaMn0

Bust

door open every night — of the little groups of
people straggling into it — of the swarms of
people hurrying back and forth before it,
jostling their getting-a-living lives up and
down before it, not knowing it is there, — one
wonders why it is there. Why does it not fall
upon us, or its lights go suddenly out upon us ?
We stand in the days and the nights like stalls
— suns flying over our heads, stars singing
through space beneath our feet. But we do
not see. Every man's head in a pocket, — bor-
ing for his living in a pocket — or being bored
for his living in a pocket, — why should he see ?
True we are not without a philosophy for this
— to look over the edge of our stalls with.
" Getting a living is living," we say. We
whisper it to ourselves — in our pockets. Then
we try to get it. When we get it, we try to
believe it — and when we get it we do not be-
lieve anything. Let every man under the
walled-in heaven, the iron heaven, speak for
his own soul. No one else shall speak for
him. We only know what we know — each of
us in our own pockets. The great books tell
us it has not always been an iron heaven or a
walled-in heaven. But into the faces of the
flocks of the children that come to us, year
after year, we look, wondering. They shall
not do anything but burrowing — most of them.
Our very ideals are burrowings. So are our
books. Religion burrows. It barely so much
as looks at heaven. Why should a civilised man

Bust

man who has a pocket in civilisation — s>uat
a man who can burrow — look at heaven ? It
is the glimmering boundary line where burrow-
ing leaves off. Time enough. In the mean-
time the shovel. Let the stars wheel. Do
men look at stars with shovels ?

The faults of our prevailing habits of read-
ing are the faults of our lives. Any criticism
of our habit of reading books to-day, which
actually or even apparently confines itself to
the point, is unsatisfactory. A criticism of the
reading habit of a nation is a criticism of its
civilisation. To sketch a scheme of defence
for the modern human brain, from the kinder-
garten stage to Commencement day, is merely
a way of bringing the subject of education up,
and dropping it where it begins.

Even if the youth of the period, as a live,
human, reading being (on the principles to be
laid down in the following pages), is so fortu-
nate as to succeed in escaping the dangers and
temptations of the home — even if he contrives
to run the gauntlet of the grammar school and
the academy — even if, in the last, longest, and
hardest pull of all, he succeeds in keeping a
spontaneous habit with books in spite of a col-
lege course, the story is not over. Civilisation
waits for him — all-enfolding, all-instructing
civilisation, and he stands face to face — book
in hand — with his last chance.

OLost Hrt of

III
Dust to Dust

2>uat Whatever else may be said of our present

Bust civilisation, one must needs go very far in it to
see Abraham at his tent's door, waiting for
angels. And yet, from the point of view of
reading and from the point of view of the books
that the world has always called worth read-
ing, if ever there was a type of a gentleman
and scholar in history, and a Christian, and a
man of possibilities, founder and ruler of
civilisations, it is this same man Abraham
at his tent's door waiting for angels. Have
we any like him now ? Perad venture there
shall be twenty ? Perad venture there shall
be ten ? Where is the man who feels that
he is free to-day to sit upon his steps and have
a quiet think, unless there floats across the
spirit of his dream the sweet and reassuring
sound of some one making a tremendous din
around the next corner — a band, or a new liter-
ary journal, or a historical novel, or a special
correspondent, or a new club or church or
something? Until he feels that the world is
being conducted for him, that things are toler-
ably not at rest, where shall one find in civili-
sation, in this present moment, a man who is
ready to stop and look about him — to take a
spell at last at being a reasonable, contempla-
tive, or even marriageable being ?

Bust to Dust

The essential unmarriageableness of the Dust
modern man and the unreadableness of his
books are two facts that work very well to-
gether.

When Emerson asked Bronson Alcott
1 ' What have you done in the world, what
have you written ? " the answer of Alcott, " If
Pythagoras came to Concord whom would he
ask to see?" was a diagnosis of the whole
nineteenth century. It was a very short sen-
tence, but it was a sentence to found a college
with, to build libraries out of, to make a whole
modern world read, to fill the weary and heed-
less heart of it — for a thousand years.

We have plenty of provision made for books
in civilisation, but if civilisation should ever
have another man in the course of time who
knows how to read a book, it would not know
what to do with him. No provision is made
for such a man. We have nothing but li-
braries— monstrous libraries to lose him in.
The books take up nearly all the room in
civilisation, and civilisation takes up the rest.
The man is not allowed to peep in civilisation.
He is too busy in being ordered around by
it to know that he would like to. It does
not occur to him that he ought to be allowed
time in it to know who he is, before he dies.
The typical civilised man is an exhausted,
spiritually hysterical man because he has no
idea of what it means, or can be made to mean
to a man, to face calmly with his whole life a

io Xost Hrt ot IReafcing

Bust great book, a few minutes every day, to rest
to back on his ideals in it, to keep office hours
with his own soul.

The practical value of a book is the inherent
energy and quietness of the ideals in it — the
immemorial way ideals have — have always had
— of working themselves out in a man, of doing
the work of the man and of doing their own
work at the same time.

Inasmuch as ideals are what all real books
are written with and read with, and inasmuch
as ideals are the only known way a human
being has of resting, in this present world, it
would be hard to think of any book that would
be more to the point in this modern civilisation
than a book that shall tell men how to read to
live, — how to touch their ideals swiftly every
day. Any book that should do this for us
would touch life at more points and flow out
on men's minds in more directions than any
other that could be conceived. It would con-
tribute as the June day, or as the night for
sleep, to all men's lives, to all of the problems
of all of the world at once. It would be a
night latch — to the ideal.

Whatever the remedy may be said to be, one
thing is certainly true with regard to our read-
ing habits in modern times. Men who are
habitually shamefaced or absent-minded be-
fore the ideal — that is, before the actual nature
of things — cannot expect to be real readers of
books. They can only be what most men

Bust to Dust

are nowadays, merely busy and effeminate,
rtmning-and-reading sort of men — rushing
about propping up the universe. Men who
cannot trust the ideal — the nature of things, —
and who think they can do better, are natu-
rally kept very busy, and as they take no time
to rest back on their ideals they are naturally
very tired. The result stares at us on every
hand. Whether in religion, art, education, or
public affairs, we do not stop to find our ideals
for the problems that confront us. We do
not even look at them. Our modern problems
are all Jerichos to us — most of them paper
ones. We arrange symposiums and processions
around them and shout at them and march up
and down before them. Modern prophecy is
the blare of the trumpet. Modern thought is
a crowd hurrying to and fro. Civilisation is
the dust we scuffle in each other's eyes.

When the peace and strength of spirit with
which the walls of temples are builded no
longer dwell in them, the stones crumble.
Temples are built of eon-gathered and eon-
rested stones. Infinite nights and days are
wrought in them, and leisure and splendour
wait upon them, and visits of suns and stars,
and when leisure and splendour are no more in
human beings' lives, and visits of suns and
stars are as though they were not, in our
civilisation, the walls of it shall crumble upon
us. If fulness and leisure and power of living
are no more with us, nothing shall save us.

Dust

to
Bust

Xost Hrt of

Bgbes

Walls of encyclopaedias — not even walls of
Bibles shall save us, nor miles of Carnegie-
library. Empty and hasty and cowardly living
does not get itself protected from the laws of
nature by tons of paper and ink. The only
way out for civilisation is through the practi-
cal men in it — men who grapple daily with
ideals, who keep office hours with their souls,
who keep hold of life with books, who take
enough time out of hurrahing civilisation
along — to live.

Civilisation has been long in building and
its splendour still hangs over us, but Parthenons
do not stand when Parthenons are no longer
being lived in Greek men's souls. Only those
who have Coliseums in them can keep Coli-
seums around them. The Ideal has its own
way. It has it with the very stones. It was
an Ideal, a vanished Ideal, that made a moon-
light scene for tourists out of the Coliseum —
out of the Dead Soul of Rome.

Hebes

There seem to be but two fundamental char-
acteristic sensibilities left alive in the typical,
callously-civilised man. One of these sensibili-
ties is the sense of motion and the other is the
sense of mass. If he cannot be appealed to
through one of these senses, it is of little use

Hsbes 13

to appeal to him at all. In proportion as he
is civilised, the civilised man can be depended
on for two things. He can always be touched
by a hurry of any kind, and he never fails to
be moved by a crowd. If he can have hurry
and crowd together, he is capable of almost
anything. These two sensibilities, the sense
of motion and the sense of mass, are all that is
left of the original, lusty, tasting and seeing
and feeling human being who took possession
of the earth. And even in the case of com-
paratively rudimentary and somewhat stupid
senses like these, the sense of motion, with the
average civilised man, is so blunt that he needs
to be rushed along at seventy miles an hour to
have the feeling that he is moving, and his
sense of mass is so degenerate that he needs to
live with hundreds of thousands of people next
door to know that he is not alone. He is seen
in his most natural state, — this civilised being,
— with most of his civilisation around him, in
the seat of an elevated railway train, with a
crowded newspaper before his eyes, and another
crowded newspaper in his lap, and crowds of
people reading crowded newspapers standing
round him in the aisles; but he can never be
said to be seen at his best, in a spectacle like
this, until the spectacle moves, until it is felt
rushing over the sky of the street, puffing
through space; in which delectable pell-mell
and carnival of hurry — hiss in front of it, shriek
under it, and dust behind it — he finds, to all

3Lost Hrt ot

appearances at least, the meaning of this present
world and the hope of the next. Hurry and
crowd have kissed each other and his soul
rests. " If Abraham sitting in his tent door
waiting for angels had been visited by a spec-
tacle like this and invited to live in it all his
days, would he not have climbed into it cheer-
fully enough ? " asks the modern man. Living
in a tent would have been out of the question,
and waiting for angels — waiting for anything,
in fact — forever impossible.

Whatever else may be said of Abraham, his
waiting for angels was the making of him, and
the making of all that is good in what has fol-
lowed since. The man who hangs on a strap
— up in the morning and down at night, hurry-
ing between the crowd he sleeps with and the
crowd he works with, to the crowd that hurries
no more, — even this man, such as he is, with
all his civilisation roaring about him, would
have been impossible if Abraham in the stately
and quiet days had not waited at his tent door
for angels to begin a civilisation with, or if he
had been the kind of Abraham that expected
that angels would come hurrying and scurry-
ing after one in a spectacle like this. " What
has a man," says Blank in his Angels of the
Nineteenth Century, — "What has a man who
consents to be a knee-bumping, elbow- jam-
ming, foothold-struggling strap-hanger — an
abject commuter all his days (for no better
reason than that he is not well enough to keep

Ube

1Rusb

still and that there is not enough of him to be
alone) — to do with angels — or to do with any-
thing, except to get done with it as fast as he
can ? " So say we all of us, hanging on straps
to say it, swaying and swinging to oblivion.
1 ' Is there no power, ' ' says Blank, ' ' in heaven
above or earth beneath that will help us to
stop?"

If a civilisation is founded on two senses —
the sense of motion and the sense of mass, —
one need not go far to find the essential traits
of its literature and its daily reading habit.
There are two things that such a civilisation
makes sure of in all its concerns — hurry and
crowd. Hence the spectacle before us — the
literary rush and mobs of books.

literar? 1Ru0b

The present writer, being occasionally ad-
dicted (like the reader of this book) to a seemly
desire to have the opinions of some one besides
the author represented, has fallen into the way
of having interviews held with himself from
time to time, which are afterwards published at
his own request. These interviews appear in
the public prints as being between a Mysterious
Person and The Presiding Genius of the State of
Massachusetts. The author can only earnestly
hope that in thus generously providing for an

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literary
tRusb

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literary

trtusb

opposing point of view, in taking, as it were,
the words of the enemy upon his lips, he will
lose the sympathy of the reader. The Mys-
terious Person is in colloquy with The Presid-
ing Genius of the State of Massachusetts. As
The P. G. S. of M. lives relentlessly at his
elbow — dogs every day of his life, — it is hoped
that the reader will make allowance for a cer-
tain impatient familiarity in the tone of The
Mysterious Person toward so considerable a
personage as The Presiding Genius of the State
of Massachusetts — which we can only pro-
foundly regret.

The Mysterious Person : * ' There is no escap-
ing from it. Reading-madness is a thing we
all are breathing in to-day whether we will or
no, and it is not only in the air, but it is worse
than in the air. It is underneath the founda-
tions of the things in which we live and on
which we stand. It has infected the very
character of the natural world, and the move-
ment of the planets, and the whirl of the globe
beneath our feet. Without its little paling of
books about it, there is hardly a thing that is
left in this modern world a man can go to for
its own sake. Except by stepping off the
globe, perhaps, now and then — practically
arranging a world of one's own, and breaking
with one's kind, — the life that a man must live
to-day can only be described as a kind of eter-
nal parting with himself. There is getting to
be no possible way for a man to preserve his

TTbe Sliterarg IRusb

five spiritual senses — even his five physical
ones — and be a member, in good and regular
standing, of civilisation at the same time.

" If civilisation and human nature are to
continue to be allowed to exist together there
is but one way out, apparently — an extra
planet for all of us, one for a man to live on
and the other for him to be civilised on."

P. G. S. of M.: "But "

"As long as we, who are the men and women
of the world, are willing to continue our pres-
ent fashion of giving up living in order to get
a living, one planet will never be large enough
for us. If we can only get our living in one
place and have it to live with in another, the
question is, To whom does this present planet
belong — the people who spend their days in
living into it and enjoying it, or the people
who never take time to notice the planet, who
do not seem to know that they are living on a
planet at all ?"

P. G. S. of M.: "But "

" I may not be very well informed on very
many things, but I am very sure of one of
them," said The Mysterious Person, " and that
is, that this present planet — this one we are
living on now — belongs b}' all that is fair and
just to those who are really living on it, and
that it should be saved and kept as a sacred
and protected place — a place where men shall
be able to belong to the taste and colour and
meaning of things and to God and to them-

Ubc

literary
•Kusb

SLost Hrt of 1Reafcin0

TEbe

literary
•Kusb

selves. If people want another planet — a
planet to belong to Society on, — let them go
out and get it.

* ' L,ook at our literature — current literature.
It is a mere headlong, helpless literary rush
from beginning to end. All that one can ex-
tract from it is getting to be a kind of general
sound of going. We began gently enough.
We began with the annual. We had Poor
Richard's Almanac. Then we had the quar-
terly. A monthly was reasonable enough in
course of time; so we had monthlies. Then
the semi-monthly came to ease our liter-
ary nerves; and now the weekly magazine
stumbles, rapt and wistful, on the heels of men
of genius. It makes contracts for prophecy.
Unborn poems are sold in the open market.
The latest thoughts that thinkers have, the
trend of the thoughts they are going to have
— the public makes demand for these. It gets
them. Then it cries ' More! More! ' Where
is the writer who does not think with the
printing-press hot upon his track, and the
sound of the pulp-mill making paper for his
poems, and the buzz of editors, instead of the
music of the spheres ? Think of the destruc-
tion to American forests, the bare and glaring
hills that face us day and night, all for a liter-
ature like this — thousands of square miles of it,
spread before our faces, morning after morn-
ing, week after week, through all this broad
and glorious land ! Seventy million souls —

ZIbe 3Literar£ TCusb

brothers of yours and mine — walking through
prairies of pictures Sunday after Sunday, flick-
ered at by head-lines, deceived by adjectives,
each with his long day's work, column after
column, sentence after sentence, plodding —
plodding — plodding down to . My geo-
graphy may be wrong ; the general direction is
right."

" But don't you believe in newspapers? "

''Why, yes, in the abstract; newspapers.
But we do not have any news nowadays. It is
not news to know a thing before it 's happened,
nor is it news to know what might happen, or
why it might happen, or why it might not
happen. To be told that it does n't make
any difference whether it happens at all,
would be news, perhaps, to many people
— such news as there is; but it is hardly
worth while to pay three cents to be sure of
that. An intelligent man can be sure of it for
nothing. He has been sure of it every morn-
ing for years. It 's the gist of most of the
newspapers he reads. From the point of view
of what can be called truly vital information,
in any larger sense, the only news a daily
paper has is the date at the top of the page.
If a man once makes sure of that, if he feels
from the bottom of his heart what really good
news it is that one more day is come in a world
as beautiful as this, — the rest of it "

P. G. S. of M.: "But "

" The rest of it, if it 's true, is hardly worth

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literary
TCusb

OLost Hrt ot

TTbc
literacy

•Kusb

knowing; and if it 's worth knowing, it can be
found better in books; and if it 's not true —
1 Every man his own liar ' is my motto. He
might as well have the pleasure of it, and he
knows how much to believe. The same lung-
ing, garrulous, blindly busy habit is the law of
all we do. Take our literary critical journals.
If a critic can not tell what he sees at once, he
must tell what he fails to see at once. The
point is not his seeing or not seeing, nor any-
body's seeing or not seeing. The point is the
imperative ' at once.' Literature is getting to
be the filling of orders — time-limited orders.
Criticism is out of a car window. Book re-
views are telegraphed across the sea (Tenny-
son's memoirs). The (Daily) (a

spectacle for Homer !) begins a magazine to ' re-
view in three weeks every book of permanent
value that is published' — one of the gravest
and most significant blows at literature — one
of the gravest and most significant signs of the
condition of letters to-day — that could be con-
ceived ! Three weeks, man ! As if a * book of
permanent value ' had ever been recognised, as
yet, in three years, or reviewed in thirty years
(in any proper sense), or mastered in three
hundred years— with all the hurrying of this
hurrying world ! We have no book-reviewers.
Why should we? Criticism begins where a
man's soul leaves off. It comes from bril-
liantly-defective minds, — so far as one can see,
— from men of attractively imperfect sympa-

Literary TCusb

thies. Nordau, working himself into a mighty
wrath because mystery is left out of his soul,
gathering adjectives about his loins, stalks this
little fluttered modern world, puts his huge,
fumbling, hippopotamus hoof upon the Blessed
Damozel, goes crashing through the press. He
is greeted with a shudder of delight. Even
Matthew Arnold, a man who had a way of see-
ing things almost, sometimes, criticises Kmer-
son for lack of unity, because the unity was on
so large a scale that Arnold's imagination could
not see it ; and now the chirrup from afar, ris-
ing from the east and the west, ' Why doesn't
George Meredith ? ' etc. People want him to
put guide-posts in his books, apparently, or

before his sentences : * TO ' or ' TEN MILKS

TO THE NEAREST VERB' — the inevitable fate of
any writer, man or woman, who dares to ask,
in this present day, that his reader shall stop
to think. If a man cannot read as he runs, he
does not read a book at all. The result is, he
ought to run ; that is natural enough ; and the
faster he runs, in most books, the better."

At this point The Mysterious Person reached
out his long arm from his easy-chair to some
papers that were lying near. I knew too well
what it meant. He began to read. (He is
always breaking over into manuscript when he
talks.)

" We are forgetting to see. Looking is a
lost art. With our poor, wistful, straining
eyes, we hurry along the days that slowly,

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out of the rest of heaven, move their stillness
across this little world. The more we hurry,
the more we read. Night and noon and morn-
ing the panorama passes before our eyes. By
tables, on cars, and in the street we see them
— readers, readers everywhere, drinking their
blindness in. Life is a blur of printed paper.
We see no more the things themselves. We
see about them. We lose the power to see
the things themselves. We see in sentences.
The linotype looks for us. We know the
world in columns. The sounds of the street
are muffled to us. In papers up to our ears,
we whirl along our endless tracks. The faces
that pass are phantoms. In our little wood-
cut head-line dream we go ceaseless on, turning
leaves, — days and weeks and months of leaves,
— wherever we go — years of leaves. Boys who
never have seen the sky above them, young
men who have never seen it in a face, old men
who have never looked out at sea across a
crowd, nor guessed the horizons there — dead
men, the flicker of life in their hands, not yet
beneath the roofs of graves — all turning
leaves. ' '

The Mysterious Person stopped. Nobody
said anything. It is the better way, generally,
with The Mysterious Person. We were begin-
ning to feel as if he were through, when his

eye fell on a copy of The , lying on the

floor. It was open at an unlucky page.

" Look at that! " said he. He handed the

ZTbe Xiterars IRusb

paper to The P. G. S. of M., pointing with his
finger, rather excitedly. The P. G. S. of M.
looked at it — read it through. Then he put it
down; The Mysterious Person went on.

"Do you not know what it means when you,
a civilised, cultivated, converted human being,
can stand face to face with a list — a list like
that — a list headed ' BOOKS OF THE wKKK ' —
when, unblinking and shameless, and without
a cry of protest, you actually read it through,
without seeing, or seeming to see, for a single
moment that right there — right there in that
list — the fact that there is such a list — your
civilisation is on trial for its life— that any
society or nation or century that is shallow
enough to publish as many books as that has
yet to face the most awful, the most unpre-
cedented, the most headlong-coming crisis in
the history of the human race ? "

The Mysterious Person made a pause — the
pause of settling things. [There are people
who seem to think that the only really ade-
quate way to settle a thing, in this world, is
for them to ask a question about it.]

At all events The Mysterious Person having
asked a question at this point, everybody
might as well have the benefit of it.

In the meantime, it is to be hoped that in
the next chapter The Presiding Genius of the
State of Massachusetts, or somebody — will get
a word in.

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parena
tbesis
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parenthesis
tbe (Bentle IReaber

This was a footnote at first. It is placed at
the top of the page in the hope that it will
point at itself more and let the worst out at
once. I want to say I — a little — in this
book.

I do not propose to do it very often. Indeed
I am not sure just now, that I shall be able to
do it at all, but I would like to have the feel-
ing as I go along that arrangements have been
made for it, and that it is all understood, and
that if I am fairly good about it — ring a little
bell or something — and warn people, I am
going to be allowed — right here in my own
book at least — to say I when I want to.

I is the way I feel on the inside about this
subject. Anybody can see it. And I want to
be honest, in the first place, and in the second
place (like a good many other people) I never
have had what could be called a real good
chance to say I in this world, and I feel that
if I had — somehow, it would cure me.

I have tried other ways. I have tried call-
ing myself he. I have stated my experiences
in principles — called myself it, and in the first
part of this book I have already fallen into the
way — page after page — of borrowing other
people, when all the time I knew perfectly well

parentbesfs

(and everybody) that I preferred myself. At all
events this calling one's self names — now one
and now another, — working one's way incog -
nito, all the way through one's own book, is
not making me as modest as I had hoped.
There seems to be nothing for it — with some
of us, but to work through to modesty the
other way — backward — I it out.

There is one other reason. This Mysterious
Person I have arranged with in these opening
chapters, to say I for me, does not seem to me
to be doing it very well. I think any one — any
fairly observing person — would admit that I
could do it better, and if it 's going to be done
at all, why should a mere spiritual machine — a
kind of moral phonograph like this Mysterious
Person — be put forward to take the ignominy
of it ? I have set my * ' I " up before me and
duly cross-examined it. I have said to it,
' * Either you are good enough to say I in a
book or you are not, ' ' and my ' ' I " has replied
to me, " If I am not, I want everybody to know

why and if I am — am . ' ' Well of course he

is not, and we will all help him to know why.
We will do as we would be done by. If there
is ever going to be any possible comfort in this
world for me, in not being what I ought to be,
it is the thought that I am not the only one that
knows it. At all events, this feeling that the
worst is known, even if one takes, as I am
doing now, a planet for a confessional, gives
one a luxurious sense — a sense of combined

Iparens

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safety and irresponsibility which would not be
exchanged for a world.

Every book should have I-places in it —
breathing-holes — places where one's soul can
come up to the surface and look out through
the ice and say things. I do not wish to seem
superior and I will admit that I am as respect-
able as anybody in most places, but I do think
that if half the time I am devoting, and am
going to devote, to appearing as modest as
people expect in this world, could be devoted
to really doing something in it, my little
modesty — such as it is — would not be missed.
At all events I am persuaded that anything—
almost anything — would be better than this
eternal keeping up appearances of all being a
little less interested in ourselves than we are,
which is what literature and Society are for,
mostly. We all do it, more or less. And yet
if there were only a few scattered-along places,
public soul-open places to rest in, and be honest
in— (in art-parlours and teas and things)—
would n't we see people rushing to them? I
would give the world sometimes to believe that
it would pay to be as honest with some people
as with a piece of paper or with a book.

I dare say I am all wrong in striking out and
flourishing about in a chapter like this, and in
threatening to have more like them, but there
is one comfort I lay to my soul in doing it. If
there is one thing rather than another a book
is for (one's own book) it is, that it furnishes

parentbesis 27

the one good, fair, safe place for a man to talk
about himself in, because it is the only place
that any one — absolutely any one, — at any mo-
nient, can shut him up.

This is not saying that I am going to do it.
My courage will go from me (for saying I, I
mean). Or I shall not be humble enough or
something and it all will pass away. I am
going to do it now, a little, but I cannot guar-
antee it. All of a sudden, no telling when or
why, I shall feel that Mysterious Person with
all his worldly trappings hanging around me
again and before I know it, before you know
it, Gentle Reader, I with all my I (or i) shall
be swallowed up. Next time I appear, you
shall see me, decorous, trim, and in the third
person, my literary white tie on, snooping
along through these sentences one after the
other, crossing my I's out, wishing I had never
been born.

Postscript. I cannot help recording at this
point, for the benefit of reckless persons, how
saying I in a book feels. It feels a good deal
like a very small boy in a very high swing
— a kind of flashing-of-everything through-
nothing feeling, but it cannot be undone now,
and so if you please, Gentle Reader, and if
everybody will hold their breath, I am going
to hold on tight and do it.

Xost Hrt of IReafcing

/IDorc ff>
rentbesi0—

36ut dftore
to tbe
point

VII

flDore parentbeeie— But fIDore to
tbe ipoint

I have gotten into a way lately, while I am
just living along, of going out and taking a
good square turn every now and then, in front
of myself. It is not altogether an agreeable
experience, but there seems to be a window in
every man's nature on purpose for it — arranged
and located on purpose for it, and I find on the
whole that going out around one's window,
once in so often, and standing awhile has
advantages. The general idea is to stand
perfectly still for a little time, in a kind of
general, public, disinterested way, and then
suddenly, when one is off one's guard and not
looking, so to speak, take a peek backwards
into one's self.

I am aware that it does not follow, because I
have just come out and have been looking into
my window, that I have a right to hold up any
person or persons who may be going by in
this book, and ask them to look in too, but at
the same time I cannot conceal — do not wish
to conceal, even if I could — that there have
been times, standing in front of my window
and looking in, when what I have seen there
has seemed to me to assume a national signifi-
cance.

There are millions of other windows like it.

/IDore parenthesis

It is one of the daily sorrows of my life that the
people who own them do not seem to know it
— most of them — except perhaps in a vague,
hurried pained way. Sometimes I feel like
calling out to them as I stand by my window —
see them go hurrying by on The Great Street:
"Say there, Stranger! Halloa, Stranger!
Want to see yourself ? Come right over here
and look at me ! ' '

Nobody believes it, of course. It 's a good
deal like standing and waving one's arms in
the Midway— being an egotist,— but I must say,
I have never got a man yet — got him in out of
the rush, I mean, right up in front of my win-
dow— got him once stooped down and really
looking in there, but he admitted there was
something in it.

Thus does it come to pass— this gentle swell-
ing. Let me be a warning to you, Gentle
Reader, when you once get to philosophising
yourself over (along the line of your faults)
into the disputed territory of the First Person
Singular. I am not asking you to try to be-
lieve my little philosophy of types. I am try-
ing to, in my humble way, to be sure, but I
would rather, on the whole, let it go. It is
not so much my philosophy- I rest my case
on, as my sub-philosophy or religion — viz., I
like it and believe in it — saying I. (Thank
Heaven that, bad as it is, I have struck bottom
at last !) The best I can do under the circum-
stances, I suppose, is to beg (in a perfectly

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blank way) forgiveness — forgiveness of any and
every kind from everybody, if in this and the
following chapters I fall sometimes to talking
of people — people at large — under the general
head of myself.

