 Section 16 of the Lost Art of Reading by Gerald Stanley Lee. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. 5. Reading for Results. The blank paper frame of mind. The PGS 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 anyone knew it, had waked up and learned something. The PGS 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. 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 PGS of M thought that one-tenth was enough. He didn'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 somehow 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 sideshow 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 Shakespeare, who never get so low in their 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 anemic, official, unresourceful reading. It is like putting a small tool to a book and whittling on it, instead of putting one's whole self to it. One might as well try to read most of Shakespeare's plays with a screwdriver 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 Shakespeare writes with any smaller or less general, less overflowing purpose than Shakespeare had in writing it should be advised to do his reading with some smaller, more carefully fitted author, one nearer to his size. Of course, if one wants to be a mere authority on Shakespeare or a mere author, there is no denying that one can do it and do it very well by reading him with some purpose, some purpose that is too small to have ever been thought of before, but if one wants to understand him, get the wild native flavor and power of him. He 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 afford, at least for once, to let one's purposes go. To feel oneself 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 pinwheels and theories, or any wheels whatever, is to cut oneself off from the last chance of knowing the real Shakespeare at all. A man knows Shakespeare in proportion as he gives himself. In proportion as he lets himself 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 mighty work himself if he let William Shakespeare work on him some. Before he knows it, the universe that Shakespeare lived in becomes his universe. 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. The power and effect of a book, which is a 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 PGS 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 Britannica, or the Honorable Carol D. Wright, Commissioner of Statistics, or Ella Wheeler-Wilcox. I admitted that in reading Dictionary's statistics, 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 denying 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 directions 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 is that a man can stop steering in it, that one can give oneself up to the undertow, to the cross-current in it. One feels oneself 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. 2. The Usefully Unfinished The PGS 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 and trying to use it to swallow a universe with must find it monotonous. 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 innumerable possibility, wore on him. He wanted to feel that a book was coming to something, and if he couldn't feel in reading it that the book was coming to something, he wanted to 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 reading certain classics. I brought out quite a nice little list of them, but I couldn'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 contemporary novel under discussion. He said he had read it. Great deal of power in it, he said, but it doesn't come to anything. I do not see any possible artistic sense, he said, in ending a novel like that. It doesn't bring one anywhere. Neither does one of Keats poems, I said, or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The odor of a rose doesn'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 doesn'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 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 PGS of M gave an impatient wave of his hand. To be strictly accurate, he gave it in the middle of the last paragraph just before we came to the Atlantic. The rest is congressional 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 didn't approve of the heroin. What was the matter, I said, dying in the last chapter? It is one of those novels in which the heroin 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 didn't see why people should be required by critics and other authorities to die to the point in a book where more than anywhere else. It is this shallow, reckless way that readers have of wanting to have everything pleasant and appropriate when people die in novels, which makes writing a novel nowadays as much as a man's reputation is worth. The PGS of M explained that it wasn'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 didn't leave a good deal to the imagination when he died. The dullest, most uninteresting man that anyone 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, forever. The more one knows about people's lives in this world, the more indefinitely, the more irrelevantly, 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 have been born, do not really need to die, that is if they are logical, and they 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 parlor of a book, and he sees that his people die the way they live, leaving as much left over to the imagination 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 American mind, that the greatest result of all in reading 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 emphasized, 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 himself, 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 definitely 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 events of it, and the unfinished people of it, flocking out to him, interpreting for him, the still unfinished events, and all the dear unfinished 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 blasphemed a little in my presence, if a novel finishes 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 closer away forever. 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, knowing 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 a life, is all that reading is for. It is practical because it is eternal and cannot be wasted, and because it is forever to the point. Life 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, make us live wider and deeper and farther in our seventy years. 