 Section 10 of the Lost Art of Reading by Gerald Stanley Leigh This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Entrance Examinations in Joy If entrance examinations in joy were required at our representative colleges, very few of the pupils who are prepared for college in the ordinary way would be admitted. What is more serious than this, the honor pupils in the colleges themselves at commencement time, those who have submitted most fully to the college requirements, would take a lower stand in a final examination in joy, whether of sense or spirit, than any others in the class. Their education has not consisted in the acquiring of a state of being, a condition of organs, a capacity of tasting life, of creating and sharing the joys and meanings in it. Their learning has largely consisted in the fact that they have learned at last to let their joys go. They have become the most satisfactory of scholars, not because of their power of knowing, but because of their willingness to be powerless in knowing. When they have been drilled to know without joy, have become the day laborers of learning, they are given diplomas for cheerlessness, and are sent forth into the world as teachers of the young. Almost any morning, in almost any town or city beneath the sun, you can see them, gentle reader, with the children, spreading their tired minds and their tired bodies over all the fresh and buoyant knowledge of the earth, knowledge that has not been throbbed and cannot be throbbed out. The graduates of the colleges for women, in the association of collegiate alumni, have seriously discussed the question whether the college course in literature made them nearer or farther from creating literature themselves. The editor of Harper's Monthly has recorded that the spontaneity and freedom of subjective construction in certain American authors was only made possible, probably, by their having escaped an early academic training. The Century magazine has been so struck with the fact that hardly a single writer of original power before the public has been a regular college graduate that it has offered special prizes and inducements for any form of creative literature, poem, story or essay, that a college graduate could write. If a teacher of literature desires to remove his subject from the uncreative methods he finds in use around him, he can only do so successfully by persuading trustees and college presidents that literature is an art and that it can only be taught through the methods and spirit and conditions that belong to art. If he succeeds in persuading trustees and presidents, he will probably find that faculties are not persuaded and that in the typical Germanized institution of learning, at least, any work he may choose to do in the spirit and method of joy will be looked upon by the larger part of his fellow teachers as superficial and pleasant. Those who do not feel that it is superficial and pleasant, who grant that working for a state of being is the most profound and worthy and strenuous work that a teacher can do, that it is what education is for, will feel that it is impracticable. It is thus that it has come to pass in the average institution of learning that if a teacher does not know what education is, he regards education as superficial and if he does know what education is, he regards education as impossible. It is not intended to be dogmatic, but it may be worthwhile to state from the pupil's point of view and from memory what kind of teacher a college student who is really interested in literature would like to have. Given a teacher of literature who has carte blanche from the other teachers, the authorities around him, and from the trustees, the authorities over him, what kind of a stand will he find best to take if he proposes to give his pupils an actual knowledge of literature? In the first place, he will stand on the general principle that if a pupil is to have an actual knowledge of literature as literature, he must experience literature as an art. In the second place, if he is to teach literature to his pupils as an art to be mastered, he will begin his teaching as a master. Instead of his pupils determining that they will elect him, he will elect them. If there is to be any candidate, he will see that the candidate is properly placed, that the privilege at least of the first-class music master, dancing master, and teacher of painting, the choosing of his own pupils, is accorded to him. In as much as the power and value of his class must always depend upon him, he will not allow either the size or the character of his classes to be determined by a catalogue or by the examinations of other persons or by the advertising facilities of the college. If actual results are to be achieved in his pupils, it can only be by his governing the conditions of their work and by keeping these conditions at all times in his own hands. In the third place, he will see that his class is so conducted that out of a hundred who desire to belong to it, the best ten only will be able to. In the fourth place, he will himself not only determine which are the best ten, but he will make this determination on the one basis possible for a teacher of art, the basis of mutual attraction among the pupils. He will take his stand on the spiritual principle that if classes are to be vital classes, it is not enough that the pupils should elect the teacher, but the teacher and pupils must elect each other. The basis of an art is the mutual attraction that exists between things that belong together. The basis for transmitting an art to other persons is the natural attraction that exists between persons that belong together. The more mutual the attraction is, complementary or otherwise, the more condensed and powerful teaching can it be made the conductor of. If a hundred candidates offer themselves, fifty will be rejected because the attraction is not mutual enough to ensure swift and permanent results. Out of fifty, forty will be rejected probably for the sake of ten with whom the mutual attraction is so great that great things cannot help being accomplished by it. The thorough and contagious teacher of literature will hold his power, the power of conveying the current and mood of art to others, as a public trust. He owes it to the institution in which he