I was born to read. I spent all my early
years, as I remember them, with books, — peer-
ing softly about in them. My whole being
was hushed and trustful and expectant at the
sight of a printed page. I lived in the presence
of books, with all my thoughts lying open
about me; a kind of still, radiant mood of wel-
come seemed to lie upon them. When I
looked at a shelf of books I felt the whole
world flocking to me.

I have been civilised now, I should say,
twenty, or possibly twenty-five, years. At
least every one supposes I am civilised, and
my whole being has changed. I cannot so
much as look upon a great many books in a
library or any other heaped-up place, without
feeling bleak and heartless. I never read if I
can help it. My whole attitude toward current
literature is grouty and snappish, a kind of
perpetual interrupted ' ' What are you ringing
my door-bell now f or ? " attitude. I am a
disagreeable character. I spend at least one
half my time, I should judge, keeping things
off, in defending my character. Then I spend
the other half in wondering if, after all, it was
worth it. What I see in my window has

/Ifoore parentbests

changed. When I used to go out around and
look into it, in the old days, to see what I was
like, I was a sunny, open valley — streams and
roads and everything running down into it,
and opening out of it, and when I go out sud-
denly now, and turn around in front of myself
and look in — I am a mountain pass. I sift
my friends — up a trail. The few friends that
come, come a little out of breath (God bless
them !), and a book cannot so much as get to
me except on a mule's back.

It is by no means an ideal arrangement — a
mountain pass, but it is better than always
sitting in one's study in civilisation, where
every passer-by, pamphlet, boy in the street,
thinks he might just as well come up and ring
one's door-bell awhile. All modern books are
book agents at heart, around getting subscrip-
tions for themselves. If a man wants to be
sociable or literary nowadays, he can only do
it by being a more or less disagreeable char-
acter, and if he wishes to be a beautiful charac-
ter, he must go off and do it by himself.

This is a mere choice in suicides.

The question that presses upon me is : Whose
fault is it that a poor wistful, incomplete, hu-
man being, born into this huge dilemma of a
world, can only keep on having a soul in it, by
keeping it (that is, his soul) tossed back and
forth — now in one place where souls are lost,
and now in another ? Is it your fault, or mine,
Gentle Reader, that we are obliged to live in

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this undignified, obstreperous fashion in what is
called civilisation ? I cannot believe it. Nearly
all the best people one knows can be seen sitting
in civilisation on the edge of their chairs, or
hurrying along with their souls in satchels.

There is but one conclusion. Civilisation is
not what it is advertised to be. Every time I
see a fresh missionary down at the steamer
wharf, as I do sometimes, starting away for
other lands, loaded up with our Institutions to
the eyes, Church in one hand and Schoolhouse
in the other, trim, happy, and smiling over
them, at everybody, I feel like stepping up to
him and saying, what seem to me, a few ap-
propriate words. I seldom do it, but the other
day when I happened to be down at the Umbria
dock about sailing-time, I came across one (a
foreign missionary, I mean) pleasant, thought-
less, and benevolent-looking, standing there all
by himself by the steamer-rail, and I thought
I would try speaking to him.

' ' Where are you going to be putting —
those ? " I said, pointing to a lot of funny little
churches and funny little schoolhouses he was
holding in both hands.

" From Greenland's icy mountains to India's
coral strand," he said.

I looked at them a minute. "You don't
think, do you? " I said — " You don't really
think you had better wait over a little — bring
them back and let us — finish them for you, do
you ? one or two — samples ? " I said.

/iDore iparentbesis

He looked at me with what seemed to me at
first, a kind of blurred, helpless look. I soon
saw that he was pitying me and I promptly
stepped down to the dining-saloon and tried to
appreciate two or three tons of flowers.

I do not wish to say a word against mission-
aries. They are merely apt to be somewhat
heedless, morally-hurried persons, rushing
about the world turning people (as they think)
right side up everywhere, without really noti-
cing them much, but I do think that a great
deliberate corporate body like The American
Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions
ought to be more optimistic about the Church
—wait and work for it a little more, expect a
little more of it.

It seems to me that it ought to be far less
pessimistic than it is, also, about what we can
do in the way of schools and social life in
civilisation and about civilisation's way of
doing business. Is our little knack of Christi-
anity (I find myself wondering) quite worthy
of all this attention it is getting from The
American Board of Commissioners of Foreign
Missions ? Why should it approve of civilisa-
tion with a rush ? Does any one really suppose
that it is really time to pat it on the back — yet ?
— to spend a million dollars a year — patting it
on the back ?

I merely throw out the question.

rentbesis—
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VIII

fIDore literary IRusb

We had been talking along, in our Club, as
usual, for some time, on the general subject of
the world — fixing the blame for things. We
had come to the point where it was nearly all
fixed (most of it on other people) when I
thought I might as well put forward my little
theory that nearly everything that was the
matter, could be traced to the people who
"belong to Society."

Then The P. G. S. of M. (who is always
shoving a dictionary around in front of him
when he talks) spoke up and said :

1 ' But who belongs to Society ? ' '

' ' All persons who read what they are told to
and who call where they can't help it. What
this world needs just now," I went on, looking
The P. G. S. of M. as much in the eye as I
could, ' * is emancipation. It needs a prophet
— a man who can gather about him a few
brave-hearted, intelligently ignorant men, who
shall go about with their beautiful feet on the
mountains, telling the good tidings of how
many things there are we do not need to know.
The prejudice against being ignorant is largely
because people have not learned how to do it.
The wrong people have taken hold of it."

I cannot remember the exact words of what
was said after this, but I said that it seemed to me

/IDore 3Literar£ IRusb

that most people were afraid not to know every-
thing. Not knowing too much is a natural
gift, and unless a man can make his ignorance
contagious — inspire people with the books he
dares not read — of course the only thing he
can do is to give up and read everything, and
belong to Society. He certainly cannot belong
to himself unless he protects himself with well-
selected, carefully guarded, daring ignorance.
Think of the books — the books that are dic-
tated to us — the books that will not let a man
go, — and behind every book a hundred intelli-
gent men and women — one's friends, too —
one's own kin

P. G. S. of M.: "But the cultured man
must "

The cultured man is the man who can tell
me what he does not know, with such grace
that I feel ashamed of knowing it.

Now there 's M , for example. Other

people seem to read to talk, but I never see
him across a drawing-room without an impulse
of barbarism, and I always get him off into a
corner as soon as I can, if only to rest myself —
to feel that I have a right not to read every-
thing. He always proves to me something
that I can get along without. He is full of the
most choice and picturesque bits of ignorance.
He is creatively ignorant. He displaces a
book every time I see him — which is a deal
better in these days than writing one. A
man should be measured by his book-displace-

.flDore

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ment. He goes about with his thinking face,
and a kind of nimbus over him, of never need-
ing to read at all. He has nothing whatever
to give but himself, but I had rather have one
of his questions about a book I had read, than
all the other opinions and subtle distinctions
in the room — or the book itself.

P. G. S. of M. " But the cultured man
must ' '

NOT. It is the very essence of a cultured
man that when he hears the word * ' must ' ' it
is on his own lips. It is the very essence of
his culture that he says it to himself. His
culture is his belonging to himself, and his be-
longing to himself is the first condition of his
being worth giving to other people. One longs
for Klia. People know too much, and there
does n't seem to be a man living who can
charm them from the error of their way.
Knowledge takes the place of everything else,
and all one can do in this present day as he
reads the reviews and goes to his club, is to
look forward with a tired heart to the prophecy
of Scripture, " Knowledge shall pass away."

Where do we see the old and sweet content
of loving a thing for itself? Now, there are
the flowers. The only way to delight in a
flower at your feet in these days is to watch
with it all alone, or keep still about it. The
moment you speak of it, it becomes botany.
It 's a rare man who will not tell you all he
knows about it. Love is n't worth anything

1Rusb

without a. classic name. It 's a wonder we
have any flowers left. Half the charm of a
flower to me is that it looks demure and talks
perfume and keeps its name so gently to itself.
The man who always enjoys views by pick-
ing out the places he knows, is a symbol of all
our reading habits and of our national relation
to books. One can glory in a great cliff down
in the depths of his heart, but if you mention
it, it is geology, and an argument. Even the
birds sing zoologically, and as for the sky, it
has become a mere blue-and-gold science, and
all the wonder seems to be confined to one's
not knowing the names of the planets. I was
brought up wistfully on

Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are.

But now it is become:

Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
Teacher's told me what you are.

Even babies won't wonder very soon. That
is to say, they won't wonder out loud. No-
body does. Another of my poems was :

Where did you come from, baby dear ?
Out of the everywhere into here.

I thought of it the other day when I stepped
into the library with the list of books I had to
have an opinion about before Mrs. W 's

/IDore

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Trtusb

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IRusb

Thursday Afternoon,
infant.

I felt like a literary

Where did you come from, baby fair?
Out of the here into everywhere.

And the bookcases stared at me.

It is a serious question whether the average
American youth is ever given a chance to thirst
for knowledge. He thirsts for ignorance in-
stead. From the very first he is hemmed in
by knowledge. The kindergarten with its
suave relentlessness, its perfunctory cheerful-
ness, closes in upon the life of every child with
himself. The dear old-fashioned breathing
spell he used to have after getting here —
whither has it gone ? The rough, strong, ruth-
less, unseemly, grown-up world crowds to the
very edge of every beginning life. It has no
patience with trailing clouds of glory. Flocks
of infants every year — new-comers to this planet
— who can but watch them sadly, huddled
closer and closer to the little strip of wonder
that is left near the land from which they
came ? No lingering away from us. No in-
finite holiday. Childhood walks a precipice
crowded to the brink of birth. We tabulate its
moods. We register its learning inch by inch.
We draw its poor little premature soul out of
its body breath by breath. Infants are well
informed now. The suckling has nerves. A
few days more he will be like all the rest of
us. It will be :

/IDore OLiterars IRusb

Poem: " When I Was Weaned."

" My First Tooth: A Study."

The Presiding Genius of the State of Massa-
chusetts, with his dazed, kind look, looked up
and said : * ' I fear, my dear fellow, there is no
place for you in the world."

Thanks. One of the delights of going fish-
ing or hunting is, that one learns how small
"a place in the world" is — comes across so
many accidentally preserved characters — pre-
served by not having a place in the world —
persons that are interesting to be with — persons
you can tell things.

The real object — it seems to me — in meeting
another human being is complement — fitting
into each other's ignorances. Sometimes it
seems as if it were only where there is some-
thing to be caught or shot, or where there is
plenty of room, that the highest and most
sociable and useful forms of ignorance were
allowed to mature.

One can still find such fascinating prejudices,
such frank enthusiasms of ignorance, where
there 's good fishing; and then, in the stray
hamlets, there is the grave whimsicalness and
the calm superior air of austerity to cultured
people.

Ah, let me live in the Maine woods or wan-
der by the brooks of Virginia, and rest my
soul in the delights — in the pomposity — of
ignorance — ignorance in its pride and glory
and courage and lovableness! I never come

/Iftore
literary

OLost Hrt of

/IDore

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tRueb

back from a vacation without a dream of what
I might have been, if I had only dared to know
a little less; and even now I sometimes feel I
have ignorance enough, if like BHa, for in-
stance, I only knew how to use it, but I cannot
as much as get over being ashamed of it. I
am nearly gone. I have little left but the gift
of being bored. That is something — but
hardly a day passes without my slurring over
a guilty place in conversation, without my
hiding my ignorance under a bushel, where I
can go later and take a look at it by myself.
Then I know all about it next time and sink
lower and lower. A man can do nothing
alone. Of course, ignorance must be natural
and not acquired in order to have the true ring
and afford the most relief in the world; but
every wide-awake village that has thoughtful
people enough — people who are educated up to
it — ought to organise an Ignoramus Club to

defend the town from papers and books .

It was at about this point that The Presiding
Genius of the State of Massachusetts took
up the subject, and after modulating a little
and then modulating a little more, he was soon
listening to himself about a book we had not
read, and I sat in my chair and wrote out this.

Ube Bugbear of Being Well flnformefc

Gbe Bugbear of Being Well Tin*
formeb— B practical Suggestion

i. This Club shall be known as the Igno-
ramus Club of .

4. Every member shall be pledged not to
read the latest book until people have stopped
expecting it.

5. The Club shall have a Standing Commit-
tee that shall report at every meeting on New
Things That People Do Not Need to Know.

6. It shall have a Public Library Committee,
appointed every year, to look over the books
in regular order and report on Old Things That
People Do Not Need to Know. (Committee
instructed to keep the library as small as pos-
sible.)

8. No member (vacations excepted) shall
read any book that he would not read twice.
In case he does, he shall be obliged to read it
twice or pay a fine (three times the price of
book, net).

11. The Club shall meet weekly.

12. Any person of suitable age shall be
eligible for membership in the Club, who, after
a written examination in his deficiencies, shall
appear, in the opinion of the Examining Board,
to have selected his ignorance thoughtfully,
conscientiously, and for the protection of his
mind.

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practical
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13. All persons thus approved shall be voted
upon at the next regular meeting of the Club
— the vote to be taken by ballot (any candidate
who has not read When Knighthood Was in
Flower ; or Audrey, or David Harum — by ac-
clamation).

Perhaps I have quoted from the by-laws
sufficiently to give an idea of the spirit and
aim of the Club. I append the order of meet-
ing:

1. Called to order.

2. Reports of Committees.

3. General Confession (what members have
read during the week).

4. FINES.

5. Review: Books I Have Escaped.

6. Essay: Things Plato Did Not Need to
Know.

7. Omniscience. Helpful Hints. Remedies.

8. The Description Evil; followed by an
illustration.

9. Not Travelling on the Nile: By One Who
Has Been There.

10. Our Village Street : Stereopticon.

11. What Not to Know about Birds.

12. Myself through an Opera-Glass.

13. Sonnet: Botany.

14. Essay: Proper Treatment of Paupers,
Insane, and Instructive People.

15. The Fad for Facts.

16. How to Organise a Club against Clubs.

Bugbear of Being Well Unformed

17. Paper: How to Humble Him Who Asks,
' 'Have You Read ?"

1 8. Essay, by youngest member: Infinity.
An Appreciation.

19. Review: The Heavens in a Nutshell.

20. Review. Wild Animals I Do Not Want
to Know.

21. Exercise in Silence. (Ten Minutes.
Entire Club.)

22. Essay (Ten Minutes) : Encyclopedia Bri-
tannica, Summary.

23. Exercise in Wondering about Some-
thing. (Selected. Ten Minutes. Entire Club.)

24. Debate: Which Is More Deadly— the
Pen or the Sword ?

25. Things Said To-Night That We Must
Forget.

26. ADJOURNMENT. (Each member re-
quired to walk home alone looking at the stars.)

I have sometimes thought I would like to go
off to some great, wide, bare, splendid place —
nothing but Time and Room in it — and read
awhile. I would want it built in the same
general style and with the same general effect
as the universe, but a universe in which every-
thing lets one alone, in which everything just
goes quietly on in its great still round, letting
itself be looked at— no more said about it,
nothing to be done about it. No exclamations
required. No one standing around explaining
things or showing how they appreciated them.

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Then after I had looked about a little, seen
that everything was safe and according to
specifications, I think the first thing I would
do would be to sit down and see if I could not
read a great book — the way I used to read a
great book, before I belonged to civilisation,
read it until I felt my soul growing softly
toward it, reaching up to the day and to the
night with it.

I have always kept on hoping that I would
be allowed, in spite of being somewhat mixed
up with civilisation, to be a normal man some-
time. It has always seemed to me that the
normal man — the highly organised man in all
ages, is the man who takes the universe pri-
marily as a spectacle. This is his main use for
it. The object of his life is to get a good look
at it before he dies — to be the kind of man who
can get a good look at it. How any one can
go through a whole life — sixty or seventy years
of it — with a splendour like this arching over
him morning, noon, and night, flying beneath
his feet, blooming out at him on every side,
and not spend nearly all his time (after the
bare necessaries of life) in taking it in, listen-
ing and tasting and looking in it, is one of the
seven wonders of the world. I never look out
of my factory window in civilisation, see a
sunset or shore of the universe, — am reminded
again that there is a universe — but I wonder
at myself and wonder at It. I try to put
civilisation and the universe together. I can-

Bugbear of Being Well Unformefc

not do it. It 's as if we were afraid to be caught
looking at it — most of us— spending the time
to look at it, or as if we were ashamed before
the universe itself — running furiously to and
fro in it, lest it should look at us.

It is the first trait of a great book, it seems
to me, that it makes all other books — little
hurrying, petulant books — wait. A kind of
immeasurable elemental hunger comes to a
man out of it. Somehow I feel I have not had
it out with a great book if I have not faced
other great things with it. I want to face storms
with it, hours of weariness and miles of walk-
ing with it. It seems to ask me to. It seems
to bring with it something which makes me
want to stop my mere reading-and-doing kind
of life, my ink-and-paper imitation kind of life,
and come out and be a companion with the
silent shining, with the eternal going on of
things. It seems to be written in every
writing that is worth a man's while that it
can not — that it shall not — be read by itself.
It is written that a man shall work to read, that
he must win some great delight to do his read-
ing with. Many and many a winter day I
have tramped with four lines down to the edge
of the night, to overtake my soul — to read
four lines with. I have faced a wind for
hours — been bitterly cold with it — before the
utmost joy of the book I had lost would come
back to me. I find that when I am being
normal (vacations mostly) I scarcely know

Ube

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formeb— B

Ipractical
Suggestion

Xost Hrt of

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what it is to give myself over to another mind
for more than an hour or so at a time. If a
chapter has anything in it, I want to do some-
thing with it, go out and believe it, live with
it, exercise it awhile. I am not only bored
with a book when it does not interest me. I
am bored with it when it does. I want to
interrupt it, take it outdoors, see what the
hills and clouds think, try it on, test it, see if
it is good enough — see if it can come down
upon me as rain or sunlight or other real
things and blow upon me as the wind. It
does not belong to me until it has found its
way through all the weathers within and the
weathers without, until it drifts with me
through moods, events, sensations, and days
and nights, faces and sunsets, and the light of
stars, — until it is a part of life itself. I find
there is no other or shorter or easier way for
me to do with a great book than to greet it as
it seems to ask to be greeted, as if it were a
world that had come to me and sought me out
— wanted me to live in it. Hundreds and hun-
dreds of times, when I am being civilised,
have I not tried to do otherwise ? Have I not
stopped my poor pale, hurried, busy soul (like
a kind of spectre flying past me) before a great
book and tried to get it to speak to it, and it
would not ? It requires a world — a great book
does — as a kind of ticket of admission, and
what have I to do, when I am being civilised,
with a world — the one that 's running still

Ube Buabear ot Being TRUell Unformefc

and godlike over me ? Do I not for days and
weeks at a time go about in it, guilty, shut-in,
and foolish under it, slinking about — its emptied
miracles all around me, mean, joyless, anxious,
unable to look the littlest flower in the face

— unable . "Ah, God! " my soul cries out

within me. Are not all these things mine?
Do they not belong with me and I with them ?
And I go racing about, making things up in
their presence, plodding for shadows, cutting
out paper dolls to live with. All the time this
earnest, splendid, wasted heaven shining over
me — doing nothing with it, expecting nothing
of it— a little more warmth out of it perhaps,

a little more light not to see in . Who am I

that the grasses should whisper to me, that the
winds should blow upon me ? Now and then
there are days that come, when I see a flower
— when I really see a flower — and my soul cries
out to it.

Now and then there are days too, when I
see a great book, a book that has the universe
wrought in it. I find my soul feeling it vaguely,
creeping toward it. I wonder if I dare to read
it. I remember how I used to read it. I all
but pray to it. I sit in my factory window and
try sometimes. But it is all far away— at least
as long as I stay in my window. It 's all about
some one else — a kind of splendid wistful walk-
ing in a dream. It does not really belong to
me to live in a great book — a book with the
universe in it. Sometimes it almost seems to.

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Xost Hrt of

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But it barely, faintly belongs to me. It is as
if the sky came to me, and stooped down over
me, and then went softly away in my sleep.

Beat) %e\>el of Intelligence

Your hostess introduces you to a man in a

drawing - room. * ' Mr. C belongs to a

Browning Club, too," she says.

What are you going to do about it? Are
you going to talk about Browning ?

Not if Browning is one of your alive places.
You will reconnoitre first — James Whitcomb
Riley or Ella Wheeler Wilcox. There is no
telling where The Enemy will bring you up, if
you do not. He may tell you something about
Browning you never knew — something you
have always wanted to know, — but you will
be hurt that he knew it. He may be the
original Grammarian of " The Grammarian's
Funeral" (whom Robert Browning took — and
knew perfectly well that he took at the one
poetic moment of his life), but his belonging to
a Browning Club— The Enemy, that is— does
not mean anything to you or to any one else
nowadays — either about Browning or about
himself.

There was a time once, when, if a man
revealed in conversation, that he was familiar
with poetic structure in John Keats, it meant

Tlbe Beat) 3Le\>el of Ifnteiligence

something about the man — his temperament,
his producing or delighting power. It means
now, that he has taken a course in poetics in
college, or teaches English in a high school,
and is carrying deadly information about with
him wherever he goes. It does not mean that
he has a spark of the Keats spirit in him, or
that he could have endured being in the same
room with Keats, or Keats could have endured
being in the same room with him, for fifteen
minutes.

If there is one inconvenience rather than
another in being born in the latter half of the
nineteenth century, it is the almost constant
compulsion one is under in it, of finding people
out — making a distinction between the people
who know a beautiful thing and are worth
while, and the boors of culture — the people who
know all about it. One sees on every hand
to-day persons occupying positions of im-
portance who have been taken through all
the motions of education, from the bottom to
the top, but who always belong to the intel-
lectual lower classes whatever their positions
may be, because they are not masters. They
are clumsy and futile with knowledge. Their
culture has not been made over into them-
selves. They have acquired it largely under
mob-influence (the dead level of intelligence),
and all that they can do with it, not wanting
it, is to be teachery with it — force it on other
people who do not want it.

tlbe 2>ea&

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Whether in the origin, processes, or results
of their learning, these people have all the
attributes of a mob. Their influence and force
in civilisation is a mob influence, and it operates
in the old and classic fashion of mobs upon all
who oppose it.

It constitutes at present the most important
and securely intrenched intimidating force that
modern society presents against the actual
culture of the world, whether in the schools or
out of them. Its voice is in every street, and its
shout of derision may be heard in almost every
walk of life against all who refuse to conform
to it. There are but very few who refuse.
Millions of human beings, young and old, in
meek and willing rows are seen on every side,
standing before It — THE DEAD lyEVEX, —
anxious to do anything to be graded up to it,
or to be graded down to it — offering their heads
to be taken off, their necks to be stretched, or
their waists — willing to live footless all their
days — anything — anything whatever, bless
their hearts! to know that they are on the
Level, the Dead Level, the precise and exact
Dead Level of Intelligence.

The fact that this mob-power keeps its hold
by using books instead of bricks is merely a
matter of form. It occupies most of the
strategic positions just now in the highways
of learning, and it does all the things that
mobs do, and does them in the way that mobs
do them. It has broken into the gardens, into

Beat) 2Le\>el of Untelliaence

the arts, the resting-places of nations, and with
its factories to learn to love in, its treadmills
to learn to sing in, it girdles its belt of drudgery
around the world and carries bricks and mortar
to the clouds. It shouts to every human being
across the spaces — the outdoors of life : ' c Who
goes there? Come thou with us. Dig thou
with us. Root or die!"

Every vagrant joy-maker and world-builder
the modern era boasts — genius, lover, singer,
artist, has had to have his struggle with the
hod-carriers of culture, and if a lover of books
has not enough love in him to refuse to be
coerced into joining the huge Intimidator, the
aggregation of the Reading Labour Unions
of the world, which rules the world, there is
little hope for him. All true books draw
quietly away from him. Their spirit is a
spirit he cannot know.

It would be hard to find a more significant
fact with regard to the ruling culture of
modern life than the almost total displacement
of temperament in it, — its blank, staring in-
expressiveness. We have lived our lives so
long under the domination of the " Cultured-
man-must" theory of education — the industry
of being well informed has gained such head-
way with us, that out of all of the crowds of
the civilised we prefer to live with to-day, one
must go very far to find a cultivated man who
has not violated himself in his knowledge, who
has not given up his last chance at distinction

Ube
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Untellia
gence

OLost Hrt ot

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level of

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— his last chance to have his knowledge fit him
closely and express him and belong to him.

The time was, when knowledge was made to
fit people like their clothes. But now that we
have come to the point where we pride our-
selves on educating people in rows and civil-
ising them in the bulk, " If a man has the
privilege of being born by himself, of begin-
ning his life by himself, it is as much as he
can expect," says the typical Board of Edu-
cation. The result is, so far as his being
educated is concerned, the average man looks
back to his first birthday as his last chance of
being treated as God made him, — a special
creation by himself. <( The Almighty may
deal with a man, when He makes him, as a
special creation by himself. He may manage
to do it afterward. We cannot," says The
Board, succinctly, drawing its salary; " It in-
creases the tax rate."

The problem is dealt with simply enough.
There is just so much cloth to be had and just
so many young and two-legged persons to be
covered with it — and that is the end of it.
The growing child walks down the years —
turns every corner of life — with Vistas of
Ready-Made Clothing hanging before him,
closing behind him. Unless he shall fit him-
self to these clothes — he is given to understand
—down the pitying, staring world he shall
go, naked, all his days, like a dream in the
night.

Ube

3Lex>el ot flntelliaence

It is a general principle that a nation's life
can be said to be truly a civilised life, in pro-
portion as it is expressive, and in proportion
as all the persons in it, in the things they
know and in the things they do, are engaged
in expressing what they are.

A generation may be said to stand forth in
history, to be a great and memorable genera-
tion in art and letters, in material and spiritual
creation, in proportion as the knowledge of
that generation was fitted to the people who
wore it and the things they were doing in it,
and the things they were born to do.

If it were not contradicted by almost every
attribute of what is being called an age of
special and general culture, it would seem to
be the first axiom of all culture that know-
ledge can only be made to be true knowledge,
by being made to fit people, and to express
them as their clothes fit them and express
them.

But we do not want knowledge in our civili-
sation to fit people as their clothes fit them.
We do not even want their clothes to fit them.
The people themselves do not want it. Our
modern life is an elaborate and organised en-
deavour, on the part of almost every person in
it, to escape from being fitted, either in know-
ledge or in anything else. The first symptom
of civilisation — of the fact that a man is be-
coming civilised — is that he wishes to appear
to belong where he does not. It is looked

level of

UntellU
gence

SLost Hrt of 1ReaMn0

Ube SJcafc
level of

UntelHs
gence

upon as the spirit of the age. He wishes to be
learned, that no one may find out how little
he knows. He wishes to be religious, that no
one may see how wicked he is. He wishes to
be respectable, that no one may know that he
does not respect himself. The result mocks
at us from every corner in life. Society is a
struggle to get into the wrong clothes. Cul-
ture is a struggle to learn the things that be-
long to some one else. Black Mollie (who is
the cook next door) presented her betrothed
last week — a stable hand on the farm — with an
eight-dollar manicure set. She did not mean
to sum up the condition of culture in the
United States in this simple and tender act.
But she did.

Michael O'Hennessy, who lives under the
hill, sums it up also. He has just bought a
brougham in which he and Mrs. O'H. can be
seen almost any pleasant Sunday driving in
the Park. It is not to be denied that Michael
O'Hennessy, sitting in his brougham, is a
genuinely happy-looking object. But it is not
the brougham itself that Michael enjoys.
What he enjoys is the fact that he has bought
the brougham, and that the brougham belongs
to some one else. Mrs. John Brown-Smith,
who presides at our tubs from week to week,
and who comes to us in a brilliant silk waist
(removed for business), has just bought a
piano to play Hold the Fort on, with one finger,
when the neighbours are passing by — a fact

%ex>ei ot 1Inteili0ence

which is not without national significance,
which sheds light upon schools and upon
college catalogues and learning-shows, and
upon educational conditions through the whole
United States.