3. Athletics. The world is full, Ellarie Charming 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 believe that if an archangel were to come to this earth and select a profession on it, instead of taking up some splendid, serious dignified calling he would devote himself to a comparatively small and humble looking career that of jogging 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 business-like 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 treadmill 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 that way of jogging, is a new day in the week. I've always thought that there ought to 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, delectable, 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 done, books that don't bear on anything, books that no one has asked one to read, calls on unexpected people, bills that might just as well wait, tinkering around the house on the wrong things, the right ones, perfectly helpless standing by, sitting with one's feet a little too high, if possible on one's working desk, being a little foolish, and liking it, making poor puns and enjoying one's bad grammar, a day and short in which whatever a man is, he rests from himself and plays marbles with his soul. Most people nowadays, at least the intellectual, so called, the learned above all others, are so far gone under the reading for results theory that they have become mere work worshipers in books. Worshipers 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 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 this 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 playing with a mind, on great subjects at least, is the only possible way to make it work. He entirely overlooks the fact in this 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 farsightedness, 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 stability, power of knowing, and combining facts, the Multium in Parvo method in reading, and the Parvo in Multio method, a dogged accumulating, impotent, callous reading for results, it is not hard to say which 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 everything 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 culminating 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 rejecting things, but of keeping out of their way when necessary. So is 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 century. The saying of the man of genius that everything is grist to his mill merely means that he reads a book athletically, with a magnificent 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 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 beautiful 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 reading 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 the truth that they need to be told it. It is of little use 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 epidemic 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 guideboard to the universe, it would supply to all who know him the main thing that the universe seems to be without. But a man who, like Walt Whitman, is more than a guideboard to the universe, who deliberately takes time to live in the whole of it, who becomes 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 rumored 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 nothing, that is, with no result, in a universe where you can play for nothing and by playing 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 himself 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. 6. Reading for Feelings 1. The Passion of Truth Reading resolves itself sooner or later into two elements in the reader's mind. 1. Tables of Facts, a Rose of Raw Fact, the Principles Spiritual or Some 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 always saying, science requires the elimination of feelings, says it to me in his usual chilled through aphidian 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 is hard, I notice as if I had made it all up myself. The statement that science requires the elimination of the feelings is true or not true, it seems to me, according to the size of the feelings. 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 single great scientific achievement or conception 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 source is great not by having no emotions, but by having disinterested 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 having passions enough to go around. The temporary idea that a scientist cannot be scientific and emotional at once is based upon the experience of men who have never had emotions enough. Men whose emotions are slow and weak, who have one-sided or wavering emotions, find them inconvenient as a matter of course. The men who, like Charles Darwin or some larger Browning, have the passion of disinterestedness, 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 world 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, 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 appreciation, 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. And so far as a man's geology is real to him, if he is after anything but a degree 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, sweeping him out with it into the great workroom, 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 we were going to be the great strategic event of the 20th century for all men to get the sciences and the humanities 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 in humanity 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 anything. The man who finds a God proves quite as much, and he has his God besides. 2. Topical point of view. 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 facts and spiritualized or related facts, several things follow. The most important 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 is 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 anywhere. 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 in as much as great men or semi-infinite men have all had to contend with this same difficulty 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 scientist's principle of economy and the other the poets or artists. The main difference between 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 entire business of every moment of his life. The scientist of the average sort begins by partitioning the universe off into topics. Having selected his topic and walled himself in with it, he develops it by walling the rest of the universe 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 everything in it, is represented in everything he does. Whatever his specialty may be in poetry, painting, or literature, he produces an eternal result by massing the infinite and eternal into the result. He succeeds by bringing the universe 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 appearances 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 today 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 labor, 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 wandering at the air, air monsters peering curiously down into the sea, sailors on the surfaces, trolers 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 quarreling over bits of the crust of it. Some of us burrow and live in the ground and are as workers in minds. 