is placed to refuse to surround himself with non-conductors. And in as much as his power, such as it is, is instinctive power, it will be placed where it instinctively counts the most. In proportion as he loves his art and loves his kind and desires to get them on speaking terms with each other, he will devote himself to selected pupils, to those with whom he will throw the least away. His service to others will be to give to these such real, inspired and reproductive knowledge that it shall pass on from them to others of its own inherent energy. From the narrower, that is the less spiritual, point of view, it has seemed perhaps a selfish and aristocratic thing for a teacher to make distinctions in persons in the conduct of his work, but from the point of view of the progress of the world it is heartless and sentimental to do otherwise. And without exception, all of the most successful teachers in all of the arts have been successful quite as much through a kind of dictatorial insight in selecting the pupils they could teach, as in selecting the things they could teach them. In the fifth place, having determined to choose his pupils himself, the selection will be determined by processes of his own choosing. These processes, whatever form or lack of form they may take, will serve to convey to the teacher the knowledge he desires. They will be an examination in the capacity of joy in the pupil, and as much as surplus joy in a pupil is the most promising thing he can have. The sole secret of any ability he may ever attain of learning literature, the basis of all discipline, it will be the first thing the teacher takes into account. While it is obvious that an examination in joy could not be conducted in any set fashion, every great joy in the world has its natural diviners and experts, and teachers of literature who know its joy have plenty of ways of divining this joy in others. In the sixth place, pupils will be dropped and promoted by a teacher in such a class as has been described according to the spirit and force and creativeness of their daily work. Promotion will be by elimination. That is, the pupil will stay where he is and the class will be made smaller for him. The superior natural force of each pupil will have full sway in determining his share of the teacher's force. As this force belongs most to those who waste at least, if five-tenths of the appreciation in a class belongs to one pupil, five-tenths of the teacher belongs to him, and promotion is most truly affected not by giving the best pupils a new teacher, but by giving them more of the old one. A teacher's work can only be successful in proportion as it is accurately individual and puts each pupil in the place he was made to fit. In the seventh place, the select class will be selected by the teacher as a baseball captain selects his team, not as being the nine best men, but as being the nine men who most call each other out and make the best play together. If the teacher selects his class wisely, the principle of his selection sometimes, from the outside at least, will seem no principle at all. The class must have its fool, for instance, and pupils must be selected for useful defects, as well as for virtues. Belonging to such a class will not be allowed to have a stiff, definite water meter meaning in it with regard to the capacity of a pupil. It will only be known that he is placed in the class for some quality, fault, or inspiration in him that can be brought to bear on the state of being in the class in such a way as to produce results, not only for himself, but for all concerned. Natural selection in theory. The conditions just stated as necessary for the vital teaching of literature narrow themselves down for the most part to the very simple and common principle of life and art, the principle of natural selection. As an item in current philosophy, the principle of natural selection meets with general acceptance. It is one of those pleasant and instructive doctrines which, when applied to existing institutions, is opposed at once as a sensational visionary and revolutionary doctrine. There are two most powerful objections to the doctrine of natural selection in education. One of these is the scholastic objection and the other is the religious one. The scholastic objection is that natural selection in education is impracticable. It cannot be made to operate mechanically or for large numbers, and it interferes with nearly all of the educational machinery for hammering heads in rows, which we have at command at present. Even if the machinery could be stopped and natural selection could be given the place that it belongs to it, all success in acting on it would call for handmade teachers, and handmade teachers are not being produced when we have nothing but machines to produce them with. The scholastic objection that natural selection in education is impracticable under existing conditions is obviously well taken. As it cannot be answered, it had best be taken perhaps as a recommendation. The religious objection to natural selection in education is not that it is impracticable, but that it is wicked. It rests its case on the defense of the weak. But the question at issue is not whether the weak shall be served and defended or whether they shall not. We all would serve and defend the weak. If a teacher feels that he can serve his inferior pupils best by making his superior pupils inferior too, it is probable that he had better do it and that he will know how to do it and that he will know how to do it better than anyone else. There are many teachers, however, who have the instinctive belief and who act on it so far as they are allowed to, that to take the stand that the inferior pupil must be defended at the expense of the superior pupil is to take a sentimental stand. It is not a stand in favor of the inferior pupil but against him. The best way to respect an inferior pupil is to keep him in place. The more he is kept in place, the more his powers will be called upon. If he is in the place above him, he may see much that he would not see otherwise, much at which he will wonder, perhaps, but he deserves to be treated spiritually and thoroughly to be kept where he will be creative, where his wondering will be to the point both at once and eventually. It is a law that