It would be a great pity if a man could not
know the things that have always belonged
before, to other men to know, and it is the
essence of culture that he should, but his ap-
pearing to know things that belong to some one
else — his desire to appear to know them —
heaps up darkness. The more things there
are a man knows without knowing the inside
of them — the spirit of them — the more kinds
of an ignoramus he is. It is not enough to say
that the learned man (learned in this way) is
merely ignorant. His ignorance is placed
where it counts the most, — generally, — at the
fountain heads of society, and he radiates
ignorance.

There seem to be three objections to the
Dead Level of Intelligence, — getting people at
all hazards, alive or dead, to know certain
things. First, the things that a person who
learns in this way appears to know, are blighted
by his appearing to know them. Second, he
keeps other people who might know them from
wanting to. Third, he poisons his own life,
by appearing to know — by even desiring to
appear to know — what is not in him to know.
He takes away the last hope he can ever have
of really knowing the thing he appears to

Ube 2>ea&

level of

tlntclli=

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OLost Hrt of

"Cbe £>ea&
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know, and, unless he is careful, the last hope
he can ever have of really knowing anything.
He destroys the thing a man does his knowing
with. It is not the least pathetic phase of the
great industry of being well informed, that
thousands of men and women may be seen on
every hand, giving up their lives that they
may appear to live, and giving up knowledge
that they may appear to know, taking pains for
vacuums. Success in appearing to know is suc-
cess in locking one's self outside of knowledge,
and all that can be said of the most learned
man that lives — if he is learned in this way —
is that he knows more things that he does not
know, about more things, than any man in the
world. He runs the gamut of ignorance.

In the meantime, as long as the industry of
being well informed is the main ideal of living
in the world, as long as every man's life,
chasing the shadow of some other man's life,
goes hurrying by, grasping at ignorance, there
is nothing we can do — most of us — as educa-
tors, but to rescue a youth now and then from
the rush and wait for results, both good and
evil, to work themselves out. Those of us who
respect every man's life, and delight in it and
in the dignity of the things that belong to it,
would like to do many things. We should be
particularly glad to join hands in the " practi-
cal" things that are being hurried into the
hurry around us. But they do not seem to us
practical. The only practical thing we know

TIbe Beafc 3Le\>el of Untelli0ence

of that can be done with a man who does not
respect himself, is to get him to. It is true,
no doubt, that we cannot respect another man's
life for him, but we are profoundly convinced
that we cannot do anything more practical for
such a man's life than respecting it until he
respects it himself, and we are convinced also
that until he does respect it himself, respecting
it for him is the only thing that any one else
can do — the beginning and end of all action for
him and of all knowledge. Democracy to-day
in education — as in everything else — is facing
its supreme opportunity. Going about in the
world respecting men until they respect them-
selves is almost the only practical way there is
of serving them.

We find it necessary to believe that any man
in this present day who shall be inspired to re-
spect his life, who shall refuse to take to him-
self the things that do not belong to his life,
who shall break with the appearance of things,
who shall rejoice in the things that are really
real to him — there shall be no withstanding
him. The strength of the universe shall be in
him. He shall be glorious with it. The man
who lives down through the knowledge that
he has, has the secret of all knowledge that he
does not have. The spirit that all truths are
known with, becomes his spirit. The essen-
tial mastery over all real things and over all
real men is his possession forever.

When this vital and delighted knowledge —

ttbe S>ea&

level of

Untelli*

gence

3Lo0t Btt of

ing as ©ne

knowledge that is based on facts — one's own
self-respecting experience with facts, shall be-
gin again to be the habit of the educated life,
the days of the Dead Level of Intelligence
shall be numbered. Men are going to be the
embodiment of the truths they know— some-
time— as they have been in the past. When
the world is filled once more with men who
know what they know, learning will cease to
be a theory about a theory of life, and children
will acquire truths as helplessly and inescap-
ably as they acquire parents. Truths will be
learned through the types of men the truths
have made. A man was meant to learn truths
by gazing up and down lives — out of his own
life.

When these principles are brought home to
educators — when they are practised in some
degree by the people, instead of merely, as
they have always been before, by the leaders
of the people, the world of knowledge shall be
a new world. All knowledge shall be human,
incarnate, expressive, artistic. Whole systems
of knowledge shall come to us by seeing one
another's faces on the street.

IRot IReaMng as ©ne %ifce$

Most of us are apt to discover by the time we
are too old to get over it, that we are born with

IRot 1Rea&in0 as ®ne Sltfces

a natural gift for being interested in ourselves.
We realise in a general way, that our lives are
not very important — that they are being lived
on a comparatively obscure but comfortable
little planet, on a side street in space — but no
matter how much we study astronomy, nor
how fully we are made to feel how many other
worlds there are for people to live on, and
how many other people have lived on this one,
we are still interested in ourselves.

The fact that the universe is very large is
neither here nor there to us, in a certain sense.
It is a mere matter of size. A man has to live
on it. If he had to live on all of it, it would
be different. It naturally comes to pass that
when a human being once discovers that he is
born in a universe like this, his first business
in it is to find out the relation of the nearest,
most sympathetic part of it to himself.

After the usual first successful experiment a
child makes in making connection with the
universe, the next thing he learns is how much
of the universe there is that is not good to eat.
He does not quite understand it at first — the
unswallowableness of things. He soon comes
to the conclusion that, although it is worth
while as a general principle, in dealing with
a universe, to try to make the connection, as
a rule, with one's mouth, it cannot be ex-
pected to succeed except part of the time. He
looks for another connection. He learns that
some things in this world are merely made to

•Hot 1Rea&.

ing as ©ne
Xifces

2Lost Hrt of

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Xiftea

feel, and drop on the floor. He discovers each
of his senses by trying to make some other
sense work. If his mouth waters for the moon,
and he tries to smack his lips on a lullaby, who
shall smile at him, poor little fellow, making
his sturdy lunges at this huge, impenetrable
world ? He is making his connection and get-
ting his hold on his world of colour and sense
and sound, with infinitely more truth and
patience and precision and delight than nine
out of ten of his elders are doing or have ever
been able to do, in the world of books.

The books that were written to be breathed
— gravely chewed upon by the literary infants
of this modern day, — who can number them ?
— books that were made to live in — vast, open
clearings in the thicket of life — chapters like
tents to dwell in under the wide heaven, visited
like railway stations by excursion trains of
readers, — books that were made to look down
from — serene mountain heights criticised be-
cause factories are not founded on them — in
every reading-room hundreds of people (who
has not seen them ? ), looking up inspirations
in encyclopaedias, poring over poems for facts,
looking in the clouds for seeds, digging in the
ground for sunsets; and everywhere through
all the world, the whole huddling, crowding
mob of those who read, hastening on its end-
less paper-paved streets, from the pyramids of
Egypt and the gates of Greece, to Pater Noster
Row and the Old Corner Book Store — nearly

ftf THE

UNIVERSITY

Iftot IReafcins as ©ne OLifees

all of them trying to make the wrong connec-
tions with the right things or the right con-
nections with things they have no connection
with, and only now and then a straggler lag-
ging behind perhaps, at some left-over book-
stall, who truly knows how to read, or some
beautiful, over-grown child let loose in a li-
brary— making connections for himself, who
knows the uttermost joy of a book.

In seeking for a fundamental principle to
proceed upon in the reading of books, it seems
only reasonable to assert that the printed uni-
verse is governed by the same laws as the real
one. If a child is to have his senses about
him — his five reading senses — he must learn
them in exactly the way he learns his five
living senses. The most significant fact about
the way a child learns the five senses he has to
live with is, that no one can teach them to
him. We do not even try to. There are still
— thanks to a most merciful Heaven — five
things left in the poor, experitnented-on, bat-
tered, modern child, that a board of education
cannot get at. For the first few months of his
life, at least, it is generally conceded, the
modern infant has his education — that is, his
making connection with things — entirely in
his own hands. That he learns more these
first few months of his life when his education
is in his own hands, than he learns in all the
later days when he is surrounded by those who
hope they are teaching him something, it may

ing as ©ne
liftes

SLost Hrt ot

Vlot ttcab*
a as One
Xfftes

not be fair to say; but while it cannot be said
that he learns more perhaps, what he does
learn, he learns better, and more scientifically,
than he is ever allowed to learn with ordinary
parents and ordinary teachers and text-books
in the years that come afterward. With most
of us, this first year or so, we are obliged to
confess, was the chance of our lives. Some of
us have lived long enough to suspect that if
we have ever really learned anything at all we
must have learned it then.

The whole problem of bringing to pass in
others and of maintaining in ourselves a vital
and beautiful relation to the world of books,
turns entirely upon such success as we may
have in calling back or keeping up in our atti-
tude toward books, the attitude of the new-born
child when he wakes in the sunshine of the
earth, and little by little on the edge of the
infinite, groping and slow, begins to make
his connections with the universe. It cannot
be over-emphasised that this new-born child
makes these connections for himself, that the
entire value of having these connections made
is in the fact that he makes them for himself.

As between the books in a library that ought
to be read, and a new life standing in it, that
ought to read them, the sacred thing is not the
books the child ought to read. The sacred
thing is the way the child feels about the
books; and unless the new life, like the needle
of a magnet trembling there under the whole

Wot IRea&fna as <§>ne SLifees

wide heaven of them all, is allowed to turn and
poise itself by laws of attraction and repulsion
forever left out of our hands, the magnet is
ruined. It is made a dead thing. It makes
no difference how many similar books may be
placed within range of the dead thing after-
ward, nor how many good reasons there may
be for the dead thing's being attracted to
them, the poise of the magnet toward a book,
which is the sole secret of any power that a
book can have, is trained and disciplined out
of it. The poise of the magnet, the magnet's
poising itself, is inspiration, and inspiration is
what a book is for.

If John Milton had had any idea when he
wrote the little book called Paradise Lost that
it was going to be used mostly during the
nineteenth century to batter children's minds
with, it is doubtful if he would ever have had
the heart to write it. It does not damage a book
very much to let it lie on a wooden shelf little
longer than it ought to. But to come crashing
down into the exquisite filaments of a human
brain with it, to use it to keep a brain from
continuing to be a brain — that is, an organ
with all its reading senses acting and reacting
warm and living in it, is a very serious matter.
It always ends in the same way, this modern
brutality with books. Even Bibles cannot
stand it. Human nature stands it least of all.
That books of all things in this world, made
to open men's instincts with, should be so

•toot •Ceas-
ing as ©ne

SLost Hrt of IReafcing

t 1Reat?«
ing as One
Xiftes

generally used to shut them up with, is one
of the saddest signs we have of the caricature
of culture that is having its way in our modern
world. It is getting so that the only way the
average dinned-at, educated modern boy, shut
in with masterpieces, can really get to read is in
some still overlooked moment when people are
too tired of him to do him good. Then softly,
perhaps guiltily, left all by himself with a book,
he stumbles all of a sudden on his soul —
steals out and loves something. It may not be
the best, but listening to the singing of the
crickets is more worth while than seeming to
listen to the music of the spheres. It leads to
the music of the spheres. All agencies, per-
sons, institutions, or customs that interfere
with this sensitive, self-discovering moment
when a human spirit makes its connection in
life with its ideal, that interfere with its being
a genuine, instinctive, free and beautiful con-
nection, living and growing daily of itself, — all
influences that tend to make it a formal con-
nection or a merely decorous or borrowed one,
whether they act in the name of culture or
religion or the state, are the profoundest, most
subtle, and most unconquerable enemies of
culture in the world.

It is not necessary to contend for the doc-
trine of reading as one likes — using the word
11 likes " in the sense of direction and tempera-
ment— in its larger and more permanent sense.
It is but necessary to call attention to the fact

"Wot 1Rea&fn0 as ©ne Hikes

that the universe of books is such a very large
and various universe, a universe in which so
much that one likes can be brought to bear at
any given point, that reading as one likes is
almost always safe in it. There is always
more of what one likes than one can possibly
read. It is impossible to like any one thing
deeply without discovering a hundred other
things to like with it. One is infallibly led
out. If one touches the universe vitally at
one point, all the rest of the universe flocks to
it. It is the way a universe is made.

Almost anything can be accomplished with
a child who has a habit of being eager with
books, who respects them enough, and who re-
spects himself enough, to leave books alone
when he cannot be eager with them. Eager-
ness in reading counts as much as it does in
living. A live reader who reads the wrong
books is more promising than a dead one who
reads the right ones. Being alive is the point.
Anything can be done with life. It is the Seed
of Infinity.

While much might be said for the topical or
purely scientific method in learning how to
read, it certainly is not claiming too much for
the human, artistic, or personal point of view
in reading, that it comes first in the order of
time in a developing life and first in the order
of strategic importance. Topical or scientific
reading cannot be fruitful ; it cannot even be
scientific, in the larger sense, except as, in its

ing as ©ne
lihcs

SLost Hrt ot

ng a0 One

Xffces

own time and in its own way, it selects itself
in due time in a boy's life, buds out, and is
allowed to branch out, from his own inner
personal reading.

The fact that the art of reading as one likes
is the most difficult, perhaps the most impossi-
ble, of all the arts in modern times, constitutes
one of those serio-comic problems of civilisation
— a problem which civilisation itself, with all
its swagger of science, its literary braggadocio,
its Library Cure, with all its Board Schools,
Commissioners of Education and specialists,
and bishops and newsboys, all hard at work
upon it, is only beginning to realise.

As the first and most important and most far-
reaching of the arts of reading is the Art of
Reading as One Likes, the principles, inspira-
tions, and difficulties of reading as one likes
are the first to be considered in this book.

There seem to be certain spiritual and intel-
lectual experiences some people have had with
books, which in spite of certain difficulties,
certain obstinate plausibilities, incline them to
believe there is, or can be found a method of
Reading as One Likes, which will make it
progressive, practical, artistic, and respectable.

What these methods are or might be, one
member of this hopeful company, for the en-
couragement of the others, has made bold to
express in the following chapters.

1Rot

2Lifees

In order to keep the discussion concrete and
human it has seemed best to tell things just as
they happened, and so the principles have been
put (not without a little fear and trembling)
in the form of experiences with books and
libraries, and personal impressions, under the
general head of The Confessions of an Unscien-
tific Mind. The reader's attention will be in-
vited to a consideration of the atmosphere of
libraries, the pros and cons of the Scientific
Method, and to a general constructive criticism
of the modern man's personal reading habits,
such as Reading for Principles, Reading for
Facts, Reading for Feelings, Reading for Re-
sults, and some further hopeful principles
which have been called Reading Down
Through, and Reading the World Together.

flot 1Re
ing as One

itfces

Libraries. Wanted: An
Old- Fashioned Librarian

vis.

1 NEVER shall quite forget the time when
the rumour was started in our town that
old Mr. M , our librarian — a gentle, fur-
tive, silent man — a man who (with the single
exception of a long white beard) was all
screwed up and bent around with learning,
who was always slipping invisibly in and out
of his high shelves, and who looked as if his
whole life had been nothing but a kind of
long, perpetual salaam to books — had been
caught dancing one day with his wife.

" Which only goes to show," broke in The

M. P., " what a man of fixed literary habits —
mere book-habits — if he keeps on, is reduced
to."

But as I was about to remark, for a good
many weeks afterward — after the rumour was
started — one kept seeing people (I was one of
them) as they came into the library, looking

shyly at Mr. M , as if they were looking at

him all over again. They looked at him as
if they had really never quite noticed him be-
fore. He sat at his desk, quiet and busy, and
bent over, with his fine-pointed pen and his
labels, as usual, and his big leather- bound
catalogue of the universe.

A few of us had had reason to suspect — at
least we had had hopes — that the pedantry in

Mr. M was somewhat superimposed, that

he had possibilities, human and otherwise, but
none of us, it must be confessed, had been able
to surmise quite accurately just where they
would break out. We were filled with a gentle
spreading joy with the very thought of it, a
sense of having acquired a secret possession in
a librarian. The community at large, how-
ever, as it walked into its library, looked at its
Acre of Books, and then looked at its librarian ;
felt cheated. It was shocked. The commun-
ity had always been proud of its books, proud
of its Book Worm. It had always paid a big
salary to it. And the Worm had turned.

I have only been back to the old town twice
since the day I left it, as a boy — about this

7° SLost Hrt of 1Rea&in0

time. The first time I weut he was there. I
came across him in his big, splendid new
library, his face like some live, but wrinkled
old parchment, twinkling and human though
— looking out from its Dust Heap. " It seems
to me," I thought, as I stood in the doorway,
— saw him edging around an alcove in The
Syriac Department, — " that if one must have a
great dreary heaped-up pile of books in a town
— anyway — the spectacle of a man like this,
flitting around in it, doting on them, is what
one ought to have to go with it." He always
seemed to me a kind of responsive every- way -
at-once little man, book-alive all through.
One never missed it with him. He had the
literary nerves of ten dead nations tingling
in him.

The next time I was in town they said he
had resigned. They said he lived in the little
grey house around the corner from the great
new glaring stone library. No one ever saw
him except in one of his long, hesitating walks,
or sometimes, perhaps, by the little study win-
dow, pouring himself over into a book there.
It was there that I saw him myself that last
morning — older and closer to the light turning
leaves — the same still, swift eagerness about
him.

I stepped into the library next door and saw
the new librarian — an efficient person. He
seemed to know what time it was while we
stood and chatted together. That is the main

cf. 71

impression one had of him — that he would cf.
always know what time it was. Put him any-
where. One felt it.

n
ct

Our new librarian troubles me a good deal.
I have not quite made out why. Perhaps it is
because he has a kind of chipper air with the
books. I am always coming across him in the
shelves, but I do not seem to get used to him.
Of course I pull myself together, bow and say
things, make it a point to assume he is liter-
ary, go through the form of not letting him
know what I think as well as may be, but we
do not get on.

And yet all the time down underneath I
know perfectly well that there is no real reason
why I should find fault with him. The only
thing that seems to be the matter with him is
that he keeps right on, every time I see him,
making me try to.

I have had occasion to notice that, as a gen-
eral rule, when I find myself finding fault with
a man in this fashion — this vague, eager
fashion — the gist of it is that I merely want
him to be some one else. But in this case —
well, he is some one else. He is almost any-
body else. He might be a head salesman in a
department store, or a hotel clerk, or a train

72 Xost Hrt of

cf. dispatcher, or a broker, or a treasurer of some-
thing. There are thousands of things he might
be — ought to be — except our librarian. He
has an odd, displaced look behind the great
desk. He looks as if he had gotten in by mis-
take and was trying to make the most of it.
He has a business-like, worldly-minded, foreign
air about him — a kind of off-hand, pert, famil-
iar way with books. He does not know how
to bend over — like a librarian — and when one
comes on him in an alcove, the way one ought
to come on a librarian, with a great folio on
his knees, he is — well, there are those who
think, that have seen it, that he is positively
comic. I followed him around only the other
day for fifteen or twenty minutes, from one
alcove to another, and watched him taking
down books. He does not even know how to
take down a book. He takes all the books
down alike — the same pleasant, dapper, capable
manner, the same peek and clap for all of
them. He always seems to have the same in-
defatigable unconsciousness about him, going
up and down his long aisles, no more idea of
what he is about or of what the books are
about; everything about him seems discon-
nected with a library. I find I cannot get my-
self to notice him as a librarian or comrade, or
book-mind. He does not seem to have noticed
himself in this capacity — exactly. So far as I
can get at his mind at all, he seems to have
decided that his mind (any librarian's mind) is

ct.

a kind of pneumatic-tube, or carrier system —
apparently — for shoving immortals at people.
Any higher or more thorough use for a mind,
such as being a kind of spirit of the books for
people, making a kind of spiritual connection
with them down underneath, does not seem to
have occurred to him.

Time was when librarians really had some-
thing to do with books. They looked it. One
could almost tell a librarian on the street — tell
him at sight, if he had been one long enough.
One could feel a library in a man somehow. It
struck in. Librarians were allowed to be per-
sons. It was expected of them. They have
not always been what so many of them are
now — mere couplings, conveniences, connect-
ing-rods, literary-beltings. They were identi-
fied— wrought in with books. They could not
be unmixed. They ate books; and, like the
little green caterpillars that eat green grass,
the colour showed through. A sort of general
brown, faded colour, a little undusted around
the edges, was the proper colour for librarians.

It is true that people did not expect librarians
to look quite human — at least on the outside,
sometimes, and doubtless the whole matter was
carried too far. But it does seem to me it is
some comfort (if one has to have a librarian
in a library) to have one that goes with the
books — same colour, tone, feeling, spirit, and
everything — the kind of librarian that slips in
and out among books without being noticed

cf.

74 SLost Hrt of

ct ai. there, one way or the other, like the overtone
in a symphony.

Ill

etal

But the trouble with our library is not merely
the new librarian, who permeates, penetrates,
and ramifies the whole library within and
without, percolating efficiency into its farthest
and loneliest alcoves. Our new librarian has
a corps of assistants. And even if you man-
age, by slipping around a little, to get over to
where a book is, alone, and get settled down
with it, there is always some one who is, has
been, or will be looking over your shoulder.

I dare say it 's a defect of temperament — this
having one's shoulder looked over in libraries.
Other people do not seem to be troubled much,
and I suppose I ought to admit, while I am
about it, that having one's shoulder looked
over in a library does not in the least depend
upon any one's actually looking over it. That
is merely a matter of form. It is a little hard
to express it. What one feels — at least in our
library — is that one is in a kind of side-looking
place. One feels a kind of literary detective
system going silently on in and out all around
one, a polite, absent-minded-looking watchful-
ness.

Now I am not for one moment flattering

et aU 75

myself that I can make my fault-finding with et *l»
our librarian's assistants amount to much — fill
out a blank with it.

No one can feel more strongly than I do my
failure to put my finger on the letter of our
librarian's faults. I cannot even tell the dif-
ference between the faults and the virtues of
our librarian's assistants. Either by doing the
right thing with the wrong spirit, or the wrong
thing with the right spirit they do their faults
and virtues all up together. Their indefatig-
able unobtrusiveness, their kindly, faithful
service I both dread and appreciate. I have
tried my utmost to notice and emphasise every
day the pleasant things about them, but I
always get tangled up. I have started out to
think with approval, for instance, of the hush,
— the hush that clothes them as a garment, —
but it has all ended in my merely wondering
where they got it and what they thought they
were doing with it. One would think that a
hush — a hush of almost any kind — could hardly
help — but I have said enough. I do not want
to seem censorious, but if ever there was a
visible, unctuous, tangible, actual thick silence,
a silence that can be proved, if ever there was a
silence that stood up and flourished and swung
its hat, that silence is in our library. The way
our librarian's assistants go tiptoeing and re-
verberating around the room — well — it's one
of those things that follow a man always, fol-
low his inmost being all his life. It gets in

76 SLost Hrt of 1Reat>in0

et ai. with the books — after a few years or so. One
can feel the tiptoeing going on in a book — one
of our library books — when one gets home with
it. It is the spirit of the place. Everything
that comes out of it is followed and tiptoed
around by our librarian's assistants' silence.
They are followed about by it themselves. The
thick little blonde one, with the high yellow
hair, lives in our ward. One feels a kind of
hush rimming her around, when one meets her
on the street.

Now I do not wish to claim that librarians'
assistants can possibly be blamed, in so many
words, either for this, or for any of the other
things that seem to make them (in our library,
at least) more prominent than the books.
Everything in a library seems to depend upon
something in it that cannot be put into words.
It seems to be a kind of spirit. If the spirit is
the wrong spirit, not all the librarians in the
world, not even the books themselves can do
anything about it.

Postscript. I do hope that no one will sup-
pose from this chapter that I am finding fault
or think I am finding fault with our assistant
librarians. I am merely finding fault with them
(may Heaven forgive them !) because I cannot.
It doesn't seem to make very much difference
— their doing certain things or not doing them.
They either do them or they don't do them —
whichever it is — with the same spirit. They

etc. 77

are not really down in their hearts true to the etc*
books. One can hardly help feeling vaguely,
persistently resentful over having them about
presiding over the past. One never catches
them — at least I never do — forgetting them-
selves. One never comes on one loving a book.
They seem to be servants, — most of them, —
book chambermaids. They do not care any-
thing about a library as a library. They j ust
seem to be going around remembering rules
in it.

etc

The P. G. S. of M. as good as said the other
day, when I had been trying as well as I could
to express something of this kind, that the real
trouble with the modern library was not with
the modern library, but with me. He thought
I tried to carry too many likes and dislikes
around with me, that I was too sensitive. He
seemed to think that I should learn to be cal-
lous in places of public resort.

I said I had no very violent dislikes to deal
with. The only thing I could think of that
was the matter with me in a library was that I
had a passion for books. I did n't like climb-
ing over a barricade of catalogues to get to
books. I hated to feel partitioned off from
them, to stand and watch rows of people mark-
ing things between me and books. I thought

78 OLost Hrt of 1Rea&in0

<tc« that things had come to a pretty pass, if a man
could not so much as touch elbows with a poet
nowadays — with Plato, for instance — without
carrying a redoubt of terrible beautiful young
ladies. I said I thought a great many other
people felt the way I did. I admitted there
were other sides to it, but there were times, I
said, when it almost seemed to me that this
spontaneous uprising in our country — this
movement of the Book L,overs, for instance —
was simply a struggle on the part of the people
to get away from Mr. Carnegie's libraries.
They are hemming literature and human
nature in, on every side, or they are going to
unless Mr. Carnegie can buy up occasional
old-fashioned librarians — some other kind than
are turned out in steel works — to put into
them. Libraries are getting to be huge Sepa-
rators. Books that have been put through
libraries are separated from themselves. They
are depersonalised — the human nature all taken
off. And yet when one thinks of it, with nine
people out of ten — the best people and the
worst both — the sense of having a personal re-
lation to a book, the sense of snuggling up
with one's own little life to a book, is what
books are for.

' ' To a man, ' ' I said, ' ' to whom books are
people, and the livest kind of people, brothers
of his own flesh, cronies of his life, the whole
business of getting a book in a library is full
of resentment and rebellion. He finds his

etc. 79

rights, or what he thinks are his rights, being
treated as privileges, his most sacred and con-
fidential relations, his relations with the great,
meddled with by strangers — pleasant enough
strangers, but still strangers. Perhaps he
wishes to see John Milton. He goes down town
to a great unhomelike-looking building, and
slides in at the door. He steps up to a wall,
and asks permission to see John Milton. He
waits in a kind of vague, unsatisfied fashion,
but he feels that machinery is being set in
motion. While it is being set in motion, he
sits down before the wall on one of the seats or
pews where a large audience of other comfort-
less and lonely-looking people are. He feels
the great, heartless building gathering itself
together, going after John Milton for him,
while he sits and waits. One after the other
he hears human beings' names being called out
in space, and one by one poor scared-looking
people who seem to be ashamed to go with
their names — most of them — step up before
the audience. He sees a book being swung
out to them, watches them slink gratefully
away, and finally his own name echoing about
among the Immortals, startles its way down
to him. Then he steps up to the wall again,
and John Milton at last, as on some huge
transcendental derrick belonging to the city of

, is swung into his arms. He feels of the

outside gropingly — takes it home. If he can
get John Milton to come to life again after all

8o Xost Hrt ot

etc. this, he communes with him. In two weeks
he takes him back. Then the derrick again.