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 today 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 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 the 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 forties 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 recognized 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, insofar as it obtains today, is that it strikes both ways. It strikes in and makes a man mean something, and having made the man the main fact means something. It 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 sometime, but the science that attempts to build a civilization in this twentieth century by subdividing such men as we already have mocks at itself. The devil is not a specialist and he 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 subdivided 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 himself into everything, a seer if he masses everything into himself. But when he succeeds at last he will find that for all practical purposes as things are going today 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 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 the house is to continue 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? And of section 16, section 17 of the lost art of reading by Gerald Stanley Lee. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Seven. Reading the world together. One. Focusing. There are only a few square inches of 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 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 portrait 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 instead of to it is a mere matter of form. I cannot 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, when I have caught a face in a congregation and prayed to it and with it every man's face is kind of a prayer he carries around with him. One can hardly help joining in. It is sacrament to look at a face if only to take sides in it, join with the God's self in it and help against the others. Whoever or whatever 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 before audiences, have really realized 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 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 there is an organic principle of unity like this in a human face. 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 together in his education. It is this summing a universe up for oneself and putting it together for oneself and for oneself which makes an education in a universe worthwhile. 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 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 proportion 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 making 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 making 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 infinite 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 universe. 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 it changed being, the godlikeness 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, 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, nations 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 reflection, 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 wondered 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 hasten 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 cold, 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, 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 reaching down for him, half patronizing him, half worshiping him, taking him up to myself, where I could keep him by me, keep him to consult, watch for the sun, face the infinite. Dear little fellow, I said, my own queer little fellow, my own little cosmos 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 through 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 cosmos 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. The human unit. 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 and more twisted than others. The great point, so far as education is concerned, is for all teachers to realize 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 infinite 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 intend to know all of, the best and most scientific 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 walls of faces, one painter's faces, found myself walking up and down in Sargent's soul, without thinking what a great inhabited trooped through man he was, all knowledge is flocking to him, showing their faces to him, from the ends of the earth, emptying their secrets silently to his brush. If a man like Sargent has for one of his sitters a great astronomer, 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. Three, the higher cannibalism. It is not unnatural to claim therefore that the most immediate and important shortcut 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 of generalizations than the habit of trying things on to people in one's mind. I have always thought that if I ever got discouraged 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 oneself 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 fireplace 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, oh 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 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 conviction. 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 intense 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, 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 a gentle reader in the very next page swiveling 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 dog muttist who would not enjoy more speaking for himself if anybody would notice it, then 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, 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 generalization 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 unconscious procession of human beings. A murmur of countless voices. All our knowledge is conceived at first taken up and organized 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 Carlisle'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 Carlisle and it was another French Revolution to every one of his readers. It was dynamic and induced current from Paris via craggin puttuk because it was dramatic great abstractions playing magnificently over great concretes. Every man in Carlisle's history 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 doing 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 organized some totals of experience 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 Carlisle 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 