holds as good in the life of a teacher of literature as it does in the lives of makers of literature. From the point of view of the world at large, the author who can do anything else has no right to write for the average man. There are plenty of people who cannot help writing for him. Let them do it. It is their right and the world's right that they should be the ones to do it. It is the place that belongs to them and why should nearly every man we have of the more seeing kind today deliberately compete with men who cannot compete with him. The man who abandons the life that belongs to him, the life that would not exist in the world if he did not live it and keep it existing in the world and who does it to help his inferiors, does not help his inferiors. He becomes their rival. He crowds them out of their lives. There could not possibly be a more noble or more exact and spiritual law of progress than this that every man should take his place in human society and do his work in it with his nearest spiritual neighbors. These nearest spiritual neighbors are a part of the economy of the universe. They are now and always have been the natural conductors over the face of the earth of actual power in it. It has been through the grouping of the nearest spiritual neighbors around the world that men have unfailingly found the heaven-appointed world-remolding teachers of every age. It does not sound very much like Thomas Jefferson, and it is to be admitted that there are certain lines in our first great national document, which, read on the run at least, may seem to deny it. But the living spirit of Thomas Jefferson does not teach that amputation is progress, nor does true democracy admit either the patriotism or the religion of a man who feels that his legs must be cut off to run to the assistance of neighbors whose legs are cut off. An educational democracy which expects a pupil to be less than himself for the benefit of other pupils is a mock democracy, and it is the very essence of a democracy of the truer kind that expects every man to be more than himself, and if a man's religion is of the truer kind, it will not be heard telling him that he owes it to God and the average man to be less than himself. Natural selection in practice it is not going to be possible very much longer to take it for granted that natural selection is a somewhat absent-minded and heathen habit that God has fallen into in the natural world and uses in his dealings with men, but that it is not a good enough law for men to use in their dealings with one another. The main thing that science has done in the last 50 years, in spite of conventional religion and so-called scholarship, has been to bring to pass in many respect for the natural world. The next thing is to be brought to pass, also in spite of conventional religion and so-called scholarship, is the self-respect of the natural man and of the instincts of human nature. The self-respect of the natural man when once he gains it is a thing that is bound to take care of itself and take care of the man and take care of everything that is important to the man, in as much as in the long run at least education and in times of its not being human interests humanity more than anything else. A most important consequence of the self-respect of the natural man is going to be an uprising all over the world of teachers who believe something. The most important consequence of having teachers who believe something will be a wholesale and uncompromising rearrangement of nearly all our systems and methods of education. Instead of being arranged to cow the teacher with routine, to keep teachers from being human beings and to keep their pupils from finding it out if they are human beings, they will be arranged on the principle that the whole object of knowledge is the being of a human being and the only way to know anything worth knowing in the world is to begin by knowing how to be a human being and by liking it. Not until our current education is based throughout on expecting great things of human nature instead of secretly despising it, can it truly be called education? Expectancy is the very essence of education. Actions not only speak louder than words, they make words as though they were not. And so long as our teachers confine themselves to saying beautiful and literary things about the instincts of the human heart and do not trust their own instincts in their daily teaching and the instincts of their pupils and do not make this trust the foundation of all their work the more they educate the more they destroy. The destruction is both ways and whatever the subjects are they may choose to know, murder and suicide are the branches they teach. The chief characteristic of the teacher of the future is going to be that he will dare to believe in himself and that he will divine some one thing to believe in in everybody else and that trusting the laws of human nature he will go to work on this some one thing and work out from it to everything. In as much as the chief working principle of human nature is the principle of natural selection the entire method of the teacher of the future will be based on his faith in natural selection. All such teaching as he attempts to do will be worked out from the temperamental involuntary primitive choices of his own being both in persons and in subject. His power with his classes will be his power of divining the free and unconscious and primitive choices of individual pupils in persons and subjects. Half of the battle is already won. The principle of natural selection between pupils and subjects is recognized in the elective system but we have barely commenced to conceive as yet the principle of natural selection in its more important application mutual attraction between teacher and pupil. Natural selection in its deeper and more powerful and spiritual sense the kind of natural selection that makes the teacher a worker in wonder and education the handiwork of God. In most of our great institutions we do not believe in even the theory of this deeper natural selection and if we do believe in it sitting in endowed chairs under the umbrella of endowed ideas how can we act on that belief and if we do who will come out and act with us if it does not seem best for even the single teacher doing his teaching