The only kind of book that I ever feel close
to, in the average library, is a book on war.
Even if I go in, in a gentle, harmless, happy,
singing sort of way, thinking I want a volume
of pastoral poems, by the time I get it, I wish
it were something that could be loaded, or that
would go off. As for asking for a book and
reading it in cold blood right in the middle of
such a place, it will always be beyond me. I
have never found a book I could do it with
yet. However I struggle to follow the train
of thought in it, it 's a fuse. I find myself
breaking out, when I see all these far-away-
looking people coming up in rows to their far-
away books. "A library," I say to myself,
" is a huge barbaric, mediaeval institution,
where behind stone and glass a man's dearest
friends in the world, the familiars of his life,
lie helpless in their cells. It is the Peniten-
tiary of Immortals. There are certain visiting
days when friends and relatives are allowed to
come, but it only — " At this point a gong
sounds and tells me to go home. "Are not
books bone of a man's bone, and flesh of his
flesh ? Ought n't they to be ? Shall a man
ask permission to see his wife ? Why should
I fill out a slip to a pretty girl, when I want to
be in Greece with Homer, or go to hell with
Dante? Why should I write on a piece of
paper, * I promise to return — infinity — by six

etc, 81

o'clock ' ? A library is a huge machine for etc.
keeping the letter with books and violating
their spirit. The fact that the machinery is
filled with a mirage of pleasant faces does not
help. Pleasant faces make machinery worse
— if they are a part of it. They make one
expect something better."

The P. G. S. of M. wished me to understand
at this point that I was not made right, that I
was incapable, helpless in a library, that I did
not seem to know what to do unless I could
have a simple, natural, or country relation to
books.

" It does n't follow," he said, " because you
are bashful in a library, cannot get your mind
to work there, with other people around, that
the other people ought n't to be around.
There are a great many ways of using a
library, and the more people there are crowded
in with the books there, other things being
equal, the better. It's what a library is for," he
said, and a great deal more to the same effect.

I listened a while and told him that I sup-
posed he was right. I supposed I had natur-
ally a kind of wild mind. I allowed that the
more a library in a general way took after a
piece of woods, the more I enjoyed it. I did
not attempt to deny that a library was made
for the people, but I did think there ought to
be places in libraries — all libraries — where wild
ones, like me, could go. There ought to be in
every library some uncultivated, uncatalogued,

82 SLost Hrt of 1Rea&ing

etc. unlibrarianed tract where a man with a skittish
or country mind will have a chance, where a
man who likes to be alone with books — with
books just as books — will be permitted to
browze, unnoticed, bars all down, and frisk
with his mind and roll himself, without turning
over all of a sudden only to find a librarian's
assistant standing there wondering at him,
looking down to the bottom of his soul.

I am not in the least denying that librarians
are well enough, — that is, might be well
enough, — but as things are going to-day, they
all seem to contribute, somehow, toward mak-
ing a library a conscious and stilted place.
They hold one up to the surface of things, with
books. They make impossible to a man those
freedoms of the spirit — those best times of all
in a library, when one feels free to find one's
mood, when one gets hold of one's divining-
rod, opens down into a book, discovers a new,
unconscious, subterranean self there.

The P. G. S. of M. broke in at this point and
said this was all subjective folderol on my part
— that I had better drop it — a kind of habit I
had gotten into lately, of splitting the hairs of
my emotions — or something to that effect. He
went on at some length and took the general
ground before he was through, that absolutely
everything in modern libraries depended on
the librarians. Librarians — I should judge —
in a modern library were what books were for.
He said that the more intelligent people were

etc

nowadays the more they enjoyed librarians — etc.
knew how to use them — doted on them, etc. ,
ad infinitum.

" The kind of people one sees at operas," I
interrupted, ' ' listening with librettos, the kind
of people who puff up mountains to see views
and extract geography from them, the people
one meets in the fields, nowadays, flower in
one hand, botany in the other, the kind of
people who have to have charts to enjoy stars
with — these are the people who want librarians
between them and their books. The more li-
brarians they can get standing in a row between
them and a masterpiece the more they feel
they are appreciating it, the more card cata-
logues, gazetteers, dictionaries, derricks, and
other machinery they can have pulling and
hauling above their heads in a library the more
literary they feel in it. They feel culture —
somehow — stirring around them. They are
not exactly sure what culture is, but they feel
that a great deal of it — whatever it is — is being
poured over into them.

But I must begin to bring these wanderings
about libraries to a close. It can do no harm to
remark, perhaps, that I am not maintaining —
do not wish to maintain (I could not if I dared)
that the modern librarian with all his faults
is not useful at times. As a sort of pianola
or aeolian attachment for a library, as a me-
chanical contrivance for making a compara-
tively ignorant man draw perfectly enormous

84 OLost Hrt ot

harmonies out of it (which he does not care
anything about), a modern librarian helps.
All that I am maintaining is, that I am not
this comparatively ignorant man. I am another
one. I am merely saying that the pianola way
of dealing with ignorance, in my own case, up
to the present at least, does not grow on me.

v
o

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 glass, 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 nobody 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 let-
ting human beings live on it.

The general sense of unsensitiveness in a
modern library, of hurry and rush and effi-
ciency, 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, gentle-
men, 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 hav-
ing 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 nowa-
days, that is, in arranging for a great many
books and a great many people to pile up order

86 xost Hrt ot

among a great many books, could be spent in
providing hundreds of thousands of small libra-
ries, 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 — nobody
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 gentle-
man 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 classify 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 any-
body, — 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 dis-
pose 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, shiver-
ing, miscellaneous soul in your hands.

Book II

flDofcern IReafcer's Inspirations
Ube Confessions of an Unscientific /IDinb

I — Unscientific

©n Being Intelligent in a Xibrar?

[HAVE a way every two or three days or
so, of an afternoon, of going down to our
library, sliding into the little gate by the
shelves, and taking a long empty walk there.
I have found that nothing quite takes the place
of it for me, — wandering up and down the aisles
of my ignorance, letting myself be loomed at,
staring doggedly back. I always feel when I
go out the great door as if I had won a victory.
I have at least faced the facts. I swing off to
my tramp on the hills where is the sense of
space, as if I had faced the bully of the world,
the whole assembled world, in his own den,
and he had given me a license to live.

Of course it only lasts a little while. One
soon feels a library nowadays pulling on him.

©n 3Bef ng
•(Intelligent

in a
library

SLost Hrt ot 1Rea&in0

On 3Being
Intelligent

in a
librarg

One has to go back and do it all over again, but
for the time being it affords infinite relief. It
sets one in right relations to the universe, to
the original plan of things. One suspects that
if God had originally intended that men on this
planet should be crowded off by books on it, it
would not have been put off to the twentieth
century.

I was saying something of this sort to The
Presiding Genius of the State of Massachusetts
the other day, and when I was through he said
promptly : ' * The way a man feels in a library
(if any one can get him to tell it) lets out more
about a man than anything else in the world."

It did not seem best to make a reply to this.
I did n't think it would do either of us any
good.

Finally, in spite of myself, I spoke up and
allowed that I felt as intelligent in a library as
anybody.

He did not say anything.

When I asked him what he thought being
intelligent in a library was, he took the general
ground that it consisted in always knowing
what one was about there, in knowing exactly
what one wanted.

I replied that I did not think that that was a
very intelligent state of mind to be in, in a
library.

Then I waited while he told me (fifteen min-
utes) what an intelligent mind was anywhere
(nearly everywhere, it seemed to me). But I

<§>n

Untellioent in a Xtbrarp

did not wait in vain, and at last, when he had
come around to it, and had asked me what I
thought the feeling of intelligence consisted in,
in libraries, I said it consisted in being pulled
on by the books.

I said quite a little after this, and of course
the general run of my argument was that I was
rather intelligent myself. The P. G. S. of M.
had little to say to this, and after he had said
how intelligent he was awhile, the conversation
was dropped.

The question that concerns me is, What shall
a man do, how shall he act, when he finds him-
self in the hush of a great library, — opens the
door upon it, stands and waits in the midst of
it, with his poor outstretched soul all by him-
self before IT, — and feels the books pulling on
him ? I always feel as if it were a sort of in-
finite crossroads. The last thing I want to
know in a library is exactly what I want there.
I am tired of knowing what I want. I am al-
ways knowing what I want. I can know what
I want almost anywhere. If there is a place
left on God's earth where a modern man can
go and go regularly and not know what he
wants awhile, in Heaven's name why not let
him ? I am as fond as the next man, I think,
of knowing what I am about, but when I find
myself ushered into a great library I do not
know what I am about any sooner than I can
help. I shall know soon enough — God forgive

Untetltgent

in a
library

2Lost Hrt of TReafcing

On SSefng
•(Intelligent

in a
library

me ! When it is given to a man to stand in the
Assembly Room of Nations, to feel the ages,
all the ages, gathering around him, flowing
past his life; to listen to the immortal stir of
Thought, to the doings of The Dead, why
should a man interrupt — interrupt a whole
world — to know what he is about ? I stand at the
j unction of all Time and Space. I am the three
tenses. I read the newspaper of the universe.

It fades away after a little, I know. I go to
the card catalogue like a lamb to the slaughter,
poke my head into Knowledge — somewhere —
and am lost, but the light of it on the spirit
does not fade away. It leaves a glow there.
It plays on the pages afterward.

There is a certain fine excitement about tak-
ing a library in this fashion, a sense of spacious-
ness of joy in it, which one is almost always
sure to miss in libraries — most libraries — by
staying in them. The only way one can get
any real good out of a modern library seems to
be by going away in the nick of time. If one
stays there is no help for it. One is soon stand-
ing before the card catalogue, sorting one's wits
out in it, filing them away, and the sense of
boundlessness both in one's self and everybody
else — the thing a library is for — is fenced off
for ever.

At least it seems fenced off for ever. One sees
the universe barred and patterned off with a
kind of grating before it. It is a card-catalogue
universe.

1bow 1Ft ffeels 95

I can only speak for one, but I must say for fjow -jt
myself, that as compared with this feeling one
has in the door, this feeling of standing over a
library — mere reading in it, sitting down and
letting one's self be tucked into a single book
in it — is a humiliating experience.

Ibcw flt 3feeI0

I am not unaware that this will seem to some
— this empty doting on infinity, this standing
and staring at All-knowledge — a mere dizzying
exercise, whirling one's head round and round in
Nothing, for Nothing. And I am not unaware
that it would be unbecoming in me or in any
other man to feel superior to a card catalogue.

A card catalogue, of course, as a device for
making a kind of tunnel for one's mind in a
library — for working one's way through it — is
useful and necessary to all of us. Certainly, if
a man insists on having infinity in a convenient
form — infinity in a box — it would be hard to
find anything better to have it in than a card
catalogue.

But there are times when one does not want
infinity in a box. He loses the best part of it
that way. He prefers it in its natural state.
All that I am contending for is, that when these
times come, the times when a man likes to feel
infinite knowledge crowding round him, — feel

2Lost Hrt of

Ibowa

Specialist

can 36e an

JE&ucatefc

/B>an

it through the backs of unopened books, and
likes to stand still and think about it, worship
with the thought of it, — he ought to be allowed
to. It is true that there is no sign up against
it (against thinking in libraries). But there
might as well be. It amounts to the same
thing. No one is expected to. People are ex-
pected to keep up an appearance, at least, of
doing something else there. I do not dare to
hope that the next time I am caught standing
and staring in a library, with a kind of blank,
happy look, I shall not be considered by all my
kind intellectually disreputable for it. I admit
that it does not look intelligent — this standing
by a door and taking in a sweep of books — this
reading a whole library at once. I can im-
agine how it looks. It looks like listening to a
kind of cloth and paper chorus — foolish enough ;
but if I go out of the door to the hills again,
refreshed for them and lifted up to them, with
the strength of the ages in my limbs, great
voices all around me, flocking my solitary walk
— who shall gainsay me ?

Ill

1bow a Specialist can Be an
flDan

It is a sad thing to go into a library nowa-
days and watch the people there who are
merely making tunnels through it. Some lib-

1bow a Specialist can 3Be an Bfcucatefc flDan

raries are worse than others — seein to be made
for tunnels. College libraries, perhaps, are the
worst. One can almost — if one stands still
enough in them — hear what is going on. It is
getting to be practically impossible in a college
library to slink off to a side shelf by one's self,
take down some gentle-hearted book one does
not need to read there and begin to listen in it,
without hearing some worthy person quietly,
persistently boring himself around the next
corner. It is getting worse every year. The
only way a readable library book can be read
nowadays is to take it away from the rest of
them. It must be taken where no other read-
ing is going on. The busy scene of a crowd of
people — mere specialists and others — gathered
around roofing their minds in is no fitting
place for a great book or a live book to be read
— a book that uncovers the universe.

On the other hand, it were certainly a trying
universe if it were uncovered all the time, if
one had to be exposed to all of it and to all of
it at once, always; and there is no denying that
libraries were intended to roof men's minds in
sometimes as well as to take the roofs of their
minds off. What seems to be necessary is to
find some middle course in reading between the
scientist's habit of tunnelling under the dome
of knowledge and the poet's habit of soaring
around in it. There ought to be some princi-
ple of economy in knowledge which will allow
a man, if he wants to, or knows enough, to be a

Dow a
Specialist
can 3Bc an
JE&ucatefc

DDan

SLost Hrt of

1foo\v> a
Specialist
can 3Bc an
lEbucatefc

/Ban

poet and a scientist both. It is well enough for
a mere poet to take a library as a spectacle — a
kind of perpetual Lick Observatory to peek at
the universe with, if he likes, and if a man is a
mere scientist, there is no objection to his tak-
ing a library as a kind of vast tunnel system,
or chart for burrowing. But the common edu-
cated man — the man who is in the business of
being a human being, unless he knows some
middle course in a library, knows how to use
its Lick Observatory and its tunnel system
both — does not get very much out of it. If
there can be found some principle of economy
in knowledge, common to artists and scientists
alike, which will make it possible for a poet to
know something, and which will make it pos-
sible for a scientist to know a very great deal
without being — to most people — a little under-
witted, it would very much simplify the prob-
lem of being educated in modern times, and
there would be a general gratefulness.

Far be it from me to seem to wish to claim
this general gratefulness for myself. I have no
world-reforming feeling about the matter. I
would be very grateful just here to be allowed
to tuck in a little idea — no chart to go with it
— on this general subject, which my mind
keeps coming back to, as it runs around
watching people.

There seem to be but two ways of knowing.
One of them is by the spirit and the other is by
the letter. The most reasonable principle of

1bow a Specialist can Be an Btwcatefc /IDan

economy in knowledge would seem to be, that
in all reading that pertains to man's specialty
— his business in knowledge — he should read by
the letter, knowing the facts by observing them
himself, and that in all other reading he should
read through the spirit or imagination — the
power of taking to one's self facts that have
been observed by others. If a man wants
to be a specialist he must do his knowing
like a scientist; but if a scientist wants to be
a man he must be a poet ; he must learn how
to read like a poet; he must educate in himself
the power of absorbing immeasurable know-
ledge, the facts of which have been approved
and observed by others.

The weak point in our modern education
seems to be that it has broken altogether with
the spirit or the imagination. Playing upon
the spirit or the imagination of a man is the
one method possible to employ in educating
him in everything except his specialty. It is
the one method possible to employ in making
even a powerful specialist of him; in relating
his specialty to other specialties; that is, in
making either him or his specialty worth while.

Inasmuch as it has been decreed that every
man in modern life must be a specialist, the
fundamental problem that confronts modern
education is, How can a specialist be an edu-
cated man ? There would seem to be but one
way a specialist can be an educated man. The
only hope for a specialist lies in his being

ibovo a
Specialist
can 3Be an
3E&ucate&

fflan

IOO

%ost Hrt of

On 1Real>=

ing JBoofcs

tbrougb

Ubeir

Sacks

allowed to have a soul (or whatever he chooses
to call it), a spirit or an imagination. If he
has This, whatever it is, in one way or another,
he will find his way to every book he needs.
He will read all the books there are in his
specialty. He will read all other books through
their backs.

©n IReabing Books tbrougb Ebeir

As this is the only way the majority of books
can be read by anybody, one wonders why so
little has been said about it.

Reading books through their backs is easily
the most important part of a man's outfit, if he
wishes to be an educated man. It is not neces-
sary to prove this statement. The books them-
selves prove it without even being opened.
The mere outside of a library — almost any
library — would seem to settle the point that if
a man proposes to be in any larger or deeper
sense a reader of books, the books must be read
through their backs.

Even the man who is obliged to open books
in order to read them sooner or later admits
this. He finds the few books he opens in the
literal or unseeing way do not make him see
anything. They merely make him see that he
ought to have opened the others — that he must

®n

36oofes tbrougb ZTbeir Bacfes

IOI

ing 36ool;0
tbrougb
Ubcic
Kacfes

open the others; that is, if he is to know any-
thing. The next thing he sees is that he must
open all the others to know anything. When
he comes to know this he may be said to have
reached what is called, by stretch of courtesy,
a state of mind. It is the scientific state of
mind. Any man who has watched his mind a
little knows what this means. It is the first
incipient symptom in a mind that science is
setting in.

The only possible cure for it is reading books
through their backs. As this scientific state of
mind is the main obstacle nowadays in the way
of reading books through their backs, it is fit-
ting, perhaps, at this point that I should dwell
on it a little.

I do not claim to be a scientist, and I have
never — even in my worst moments — hoped for
a scientific mind. I am afraid I know as well
as any one who has read as far as this, in this
book, that I cannot prove anything. The book
has at least proved that ; but it does seem to me
that there are certain things that very much
need to be said about the scientific mind, in its
general relation to knowledge. I would give
the world to be somebody else for awhile and
say them — right here in the middle of my book.
But I know as well as any one, after all that
has passed, that if I say anything about the
scientific mind nobody will believe it. The best
I can do is to say how I feel about the scien-
tific mind. "And what has that to do with

102

SLost Hrt of 1Rea&in0

ing 36ool;y

tbroiujb

Ubefr

JBacfts

it ? " exclaims the whole world and all its
laboratories. What is really wanted in dealing
with this matter seems to be some person —
some grave, superficial person — who will take
the scientific mind up scientifically, shake it
and filter it, put it under the microscope, stare
at it with a telescope, stick the X-ray through
it, lay it on the operating table — show what is
the matter with it — even to itself. Anything
that is said about the scientific mind which is
not said in a big, bow-wow, scientific, imper-
sonal, out-of-the-universe sort of way will not
go very far.

And yet, the things that need to be said
about the scientific mind — the things that need
to be done for it — need to be said and done so
very much, that it seems as if almost any one
might help. So I am going to keep on trying.
Let no one suppose, however, that because I
have turned around the corner into another
chapter, I am setting myself up as a sudden
and new authority on the scientific mind. I do
not tell how it feels to be scientific. I merely
tell how it looks as if it felt.

I have never known a great scientist, and I
can only speak of the kind of scientist I have
generally met — the kind every one meets now-
adays, the average, bare scientist. He always
looks to me as if he had a grudge against the
universe — jealous of it or something. There
are so many things in it he cannot know and
that he has no use for unless he does. It

<§>n 1fceepin0 Bacb ©tber in Countenance

103

always seems to me (perhaps it seems so to
most of us in this world, who are running
around and enjoying things and guessing on
them) that the average scientist has a kind of
dreary and disgruntled look, a look of feeling
left out. Nearly all of the universe goes to
waste with a scientist. He fixes himself so
that it has to. If a man cannot get the good of
a thing until he knows it and knows all of it,
he cannot expect to be happy in this universe.
There are no conveniences for his being happy
in it. It is the wrong size, to begin with.
Exact knowledge at its best, or even at its
worst, does not let a man into very many things
in a universe like this one. A large part of it
is left over with a scientist. It is the part that
is left over which makes him unhappy.

I am not claiming that a scientist, simply be-
cause he is a scientist, is any unhappier or
needs to be any unhappier than other men are.
He does not need to be. It all comes of a kind
of brutal, sweeping, overriding prejudice he
has against guessing on anything.

©n IReeps
ing £acb
Qtbcr in
Gountcns
ance

©n IReeping Eacb ©tber in
Countenance

I do not suppose that my philosophising on
this subject — a sort of slow, peristaltic action
of my own mind — is of any particular value;

104

Xost Hrt of IReabing

©n TRecps
ing Eacb
©tbcr in
Countens
ance

that it really makes any one feel any better ex-
cept myself.

But it has just occurred to me that I may
have arisen, quite as well as not, without
knowing it, to the dignity of the commonplace.

' ' The man who thinks he is playing a solo in
any human experience," says this morning's
paper, ' ' only needs a little more experience to
know that he is a member of a chorus. ' ' I
suspect myself of being a Typical Case. The
scientific mind has taken possession of all the
land. It has assumed the right of eminent do-
main in it, and there must be other human be-
ings here and there, I am sure, standing aghast
at learning in our modern day, even as I am,
their whys and wherefores working within
them, trying to wonder their way out in this
matter.

All that is necessary, as I take it, is for one
or the other of us to speak up in the world,
barely peep in it, make himself known wher-
ever he is, tell how he feels, and he will find
he is not alone. Then we will get together.
We will keep each other in countenance. We
will play with our minds if we want to. We
will take the liberty of knowing rows of things
we don't know all about, and we will be as
happy as we like, and if we keep together we
will manage to have a fairly educated look be-
sides. I am very sure of this. But it is the
sort of thing a man cannot do alone. If he
tries to do it with any one else, any one that

1keep(n0 }£acb ©tber in Countenance

happens along, he is soon come up with. It
cannot be done in that way. There is no one
to whom to turn. Almost every mind one
knows in this modern educated world is a sus-
picious, unhappy, abject, helpless, scientific
mind.

It is almost impossible to find a typical edu-
cated mind, either in this country or in Europe
or anywhere, that is not a rolled-over mind,
jealous and crushed by knowledge day and
night, and yet staring at its ignorance every-
where. The scientist is almost always a man
who takes his mind seriously, and he takes the
universe as seriously as he takes his mind. In-
stead of glorying in a universe and being a lit-
tle proud of it for being such an immeasurable,
unspeakable, unknowable success, his whole
state of being is one of worry about it. The
universe seems to irritate him somehow. Has
he not spent years of hard labour in making
his mind over, in drilling it into not-thinking,
into not-inferring things, into not-knowing
anything he does not know all of ? And yet
here he is and here is his whole life — does it not
consist in being baffled by germs and bacilli,
crowed over by atoms, trampled on by the
stars ? It is getting so that there is but one
thing left that the modern, educated scientific
mind feels that it knows, and that is the impos-
sibility of knowledge. Certainly if there is any-
thing in this wide world that can possibly be
in a more helpless, more pulp-like state than

On Ifteepa
ing Eacb
©tbec in
Counten=
ance

io6

Xost Hrt of

TTbe

•Romance
of Science

the scientific mind in the presence of something
that cannot be known, something that can
only be used by being wondered at (which is
all most of the universe is for), it has yet to be
pointed out.

He may be better off than he looks, and I
don't doubt he quite looks down on me as,

A mere poet,

The Chanticleer of Things,

Who lives to flap his wings —

It's all he knows, —

They 're never furled ;

Who plants his feet

On the ridge-pole of the world

And crows.

Still, I like it very well. I don't know any-
thing better that can be done with the world,
and as I have said before I say again, my
friend and brother, the scientist, is either very
great or very small, or he is moderately, de-
cently unhappy. At least this is the way it
looks from the ridge-pole of the world.

Gbe IRomance of Science

Science is generally accredited with being
very matter-of-fact. But there has always been
one romance in science from the first, — its ro-
mantic attitude toward itself. It would be hard
to find any greater romance in modern times.

IRomance of Science

107

The romance of science is the assumption that
man is a plain, pure-blooded, non-inferring,
mere-observing being and that in proportion as
his brain is educated he must not use it. "De-
ductive reasoning has gone out with the nine-
teenth century," says The Strident Voice.
This is the one single inference that the scien-
tific method seems to have been able to make
— the inference that no inference has a right
to exist.

So far as I can see, if there are going to be
inferences anyway, and one has to take one's
choice in inferring, I would rather have a few
inferences on hand that I can live with every
day than to have this one huge, voracious in-
ference (the scientist's) which swallows all the
others up. For that matter, when the scientist
has actually made it, — this one huge guess that
he has n't a right to guess, — what good does it
do him ? He never lives up to it, and all the
time he has his poor, miserable theory hanging
about him, dogging him day and night. Does
he not keep on guessing in spite of himself?
Does he not live plumped up against mystery
every hour of his life, crowded on by ignor-
ance, forced to guess if only to eat? Is he not
browbeaten into taking things for granted
whichever way he turns ? He becomes a dole-
ful, sceptical, contradictory, anxious, disagree-
able, disapproving person as a matter of course.

One would think, in the abstract, that a cer-
tain serenity would go with exact knowledge;

Ube
IRomance
of Science

io8

OLost Hrt of

Ube

tRomance
of Science

and it would, if a man were willing to put up
with a reasonable amount of exact knowledge,
eke it out with his brains, some of it; but when
he wants all the exact knowledge there is, and
nothing else but exact knowledge, and is not
willing to mix his brains with it, it is different.
When a man puts his whole being into a vise
of exact knowledge, he finds that he has about
as perfect a convenience for being miserable
as could possibly be devised. He soon becomes
incapable of noticing things or of enjoying
things in the world for themselves. With one or
two exceptions, I have never known a scientist
to whom his knowing a thing, or not knowing
it, did not seem the only important thing about it.
Of course when a man's mind gets into this
dolefully cramped, exact condition, a universe
like this is not what it ought to be for him. He
lives too unprotected a life. His whole attitude
toward the universe becomes one of wishing
things would keep off of him in it — things he
does not know. Are there not enough things
he does not know even in his specialty ? And
as for this eternal being reminded of the others,
this slovenly habit of " general information "
that interesting people have — this guessing, in-
ferring, and generalising — what is it all for?
What does it all come to? If a man is after
knowledge, let him have knowledge, know-
ledge that is knowledge, let him find a fact,
anything for a fact, get God into a corner, hug
one fact and live with it and die with it.

109

When a man once gets into this shut-in at-
titude it is of little use to put a word in, with
him, for the daily habit of taking the roof off
one's mind, letting the universe play upon it
instead of trying to bore a hole in it some-
where. " What does it avail after all, after it
is all over, after a long life, even if the hole is
bored," I say to him, " to stand by one's little
hole and cry, ' Behold, oh, human race, this
Gimlet Hole which I have bored in infinite
space! Let it be forever named for me.' "
And in the meantime the poor fellow gets no
joy out of living. He does not even get credit
for his not-living, seventy years of it. He
fences off his little place to know a little of no-
thing in, becomes a specialist, a foot note to
infinite space, and is never noticed afterwards
(and quite reasonably) by any one — not even
by himself.

VII

flfconabs

I am not saying that this is the way a scien-
tist— a mere scientist, one who has the fixed
habit of not reading books through their backs
— really feels. It is the way he ought to feel.
As often as not he feels quite comfortable. One
sees one every little while (the mere scientist)
dropping the entire universe with a dull thud
and looking happy after it.

But the best ones are different. Even those

Xost Hrt ot

who are not quite the best are different. It is
really a very rare scientist who joggles content-
edly down without qualms, or without delays,
to a hole in space. There is always a capabil-
ity, an apparently left-over capability in him.
What seems to happen is, that when the aver-
age human being makes up his mind to it, in-
sists on being a scientist, the lyord keeps a
remnant of happiness in him — a gnawing on
the inside of him which will not let him rest.

This remnant of happiness in him, his soul,
or inferring organ, or whatever it may be,
makes him suspect that the scientific method
as a complete method is a false, superficial,
and dangerous method, threatening the very
existence of all knowledge that is worth know-
ing on the earth. He begins to suspect that
a mere scientist, a man who cannot even make
his mind work both ways, backwards or for-
wards, as he likes (the simplest, most rudi-
mentary motion of a mind), inductively or
deductively, is bound to have something left
out of all of his knowledge. He sees that the
all-or-nothing assumption in knowledge, to say
nothing of not applying to the arts, in which it
is always sterile, does not even apply to the
physical sciences — to the mist, dust, fire, and
water out of which the earth and the scientist
are made.