Carlisle with his mere lighted up brute imagination 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 anyone could see them and if they could not were there not always plenty of little chilled through historians pattering around after him tracking them out but the great point of Carlisle's method was that he kept his perspective with it never flattened out like other historians by tables of statistics unbewildered by the blur of nobody's he was able to have a live glorious giants 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 focused vivid human holes it was a historical method of treating great masses which Thomas Carlisle 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 anymore historians great enough and alive enough to have temperaments 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 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 Carlisle 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 spiritually organized personally conducted a human being's brain is bound to be almost in spite of itself even when it has been educated artificially numbed and philosophized a man may not know the look of the inside of his mind well enough to formulate or recognize it but nearly every man's thinking is done as a matter of course either in people or two people or four 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 abundantly 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 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 giving 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 gradually 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 instinctively 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 some 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 tem all kinds of men about all things to enjoy their joys and the things is the greatest and the liveliest way of learning things to learn to be a committee of the temperaments all by one's self which is what Shakespeare did is that once the method and the end of education outside of one's specialty there could be no better method of doing this no method open to everybody than the method outside of one's specialty of reading for persons and with person 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 mobilizes all love and passion and delight in the world and sense it flowing past one's door in this day of immeasurable exercises why does not someone 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 necessary to go off to another world to believe in reincarnations if one practices 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 smallness 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 women are more or less familiar with the exercise of being born again living pro tem and at will in others and only a few men do it merely the greatest ones statesman diplomats editors poets great financiers and other prophets all men who live by seeing more than others have time for they're 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 everybody it is true that in his earlier stages and in his lesser moods afterward he would probably 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 long run and longer the better is always worthwhile 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 doesn't his knowing spiritually and powerfully he will have to do it dramatically it sometimes seems as if knowing in the best sense where a kind of rotary person process a being everybody 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 universal 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 end of section 17 section 18 of the lost art of reading by Gerald Stanley Lee this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for spiritual thrift but perhaps one of the most interesting things about doing up one's knowing in persons is that it is not only the most alive but the most economical knowledge that can be obtained on the whole 11 or 12 people do very well to know the world with if one can get a complete set if they are different enough and one knows them down through the rest of the people that one sees about from the point of view of stretching ones comprehension one's essential sympathy or knowledge do not count very much they are duplicates to be respected and to be loved of course but to be kept in the cellar of actual consciousness there is no other way to do everybody was not intended to be used by everybody it is because we think that they were mostly that we have to come to our present modern heartlessly cordial fashion of knowing people knowing people by parlor fools whole parlor fools 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 animal July as if they had to be taken in the bulk if one were really to get something it is heartless and shallow enough who is not weary of it no one knows anybody nowadays he merely knows everybody he falls before the reception room a reception room is a place where we set people up in rows like pickets on a fence to know them then like the small boy with a stick one tap per picket we run along knowing people no one comes in touch with anyone it is getting so that there is hardly any possible way left in our modern life for knowing people except by marrying them one cannot even be sure of that when one thinks how married people are being driven about by books and by other people society is a crowd of crowds mutually destroying each other and literature is a crowd of books all shutting each other up and the law seems to be either selection or annihilation whether in reading or living the only way to love everybody in this world seems to be to pick out a few in it delegates of everybody and use these few to read with and to love and understand the world with and to keep close to it all ones days the higher form of one's facts are put in in this world the fewer one needs to know 12 extremely different souls utterly to be able to borrow them at will turn them on all knowledge bring them to bear at a moment's notice on anything one likes is to be an educated masterful man in the most literal possible sense except in mere matters of physical fact things which are small enough to be put in encyclopedias and looked up there a man with 12 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 is like our present prevailing one is so vulgar or un-psychological 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 utilizing it makes narrow and trivial and impotent scholars as a matter of course knowledge of human nature and of oneself 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 daresay it is true that neither I nor anyone else can get by reading in this way what I like to think I am getting slowly a cross-section of the universe but it is something to get as time goes on a cross-section of all the human life that is being