For men who are living their lives as we are
living ours, in the shimmer of a globule in
space, it is not enough that we should lift our

faces to the sky and blunder and guess at a
God there, because there is so much room be-
tween the stars, and murmur faintly, ' 'Spiritual
things are spiritually discerned." By the in-
finite bones of our bodies, by the seeds of the
million years that flow in our veins, material
things are spiritually discerned. There is not
science enough nor scientific method enough in
the schools of all Christendom for a man to
listen intelligently to his own breathing with,
or to know his own thumb-nail. Is not his own
heart thundering the infinite through him —
beating the eternal against his sides — even
while he speaks? And does he not know it
while he speaks ?

By the time a man 's a Junior or a Senior
nowadays, if he feels the eternal beating
against his sides he thinks it must be some-
thing else. He thinks he ought to. It is a
mere inference. At all events he has little
use for it unless he knows just how eternal
it is. I am speaking too strongly ? I suppose
I am. I am thinking of my four special
boys— boys I have been doing my living in,
the last few years. I cannot help speaking a
little strongly. Two of them — two as fine,
flash-minded, deep-lit, wide-hearted fellows as

one would like to see, are down at W , being

cured of inferring in a four years' course at
the W— - Scientific School. Another one,
who always seemed to me to have real
genius in him, who might have had a period in

112

SLost Hrt ot

literature named after him, almost, if he 'd
stop studying literature, is taking a graduate

course at M , learning that it cannot be

proved that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.
He has already become one of these spot-
lessly accurate persons one expects nowadays.
(I hardly dare to hope he will even read this
book of mine, with all his affection for me,
after the first few pages or so, lest he should
fall into a low or wondering state of mind.)
My fourth boy, who was the most promising
of all, whose mind reached out the farthest,
who was always touching new possibilities,
a fresh, warm-blooded, bright-eyed fellow, is
down under a manhole studying God in the
N Theological Seminary.

This may not be exactly a literal statement,
nor a very scientific way to criticise the scien-
tific method, but when one has had to sit
and see four of the finest minds he ever knew
snuffed out by it, — whatever else may be said
for science, scientific language is not satisfying.
What is going to happen to us next, in our
little town, I hardly dare to know. I only
know that three relentlessly inductive, dull,

brittle, blase, and springless youths from S

University have just come down and taken
possession of our High School. They seem to
be throwing, as near as I can judge, a spell
of the impossibility of knowledge over the boys
we have left.

I admit that I am in an unreasonable state of

113

mind.* I think a great many people are. At
least I hope so. There is no excuse for not be-
ing a little unreasonable. Sometimes it almost
seems, when one looks at the condition of
most college boys' minds, as if our colleges
were becoming the moral and spiritual and in-
tellectual dead-centres of modern life.

I will not yield to any man in admiration
for Science — holy and speechless Science;
holier than any religion has ever been yet;
what religions are made of and are going to be
made of, nor am I dating my mind three
hundred years back and trying to pick a
quarrel with Lord Bacon. I am merely won-
dering whether, if science is to be taught at
all, it had not better be taught, in each branch
of it, by men who are teaching a subject they
have conceived with their minds instead of a
subject which has been merely unloaded on
them, piled up on top of their minds, and which
their minds do not know anything about.

No one seems to have stopped to notice what
the spectacle of science as taught in college is
getting to be — the spectacle of one set of
minds which has been crunched by knowledge
crunching another set. Have you never been
to One, oh Gentle Reader, and watched It,
watched It when It was working, one of these
great Endowed Fact-machines, wound up by
the dead, going round and round, thousands
and thousands of youths in it being rolled out

* Fact.

3Lost Hrt ot

and chilled through and educated in it, having
their souls smoothed out of them ? Hundreds
of human minds, small and sure and hard,
working away on thousands of other human
minds, making them small and sure and hard.
Matter — infinite matter everywhere — taught
by More Matter, — taught the way Matter
would teach if it knew how — without generalis-
ing, without putting facts together to make
truths out of them.

It would seem, looking at it theoretically,
that Science, of all things in this world, the stuff
that dreams are made of; the one boundless
subject of the earth, face to face and breath to
breath with the Creator every minute of its life,
would be taught with a divine touch in it, with
the appeal to the imagination and the soul, to
the world-building instinct in a man, the thing
in him that puts universes together, the thing
in him that fills the whole dome of space and all
the crevices of being with the whisper of God.

But it is not so. Science is great, and great
scientists are great as a matter of course ; but
the sciences in the meantime are being taught
in our colleges — in many of them, most of
them — by men whose minds are mere register-
ing machines. The facts are put in at one end
(one click per fact) and come out facts at the
other. The sciences are being taught more
and more every year by moral and spiritual
stutterers, men with non-inferring minds, men
who live in a perfect deadlock of knowledge,

men who cannot generalise about a fly's wing,
bashful, empty, limp, and hopeless and dod-
dering before the commonplacest, sanest, and
simplest generalisations of human life. In The
Great Free Show, in our common human peep
at it, who has not seen them, staggering to
know what the very children, playing with
dolls and rocking-horses, can take for granted ?
Minds which seem absolutely incapable of
striking out, of taking a good, manly stride on
anything, mincing in religion, effeminate in
enthusiasm — please forgive me, Gentle Reader,
I know I ought not to carry on in this fash-
ion, but have I not spent years in my soul
(sometimes it seems hundreds of years) in
being humble — in being abject before this
kind of mind ? It is only a day almost since
I have found it out, broken away from it, got
hold of the sky to hoot at it with. I am free
now. I am not going to be humble longer, be-
fore it. I have spent years dully wondering be-
fore this mind; wondering what was the matter
with me that I could not love it, that I could
not go where it loved to go, and come when
it said ' ' Come ' ' to me. I have spent years in
dust and ashes before it, struggling with my-
self, trying to make myself small enough to fol-
low this kind of a mind around, and now the
scales are fallen from my eyes. When I follow
An Inductive Scientific Mind now, or try to
follow it through its convolutions of matter-
of-fact, its involutions of logic, its wriggling

Xost Hrt of 1Reat>in0

through axioms, I smile a new smile and my
heart laughs within me. If I miss the point,
I am not in a panic, and if, at the end of the
seventeenth platitude that did not need to be
proved, I find I do not know where I am, I
thank God.

I know that I am partly unreasonable, and
I know that in my chosen station on the
ridge-pole of the world it is useless to criticise
those who do not even believe, probably, that
worlds have ridge-poles. It is a bit hard to
get their attention — and I hope the reader will
overlook it if one seems to speak rather loud —
from ridge-poles. Oh, ye children of The Lit-
eral ! ye most serene Highnesses, ye archangels
of Accuracy, the Voices of life all challenge
you — the world around! What are ye, after
all, but pilers-up of matter, truth-stutterers,
truth-spellers, sunk in protoplasm to the tops
of your souls ? What is it that you are going
to do with us? How many generations of
youths do you want ? When will souls be al-
lowed again ? When will they be allowed in
college ?

Well, well, I say to my soul, what does it all
come to ? Why all this ado about it one way or
the other? Is it not a great, fresh, eager,
boundless world ? Does it not roll up out of
Darkness with new children on it, night after
night ? What does it matter, I say to my soul —
a generation or so — from the ridge-pole of the
world ? The great Sun comes round again. It

flDonafcs 117

travels over the tops of seas and mountains.
Microbes in their dewdrops, seeds in their
winds, stars in their courses, worms in their
apples, answer it, and the hordes of the ants
in their ant-hills run before it. And what does
it matter after all, under the great Dome, a
few hordes of factmongers more or less, glim-
mering and wonderless, crawlers on the bottom
of the sea of time, lovers of the ooze of know-
ledge, feeling with slow, myopic mouths at
Infinite Truth ?

But when I see my four faces — the faces of
my four special boys, when I hear the college
bells ringing to them, it matters a great deal.
My soul will not wait. What is the ridge-
pole of the world ? The distance of a ridge-
pole does not count. The extent of a universe
does not seem to make very much difference.
The next ten generations do not help very
much on this one. I go forth in my soul. I
take hold of the first scientist I meet — my
whole mind pummelling him. * * What is it ? "
I say, " what is it you are doing with us and
with the lives of our children ? What is it
you are doing with yourself ? Truth is not a
Thing. Did you think it ? Truth is not even
a Heap of Things. It is a Light. How dare
you mock at inferring? How dare you to
think to escape the infinite? You cannot
escape the infinite even by making yourself
small enough. It is written that thou shalt be
infinitely small if thou art not infinitely large.

Hrt ot

Not to infer is to contradict the very nature of
facts. Not to infer is not to live. It is to cease
to be a fact one's self. What is education if
one does not infer ? Vacuums rolling around
in vacuums. Atoms cross-examining atoms.
And you say you will not guess ? Do you need
to be cudgelled with a whole universe to begin
to learn to guess ? What is all your science —
your boasted science, after all, but more raw
material to make more guesses with ? Is not
the whole Future Tense an inference ? Is not
History — that which has actually happened — a
mystery ? You yourself are a mere probability,
and God is a generalisation. What does it
profit a man to discover The Inductive Method
and to lose his own soul ? What is The In-
ductive Method ? Do you think that all these
scientists who have locked their souls up and a
large part of their bodies, in The Inductive
Method, if they had waited to be born by The
Inductive Method, would ever have heard of
it ? Being born is one inference and dying is
another. Man leaves a wake of infinity after
him wherever he goes, and of course it 's where
he does n't go. It 's all infinity — one way or
the other."

And it came to pass in my dream as I lay on
my bed in the night, I thought I saw Man my
brother blinking under the dome of space, in-
finite monad that he is: I saw him with a glass
in one hand and a Slide of Infinity in the other,

/IDultipltcatton Uables 119

and, in my dream, out of His high heaven God
leaned down to me and said to me, * ' What is .iat*°"
THAT?"

And as I looked I laughed and prayed in my
heart, I scarce knew which, and " Oh, Most
Excellent Deity! Who would think it!" I
cried. " I do not know, but I think — / think —
it is a man, thinking he is studying a GERM —
one tiny particle of inimitable Immensity og-
ling another! "

And a very pretty sight it is, too, oh Brother
Monads — if we do not take it seriously.

And what we really need next, oh comrades,
scientists — each under our separate stones — is
the lyaugh Out of Heaven which shall come
down and save us — laugh the roofs of our
stones off. Then we shall stretch our souls
with inferences. We shall lie in the great sun
and warm ourselves.

VIII

flDultiplication Gables

It would seem to be the main trouble with
the scientific mind of the second rank that it
overlooks the nature of knowledge in the thirst
for exact knowledge. In an infinite world the
better part of the knowledge a man needs to
have does not need to be exact.

These things being as they are, it would seem
that the art of reading books through their

I2O

SLost Hrt ot IReafcing

cation
Cables

backs is an equally necessary art to a great
scientist and to a great poet. If it is necessary
to great scientists and to great poets it is all the
more necessary to small ones, and to the rest of
us. It is the only way, indeed, in which an im-
mortal human being of any kind can get what
he deserves to have to live his life with — a
whole cross-section of the universe. A gentle-
man and a scholar will take nothing less.

If a man is to get his cross-section of the uni-
verse, his natural share in it, he can only get it
by living in the qualities of things instead of
the quantities ; by avoiding duplicate facts,
duplicate persons, and principles ; by using the
multiplication table in knowledge (inference)
instead of adding everything up, by taking all
things in this world (except his specialty)
through their spirits and essences, and, in gen-
eral, by reading books through their backs.

The problem of cultivating these powers in
a man, when reduced to its simplest terms, is
reduced to the problem of cultivating his im-
agination or organ of not needing to be told
things.

However much a man may know about wise
reading and about the principles of economy in
knowledge, in an infinite world the measure of
his knowledge is bound to be determined, in
the long run, by the capacity of his organ of
not needing to be told things — of reading
books through their backs.

II — On Reading for
Principles

©n Changing ©ne's Conscience

E were sitting by my fireplace— several
of our club. I had just been reading

out loud a little thing of my own. I have for- 'ce

gotten the title. It was something about Books

that Other People ought to Read, I think.

I stopped rather suddenly, rather more sud-

denly than anybody had hoped. At least no-

body had thought what he ought to say about

it. And I saw that the company, after a sort

of general, vague air of having exclaimed pro-

perly, was settling back into the usual helpless

silence one expects — after the appearance of an

idea at clubs.

" Why does n't somebody say something ? "
I said.

121

122

SLost Hrt ot IReafcing

On Changs

ing One's

Conscience

P. G. S. of M.: " We are thinking."

' ' Oh, " I said. I tried to feel grateful. But
everybody kept waiting.

I was a good deal embarrassed and was get-
ting reckless and was about to make the very
serious mistake, in a club, of seeing if I could
not rescue one idea by going out after it with
another, when The Mysterious Person (who is
the only man in our club whose mind ever
really comes over and plays in my yard) in the
goodness of his heart spoke up. * * I have not
heard anything in a long time," he began (the
club looked at him rather anxiously), " which
has done — which has made me feel — less
ashamed of myself than this paper. I "

It seemed to me that this was not exactly a
fortunate remark. I said I did n't doubt I
could do a lot of good that way, probably, if I
wanted to — going around the country making
people less ashamed of themselves.

" But I don't mean that I feel really ashamed
of myself about books I have not read," said
The Mysterious Person. ' ' What I mean is,
that I have a kind of slinking feeling that I
ought to — a feeling of being ashamed for not
being ashamed."

I told The M. P. that I thought New Eng-
land was full of people just like him — people
with a lot of left-over consciences.

The P. G. S. of M. wanted to know what I
meant by that.

I said I thought there were thousands of

Cbanging ©ne's Conscience

123

people — one sees them everywhere in Massa-
chusetts — fairly intelligent people, people
who are capable of changing their minds
about things, but who can't change their
consciences. Their consciences seem to keep
hanging on to them, in the same set way —
somehow — with or without their minds.
" Some people's consciences don't seem to no-
tice much, so far as I can see, whether they
have minds connected with them or not."
"Don't you know what it is," I appealed to
the P. G. S. of M., " to get everything all fixed
up with your mind and your reason and your
soul ; that certain things that look wrong are
all right, — the very things of all others that you
ought to do and keep on doing, — and then have
your conscience keep right on the same as it
always did — tatting them up against you ? "

The P. G. S. of M. said something about not
spending very much time thinking about his
conscience.

I said I did n't believe in it, but I thought
that if a man had one, it was apt to trouble him
a little off and on — especially if the one he had
was one of these left-over ones. " If you had
one of these consciences — I mean the kind of
conscience that pretends to belong to you, and
acts as if it belonged to some one else, ' ' I said
— "one of these dead-frog-leg, reflex-action
consciences, working and twitching away on
you day and night, the way I have, you 'd
have to think about it sometimes. You 'd get

On Cbangs
ing ©tie's

Conscience

124

OLost Hrt ot 1Rea&in0

©n tbe Uns
tolerance

of JEr*
perfence^

people

so ashamed of it. You 'd feel trifled with so.
You 'd -- "

The P. G. S. of M. said something about not
being very much surprised — over my case. He
said that people who changed their minds as
often as I did could n't reasonably expect con-
sciences spry enough.

His general theory seemed to be that I had
a conscience once and wore it out.

11 It 's getting to be so with everybody nowa-
days," he said. "Nobody is settled. Ev-
erything is blown about. We do not respect
tradition either in ourselves or in the life about
us. No one listens to the Voice of Experi-
ence. ' '

" There she blows! " I said. I knew it was
coming sooner or later. I added that one of
the great inconveniences of life, it seemed to
me, was the Intolerance of Experienced People.

tbe Intolerance of Eyperiencet)
people

It is generally assumed by persons who have
taken the pains to put themselves in this very
disagreeable class, that people in general— all
other people — are as inexperienced as they
look. If a man speaks on a subject at all in
their presence, they assume he speaks autobio-
graphically. These people are getting thicker

intolerance ot Bjperiencefc people

125

every year. One can't go anywhere without
finding them standing around with a kind of
" How-do-you-know ? " and " Did-it-happen-
to-you ? ' ' air every time a man says something
he knows by — well — by seeing it — perfectly
plain seeing it. One does n't need to stand up
to one's neck in experience, in a perfect muck
of experience, in order to know things, in order
to know they are there. People who are experi-
enced within an inch of their lives, submerged
in experience, until all you can see of them is
a tired look, are always calling out to the man
who sees a thing as he is going by — sees it, I
mean, with his mind; sees it without having
to put his feet in it — they are always calling
out to him to come back and be with them, and
know life, as they call it, and duck under to
Experience. Now, to say nothing of living
with such persons, it is almost impossible to
talk with them. It is n't safe even to philo-
sophise when they are around. If a man vent-
ures the assertion in their presence that what
a woman loves in a lover is complete subjuga-
tion they argue that either he is a fool and is
asserting what he has not experienced, or he is
still more of one and has experienced it. The
idea that a man may have several principles
around him that he has not used yet does not
occur to them. The average amateur mother,
when she belongs to this type, becomes a per-
fect bigot toward a maiden aunt who advances,
perhaps, some harmless little Froebel idea. She

©n tbe Una
tolerance

of J£$*
pertenceo

people

OFTHE

UNIVERSITY ]

OF ./

126

OLost Hrt ot

On tbe 1fn=
tolerance

perfenceo
people

swears by the shibboleth of experience, and
every new baby she has makes her more disa-
greeable to people who have not had babies.
The only way to get acquainted with her is to
have a baby. She assumes that a motherless
woman has a motherless mind. The idea that
a rich and bountiful womanhood, which is sav-
ing its motherhood up, which is free from the
absorption and the haste, keenly observant and
sympathetic, may come to a kind of motherly
insight, distinctly the result of not being ex-
perienced, does not occur to her. The art of
getting the result — the spirit of experience,
without paying all the cost of the experience
itself — needs a good word spoken for it nowa-
days. Some one has yet to point out the value
and power of what might be called The Maiden-
Aunt Attitude toward Life. The world has
had thousands of experienced young mothers
for thousands of years — experienced out of
their wits — piled up with experiences they
don't know anything about; but, in the mean-
time, the most important contribution to the
bringing-up of children in the world that has
ever been known — the kindergarten — was
thought of in the first place by a man who was
never a mother, and has been developed en-
tirely in the years that have followed since by
maiden aunts.

The spiritual power and manifoldness and
largeness which is the most informing quality
of a really cultivated man comes from a certain

Ibavimj ©ne's Bjperience Bone ©ut

127

refinement in him, a gift of knowing by tast-
ing. He seems to have touched the spirits of
a thousand experiences we know he never has
had, and they seem to have left the souls of
sorrows and joys in him. He lives in a kind
of beautiful magnetic fellowship with all real
life in the world. This is only possible by a
sort of unconscious economy in the man's na-
ture, a gift of not having to experience things.
Avoiding experience is one of the great cre-
ative arts of life. We shall have enough before
we die. It is forced upon us. We cannot even
select it, most of it. But, in so far as we can
select it, — in one's reading, for instance, — it
behooves a man to avoid experience. He at
least wants to avoid experience enough to have
time to stop and think about the experience he
has; to be sure he is getting as much out of his
experience as it is worth.

Ill

©n Ibaving ©ne's JEyperience IDone
©at

' ' But how can one avoid an experience ? ' '
By heading it off with a principle. Princi-
ples are a lot of other people's experiences, in
a convenient form a man can carry around with
him, to keep off his own experiences with.

No other rule for economising knowledge
can quite take the place, it seems to me, of

On Ifoavtmj
©ne'eEy*
perience
Bone Out

128

OLost Hrt of

©it ttmvtng
©ne'e Efs
perience

Done Out

reading for principles. It economises for a
man both ways at once. It not only makes it
possible for a man to have the whole human
race working out his life for him, instead of
having to do it all himself, but it makes it pos-
sible for him to read anything he likes, to get
something out of almost anything he does not
like, which he is obliged to read. If a man has
a habit of reading for principles, for the law
behind everything, he cannot miss it. He
cannot help learning things, even from people
who don't know them.

The other evening when The P. G. S. of M.
came into my study, he saw the morning paper
lying unopened on the settle by the fireplace.

" Have n't you read this yet ? " he said.

"No, not to-day."

" Where are you, anyway ? Why not ? "

I said I had n't felt up to it yet, did n't feel
profound enough — something to that effect.

The P. G. S. of M. thinks a newspaper
should be read in ten minutes. He looked over
at me with a sort of slow, pitying, Boston-Pub-
lic-Iyibrary expression he has sometimes.

I behaved as well as I could — took no notice
for a minute.

"The fact is, I have changed," I said,
" about papers and some things. I have times
of thinking I 'm improved considerably," I
added recklessty.

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

1ba\?tn0 ©tie's Experience Bone ©ut

129

" 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 feel-
ing 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 any-
thing 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 su-
perior to myself, but I have n'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 news-
paper, unfolded out of starlight, gleaner of a
thousand sunsets around a world, and talk at
the same time. I don't say, ' There 's noth-
ing in it,' interrupt a planet to chew my food,

On Ibaving
©ne'a TBx
perience

Done Out

130

3Lost Hrt of TReafcing

©n Ifoavfng
©ne'g Er«
pericnce
Bone ©at

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 shin-
ing 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 su-
perior 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, love-
less, 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.

1Rea&in0 a Iftewspaper in Tien /HMnutes

©n IReaMng a Wewspaper in
Gen flDinutee

I am not saying it does not take a very intel-
ligent 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 intelli-
gent 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 news-
paper as he likes. He is not confined to one
way. He does not read it in ten minutes be-
cause he has a mere ten-minute mind, but be-
cause 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 mat-
ter, 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 prin-
ciples to stow things away in. Nothing really
needs to be wasted. If one knows where every-
thing 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, tremen-
dous, and boundless acts that can be performed

tfteabing a

t\CVS>Ss

paper in

Uen
/BMnutes

132

QLost Hrt ot TReafcing

<S>n
tfteafcing a

paper in
Uen

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 news-
paper, 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, pro-
tecting 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 ca-
pacity 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 ex-
pects 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.

General "(Information

133

. . . Thousands of years in a minute, phi-
losophies, 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 su-
preme acts of presence of mind in a human life.

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 morn-
ing 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 news-
paper 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 seri-
ous, sensitive, suggestive, improving, Atlas-
like fashion, it would be better he had never
learned to read at all. At all events, if it 's

General

Unformas

tion

134

Xost Hrt of 1ReaMn0

General

Unfocmas

tion

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 prin-
ciples is, that if one reads for principles, one
really cannot miss it in reading. There is al-
ways 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,

General Unformation

I35

that their desultory reading (in the fine strenu-
ous sense) has been the making of them. The
intensely suggestive habit of thought, the pre-
hensile 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 litera-
ture, 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 to-
gether,— has its most natural background in
what" would seem at first probably, to most
minds, incidental or accidental habits of obser-
vation.

One always knows a work of art of the sec-
ond 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 de-
fiant and elusive. There is a sense of infinity
— a gathered-from -every where 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.

General

Unfovma*

tion

i36

Xost Hrt ot TCeafcing

General

flnfotmas
tion

It would be hard to think of any intellectual
or spiritual habit more likely to give a man a
bi-sexuai 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 ev-
erything 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 pos-
sibly be found than a daily newspaper of the
higher type. For scope, points of view, topics,
directions of interest, catholicity, many-sided-
ness, 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

General Huformation

I37

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 Im-
mortal, 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 im-
mediately 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 para-
graph, 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 prin-
ciples may make a man seem very slow at first
— several years slower than other people — but
as every principle he reads with makes it pos-
sible 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

General

Unforma*

tion

!Host Hrt of IReafcing

General

Informs*

tion

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 Christen-
dom 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 con-
venience that reading for principles appeals to
a vigorous mind. It is the short-cut to know-
ledge. The man who is once started in read-
ing 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 be-
comes 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 prin-
ciples. 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

General "[Information

all through. He does not need to deny that
the bare scientific method, the hugging of the
outside of a thing, the being deliberately super-
ficial 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 ap-
pears 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

General

flnformao
tion

140

SLost Hrt of

General

Unformas
tion

sermon and the essay, could fairly be traced to
the temporary failure of education, the disap-
pearance 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 — philo-
sophers. 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 ser-
mon 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 in-
duces conviction by playing upon the power of
generalisation, by arousing the associations
and experiences that have formed the princi-
ples of his reader's mind. He makes his ap-
peal 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,

But

141

economical working organ in a world as large »ut
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 pos-
sible practicable outfit for living in it.

Reading for principles is its most natural
gymnasium.

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 be-
ing. 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 philo-
sophic 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 prin-
ciples! "

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

" You always are with other people's."

II Well, there Js Meakins," I admitted.

142

!!Lo5t Hrt ot

3But — ' You would n't want a Meakins kind of a

mind, would you ? ' ' (Meakins is always read-
ing for principles.)

I refused to answer at once. I knew I did n'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 is n't that he reads for prin-
ciples, 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, de-
liberately 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 com-

143

pelled to study a map. He does n't care any- JBut
thing about me except as one more piece of
paper to stamp his map on. And he does n'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 be-
comes 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 illus-
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 intel-
lectual 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 par-
ticular 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

144

OLost Hrt of

Cut — 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 was n'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 does n't notice humanity in particu-
lar. 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 foot-
note 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 tie whites of his
eyes) and talks deeply and tenderly and in-
structively 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

145

whole roomful of warm, vital people, sitting »ut
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 Mea-
kins. 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 ex-
tracts. 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 after-
ward 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 conde-
scending, 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^

146

Hrt of

3But — author of The Evolution of the Ego look
at MB, 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 glis-
tening 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 min-
ute— 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

But 147

down under the tree for quite a while, perfectly »ut
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 ' '

1 ' I SAY ! ' ' said Meakins, his great voice
roaring on my little polite, opposing sentence
like surf over a pebble, * ' that the princi-
ples "

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.

i48

Slost Brt ot 1Rea&in0

»ut — 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, hap-
pily, at last, both of us, like awkward, won-
dering boys, went to bed.

149

III— Reading Down
Through

flnsi&e

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 illus-
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

Hrt of IReafcing

<$>n 3Belmj
Xoneljj
witba
£ooft

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 tak-
ing a long, slow look at his own heart. So
does everybody else.

©n Being Xonel? witb a ffioofc

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 ought n'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

JSeing Xonels witb a JBoofe

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 peo-
ple 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 some-
thing 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 did n't. He was still at large, worry-
ing 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 impracti-
cal 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 is n'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

On JBeing
lonely
witba

JSoofc

Xost Hrt of

©n JBcing

lonely

witba

JBoofc

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

Ifteepimj ©tber /IDinfcs

153

least from having spells of wasting it, is to
begin by reading down through.

Ill

Ikeeping ©tber flIMnbs ©ff

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 differ-
ent, but in being honest — really having some-
thing 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, be-
cause none of it can possibly be lost. And it
can all be used on the place.

IReepina
©tber

%ost Hrt of IReafcing

Keeping
©tber

I do not know how it is with others nowa-
days, but I find that this feeling of originality
in an experience, in my own case, is exceed-
ingly 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 regu-
lar 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 reg-
ularly hardly knows what to do with it part of
the time. But it makes having a mind inter-
esting. There 's a kind of pleasant, lusty feel-

ing in it — a feeling of reality and honesty that
makes having a mind — even merely one's own
mind — seem almost respectable.

Jfiacfcwavbs

IReabino Bacfcwar&s

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 orig-
inality was wrong.

If Sir Joshua Reynolds had gone to Italy
earlier he would never have been heard of ex-
cept as a copyist, lecturer, or colour-commen-
tator. 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, con-
front 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, sub-
ject to the whole world and yet who has a
whole world subject to him, either by turns or
at will.

'56

&ost Hrt ot

•Reading

36acfc\var&s

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 re-
ceived an ideal education, having begun his
education properly, with self-command, he
completed his career with a kind of Reynolds-
ocracy — 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 princi-
ples 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 ig-
norant and creative and English, long enough
to get a good start with himself before he went

Bacfewarfcs

157

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 Js no-
thing better than having one's originality rid-
den 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 be-
come absolutely necessary so far as I am con-
cerned, 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

tfteaMng

'58

SLost Hrt of 1Rea&in0

•Rea&tng

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 L,ittle 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 notic-
ing. 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

IReafctng JBacfewarfcs

159

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 col-
umn, 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 in-
terested 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.

JBachwar&a

i6o

SLost Hrt of

•Keabtng
JBachwar&a

As has been said by Hoffentotter (in the four-
teenth chapter of his great masterpiece) : " If
you find that you cannot go on, gentle reader,
in the reading of this book, pray read it back-
wards. ' '

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. Kven the humblest man must ad-
mit 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

161

(Balling tbe Meeting to ©rfcer

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 philos-
opher.

Reading for facts makes a man

"It does n'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

Calling tbe

/Meeting
to ©r&er

162

3Lost Brt of IReafcing

Calling tbe

/fleeting
to ©rfcer

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 collec-
tion 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 reason-
able 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

Calling tbe Meeting to

163

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 invol-
untary, 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

Calling tbe
Meeting
to ©rber

164

OLost Hrt of IReafcing

Calling tbe
Meeting

Nature, whether they are noticed or not, he
ought to find it worth his while to do some-
thing in return, conduct his life with reference
to them. They ought to have the main chance
at him. It seems reasonable also that his read-
ing 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 offi-
cers, 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 at-
tracted to each other, day and night, — getting
themselves made over into each other, mutu-
ally mastering the world.

Certainly, if there is one token rather than
another of the great scientist or poet in distinc-

Symbolic Jfacts

165

tion 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 read-
ing 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.

Symbolic facts

If the meeting is to accomplish anything be-
fore 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 in-
terrupting. The amount of knowledge a man
is going to be able to master in the world

Symbolic

ffacts

i66

SLost Hrt ot 1Reat>in0

Symbolic
jfacta

depends upon the number of facts he knows
how to avoid.

This is where our common scientific train-
ing— 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 genera-
tion who by mere circumstance cannot be edu-
cated— bowled over by their memories. Even
at the worst only a few hundred persons can be
made over into reductio-ad-absurdum Stanley

duplicates : H principle of Economy

167

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 get-
ting 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.

Ill

Duplicates : a principle of
jgconom?

I do not suppose that anybody would submit
to my being admitted — I was black-balled be-
fore I was born — to the brotherhood of scien-
tists. 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 mat-
ter-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 him-
self to fall into any general, interesting, fact-
comparing habit. The small poet never thinks

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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 some-
thing.

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 know-
ledge 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

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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 col-
lect 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, representa-
tive 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 any-
thing 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

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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

Blank paper frame of

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."

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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 did n'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 some-
how 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

36lanfe paper fframe of flDin& 173

Shakespeare, who never get so low in their Ube
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, in-
stead 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 Shake-
speare writes with any smaller or less general,
less overflowing purpose than Shakespeare had
in writing it should be advised to do his read-
ing with some smaller, more carefully fitted
author, — one nearer to his size. Of course if
one wants to be a mere authority on Shake-
speare or a mere author there is no denying
that one can do it, and do it very well, by read-
ing him with some purpose — some purpose that
is too small to have ever been thought of be-
fore ; but if one wants to understand him, get
the wild native flavour and power of him, he

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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 af-
ford— 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 propor-
tion 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 might y work him-
self if he let William Shakespeare work on
him some. Before he knows it the universe
that Shakespeare lived in becomes his uni-
verse. 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.

Hbe JSlanfe paper fframe of flDinfc 175

1 ' The power and effect of a book which is a Ube
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 Bri-
tannica or the Hon. Carroll D. Wright, Com-
missioner of Statistics, or Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
I admitted that in reading dictionaries, stat-
istics, 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 deny-
ing 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 di-
rections 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

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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.

TUsefullp Tflnfintebe&

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 mono-
tonous. 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 innu-
merable possibility wore on him. He wanted
to feel that a book was coming to something,
and if he could n't feel in reading it that the
book was coming to something he wanted to

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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 read-
ing certain classics. I brought out quite a nice
little list of them, but I could n'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 con-
temporary novel under discussion.

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

" Neither does one of Keats' s poems," I said,
"or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The odour
of a rose does n'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 does n'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

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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 be-
fore we came to the Atlantic. The rest is Con-
gressional 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 did n'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 did n'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

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179

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 was n'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 did n'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 irrele-
vantly,— 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

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"Unfiniabeb

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 imagina-
tion 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 Ameri-
can mind that the greatest result of all in read-
ing, 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 him-
self, 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 defi-
nitely 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

ZEbe msefuih? IHnfinisbeJ) 181

events of it, and the unfinished people of it, Ube
flocking out to him, interpreting for him the
still unfinished events and all the dear un-
finished 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 blas-
phemed a little in my presence — if a novel fin-
ishes 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 — know-
ing 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 prac-
tical because it is eternal and cannot be wasted
and because it is for ever to the point.

I/ife 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.

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III
Htbletics

BtbietfcB ' ' The world is full, ' ' Ellery Channing 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 be-
lieve that, if an archangel were to come to this
earth and select a profession on it, instead of
taking up some splendid, serious, dignified call-
ing he would devote himself to a comparatively
small and humble-looking career — that of jog-
ging 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 tread-
mill-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

Btbletics

183

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, delect-
able, 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 uuexpecting people, bills that
might just as well wait, tinkering around the
house on the wrong things, the right ones, per-
fectly helpless, standing by. Sitting with one's
feet a little too high (if possible on one's work-
ing desk), being a little foolish and liking it —
making poor puns, enjoying one's bad gram-
mar— 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 intel-
lectual, 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

Btbletics

184

Hrt ot

Htbietfc0 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 play-
ing 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-sighted-
ness, 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,

Btbletfcs

185

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 * ' every-
thing 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 culmi-
nating 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 re-
jecting 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 cen-
tury. The saying of the man of genius that
everything is grist to his mill merely means
that he reads a book athletically, with a mag-
nificent 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

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Xost Hrt of

Htbietics 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 beauti-
ful 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 read-
ing 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,

Htbletfcs

187

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 epi-
demic 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 be-
comes 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

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1 88

Xost Hrt of

Htbietica nothing (that is, with no result) in a universe
where you can play for nothing — and by play-
ing 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 him-
self, 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

passion of Grutb

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

189

•Cbe

passion of
ttrutb

190

Hrt of TRcaDing

Ube

passion of
Urutb

always saying, " Science requires the elimina-
tion 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 elim-
ination of the feelings is true or not true, it
seems to me, according to the size of the feel-
ings. 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

passion of Urutb

191

single great scientific achievement or concep-
tion 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 dis-
interested 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 hav-
ing passions enough to go around. The tem-
porary idea that a scientist cannot be scientific
and emotional at once is based upon the ex-
perience of men who have never had emotions
enough. Men whose emotions are slow and
weak, who have one-sided or wavering emo-
tions, find them inconvenient as a matter of
course. The men who, like Charles Darwin or
some larger Browning, have the passion of dis-
interestedness 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,

passion of
Urutb

192

Xost Hrt ot IReafcing

Ube

passion of
Urutb

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 apprecia-
tion, 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 de-
gree 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,

Ube passion ot Ututb

193

sweeping him out with it into the great work-
room, 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 hu-
manities 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 inhu-
manity 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 any-
thing. The man who finds a God proves quite
as much. And he has his God besides.

ttbe

passion of
Urutb

194

Xost Hrt of

Ube Uopfs
cal point
of View

II
Gopical point of tDiew

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 im-
portant 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 any-
where. 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

Ube Tropical point of

195

have all had to contend with this same diffi-
culty 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 scien-
tist's principle of economy, and the other the
poet's or artist's. The main difference be-
tween 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 en-
tire business of every moment of his life. The
scientist of the average sort begins by partition-
ing the universe off into topics. Having se-
lected his topic and walled himself in with it,
he develops it by walling the rest of the uni-
verse 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 every-
thing in it, is represented in everything he does.
Whatever his specialty may be in poetry,
painting, or literature, he produces an eternal

Ube TTopfs
cat point
of IDiew

196

Xost Hrt of

TEbe Uopia
cal point
of View

result by massing the infinite and eternal into
the result. He succeeds by bringing the uni-
verse 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 appear-
ances. 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

ZTbe topical point of IDiew

197

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 wonder-
ing 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

Ube tropi-
cal point

198

SLost Hrt of IReafcing

Ube Uopis

cal point

of Wew

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.
It is the first law of culture, in the highest
sense, that it always begins and ends with the
fact that a man is a man. Teaching the fact
to a man that he can be a greater man is the
shortest and most practical way of teaching
him other facts. It is only by being a greater
man, by raising his state of being to the nth
power, that he can be made to see the other
facts. The main attribute of the education of
the future, in so far as it obtains to-day, is that
it strikes both ways. It strikes in and makes
a man mean something, and having made the
man — the main fact — mean something, it

ZTopical point of Diew

199

strikes out through the man and makes all
other facts mean something. It makes new
facts, and old facts as good as new. It makes
new worlds. All attempts to make a whole
world without a single whole man anywhere to
begin one out of are vain attempts. We are
going to have great men again some time, but
the science that attempts to build a civilisation
in this twentieth century by subdividing such
men as we already have mocks at itself. The
devil is not a specialist and never will be. He
is merely getting everybody else to be, as fast
as he can.

It is safe to say in this present hour of sub-
divided men and sub-selected careers that any
young man who shall deliberately set out at
the beginning of his life to be interested, at
any expense and at all hazards, in everything,
in twenty or thirty years will have the field
entirely to himself. It is true that he will
have to run, what every more vital man has
had to run, the supreme risk, the risk of being
either a fool or a seer, a fool if he scatters him-
self into everything, a seer if he masses every-
thing into himself. But when he succeeds at
last he will find that for all practical purposes,
as things are going to-day, he will have a
monopoly of the universe, of the greatest force
there is in it, the combining and melting and
fusing force that brings all men and all ideas
together, making the race one — a force which
is the chief characteristic of every great period

Ubc Uopfs
cal point
of VJiew

20O

Xost Hrt of IReafcing

Ube Uopts
cal point
of View

and of every great character that history has
known.

It is obvious that whatever may be its
dangers, the topical or scientific point of view
in knowledge is one that the human race is not
going to get along without, if it is to be master
of the House it lives in. It is also obvious
that the human or artistic, the man-point of
view in knowledge is one that it is not going
to get along without, if the House is to con-
tinue to have Men in it.

The question remains, the topical point of
view and the artistic point of view both being
necessary, how shall a man contrive in the
present crowding of the world to read with
both? Is there any principle in reading that
fuses them both ? And if there is, what is it ?

201

VII— Reading the World
Together

IfocuelnQ

HHHERE are only a few square inches — of
1 cells and things, no one quite knows
what — on a human face, but a man can see
more of the world in those few inches, and
understand more of the meaning of the world
in them, put the world together better there,
than in any other few inches that God has
made. Even one or two faces do it, for a
man, for most of us, when we have seen them
through and through. Not a face anywhere
— no one has ever seen one that was not a
mirror of a whole world, a poor and twisted one
perhaps, but a great one. The man that goes
with it may not know it, may not have much

JFocusing

202

Xost Hrt of

ifocusfna to do with it. While he is waiting to die, God
writes on him; but however it is, every man's
face (I cannot help feeling it when I really look
at it) is helplessly great. It is one man's por-
trait of the universe as he has found it — his
portrait of a Whole. I have caught myself
looking at crowds of faces as if they were rows
of worlds. Is not everything I can know or
guess or cry or sing written on faces? An
audience is a kind of universe by itself. I
could pray to one — when once the soul is
hushed before it. If there were any necessity
to select one place rather than another, any
particular place to address a God in, I think I
would choose an audience. Praying for it in-
stead of to it is a mere matter of form. I can-
not find a face in it that does not lead to a God,
that does not gather a God in for me out of all
space, that is not one of His assembling places.
Many and many- a time when heads were being
bowed have I caught a face in a congregation
and prayed to it and with it. Every man's face
is a kind of prayer he carries around with him.
One can hardly help joining in it. It is
sacrament to look at his face, if only to take
sides in it, join with the God-self in it and
help against the others. Whoever or What-
ever He is, up there across all heaven, He is a
God to me because He can be infinitely small
or infinitely great as He likes. I will not have
a God that can be shut up into any horizon or
shut out of any face. When I have stood be-

ffocusing

203

fore audiences, have really realised faces, felt
the still and awful thronging of them through
my soul, it has seemed to me as if some great
miracle were happening. It 's as if — but who
shall say it ? — Have you never stood, Gentle
Reader, alone at night on the frail rim of the
earth— spread your heart out wide upon the
dark, and let it lie there, —let it be flocked on
by stars ? It is like that when Something is
lifted and one sees faces. Faces are worlds to
me. However hard I try, I cannot get a man,
somehow, any smaller than a world. He is a
world to himself, and God helping me, when I
deal with him, he shall be a world to me. The
dignity of a world rests upon him. His face
is a sum-total of the universe. It is made by
the passing of the infinite through his body.
It is the mark of all things that are, upon his
flesh.

What I like to believe is, that if there is an
organic principle of unity like this in a little
human life, if there is some way of summing
up a universe in a man's face, there must be
some way of summing it up, of putting it to-
gether in his education. It is this summing a
universe up for one's self, and putting it to-
gether for one's self, and for one's own use,
which makes an education in a universe worth
while.

In other words, with a symbol as convenient,
as near to him as his own face, a man need not
go far in seeking for a principle of unity in

^focusing

204

3Lost Hrt of

education. A man's face makes it seem not
unreasonable to claim that the principle of
unity in all education is the man, that the
single human soul is created to be its own
dome of all knowledge. A man's education
may be said to be properly laid out in propor-
tion as it is laid out the way he lays out his
countenance. The method or process by which
a man's countenance is laid out is a kind of
daily organic process of world-swallowing.
What a man undertakes in living is the mak-
ing over of all phenomena, outer sights and
sounds into his own inner ones, the passing of
all outside knowledge through himself. In
proportion as he is being educated he is mak-
ing all things that are, into his own flesh and
spirit.

When one looks at it in this way it is not
too much to say that every man is a world.
He makes the tiny platform of his soul in in-
finite space, a stage for worlds to come to, to
play their parts on. His soul is a little All-
show, a kind of dainty pantomime of the uni-
verse.

It seemed that I stood and watched a world
awake, the great night still upbearing me
above the flood of the day. I watched it
strangely, as a changed being, the godlike-
ness and the might of sleep, the spell of the
All upon me. I became as one who saw the
earth as it is, in a high noon of its real self.

UNIVERSITY

ffocusing

205

Hung in its mist of worlds, wrapped in its own
breath, I saw it — a queer little ball of cooled-
off fire, it seemed, still and swift plunging
through space. And when I looked close in
my heart, I saw cunning little men on it, na-
tions and things running around on it. And
when I looked still nearer, looked at the
lighted side of it, I saw that each little man
was not what I thought — a dot or fleck on
the universe. And I saw that he was a reflec-
tion, a serious, wondrous miniature of all the
rest. It all seemed strange to me at first — to
a man who lives, as I do, in a rather weary,
laborious, painstaking age — that this should
be so. As I looked at the little man I won-
dered if it really could be so. Then, as I
looked, the great light flowed all around the
little man, and the little man reflected the
great light.

But he did not seem to know it.

I felt like calling out to him — to one of them
— telling him out loud to himself, wrapped
away as he was, in his haste and dumbness,
not knowing, and in the funny little noise of
cities in the great still light. And so while
the godlikeness and the might of sleep was
upon me, I watched him, longed for him,
wanted him for myself. I thought of my great
cola, stretched-out wisdom. How empty and
bare it was, this staring at stars one by one,
this taking notes on creation, this slow painful
tour of space, when after all right down there

Jfocuefng

206

Hrt of 1ReaMn0

ffocuainy in this little man, I said " Is not all I can know,
or hope to know stowed away and written
up ? " And when I thought of this — the blur of
sleep still upon me — I could hardly help reach-
ing down for him, half-patronising him, half-
worshipping him, taking him up to myself,
where I could keep him by me, keep him to
consult, watch for the sun, face for the infinite.
—"Dear little fellow!" I said, "my own
queer little fellow! my own little Kosmos,
pocket-size! "

I thought how convenient it would be if I
could take one in my hand, do my seeing
through it, focus my universe with it. And
when the strange mood left me and I came to,
I remembered or thought I remembered that I
was one of Those myself. ' * Why not be your
own little Kosmos-glass ? " I said.

I have been trying it now for some time. It
is hard to regulate the focus of course, and it
is not always what it ought to be. It has to
be allowed for some. I do not claim much for
it. But it's better, such as it is, than a sheer
bit of Nothing, I think, to look at a universe
with.

Ibuman TUnit

It matters little that the worlds that are
made in this way are very different in detail or
emphasis, that some of them are much smaller

ZTbe Ifouman "Quit

207

and more twisted than others. The great
point, so far as education is concerned, is for
all teachers to realise that every man is a
whole world, that it is possible and natural for
every man to be a whole world. His very body
is, and there must be some way for him to have
a whole world in his mind. A being who finds
a way of living a world into his face can find a
way of reading a world together. If a man is
going to have unity, read his world together,
possess all-in-oneness in knowledge, he will
have to have it the way he has it in his face.

It is superficial to assume, as scientists are
apt to do, that in a world where there are in-
finite things to know, a man's knowledge must
have unity or can have unity, in and of itself.
The moment that all the different knowledges
of a man are passed over or allowed to be passed
over into his personal qualities, into the muscles
and traits and organs and natural expressions
of the man, they have unity and force and order
and meaning as a matter of course. Infinite
opposites of knowledge, recluses and separates
of knowledge are gathered and can be seen
gathered every day in almost any man, in the
glance of his eye, in the turn of his lip, or in
the blow of his fist.

It is not the method of science as science,
and it is not in any sense put forward as the
proper method for a man to use in his mere
specialty, but it does seem to be true that if a
man wants to know things which he does not

Ube

Ibuman

•dnit

208

SLost Hit ot

Ibuman
Unit

intend to know all of, the best and most scien-
tific way for him to know such things is to
reach out to them and know them through
their human or personal relations. I can only
speak for myself, but I have found for one that
the easiest and most thorough, practical way
for me to get the benefit of things I do not
know, is to know a man who does. If he is
an educated man, a man who really knows,
who has made what he knows over into himself,
I find if I know him that I get it all — the gist
of it. The spirit of his knowledge, its attitude
toward life, is all in the man, and if I really
know the man, absorb his nature, drink deep
at his soul, I know what he knows — it seems
to me — and what I know besides. It is true
that I cannot express it precisely. He would
have to give the lecture or diagram of it, but I
know it — know what it comes to in life, his life
and my life. I can be seen going around living
with it afterwards, any day. His knowledge
is summed up in him, his whole world is read
together in him, belongs to him, and he belongs
to me. To know a man is to know what he
knows in its best form — the things that have
made the man possible.

A great portrait painter, it has always seemed
to me, is a kind of god in his way — knows
everything his sitters know. He knows what
every man's knowledge has done with the man
— the best part of it — and makes it speak. I
have never yet found myself looking at great

ZTbe

Cannibalism

209

walls of faces (one painter's faces), found my-
self walking up and down in Sargent's soul,
without thinking what a great inhabited,
trooped-through man he was— all knowledges
flocking to him, showing their faces to him,
from the ends of the earth, emptying their
secrets silently out to his brush. If a man like
Sargent has for one of his sitters a great as-
tronomer, an astronomer who is really great,
who knows and absorbs stars, Sargent absorbs
the man, and as a last result the stars in the
man, and the man in Sargent, and the man's
stars in Sargent, all look out of the canvas.

It is the spirit that sums up and unifies
knowledge. It is a fact to be reckoned with,
in education, that knowledge can be summed
up, and that the best summing up of it is a
human face.

Ill

fbigber Cannibalism

It is not unnatural to claim, therefore, that
the most immediate and important short-cut in
knowledge that the comprehensive or educated
man can take comes to him through his human
and personal relations. There is no better way
of getting at the spirits of facts, of tracing out
valuable and practical laws or generalisations,
than the habit of trying things on to people in
one's mind.

Ube

trfgber

Cannibal*

ism

210

Xost Hrt of

Ube

Digber

Cannibals

ism

I have always thought that if I ever got dis-
couraged and had to be an editor, I would do
this more practically. As it is, I merely do it
with books. I find no more satisfactory way
of reading most books — the way one has to —
through their backs, than reading the few
books that one does read, through persons and
for persons and with persons. It is a great
waste of time to read a book alone. One needs
room for rows of one's friends in a book. One
book read through the eyes of ten people has
more reading matter in it than ten books read
in a common, lazy, lonesome fashion. One
likes to do it, not only because one finds one's
self enjoying a book ten times over, getting ten
people's worth out of it, but because it makes
a kind of sitting-room of one's mind, puts a
fire-place in it, and one watches the ten people
enjoying one another.

It may be for better and it may be for
worse, but I have come to the point where, if I
really care about a book, the last thing I want
to do with it is to sit down in a chair and read
it by myself. If I were ever to get so low in
my mind as to try to give advice to a real live
author (any author but a dead one), it would
be, ' ' Let there be room for all of us, O Author,
in your book. If I am to read a live, happy,
human book, give me a bench."

I have noticed that getting at truth on most
subjects is a dramatic process rather than an
argumentative one. One gets at truth either

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in a book or in a conversation not so much by
logic as by having different people speak. If
what is wanted is a really comprehensive view
of a subject, two or three rather different men
placed in a row and talking about it, saying
what they think about it in a perfectly plain
way, without argument, will do more for it
than two or three hundred syllogisms. A man
seems to be the natural or wild form of the
syllogism, which this world has tacitly agreed
to adopt. Even when he is a very poor one he
works better with most people than the other
kind. If a man takes a few other men (very
different ones), uses them as glasses to see a
truth through, it will make him as wise in a
few minutes, with that truth, as a whole human
race.

Knowledge which comes to a man with any
particular sweep or scope is, in the very nature
of things, dramatic.

[I fear, Gentle Reader, I am nearing a con-
viction. I feel a certain constraint coming
over me. I always do, when I am nearing
a conviction. I never can be sure how my
soul will take it upon itself to act when I am
making the attempt I am making now, to state
what is to me an intensely personal belief, in a
general, convincing, or impersonal way. The
embarrassing part of a conviction is that IT is
SO. And when a man attempts to state a
thing as it is, to speak for God or everybody,

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— well, it would not be respectable not to be
embarrassed a little — speaking for God. I
know perfectly well, sitting here at my desk,
this minute, with this conviction up in my
pen, that it is merely a little thing of my own,
that I ought to go on from this point cool and
straight with it. But it is a conviction, and if
you find me, Gentle Reader, in the very next
page, swivelling off and speaking for God, I can
only beg that both He and you will forgive me.
I solemnly assure you herewith, that, however
it may look, I am merely speaking for myself.
I have thought of having a rubber stamp for
this book, a stamp with IT SEEMS TO ME on it.
A good many of these pages need going over
with it afterwards. I do not suppose there is
a man living — either I or any other dogmatist —
who would not enjoy more speaking for himself
(if anybody would notice it) than speaking for
God. I have a hope that if I can only hold
myself to it on this subject I shall do much
better in speaking for myself, and may speak
accidentally for God besides. I leave it for
others to say, but it is hard not to point a little
— in a few places.]

But here is the conviction. As I was going
to say, knowledge which comes to a man with
any particular sweep or scope is in the very
nature of 'things dramatic. If the minds of
two men expressing opinions in the dark could
be flashed on a canvas, if there could be such
a thing as a composite photograph of an opinion

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—a biograph of it, — it would prove to be, with
nine men out of ten, a dissolving view of faces.
The unspoken sides of thought are all dramatic.
The palest generalisation a man can express,
if it could be first stretched out into its origins,
and then in its origins could be crowded up
and focused, would be found to be a long un-
conscious procession of human beings — a mur-
mur of countless voices. All our knowledge
is conceived at first, taken up and organised in
actual men, flashed through the delights of
souls and the music of voices upon our brains.
If it is true even in the business of the street
that the greatest efficiency is reached by dealers
who mix with the knowledge of their subject
a keen appreciation and mastery of men, it is
still more true of the business of the mind that
the greatest, most natural and comprehensive
results are reached through the dramatic or
human insights.

All our knowledge is dead drama. Wisdom
is always some old play faded out, blurred
into abstractions. A principle is a wonderful
disguised biograph. The power of Carlyle's
French Revolution is that it is a great spiritual
play, a series of pictures and faces.

It was the French Revolution all happening
over again to Carlyle, and it was another
French Revolution to every one of his readers.
It was dynamic, an induced current from Paris
via Craigenputtock, because it was dramatic —
great abstractions, playing magnificently over

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great concretes. Every man in Carlyle's his-
tory is a philosophy, and every abstraction in
it a man's face, a beckoning to us. He always
seems to me a kind of colossus of a man stalking
across the dark, way out in The Past, using
men as search -lights. He could not help do-
ing his thinking in persons, and everything he
touches is terribly and beautifully alive. It
was because he saw things in persons, that is,
in great, rapid, organised sum-totals of experi-
ence and feeling, that he was able to make so
much of so little as a historian, and what is
quite as important (at least in history), so little
of so much.

The true criticism of Carlyle as a historian
is not a criticism of his method, that he
went about in events and eras doing his
seeing and thinking with persons, but that
there were certain sorts of persons that Car-
lyle, with his mere lighted-up-brute imagina-
tion, could never see with. They were opaque
to him. Every time he lifted one of them up
to see ten years with, or a bevy of events or
whatever it might be, he merely made blots or
sputters with them, on his page. But it was
his method that made it a great page, wider
and deeper and more splendid than any of the
others, and the blots were always obvious blots,
did no harm there — no historical harm — almost
any one could see them, and if they could not,
were there not always plenty of little chilled-
through historians, pattering around after him,

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tracking them out? But the great point of
Carlyle's method was that he kept his per-
spective with it. Never flattened out like
other historians, by tables of statistics, unbe-
wildered by the blur of nobodies, he was able
to have a live, glorious giant's way of writing,
a godlike method of handling great handfuls
of events in one hand, of unrolling great
stretches of history with a look, of seeing
things and making things seen, in huge, broad,
focussed, vivid human wholes. It was a his-
torical method of treating great masses, which
Thomas Carlyle and Shakespeare and Homer
and the Old Testament all have in common.

The fact that it fails in the letter and with
hordes of literal persons, that it has great gaps
of temperament left over in it, is of lesser
weight. The letter passes by (thank Heaven !)
in the great girths of time and space. In all
lasting or real history, only the spirit has a
right to live. Temperaments in histories even
at the worst are easily allowed for, filled out
with temperaments of other historians — that is,
they ought to be and are going to be if we ever
have real historians any more, historians great
enough and alive enough to have tempera-
ments, and with temperaments great enough
to write history the way God does — that can be
read.

History can only be truly written by men
who have concepts of history, and ' ' Every
concept," says Hegel, "must be universal,

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concrete, and particular, or else it cannot be
a concept." That is, it must be dramatic.

And what is true of a great natural man or
man of genius like Carlyle is equally true of
all other natural persons whether men of genius
or not. A stenographic report of all the
thoughts of almost any man's brain for a day
would prove to almost any scientist how spirit-
ually organised, personally conducted a human
being's brain is bound to be, almost in spite
of itself— even when it has been educated, arti-
ficially numbed and philosophised. A man
may not know the look of the inside of his
mind well enough to formulate or recognise it,
but nearly every man's thinking is done, as a
matter of course, either in people, or to people,
or for people, or out of people. It is the way
he grows, the way the world is woven through
his being, the way of having life more abun-
dantly.

It is not at all an exaggeration to say that if
Shakespeare had not created his characters
they would have created him. One need not
wonder so very much that Shakespeare grew so
masterfully in his later plays and as the years
went on. Such a troop of people as flocked
through Shakespeare's soul would have made
a Shakespeare (allowing more time for it) out
of almost anybody.