lived in it it is something to take each knowledge that comes strike all the keys of one's friends on it clear the keyboard of 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 circumstances dandelions stars politics bob whites acids Kant and domestic science but personalities a man's means of seeing things are determined only by the limits of his imagination one's knowledge of pictures or of Kant of bob whites or acids cannot be applied to every conceivable occasion but nothing can happen in all the world that one cannot see or feel or delight in or suffer in through Charles Lamb's soul if one has really acquired it one can be a Charles Lamb almost anywhere toward almost anything that happens along or a Robert Burns or a Socrates or a Heine or an Amel or a Dickens or Hugo or anyone 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 oneself 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 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 Jay G. Holland Sambov of my youth is digested by Matthew Arnold and Matthew Arnold by Walter Pater and Walter Pater by Walt Whitman Montaigne and Plato have moved over into Emerson and Emerson has been distilled slowly into 40 years Holmes has dissolved into Charles Lamb and Thomas Brown a big volume of Rosetti whom I oddly knew first is lost in a little volume of Keats and as I sit and wait Ruskin and Carlisle 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 five the city the church and the college the greatest event of the 19th century was that somewhere in it at some immense and hidden moment in it human knowledge passed silently over from the emphasis of persons to the emphasis of things I've 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 clothes lines pale faces mist and rumble and dust perhaps I have a soul I say perhaps I have not has anyone 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 scrape of sky or something or as if he really counted looks at me as one would say I I am a millionth of New York and you I am not even that the city gathers itself together and a great roar about me puts its hands to its mouth and bellows in my country ears men are cheap enough dear boy didn't you know that see those dots on Brooklyn bridge I go on with my walk I stop and look up at the great blocks who are you the great blocks say I take another step I'm one more shuffle on the street men are cheap look at us a thousand show windows say are there not square miles of human countenance drifting up Broadway any day and where are they going I ask my soul to oblivion they are going from things said my soul to things and Satavocce from one set of things they know they do not want to another set of things they do not know they do not want one need not wonder very long that nearly every man who 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 favorite 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 favorite New Yorker shake himself off from him save his soul a little longer men are cheap it keeps saying over and over to one a New York soul does it keeps coming back whispering through all the aisles of thought New York spreads itself like a vast concrete philosophy over every man's spirit it reeks with cheapness human cheapness how could it be otherwise with a New York man I never come home from New York wander through the city with my heart afterward look down upon it see Broadway with this little man on it fretting up and down between his 20 story blocks in his little trough of din under the wide heaven loomed at by iron and glass brow beaten by stone smothered by smoke but that he all but seems to me this little Broadway man to be slipping off the planet to barely belong to the planet I feel like clutching at him helping him to hold on pitying him then I remember how it really is if there is any pitying to be done this crowded over crowded off matter cringing callous looking man pities me when I was coming home from New York the last time had reached a safe distance behind my engine out in the fields I found myself listening all over again to the roar saved up in me of the great city I tried to make it out tried to analyze what it was that the voice of the great city said to me the voice of the city is the voice of things my soul said to me and the man I said where does the man come in are not the things for the man then the roar of the great city rose up about me like a flood swallowed my senses in itself numbed and overbore me swooned my soul in itself and said no the things are not for the man the man is for the things this is what the great city said and while I still listened the roar broke over me once more with its no no no its million voices in it its million souls in it all doubts and fears and hates and cries all deadnesses float around me took possession of me then I remembered the iron and wood faces of the man 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 sunlighted ceaseless struggle day unto day but New York is not the world try the whole world said my soul to me perhaps you can do better are there not churches men making men gathering places oasis for strength and rest in it then I went to all the churches in the land at once of a still Sabbath morning steeples in the fields and hills and steeples in cities the sound of splendid organs praying for the poor emptied people the long still innumerable sound of countless collections being taken the drone and seesaw of sermons countless sermons are these poor helpless Sundays paper philosophy and axioms chimes of bells to call the people to paper philosophy and axioms hence 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 once 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 in limitableness and wonder of one man and when I turn from the world of affairs and churches to the world of scholarship I cannot say that I find relief even scholarship scholarship itself is under a stone most of it prone and pale and like all the rest under the emphasis of things scholarship is getting to be a mere huge New York infinite rows and streets of things taught by rows of men who have made themselves over into things to another row of men who are trying to make themselves over into things I visit one after the other of our great colleges with forlorn lonesome little chapels cozy corners for God and for the humanities their vast thing libraries men like dots in them their great long reached out laboratories stables for truth and I am obliged to confess in spirit that even the colleges in all ages the strongholds of the human past and the human future the citadels of manhood are getting to be great man blind centers shambles of souls places for turning every man out from himself every man away from other men making a thing of him or at best a Columbus for a new kind of fly or valet