The essential wonder of Shakespeare, the
greatness which has made men try to make a
dozen specialists out of him, is not so very

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wonderful when one considers that he was a
dramatist. A dramatist cannot help growing
great. At least he has the outfit for it if he
wants to. One hardly wants to be caught giv-
ing a world recipe, — a prescription for being a
great man; but it does look sometimes as if the
habit of reading for persons, of being a sort of
spiritual cannibal, or man-eater, of going about
through all the world absorbing personalities
the way other men absorb facts, would gradual-
ly store up personality in a man, and make him
great — almost inconveniently great, at times,
and in spite of himself. The probabilities seem
to be that it was because Shakespeare instinc-
tively picked out persons in the general scheme
of knowledge more than facts; it was because
persons seemed to him, on the whole in every
age, to be the main facts the age was for, summed
the most facts up; it was because they made
him see the most facts, helped him to feel and
act on facts, made facts experiences to him,
that William Shakespeare became so supreme
and masterful with facts and men both.

To learn how to be pro tern, all kinds of men,
about all things, to enjoy their joys in the
things, is the greatest and the livest way of
learning the things.

To learn to be a Committee of the Tempera-
ments all by one's self (which is what Shake-
speare did) is at once the method and the end
of education — outside of one's specialty.

There could be no better method of doing

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this (no method open to everybody) than the
method, — outside of one's specialty, — of read-
ing for persons and with persons. It makes all
one's life a series of spiritual revelations. It
is like having regular habits of being born
again, of having new experiences at will. It
mobilises all love and passion and delight in the
world and sends it flowing past one's door.

In this day of immeasurable exercises, why
does not some one put in a word for the good
old-fashioned exercise of being born again ? It
is an exercise which few men seem to believe
in, not even once in a lifetime, but it is easily
the best all-around drill for living, and even
for reading, that can be arranged. And it is
not a very difficult exercise if one knows how,
does it regularly enough. It is not at all neces-
sary to go off to another world to believe in re-
incarnations, if one practises on them every
day. Women have always seemed to be more
generally in the way of being born again than
men, but they have less scope and sometimes
there is a certain feverish small ness about it,
and when men once get started (like Robert
Browning in distinction from Mrs. Browning)
they make the method of being born again
seem a great triumphant one. They seem to
have a larger repertoire to be born to, and
they go through it more rapidly and justly.
At the same time it is true that nearly all wo-
men are more or less familiar with the exercise
of being born again — living pro tern, and at

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will — in others, and only a few men do it —
merely the greatest ones, statesmen, diplo-
mats, editors, poets, great financiers, and other
prophets — all men who live by seeing more
than others have time for. They are found to
do their seeing rather easily on the whole.
They do it by the perfectly normal exercise of
being born into other men, looking out of their
eyes a minute, whenever they like. All great
power in its first stage is essentially dramatic,
a man-judging, man-illuminating power, the
power of guessing what other people are going
to think and do.

When the world points out to the young man,
as it is very fond of doing, that he must learn
from experience, what it really means is, that
he must learn from his dramatic drill in human
life, his contact with real persons, his slow,
compulsory scrupulous going the rounds of his
heart, putting himself in the place of real
persons.

Probably every man who lives, in proportion
as he covets power or knowledge, would like to
be (at will at least) a kind of focused every-
body. It is true that in his earlier stages, and
in his lesser moods afterward, he would prob-
ably seem to most people a somewhat teetering
person, diffused, chaotic, or contradictory. It
could hardly be helped — with the raw materials
of a great man all scattered around in him,
great unaccounted-for insights, idle-looking
powers all as yet unfused. But a man in the

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long run (and longer the better) is always
worth while, no matter how he looks in the
making, and it certainly does seem reasonable,
however bad it may look, that this is the way
he is made, that in proportion as he does his
knowing spiritually and powerfully, he will
have to do it dramatically. It sometimes
seems as if knowing, in the best sense, were a
kind of rotary-person process, a being every-
body in a row, a state of living symposium.
The interpenetrating, blending-in, digesting
period comes in due course, the time of settling
down into himself, and behold the man is
made, a unified, concentrated, individual, uni-
versal man — a focused everybody.

This is not quite being a god perhaps, but it
is as near to it, on the whole, as a man can
conveniently get.

Spiritual Ebrift

But perhaps one of the most interesting
things about doing up one's knowing in per-
sons is that it is not only the most alive, but
the most economical knowledge that can be ob-
tained. 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

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221

the point of view of stretching one's compre-
hension, one's essential sympathy or know-
ledge, 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 now-
adays. 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

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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 know-
ledge, 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 encyclo-
pedias 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,

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223

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-sec-
tion 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 space 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 circum-
stances— dandelions, stars, politics, bob-whites,
acids, Kant, and domestic science — but person-
alities, a man's means of seeing things, are de-
termined 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 con-
ceivable occasion, but nothing can happen in
all the world that one cannot see or feel or de-
light 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

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anything that happens along, or a Robert
Burns or a Socrates or a Heine, or an Amiel
or a Dickens or Hugo or any one, or one can
hush one's soul one eternal moment and be the
Son of God. 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 God 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 titles
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

Spiritual Ubrift

225

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 Mat-
thew 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 slow-
ly 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 grass. 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.

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The greatest event of the nineteenth century
was that somewhere in it, at some immense
and hidden moment in it, human knowledge
passed silently over from the emphasis of Per-
sons 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 scrap 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 ? ' '

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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,
did n'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 win-
dows 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 an-
other 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 —

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whispering through all the aisles of thought.
New York spreads itself like a vast concrete phi-
losophy 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 glass,
browbeaten by stone, smothered by smoke, but
that he all but seems to me, this little Broad-
way man, to be slipping off the planet, to
barely belong to the planet. I feel like clutch-
ing 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 be-
hind my engine, out in the fields, I found my-
self listening all over again to the roar (saved
up in me) of the great city. I tried to make
it out, tried to analyse 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

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229

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."

11 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

Ube Cits,

tbe

Cburcb,
an& tbe
College

230

3Lost Htt of

•Cbe Cits,

tbe

Cburcb,
anD tbe
College

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, illimltableness, 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. Kven scholar-
ship, scholarship itself, is under a stone most
of it, prone and pale and like all the rest, under
The Emphasis of Things. Scholarship is get-
ting 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 God and for the humanities, their
vast Thing-libraries, men like dots in them,
their great long, reached-out laboratories, stables

©utstfcers

231

for truth, and I am obliged to confess in spirit
that even the colleges, in all ages the strong-
holds 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, scien-
tific, 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
classes of men toward one another, it is very
hard to sit by and watch the modern college al-
most 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.

ZEbe ©utefoers

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 empha-
sised Things, — who could emphasise Things.

Ube
©utst&ers

232

Xost Hrt ot

Ube

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 sus-
piciously 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

©utsifcers

233

specialists ourselves or vulgarly to compete
with specialists, for the right of living, or get-
ting 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 nonentities for nothings.
And even if a thing is a thing, it is a nothing
to a nonentity. 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 forg-
ing boilers and getting deaf to buy violins, of
having elevated railways for dead men, wire-
less 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

Outsiders

234

Xost Hrt of 1Reafcfn0

Ube

Gutet&ere

off. We are getting to be already, even in
the arts, men with one sense. We have classes
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 (nobodies) because they only
use a hundred and forty-three. " What is the
use of attaining results," one asks, "of mak-
ing 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 be-
ing 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, per-
haps, 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 disgrac-
ing 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 pass the old
secret on.

No one seems to believe in appreciating—-
appreciating more than one thing, at least.

Ube ©utsifcers

235

The practical disappearance in any vital form
of the lecture-lyceum, the sermon, the essay,
and the poem, the annihilation of the imagina-
tion or organ of comprehension, the disappear-
ance of personality, the abolition of the edi-
torial, 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 mod-
ern 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 para-
graphs, 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 to-
gether 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 para-
graph way of thinking, a scrap-bag of a soul,
because he cannot concentrate separate things,

Slost Hrt of

Ube

Outsibcis

cannot put things together. He has no person-
ality because he cannot put himself together.

It is significant that in the days when per-
sonalities were common and when very power-
ful, 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
institution of learning which will produce arbi-
trators, men who have two or three perfectly
good, human sides to their minds, who have
been allowed to keep minds with three dimen-
sions. 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

237

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 col-
lege 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,

Ube

Outsi&cre

3Lost Hrt of IReafcing

Ubc

©utsibets

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 en-
tered not in yourselves and them that were en-
tering in, ye have hindered," and the mighty
message of the one great scholar of his day
who knew a God: <( Whether there be pro-
phecies 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 brass 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 brass and tinkling their cym-
bals, 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 ?"

tbe Morifc Uogetber

239

Now these nineteen hundred years since the Boy
In the temple with The Doctors
Still the wind of faces flying
Through the spaces of niy dream,
" WHAT is POWER? " they cried.

tfteabing

tbe Wlorlfc
Uofletber

VII

tbe Worib

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 pronoun 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 mat-
ter, should be allowed to have sex enough to
be men and women a large part of the time, the
privilege of being persons, perchance gods, sur-
mounting 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 know-
ledges 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

240

Xost Brt of

•Reading

be THIloi-lb
Uogetbcv

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 educa-
tion 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 ansemically spiritual, broad,
big, pallid men, and on the other the funny,
infinitesimal, provincial, matter cornered, mat-
ter-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 edu-
cation until we have one man who can em-
phasise 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

Heading tbe World ZTogetber

241

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 re-
lated to himself. His most natural and power-
ful 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 particu-
larly 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 super-
ficial 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, be-
ing 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.

tbe TOlorlb
Uogetber

242

Xost Hrt of TReafcing

tbe TMorlb
Uogetbcr

' * 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 f or me ! " ' ' Aye, aye, and they shall be
to thee, ' ' said my soul, ' ' what thou biddest
them."

IReafcing tbe TKHortt) Uogetber

243

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. I£ 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."

All knowledge, I have said in my heart, in-
stead of being a kind of vast overseer-and-slave
system for a man to lock himself up in, and
throw away his key in, becomes free, fluent,
daring, and glorious the moment it is conceived
through persons and for persons and with per-
sons. Knowledge is not knowledge until it is
conceived in relation to persons; that is, in
relation to all the facts. Persons are facts
also and on the whole the main facts, the
facts which for seventy years, at least, or until
the planet is too cooled off, all other facts are
for. The world belongs to persons, is related
to persons, and all the knowledge thereof, and
by heaven, and by my soul's delight, all the
persons the knowledge is related to shall be-
long to me, and the knowledge that is related
to them shall belong to me, the whole human
round of it. The spirit and rhythm and song
of their knowledge, the thing in it that is real
to them, that sings out their lives to them, shall
sing to me.

Hogetber

245

Book III
Mbat to Do IRejt

I am he who tauntingly compels men, women,

nations,
Crying, * Leap from your seats and contend for your

lives!'"

See IReyt Chapter

IT is good to rise early in the morning, when
the world is still respectable and nobody
has used it yet, and sit and look at it, try to
realise it. One sees things very differently.
It is a kind of yawn of all being. One feels
one's soul lying out, all relaxed, on it, and
resting on real things. It stretches itself on
the bare bones of the earth and knows. On a
hundred silent hills it lies and suns itself.

And as I lay in the morning, soul and body
reaching out to the real things and resting on
them, I thought I heard One Part of me, down
underneath, half in the light and half in the
dark, laughing softly at the Other. " What is
this book of yours ? " it said coldly, " with its
proffered scheme of education, its millenniums
and things ? What do you think this theory,
this heaven-spanning theory of reading of
yours, really is, which you have held up ob-
jectively, almost authoritatively, to be looked

247

See next
Cbapter

248

3Lost Hrt of IReafctng

See meit
Cbapter

at as truth ? Do you think it is anything after
all but a kind of pallid, unreal, water-colour
exhibition, a row of blurs of faintly coloured
portraits of yourself, spiead on space ? Do
you not see how unfair it is — this spinning out
of one's own little dark, tired inside, a theory
for a wide heaven and earth, this straddling
with one temperament a star ? "

Then I made myself sit down and compose
what I feared would be a strictly honest title-
page for this book. Instead of:

THE LOST ART OF READING

A STUDY

OF
EDUCATION

BY
ETC.

I wrote it :

HOW TO BE MORE LIKE ME

A SHY

AT
EDUCATION

BY
ETC.

And when I had looked boldly (almost
scientifically) at this title-page, let it mock me
a little, had laughed and sighed over it, as I
ought, there came a great hush from I know
not where. I remembered it was the title,

See IRejt Gbapter

249

after all, for better or worse, in some sort or
another, of every book I had craved and de-
lighted in, in the whole world. Then suddenly
I found myself before this book, praying to it,
and before every struggling desiring-book of
every man, of other men, where it has prayed
before, and I dared to look my title in the face.
I have not denied — I do not need to deny —
that what I have uncovered here is merely my
own soul's glimmer — my interpretation — at this
mighty, passing show of a world, and it comes
to you, Oh Gentle Reader, not as I am, but as I
would like to be. Out of chaos it struggles to
you, and defeat— can you not see it? — and if but
the benediction of what I, or you, or any man
would like to be will come and rest on it, it is
enough. Take it first and last, it is written in
every man's soul, be his theory whatsoever it
may of this great wondering world — wave
after wave of it, shuddering and glorying over
him — it is written after all that he does not
know that anything is, can be, or has been in
this world until he possesses it, or misses pos-
sessing it himself — feels it slipping from him.
It is in what a man is, has, or might have, that
he must track out his promise for a world. His
life is his prayer for the ages as long as he lives,
and what he is, and what he is trying to be,
sings and prays for him, says masses for his
soul under the stars, and in the presence of all
peoples, when he is dead. By this truth, I
and my book with you, Gentle Reader, must

Set Ylext

Chapter

250

OLost Hrt of

See inert
Chapter

stand or fall. Even now as I bend over the
click of my typewriter, the years rise dim and
flow over me out of the east, . . . genera-
tions of brothers, out of the mist of heaven and
out of the dust of the earth, trooping across
the world, and wondering at it, come and go,
and out of all these there shall not be one, no
not one, Gentle Reader, but shall be touched
and loved by you, by me. In light out of
shadow or in the shadow out of the light, our
souls fleck them, fleck them with the invisible,
blessing them and cursing them. We shall be
the voices of the night and day to them, shall
live a shadow of life with them, and be the
sounds in their ears; did any man think that
what we are, and what we are trying to be, is
ours, is private, is for ourselves ? Boundlessly,
helplessly scattered on the world, upon the
faces of our fellows, our souls mock to us or
sing to us forever.

So if I have opened my windows to you, say
not it is because I have dared. It is because I
have not dared. I have said I will protect
my soul with the street. I will have my vow
written on my forehead. I will throw open
my window to the passer-by. Fling it in! I
beg you, oh world, whatever it is, be it prayer
or hope or jest. It is mine. I have vowed
to live with it, to live out of it — so long as
I feel your footsteps under my casement, and
know that your watch is upon my days, and
that you hold me to myself. I have taken for

See IRejt Cbapter

25 1

my challenge or for my comrade, I know not
which, a whole world.

And what shall a man give in exchange for
a whole world ?

And my soul said " He shall not save nor
keep back himself. ' '

Who is the Fool — that I should be always
taking all this trouble for him, — tiptoeing up
and down the world with my little cover over
my secret for him ? To defy a Fool, I have
said, speak your whole truth. Then God
locks him out. To hide a secret, have enough
of it. Hide it outdoors. Why should a man
take anything less than a world to hide in?
If a soul is really a soul, why should it not fall
back for its reserve on its own infinity ? God
does. Even daisies do it. It is too big a
world to be always bothering about one's secret
in it. " Who has time for it ? " I have said.
" Give it out. Move right on living. Get
another." The only way for a man in this
twentieth century to hide his soul is by letting
it reach out of sight. Not by locks, nor by
stiflings, nor by mean little economizings of
the heart does a man earn a world for a com-
rade. Let the laughers laugh. On the great
still street in space where souls are, — who
cares ?

Sec Ylext
Cbaptetr

252

SLost Hrt of

^Diagnosis

Compelled as I am, as most of us are, to wit-
ness the unhappy spectacle, in every city of the
land, of a great mass of unfortunate and muti-
lated persons whirled round and round in rows,
in huge reading-machines, being crunched and
educated, it is very hard not to rush thought-
lessly in to the rescue sometimes, even if one
has nothing better than such a pitiful, helpless
thing as good advice.

I am afraid it does not look very wise to do
it. Civilisation is such a vast, hypnotising,
polarising spectacle, has the stage so fully to
itself, everybody's eyes glued on it, it is hard
to get up and say what one thinks in it. One
cannot find anything equally objective to say
it with. One feels as if calling attention to
one's self, to the little, private, shabby theatre
of one's own mind. It is as if in a great theatre
(on a back seat in it) one were to get up and
stand in his chair and get the audience to
turn round, and say, " L,adies and gentlemen.
That is not the stage, with the foot-lights over
there. This is the stage, here where I am.
Now watch me twirl my thumbs."

But the great spectacle of the universal
reading-machine is too much for me. Before
I know it I try to get the audience to turn
around.

Diagnosis

253

The spectacle of even a single lad, in his
more impressionable and possible years, read-
ing a book whether he has anything to do with
it or not, in spite of the author and in spite of
himself, when one considers how many books
he might read which really belong to him, is
enough to make a mere reformer or outlaw or
parent-interferer of any man who is compelled
to witness it.

But it seems that the only way to interfere
with one of these great reading-machines is to
stop the machine. One would say theoretically
that it would not take very much to stop it — a
mere broken thread of thought would do it, if
the machine had any provision for thoughts.
As it is, one can only stand outside, watch it
through the window, and do what all outsiders
are obliged to do, shout into the din a little
good advice. If this good advice were to be
summed up in a principle or prepared for a
text-book it would be something like this:

The whole theory of our prevailing education
is a kind of unanimous, colossal, " I can't,"
"You can't"; chorus, "We all of us to-
gether can't." The working principle of pub-
lic-school education, all the way from its biggest
superintendents or overseers down to its littlest
tow-heads in the primary rooms, is a huge,
overbearing, overwhelming system of not ex-
pecting anything of anybody. Kverything is
arranged throughout with reference to not-ex-
pecting, and the more perfectly a system works

Diagnosis

254 Xost Hrt of 1Rea&in0

Eclipse without expecting, or needing to expect, the
more successful it is represented to be. The
public does not expect anything of the poli-
ticians. The politicians do not expect anything
of the superintendents. The superintendents
do not expect anything of the teachers, and
the teachers do not expect anything of the
pupils, and the pupils do not expect anything
of themselves. That is to say, the whole edu-
cational world is upside down, — so perfectly
and regularly and faultlessly upside down that
it is almost hopeful. All one needs to do is to
turn it accurately and carefully over at every
point and it will work wonderfully.

To turn it upside down, have teachers that
believe something.

Ill

Eclipse

When it was decreed in the course of the
nineteenth century that the educational world
should pass over from the emphasis of persons
to the emphasis of things, it was decreed that a
generation that could not emphasise persons
in its knowledge could not know persons. A
generation which knows things and does not
know persons naturally believes in things more
than it believes in persons.

Even an educator who is as forward-looking
and open to human nature as President Charles

3£ciipse

255

F. Thwing, with all his emphasis of knowing
persons and believing in persons as a basis for
educational work, seems to some of us to give
an essentially unbelieving and pessimistic
classification of human nature for the use of
teachers.

" Early education," says President Thwing,
1 1 occupies itself with description (geometry,
space, arithmetic, time, science, the world of
nature). L,ater education with comparison
and relations." If one asks, " Why not both
together ? Why learn facts at one time and
their relations at another ? Is it not the most
vital possible way to learn facts to learn them
in their relations ? " — the answer that would be
generally made reveals that most teachers are
pessimists, that they have very small faith in
what can be expected of the youngest pupils.
The theory is that interpretative minds must
not be expected of them. Some of us find it
very hard to believe as little as this, in any
child. Most children have such an incorrigible
tendency for putting things together that they
even put them together wrong rather than not
put them together at all. Under existing edu-
cational conditions a child is more of a philos-
opher at six than he is at twenty-six.

The third stage of education for which Dr.
Thwing partitions off the human mind is the
"stage in which a pupil becomes capable of
original research, a discoverer of facts and re-
lations" himself. In theory this means that

Eclipse

256

OLost Hrt of

when a man is thirty years old and all possible
habits of originality have been trained out of
him, he should be allowed to be original. In
practice it means removing a man's brain for
thirty years and then telling him he can think.
There never has been a live boy in a school as
yet that would allow himself to be educated in
this way if he could help it. All the daily
habits of his mind resent it. It is a pessi-
mistic, postponing way of educating him. It
does not believe in him enough. It may be true
of men in the bulk, men by the five thousand,
that their intellectual processes happen along in
this conveniently scientific fashion, at least as
regards emphasis, but when it is applied to any
individual mind, at any particular time, in
actual education, it is found that it is not true,
that it is pessimistic. God is not so monoto-
nous and the universe is not graded as accu-
rately as a public school, and things are much
more delightfully mixed up. If a great uni-
versity were to give itself whole-heartedly and
pointedly to one single individual student, it
would find it both convenient and pleasant and
natural and necessary to let him follow these
three stages all at once, in one stage with one
set of things, and in another stage with another.
Everyone admits that the first thing a genius
does with such a convenient, three-part sys-
tem, or chart for a soul, is to knock it endwise.
He does it because he can. Others would if
they could. He insists from his earliest days

Eclipse

257

on doing all three parts, everything, one set
of things after the other — description, compari-
son, creation, and original research sometimes
all at once. He learns even words all ways at
once. All of these processes are applied to each
thing that a genius learns in his life, not the
three parts of his life. One might as well say
to a child, " Now, dear little lad, your life is
going to be made up of eating, sleeping, and
living. You must get your eating all done up
now, these first ten years, and then you can
get your sleeping done up, and then you can
take a spell at living — or putting things to-
gether."

The first axiom of true pedagogics is that
nothing can be taught except the outside or
letter of a thing. The second axiom is that
there is nothing gained in teaching a pupil the
outside of a thing if he has not the inside —
the spirit or relations of it. Teachers do not
dare to believe this. They think it is true
only of men of genius. They admit that men
of genius can be educated through the inside
or by calling out the spirit, by drawing out
their powers of originality from the first, but
they argue that with common pupils this pro-
cess should not be allowed. They are not
worthy of it. That is to say, the more ordinary
men are and the more they need brains, the
less they shall be allowed to have them.

Inasmuch, then, as the inside cannot be
taught and there is no object in teaching the

ficllpse

258

Xost Hrt ot

Eclipse outside, the question remains how to get the
right inside at work producing the right out-
side.* This is a purely spiritual question and
brings us to the third axiom. Every human
being born into the world is entitled to a special
study and a special answer all to himself. If,
as President Thwing very truly says, ''The
higher education as well as the lower is to be
organised about the unit of the individual stu-
dent, ' ' what follows ? The organisation must
be such as to make it possible for every teacher
to study and serve each individual student as a
special being by himself. In other words, if
this last statement of Dr. Tbwing's is to be
acted on, it makes havoc with his first. It re-
quires a somewhat new and practically revo-
lutionary organisation in education. It will
be an organisation which takes for its basic
principle something like this:

Viz.: The very essence of an average pupil
is that he needs to be studied more, not less,
than any one else in order to find his master-
key, the master-passion to open his soul with.
The essence of a genius is that almost any one
of a dozen passions can be made the motive
power of his learning. His soul is opening
somewhere all the time.

The less individuality a student has, the
more he is like other students, the more he
should be kept away from other students until
what little individuality he has has been
brought out. It is not only equally true of the

Eclipse 259

ordinary man as well as of the man of genius Eclipse
that he must educate himself, but it is more
true. Other people's knowledge can be poured
into and poured over a genius innocently
enough. It rolls off him like water on a duck's
back. Even if it gets in, he organically pro-
tects himself. The genius of the ordinary man
needs special protection made for it. As our
educational institutions are arranged at pre-
sent, the more commonplace our students are
the more we herd them together to make them
more commonplace. That is, we do not be-
lieve in them enough. We believe that they
are commonplace through and through, and
that nothing can be done about it. We admit,
after a little intellectual struggle, that a genius
(who is bound to be an individual anyway)
should be treated as one, but a common boy,
whose individuality can only be brought out by
his being very vigorously and constantly re-
minded of it, and exercised in it, is dropped
altogether as an individual, is put into a herd
of other common boys, and his last remaining
chance of being anybody is irrevocably cut off.
We do not believe in him as an individual.
He is a fraction of a roomful. He is a 6yth or
734th of something. Some one has said that the
problem of education is getting to be, How can
we give, in our huge learning-machines, our ex-
ceptional students more of a chance ? I state a
greater problem : How can we give our common
students a chance to be exceptional ones ?

260

OLost Hrt of

Eclipse

The problem can only be solved by teachers
who believe something, who believe that there
is some common ground, some spiritual law of
junction, between the man of genius, the nat-
ural or free man, and the cramped, z. <?., arti-
ficial, ordinary one. It would be hard to name
any more important proposition for current
education to act on than this, that the nat-
ural man in this world is the man of genius.
The Church has had to learn that religion does
not consist in being unnatural. The schools
are next to learn that the man of genius is
not unnatural. He is what nature intended
every man to be, at the point where his genius
lies. The way out in education, the only be-
lieving, virile, man's way out, would seem to
be to begin with the man of genius as a prin-
ciple and work out the application of the
principle to more ordinary men — men of slowed-
down genius. We are going to use the same
methods — faster or slower — for both. A child's
greater genius lies in his having a more lively
sense of relation with more things than other
children. Teachers are going to believe that
if the right thing can be done about it, this
sense of a live relation to knowledge can be
uncovered in every human soul, that there
is a certain sense in which every man is his
own genius. " By education," said Helvetius,
" you can make bears dance, but never create
a man of genius." The first thing for a
teacher who believes this to do, is not to teach.

Epocalspse

261

apocalypse

There is a spirit in this book, struggling
down underneath it, which neither I nor any
other man shall ever express. It needs a na-
tion to express it, a nation fearless to know
itself, a great, joyous, trustful, expectant na-
tion. The centuries break away. I almost
see it now, lifting itself in its plains and hills
and fields and cities, in its smoke and cloud-
land, as on some huge altar, to supreme destiny,
a nation freed before heaven by the mighty,
daily, childlike joy of its own life. I see it as
a nation full of personalities, full of self-con-
tained, normally self-centred, self-delighted,
self-poised men — men of genius, men who bal-
ance off with a world, men who are capable of
being at will magnificently self-conscious or
unconscious, self-possessed and self- forgetful —
balanced men, comrades and equals of a world,
neither its slaves nor its masters.

I have said I will not have a faith that I
have to get to with a trap-door. I have said
that inspiration is for everybody. I have had
inspiration myself and I will not clang down a
door above my soul and believe that God has
given to me or to any one else what only a few
can have. I do not want anything, I will not
have anything that any one cannot have. If
there is one thing rather than another that

Hpoca*

262

%ost Hrt ot

Hpoca=

inspiration is for, it is that when I have it I
know that any man can have it. It is neces-
sary to my selfishness that he shall have it. If
a great wonder of a world like this is given to
a man, and he is told to live on it and it is not
furnished with men to live with, with men that
go with it, what is it all for? If one could
have one's choice in being damned there would
be no way that would be quite so quick and
effective as having inspirations that were so
little inspired as to make one suppose they
v:ere merely for one's self or for a few others.
The only way to save one's soul or to keep a
corner for God in it is to believe that He is a
kind of God who has put inspiration in every
man. All that has to be done with it, is to get
him to stop smothering it.