to a worm or tag or label on matter when one considers that it is a literal scientific demonstrable fact that there is not a single evil that can be named in modern life social religious political or industrial which is not based on the narrowness and blindness of classes of men toward one another it is very hard to sit by and watch the modern college almost everywhere with its silent a deadly thing emphasis upon it educating every man it can reach into not knowing other men into not knowing even himself six the outsiders one cannot but look with deep pleasure at first with much relief upon these healthy objective modern men of ours the only way out for spiritual hardy hood after the world's sick middle ages was a Columbus a vast splendid train of things after him of men who emphasized things who could emphasize things it is a great spectacle and a memorable one the one we are in today the spectacle of the wonder that men are doing with things but when one begins to see that it is all being turned around that it is really a spectacle of what things are doing with men one wakes with a start one wonders if there could be such a thing as having all the personalities of a whole generation lost one looks suspiciously and wistfully at the children one sees in the schools one wonders if they are going to be allowed like their fathers and mothers to have personalities to lose I have all but caught myself kidnapping children as I have watched them flocking in the street I have wanted to screw 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 things upon it then I would wait and see what would come out 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 bear idea of the great man a kind of isthmus to the future the test of civilization is what it produces it's man if only because it produces all else if we have all made up our minds to allow the specialist to set the pace for us either to be specialists ourselves or vulgarly to compete with specialists for the right of living or getting a living there is going to be a crash sometime then a sense of emptiness after the crash which will call us to our senses the specialist's view of the world logically narrows itself down to a race of non-entities for nothings and even if a thing is a thing it is a nothing to a non-entity and if it is the one business of a specialist to obtain results and we are all brow beaten 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 worthwhile a world which has accepted as the order of the day success by suicide the spending of man who had done things which only by being men we can enjoy the method of forging boilers and getting death to buy vial ends of having elevated railways for dead men wireless telegraphs for clods gigantic printing presses for men who have forgotten how to read let us all by all means make all things for the world so we set ourselves to our task cheerfully the task of attaining results for people at large by killing people in particular off we are getting to be already even in the arts men with one sense we have classes even in color schools of painters are founded by men because they have one seventh of a sense of sight schools of musicians divide themselves often to 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 making such a perfectly finished world when there is not a man in it who would pay any attention to it as a world if the planet were really being improved by us if the stars shown better by our committing suicide to know their names it might be worthwhile for us all to die perhaps to make racks of ourselves frames for souls one whole generation of us in one single heroic concerted attempt to perfect a universe like this the use and mastery of it but what would it all come to would we not still be left in the way on it we and our children lumbering it up soiling and disgracing it making a machine of it there would be no one to appreciate it our children would inherit the curse from us would be more like us than we are if anyone is to appreciate the 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 the practical disappearance in any vital form of the lecture lyceum the sermon the essay and the poem the annihilation of the imagination or organ of comprehension the disappearance of personality the abolition of the editorial the temporary decline of religion of genius of the artistic temperament can all be summed up and symbolized in a single trait of modern life it's separated men interested in separate things we are getting to be lovers of contentedly separate things little things in their little places all by themselves the modern reader is a skimmer a stare at pictures like a child while he reads never thinking a whole thought a lover of peaks and paragraphs as a matter of course except in his money making or perhaps in the upper levels of science the typical modern man is all paragraphs not only in the way he reads but in the way he lives and thinks outside of his specialty he is not interested in anything more than one paragraph's worth he is as helpless as a bit of protoplasm before the sight of a great many very different things being honestly put together putting things together tires him he has no imagination because he has the daily habit of contentedly seeing a great many things which he never puts together he is neither artistic nor original nor farsighted nor powerful because he has a paragraph way of thinking a scrap bag of a soul because he cannot concentrate separate things cannot put things together he has no personality because he cannot put himself together it is significant that in the days when personalities were common and when very powerful interesting personalities could be looked up several to the mile on almost any road in the land it was not uncommon to see a business letterhead 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 arbitrators men who have two or three perfectly good human sides to their mind who have been allowed to keep minds with three dimensions the probabilities are that if the mind of Socrates or any other great man could have an x-ray put on it and could be thrown on a canvas it would come out as a hexagon or an almost a circle with lines very like spokes on the inside bringing all things to a center it is not necessary to deny in the present emphasis of things that we are making and inspiring all things except ourselves in a way that would make the things glad the trouble is that things are getting too glad they are turning around and making us nearly every man in college is being made over mind and body into a sort of machine when the college has finished him and put him on the market and one wonders what he is for one learns he is to do some very little part of some very little thing and nothing else the local paper announces with pride that in the new factory we have for the manufacture of shoes it takes 163 machines to make one shoe one man to each machine I ask myself if it takes 163 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 their weights in all man a great man I know as always great men wait whose soul shall be the signal to the latent hero in us all who standing forth from the machines of learning and the machines of worship that spread their noise and network through all the living of our lives shall start again the old sublime adventure of keeping a man upon the earth he shall rouse the glowing crusaders the dares of every land who through the proud and dreary temples of the wise shall go with the cry from Nazareth on their lips woe unto you ye men of learning ye have taken away the key of knowledge ye have entered not in yourselves and them that we're entering in ye have hindered and the mighty message of the one great scholar of his day who knew a god whether there be prophecies they shall fail whether there be tongues they shall cease whether there be knowledge it shall vanish away though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not love I am become as sounding brass and tinkling cymbal I do not forget of him whose eye 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 cymbals asked the essentially ignorant question of all outsiders of knowledge in every age how north this man letters never having learned as I lay on my bed in the night they came pale with sleep the faces of all the living as though they were dead what is power they cried souls that were lost from their masters while they slept trooping through my dream what is power now these 1900 years since the boy and the temple with the doctors still the wind of faces flying through the spaces of my dream what is power they cried seven reading the world together it is not necessary to decry science but it should be decried on the housetops of education the world around in this 20th 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 matter 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 surmounting this matter we know so much about rather than becoming like it the next great move of education the one which is to be expected is that the educated man of the 20th century is going to be educated by selecting out of all the bare knowledges the warm and human elements in them he is going to work these over into a relation to himself and when he has worked them over into relation to himself he is going to work them over through himself into everyone else and read the world together it is because the general habit of reading for persons acquiring one's knowledge naturally and vitally and its relation to life has been temporarily swept one side in modern education that we are obliged to face the divorced condition of the educated world today 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 anemically spiritual broad big pallid men and on the other the funny in infinitesimal provincial matter cornered matter of fact ones however useless it may seem to be there is but one way out some man is going to come to us must come to us who will have it in him to challenge these forces do battle with them fight with fog on one hand and desert on the other there never will be one world in education until we have one man who can emphasize persons and things together and do it every day side by side in his own mind when there is one man who is an all man an epitome of a world there shall be more all men he cannot help attracting them drawing them out creating them with enough men who have a whole world in their hearts we shall soon have a whole world whether it is true or not that the universe is most swiftly known most naturally enjoyed as related to one creator or person as the self-expression of one being who loved all these things enough to gather them together it is generally admitted that the natural man seems to have been created to enjoy a universe as related to himself his most natural and powerful way of enjoying it is to enjoy it in its relation to persons a person may not have created it but it seems for the time being at least and so far as persons are concerned to have been created for persons to know the persons and the things together and particularly the things in relation to the persons is the swiftest and simplest way of knowing the things persons are the nervous system of all knowledge so far as man is concerned all truth is a subtopic under his own soul and the universe is the tool of his own life reading for different topics in it gives a superficial knowledge of the men who write about them reading to know the men gives him a superficial knowledge in the technical sense of the things they write about let him stand up and take his choice like a man between being superficial in the letter and superficial in the spirit outside of his specialty however being superficial in the letter will lead him to the most knowledge man is the greatest topic all other knowledge is a subtopic under a man and the stars themselves are as footnotes to the thoughts of his heart things are not only related to other things the soul of the man says they are related to me this relation of things to me is a mutual affair partly theirs and partly mine and i am going to do my knowing act on my own knowledge as if i were of some importance in it shall i reckon with alkalis and acids and not reckon with myself i say oh great nature oh 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 oh mighty child the stars thy companions stand up come out into the day laugh the great winds to thy side the sea if thou wilt have it so is thy frog pond and thou shall play with the lightnings in thy breast i i 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 but in my body in the end for things but now i live i live and things are for me i i and they shall be to thee said my soul what thou biddest them and now i go forth quietly do you not see oh mountains that you must reckon with me i am the younger brother of the stars i have faced nations in my heart great bullying hulking half dead centuries i have faced i have made them speak to me and have dared against them if there is history i also am history if there are facts i also am a fact if there are laws it is one of the laws that i am one of the laws all knowledge i have said in my heart instead of being a kind of vast overseer and slave system for a man to lock himself up in and throw away his key becomes free fluent daring and glorious the moment it is conceived through persons and for persons and with persons 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 by my soul's delight all the persons the knowledge is related to shall belong 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 and of section 18