Inspiration, instead of being an act of going
to work in a minute, living a few hundred
years at once, an act of making up and creating
a new and wonderful soul for one's self, con-
sists in the act of lifting off the lid from the
one one has. The mere fact that the man ex-
ists who has had both experiences, not having
inspiration and having it, gives a basis for
knowledge of what inspiration is. A man who
has never had anything except inspiration can-
not tell us what it is, and a man who has never
had it cannot tell us what it is; but a man who
has had both of these experiences (which is
the case with most of us) constitutes a cross-
section of the subject, a symbol of hope for

Hpocal^pse

263

every one. All who have had not- inspirations
and inspirations both know that the origin
and control and habit of inspiration, are all of
such a character as to suggest that it is the
common property of all men. All that is
necessary is to have true educators or promot-
ers, men who furnish the conditions in which
the common property can be got at.

The only difference between men of genius
— men of genius who know it — and other men
— men of genius who don't know it — is that the
men of genius who know it have discovered
themselves, have such a headlong habit of self-
joy in them, have tasted their self-joys so
deeply, that they are bound to get at them
whether the conditions are favourable or not.
The great fact about the ordinary man's genius,
which the educational world has next to reckon
with, is that there are not so many places to
uncover it. The ordinary man at first, or until
he gets the appetite started, is more particular
about the conditions.

It is because a man of genius is more thor-
ough with the genius he has, more spiritual
and wilful with it than other men, that he
grows great. A man's genius is always at bot-
tom religious, at the point where it is genius,
a worshipping toward something, a worship-
ping toward something until he gets it, a su-
preme covetousness for God, for being a God.
It is a faith in him, a sense of identity and shar-
ing with what seems to be above and outside,

Hpoca=

264

3Lost Hrt of

Hpocaa

a sense of his own latent infinity. I have said
that all that real teaching is for, is to say to
a man, in countless ways, a countless " You
can." And I have said that all real learning
is for is to say "I can." When we have
enough great " I can's," there will be a great
society or nation, a glorious " We can " rising
to heaven. This is the ideal that hovers over
all real teaching and makes it deathless, — fer-
tile for ever.

If the world could be stopped short for ten
years in its dull, sullen round of not believing
in itself, if it could be allowed to have, all of
it, all over, even for three days, the great
solemn joy of letting itself go, it would not be
caught falling back very soon, I think, into
its stupor of cowardice. It would not be the
same world for three hundred years. All that
it is going to require to get all people to feel
that they are inspired is some one who is strong
enough to lift a few people off of themselves —
get the idea started. Every man is so busy
nowadays keeping himself, as he thinks, prop-
erly smothered, that he has not the slightest
idea of what is really inside him, or of what
the thing that is really inside him would do with
him, if he would give it a chance. Any man
who has had the experience of not having in-
spiration and the experience of having it both
knows that it is the sense of striking down
through, of having the lid of one's smaller
consciousness lifted off. In the long run his

Hpocalupse

265

inspiration can be had or not as he wills. He
knows that it is the supreme reasonableness in
him, the primeval, underlying naturalness in
him, rising to its rights. What he feels when
he is inspired is that the larger laws, the laws
above the other laws, have taken hold of him.
He knows that the one law of inspiration is
that a man shall have the freedom of himself.
Most problems and worries are based on de-
fective, uninvoked functions. Some organ,
vision, taste, or feeling or instinct is not allowed
its vent, its chance to qualify. Something
needs lifting away. The common experience
of sleeping things off, or walking or working
them off, is the daily symbol of inspiration.
More often than not a worry or trouble is
moved entirely out of one's path by the sim-
plest possible device, an intelligent or instinc-
tive change of conditions.

The fundamental heresy of modern educa-
tion is that it does not believe this— does not
believe in making deliberate arrangements for
the originality of the average man. It does
not see that the extraordinary man is simply
the ordinary man keyed-up, writ large or mov-
ing more rapidly. What the average man is
now, the great men were once. When we be-
gin to understand that a man of genius is not
supernatural, that he is simply more natural
than the rest of us, that all the things that are
true for him are true for us, except that they
are true more slowly, the educational world

Bpoca*

266

SLost Hrt of

Bpoca=

will be a new world. The very essence of the
creative power of a man of genius over other
men, is that he believes in them more than
they do. He writes, paints, or sings as if all
other men were men of genius, and he keeps
on doing it until they are. All modern human
nature is annexed genius. The whole world
is a great gallery of things, that men of genius
have seen, until they make other men see them
too, and prove that other men can see them.
What one man sees with travail or by being
born again, whole generations see at last with-
out trying, and when they are born the first
time. The great cosmic process is going on
in the human spirit. Ages flow down from
the stars upon it. No one man shall guess,
now or ever, what a man is, what a man shall
be. But it is to be noticed that when the world
gets its greatest man — the One who guesses
most, generations are born and die to know
Him, all with awe and gentleness in their
hearts. One after the other as they wheel up to
the Great Sun to live, — they call Him the Son
of God because He thought everybody was.

The main difference between a great man
and a little one is a matter of time. If the little
man could keep his organs going, could keep
on experiencing, acting, and reacting on things
for four thousand years, he would have no
difficulty in being as great as some men are in
their threescore and ten. All genius is in-
herited time and space. The imagination,

Bpocalspse

267

which is the psychological substitute for time
and space, is a fundamental element in all
great power, because, being able to reach
results without pacing off the processes, it
makes it possible for a man to crowd more
experience in, and be great in a shorter
time.

The idea of educating the little man in the
same way as the great man, from the inside,
or by drawing out his originality, meets with
many objections. It is objected that inas-
much as no little men could be made into
great men in the time allotted, there would be
no object in trying to do it, and no result to
show for it in the world, except row after row
of spoiled little men, drearily waiting to die.
The answer to this is the simple assertion that
if a quart-cup is full it is the utmost a quart-
cup can expect. A hogshead can do no more.
So far as the man himself is concerned, if he
has five sound, real senses in him, all of them
acting and reacting on real things, if he is alive,
i. e. , sincere through and through, he is edu-
cated. True education must always consist,
not in how much a man has, but in the way
he feels about what he has. The kingdom
of heaven is on the inside of his five senses.

Hpoca*

268

Hrt of

/IDan Dis

Own

Genius

I do not mean by the man of genius in this
connection the great man of genius, who takes
hold of his ancestors to live, rakes centuries
into his life, burns up the phosphorus of ten
generations in fifty years, and with giant
masterpieces takes leave of the world at last,
bringing his family to a full stop in a blaze of
glory, and a spindling child or so. I am merely
contending for the principle that the extraord-
inary or inspired man is the normal man (at the
point where he is inspired) and that the ordi-
nary or uninspired boy can be made like him,
must be educated like him, led out through
his self-delight to truth, that, if anything, the
ordinary or uninspired boy needs to be edu-
cated like a genius more than a genius does.

I know of a country house which reminds
me of the kind of mind I would like to have.
In the first place, it is a house that grew. It
could not possibly have been thought of all at
once. In the second place, it grew itself.
Half inspiration and half common-sense, with
its mistakes and its delights all in it, glori-
ously, frankly, it blundered into being, seven
generations tumbled on its floors, filled it
with laughter and love and tears. One felt
that every life that had come to it had written
itself on its walls, that the old house had

269

broken out in a new place for it, full of new
little joys everywhere, and jogs and bays and fl°^*{8
afterthoughts and forethoughts, old roofs and oenhw
young ones chumming together, and old chim-
neys (three to start with and four new ones
that came when they got ready). Kverything
about it touched the heart and said something.
I have never managed to see it yet, whether in
sunlight, cloud-light, or starlight, or the light
of its own lamps, but that it stood and spoke.
It is a house that has genius. The genius of
the earth and the sky around it are all in it,
of motherhood, of old age, and of little children.
It grew out of a spirit, a loving, eager, putting-
together, a making of relations between things
that were apart, — the portrait of a family. It is
a very beautiful, eloquent house, and hundreds
of nights on the white road have I passed it by,
in my lonely walk, and stopped and listened to
it, standing there in its lights, like a kind of
low singing in the trees, and when I have come
home, later, on the white road, and the lights
were all put out, I still feel it speaking there,
faint against heaven, with all its sleep, its
young and old sleep, its memories and hopes
of birth and death, lifting itself in the night, a
prayer of generations.

Many people do not care for it very much.
They would wonder that I should like a mind
like it. It is a wandering-around kind of a
house, has thirty outside doors. If one
does n't like it, it is easy to get out (which is

270

Xost Hrt of IReafcing

Ever?

fl&an fbis

©wn

Genius

just what I like in a mind). Stairways almost
anywhere, only one or two places in the whole
building where there is not a piazza, and every
inch of piazza has steps down to the grass and
there are no walks. A great central fireplace,
big as a room, little groups of rooms that keep
coming on one like surprises, and little groups
of houses around outside that have sprung up
out of the ground themselves. A flower gar-
den that thought of itself and looks as if it took
care of itself (but does n't). Everything ex-
uberant and hospitable and free on every side
and full of play, — a high stillness and serious-
ness over all.

I cannot quite say what it is, but most
country houses look to me as if they had for-
gotten they were really outdoors, in a great,
wide, free, happy place, where winds and suns
run things, where not even God says nay, and
everything lives by its inner law, in the pres-
ence of the others, exults in its own joy and
plays with God. Most country homes forget
this. They look like little isles of glare and
showing off, and human joylessness, dotting
the earth. People's minds in the houses are
like the houses : they reek with propriety.
That is, they are all abnormal, foreign to the
spirit, to the passion of self-delight, of life, of
genius. Most of them are fairly hostile to gen-
ius or look at it with a lorgnette.

I like to think that if the principles and
habits of freedom that result in genius were to

271

be gauged and adjusted toward bringing out
the genius of ordinary men, they would result
in the following:

Recipe to make a great man (or a live small
one): Let him be made like a great work of
art. In general, follow the rule in Genesis i.

1. Chaos.

2. Enough Chaos; that is, enough kinds of
Chaos. Pouring all the several parts of Chaos
upon the other parts of Chaos.

3. Watch to see what emerges and what it is
in the Chaos that most belongs to all the rest,
what is the Unifying Principle.

4. Fertilise the Chaos. Let it be impreg-
nated with desire, will, purpose, personality.

5. When the Unifying Principle is dis-
covered, refrain from trying to force every-
thing to attach itself to it. Let things attach
themselves in their way as they are sure to do
in due time and grow upon it. Let the mind
be trusted. Let it not be always ordered
around, thrust into, or meddled with. The
making of a man, like the making of a work of
art, consists in giving the nature of things a
chance, keeping them open to the sun and air
and the springs of thought. The first person
who ever said to man, " You press the button
and I will do the rest," was God.

The emphasis of art in our modern educa-
tion, of the knack or science or how of things,
is to be followed next by the emphasis of the
art that conceals art, genius, the norm and

Ever?

A)an Die

Own

Genius

272

Xost Hrt of

Hn
lncHnel>

plane

climax of human ability. Any finishing-school
girl can out-sonnet Keats. The study of ap-
pearances, the passion for the outside has run
its course. The next thing in education is
going to be honesty, fearless naturalness, up-
heaval, the freedom of self, self-expectancy,
all-expectancy, and the passion for possessing
real things. The personalities, persons with
genius, persons with free-working, uncramped
minds, are all there, ready and waiting, both
in teachers and pupils, all growing sub rasa,
and the main thing that is left to do is to lift
the great roof of machinery off and let them
come up. The days are already upon us when
education shall be taken out of the hands of
anaemic, abstracted men — men who go into
everything theory-end first. There is already
a new atmosphere in the educated world. The
thing that shall be taught shall be the love of
swinging out, of swinging up to the light and
the air. I^et every man live, the world says
next, a little less with his outside, with his
mere brain or logic-stitching machine. I/et
him swear by his instincts more, and live with
his medulla oblongata.

Hn flnciinefc plane

; ' This is a very pleasant and profitable ideal
you have printed in this book, but teachers and

Hn Unclinefc plane

273

pupils and institutions being what they are, it
is not practical and nothing can be done about
it," it is objected.

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED

1. There is nothing so practical as an ideal,
for if through his personality and imagination
a man can be made to see an ideal, the ideal
does itself; that is, it takes hold of him and in-
spires him to do it and to find means for doing
it. This is what has been aimed at in this
book.

2. The first and most practical thing to do
with an ideal is to believe it.

3. The next most practical thing is to act
as if one believed it. This makes other peo-
ple believe it. To act as if one believed an
ideal is to be literal with it, to assume that it
can be made real, that something — some next
thing — can be done with it,

4. It is only people who believe an ideal who
can make it practical. Educators who think
that an ideal is true and who do not think it is
practical do not think it is true, do not really
know it. The process of knowing an ideal, of
realising it with the mind, is the process of
knowing that it can be made real. This is
what makes it an ideal, that it is capable of be-
coming real, and if a man does not realise an
ideal, cannot make it real in his mind, it is not
accurate for him to say that it is not practical.
It is accurate for him to say that it is not prac-

•ffnclfneb
plane

274

SLost Hrt of IReafcing

flncHneb
plane

tical to him. The ideal presented in this book
is not presented as practical except to teachers
who believe it.

5. Every man has been given in this world,
if he is allowed to get at them, two powers to
make a man out of. These powers are Vision
and Action, (i) Seeing, and (2) Being or
Doing what one sees. What a man sees with,
is quite generally called his imagination.
What he does with what he sees, is called his
character or personality. If it is true, as has
been maintained in the whole trend of this
book, that the most important means of educa-
tion are imagination and personality, the power
of seeing things and the power of living as if
one saw them, imagination and personality
must be accepted as the forces to teach with,
and the things that must be taught. The per-
sons who have imagination and personality in
modern life must do the teaching.

6. Parents and others who believe in imagin-
ation and personality as the supreme energies
of human knowledge and the means of educa-
tion, and who have children they wish taught
in this way, are going to make connections
with such teachers and call on them to do it.

7. Inasmuch as the best way to make an
ideal that rests on persons practical is to find
the persons, the next thing for persons who
believe in an ideal to do is to find each other
out. All persons, particularly teachers and
parents, in their various communities and in

Hn IFnclinefc plane

275

the nation, who believe that the ideal is prac-
tical in education should be social with their
ideal, group themselves together, make them-
selves known and felt.

8. Some of us are going to act through the
schools we have. We are going to make room
in our present over-managed, morbidly organ-
ised institutions, with ordered-around teachers,
for teachers who cannot be ordered around,
who are accustomed to use their imaginations
and personalities to teach with, instead of
superintendents. We are going to have super-
intendents who will desire such teachers. The
reason that our over-organised and over-super-
intended schools and colleges cannot get the
teachers they want, to carry out their ideals,
is a natural one enough. The moment ideal
teachers are secured it is found that they have
ideals of their own and that they will not teach
without them. When vital and free teachers
are attracted to the schools and allowed fair
conditions there, they will soon crowd others
out. The moment we arrange to give good
teachers a chance good teachers will be had.

9. Others will find it best to act in another
way. Instead of reforming schools from the
inside, they are going to attack the problem
from the outside, start new schools which shall
stand for live principles and outlive the others.
As good teachers can arrange better conditions
for themselves to teach in their own schools,
wherever practicable this would seem to be the

Unclinefc
plane

276

Xost Hrt ot TReaDlng

•ffncltnefc
plane

better way. They are going to organise col-
leges of their own. They are going to organ-
ise unorganised colleges (for such they would
be called at first), assemblings of inspired
teachers, men grouping men about them each
after his kind.

Every one can begin somewhere. Teachers
who are outside can begin outside and teachers
who are within can begin within. Certainly
if every teacher who believes something will
believe deeply, will free himself, let himself
out with his belief, act on it, the day is not
long hence when the great host of ordered-
around teachers with their ordered-around
pupils will be a memory. Copying and ap-
pearing to know will cease. Self-delight and
genius will again be the habit of the minds of
men and the days of our present poor, pale,
fuddling, unbelieving, Simon-says-thumbs-up
education will be numbered.

Sometimes it seems as if this globe, this huge
cyclorama of nations whirling in sunlight
through stars, were a mere empty, mumbled
repetition, a going round and round of the
same stupendous stupidities and the same hero-
isms in human life. One is always feeling as if
everything, arts, architecture, cables, colleges,
nations, had all almost literally happened before,
in the ages dark to us, gone the same round of
beginning, struggling, and ending. Then the
globe was wiped clean and began again.

Hllons 277

One of the great advantages in emphasising Hiion0
individuals, — the main idea of this book, — in
picking out particular men as forces, centres
of energy in society, as the basis for one's pro-
gramme for human nature, is the sense it gives
that things really can begin again — begin any-
where— where a man is. One single human
being, deeply believed in, glows up a world,
casts a kind of speculative value, a divine wager
over all the rest. I confess that most men I have
seen seem to me phantasmagorically walking
the earth, their lives haunting them, hanging
intangibly about them — indefinitely postponed.
But one does not need, in order to have a true
joyous working-theory of life, to believe ver-
batim, every moment, in the mass of men — as
men. One needs to believe in them very
much — as possible men — larvae of great men,
and if, in the meantime, one can have (what
is quite practicable) one sample to a square
mile of what the mass of men in that mile
might be, or are going to be, one comes to a
considerable degree of enthusiasm, a working
and sharing enthusiasm for all the rest.

VII

auons

I thought when I began to make my little
visit in civilisation — this book— that perhaps I
ought to have a motto to visit a civilisation

278

Xost Hrt of

Bllons

with. So the motto I selected (a good one for
all reformers, viewers of institutions and things)
was, ' ' Do not shoot the organist. He is doing
the best he can/' I fear I have not lived up
to it. I am an optimist. I cannot believe he
is doing the best he can. Before I know it, I get
to hoping and scolding. I do not even believe
he is enjoying it. Most of the people in civili-
sation are not enjoying it. They are like peo-
ple one sees on tally-hos. They are not really
enjoying what they are doing. They enjoy
thinking that other people think they are en-
joying it.

The great characteristic enthusiasm of mod-
ern society, of civilisation, the fad of showing
off, of exhibiting a life instead of living it, very
largely comes, it is not too much to say, from
the lack of normal egoism, of self-joy in civilised
human beings. It has come over us like a kind
of moral anaemia. People cannot get interested
enough in anything to be interested in it by
themselves. Hence no great art — merely the
art which is a trick or knack of appearance.
We lack great art because we do not believe in
great living.

The emphasis which would seem to be most
to the point in civilisation is that people must
enjoy something, something of their very own,
even if it is only their sins, if they can do no
better, and they are their own. It would be
a beginning. They could work out from that.
They would get the idea. Some one has said

Hlions 279

that people repent of their sins because they
did n't enjoy them as much as they expected
to. Well, then, let them enjoy their repent-
ance. The great point is, in this world, that
men must get hold of reality somewhere, some-
how, get the feel, the bare feel of living before
they try dying. Most of us seem to think we
ought to do them both up together. It is to
be admitted that people might not do really
better things for their own joy, than for other
people's, but they would do them better. It
is not the object of this book to reform people.
Reformers are sinners enjoying their own sins,
who try to keep other people from enjoying
theirs. The object of this book is to inspire
people to enjoy anything, to find a principle
that underlies right and wrong both. Let
people enjoy their sins, we say, if they really
know how to enj oy . The more they get the idea
of enjoying anything, the more vitally and sin-
cerely they will run their course — turn around
and enjoy something truer and more lasting.
What we all feel, what every man feels is, that
he has a personal need of daring and happy
people around him, people that are selfish
enough to be alive and worth while, people
that have the habit and conviction of joy,
whose joys whether they are wrong or right
are real joys to them, not shadows or shows of
joys, joys that melt away when no one is
looking.

The main difficulty in the present juncture

280

Olost Hrt of

of the world in writing on the I^ost Art of
Reading is that all the other arts are lost, the
great self-delights. As they have all been lost
together, it has been necessary to go after them
together, to seek some way of securing condi-
tions for the artist, the enjoy er and prophet of
human life, in our modern time. At the bot-
tom of all great art, it is necessary to believe,
there has been great, believing, free, beautiful
living. This is not saying that inconsistency,
contradiction, and insincerity have not played
their part, but it is the benediction, the great
Amen of the world, to say this, — that if there
has been great constructive work there has been
great radiant, unconquerable, constructive liv-
ing behind it. There is but one way to recover
the lost art of reading. It is to recover the lost
art of living. The day we begin to take the
liberty of living our own lives there will be art-
ists and seers everywhere. We will all be art-
ists and seers, and great arts, great books, and
great readers of books will flock to us.

Well, here we are, Gentle Reader. We are
rounding the corner of the last paragraph.
Time stretches out before us. On the great
highroad we stand together in the dawn — I
with my little book in hand, you, perhaps,
with yours. The white road reaches away be-
fore us, behind us. There are cross-roads.
There are parallels, too. Sometimes when
there falls a clearness on the air, they are

Hllons

281

nearer than I thought. I hear crowds trudg-
ing on them in the dark, singing faintly. I
hear them cheering in the dark.

But this is my way, right here. See the hill
there ? That is my next one. The sun in a
minute. You are going my way, comrade?
. . . You are not going my way ? So be
it. God be with you. The top o' the morning
to you. I pass on.

Bllons

Shelburne Essays

By Paul Elmer More

4 vois. Crown octavo.
« Sold separately. Net, $1.25. (By mail, $1.35)

Contents

FIRST SERIES : A Hermit's Notes on Thoreau — The Soli-
tude of Nathaniel Hawthorne— The Origins of Haw-
thorne and Poe — The Influence of Emerson — The Spirit
of Carlyle — The Science of English Verse — Arthur
Symonds: The Two Illusions — The Epic of Ireland-
Two Poets of the Irish Movement — Tolstoy; or. The
Ancient Feud between Philosophy and Art — The Re-
ligious Ground of Humanitarianism.

SECOND SERIES : Elizabethan Sonnets — Shakespeare's Son-
nets— Lafcadio Hearn — The First Complete Edition <rf
Hazlitt — Charles Lamb — Kipling and FitzGerald —
George Crabbe — The Novels of George Meredith ~
Hawthorne: Looking before and after — Delphi and
Greek Literature— Nemesis ; or, The Divine Envy.

THIRD SERIES : The Correspondence of William Cowper—
Whittier the Poet — The Centenary of Sainte-Beuve—
The Scotch Novels and Scotch History — Swinburne —
Christina Rossetti — Why is Browning Popular ? — A Note
on Byron's "Don Juan" — Laurence Sterne — J. Henry
Shorthouse — The Quest.

FOURTH SERIES : The Vicar of Morwenstow — Fanny Bur-
ney — A Note on " Daddy" Crisp — George Herbert — John
Keats — Benjamin Franklin — Charles Lamb Again — Walt
Whitman— William Blake— The Letters of Horace Wai-
pole — The Theme of Paradise Lost.

si Few Press Criticisms on
Shelburne Essays

** It is a pleasure to hail in Mr. More a genuine critic, for
genuine critics in America in these days are uncommonly
scarce. . . . We recommend, as a sample of his breadth,
style, acumen, and power the essay on Tolstoy in the present
volume. That represents criticism that has not merely
a metropolitan but a world note. . . . One is thoroughly
grateful to Mr. More for the high quality of his thought, his
serious purpose, and his excellent style." — Harvard Gradu-
ates* Magazine.

" We do not know of any one now writing who gives
evidence of a better critical equipment than Mr. More. It
is rare nowadays to find a writer so thoroughly familiar with
both ancient and modern thought. It is this width of view,
this intimate acquaintance with so much of the best that has
been thought and said in the world, irrespective of local
prejudice, that constitute Mr. More's strength as a critic.
He has been able to form for himself a sound literary canon
and a sane philosophy of life which constitute to our mind
his peculiar merit as a critic." — Independent.

" He is familiar with classical, Oriental, and English
literature; he uses a temperate, lucid, -weighty, and not
ungraceful style ; he is aware of his best predecessors, and is
apparently on the way to a set of philosophic principles
which should lead him to a high and perhaps influential
place in criticism. . . . We believe that we are in the
presence of a critic who must be counted among the first who
take literature and life for their theme." — London Speaker.

G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York London

By
ARTHUR C. BENSON ("T. B.")

(Eighth Impression)

From a College Window

A collection of essays in which the reader
is brought under the spell of a singularly
interesting and attractive personality. The
book is a frank outpouring of the author's
intimate thoughts, a frank expression of
what he prizes in life and what he expects
from life. Mr. Benson's papers are character-
ized by the intimacy of self-revelation and
allusiveness and sense of overflow that
belong to the familiar essay at its best

44 Mr. Benson has written nothing equal to this mellow and
full-flavored book. From cover to cover it is packed with per-
sonality; from phrase to phrase it reveals a thoroughly sincere
and unaffected effort of self-expression; full-orbed and four-
square, it is a piece of true and simple literature."

London Chronicle.

(Eighth Impression)

The Upton Letters

*'A piece of real literature of the highest order, beautiful and
fragrant. To review the book adequately is impossible. . . .
It is in truth a precious thing." — Week's Survey.

"A book that we have read and reread if only for the sake of
its delicious flavor. There has been nothing so good of its
kind since the Etchingham Letters. The letters are beautiful,
quiet, and wise, dealing with deep things in a dignified way."

Christian Register.
Crown 8vo. Each, $1.25 net.

G. R PUTNAM'S SONS

New York London

By THE SAME AUTHOR

THE LOST ART OF READING

(Q. P. PUTNAM'S SONS)

" It is a real pleasure to chronicle an intellectual treat among the books
of the day. Some of us will shrug at this volume. Others of us having
read it will keep it near us."— Life.

u Mr. Lee is a writer of great courage, who ventures to say what some
people are a little alarmed even to think."— Sprin field Republican.
' You get right in between the covers and live. — Denver Post.

THE CHILD AND THE BOOK

(G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS)

" I must express with your connivance the joy I have had, the enthu-
siasm I have felt, in gloating over every page of what I believe is the
most brilliant book of any season since Carlyle's and Emerson's pens
were laid aside. It is full of humor, rich in style, and eccentric in form,
and all suffused with the perfervid genius of a man who is not merely a
thinker but a force. Every sentence is tinglingly alive. . . .

" I have been reading with wonder and laughter and with loud cheers.
It is the word of all words that needed to be spoken just now. It makes
me believe that after all we have n't a great kindergarten about us in au-
thorship, but that there is virtue, race, sap in us yet. I can conceive
that the date of the publication of this book may well be the date of the
moral and intellectual renaissance for which we have long been scanning
the horizon." — WM. SLOANE KENNEDY in. Boston Transcript.

ABOUT AN OLD NEW ENGLAND CHURCH

(Mount Tom Press, Northampton, Mass.) $1.00

" I have read it twice and enjoyed it the second time even more than
the first."— Oliver Wendell Holmes.

" I read the preface, and that one little bite out of the crust made me as
hungry as a man on a railroad. What a bright evening full of laughter,
touched every now and then with tenderness, it made for us I do not
know how to tell. Here is a book I am glad to indorse as I would a
t across the face and present it for payment in any man's
. Burdette.

THE SHADOW CHRIST

(THE CENTURY CO-) $1.25

" Let me be one of the first to recognize in this book what every man
who reads it thoughtfully will feet. Heaps of the books that have
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appears who makes his way straight into the Promised Land, by sea if
necessary, and takes you with him. It is not meant to be a full, precise
treatment of the subject. It is history seen in a vision. Theology ex-
pressed in H lyric. Criticism condensed into an epigram." — Dr. Henry
van Dyk'e^ in The Book Buyer.

" The author's name — Gerald Stanley Lee — has been hitherto unknown
to us in England, but the book he has here offered to the world indicates
that he has that in him which will soon make it familiar." — The Christ-
ian World (.London.)

MOUNT TOM

An All-Outdoors Magazine.

Devoted to Rest and Worship and to a Little Look-off on the World.

Every other month. 12 issues $1.00 Mt. Tom Press, Northampton, Mass.

The Voice of the Machines

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THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE
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REC'D LD

DEC 2 1957

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