unattached quite by himself to educate in the open to trust his own soul and the souls of his pupils to the nature of things how much less shall the great institution with its crowds of teachers and its rows of pupils and its vested funds be expected to lay itself open lay its teachers and pupils and its vested funds open to the nature of things. We are suspicious of the nature of things God has concealed a lie in them we do not believe therefore we cannot teach the conclusion is inevitable as long as we believe in natural selection between pupil and subject but do not believe in natural selection between pupil and teacher no great results in education or in teaching a vital relation to books or to anything else will be possible as long as natural selection between pupil and teacher is secretly guarded as an irreligious and selfish instinct with which a teacher must have nothing to do instead of a divine ordinance a heaven appointed starting point for doing everything the average routine teacher in the conventional school and college will continue to be the kind of teacher he is and will continue to belong to what seems to many at least the sentimental and superstitious and pessimistic profession he belongs to now why should a teacher allow himself to teach without inspiration a profession on the earth where between the love of God and the love of the opening faces inspiration one would say could hardly be missed certainly if it was ever intended that artists should be in the world it was intended that teachers should be artists and why should we be artisans if we cannot be artists if we are not allowed to make our work a self expression were it not better to get ones living by the labor of ones hands being in the wonder of the ground a stone crusher as long as one works one's will with it makes it say something is nearer to nature than a college I would rather do manual labor with my hands than manual labor with my soul the true artist is saying today and a great many thousand teachers are saying it and thousands more who would like to teach the moment that teaching ceases to be a trade and becomes a profession again these thousands are going to crowd into it until the artist teachers have been attracted to teaching things can only continue as they are young men and women who are capable of teaching will continue to do all that they can not to get into it and young men and women who are capable of teaching and who are still trying to teach will continue to do all that they can to get out of it when the schools of America have been obliged like the city of Brooklyn to advertise to secure even poor teachers we shall begin to see where we stand stop our machinery a while and look at it the only way out is the return to nature and to faith in the freedom of nature not until the teacher of the young has dared to return to nature has won the emancipation of his own instincts and the emancipation of the instincts of his pupils can we expect anything better than we have now of either of them not until the modern reader has come to the point where he deliberately works with his instincts where he looks upon himself as an artist working in the subject that attracts him most and in the material that is attracted to him most can we expect to secure in our crowded conditions today enough teaching to go around the one practical and economical way to make our limited supply of passion and thought cover the ground is to be spiritual and spontaneous and thorough with what we have the one practical and economical way to do this is to leave things free to let the natural forces of men's lives find the places that belong to them develop the powers that belong to them until power in every man's life shall be contagious of power in the meantime having brought out the true and vital energies of men as far as we go if we are obliged to be specialists in knowledge we shall be specialists of the larger sort the powers of each man being actual and genuine powers shall play into the powers of other men each man that essays to live shall create for us a splendor and beauty and strength he was made to create from the beginning of the world to those who sit in the seat of the scornful the somewhat lyrical idea of an examination in joy as a basis of admission to the typical college appeals as a fit subject of laughter so it is having admitted the laugh the question is all human life is questioning the college today which way shall the laugh point if the conditions of the typical college do not allow for the working of the laws of nature so much the worse for the laws of nature or so much the worse for the college in the meantime it is good to record that there are many signs thanks to these same laws of nature that a most powerful reaction is setting in not only in the colleges themselves but in all the forces of culture outside and around them the examination in joy the test of natural selection is already employed by all celebrated music masters the world over in the choosing of pupils and by all capable teachers of painting and the time is not far off when so far as in literature are concerned if the teaching of literature is attempted in crowded institutions the examination in joy will be the determining factor with all the best teachers not only in the conduct of their classes but in the very structure of them structure is the basis of conduct the emancipation of the teacher the custom of mowing lawns in cities of having every grass blade in every door yard the other grass blade is considered by many persons as an artificial custom a violation of the law of nature it is contended that the free swinging wind blown grasses of the fields are more beautiful and that they give more various and infinite delight in color and line and movement if a piece of this same field however could be carefully cut out and moved and fitted to a city door yard bobble inks and daisies and shadows in all precisely as they are it would not be beautiful long grass conforms to a law of nature where nature has room and short grass conforms to a law of nature where nature has not room when for whatever reason of whatever importance men and women choose to be so close together that it is not fitting they should have freedom and when they choose to have so little room to live in that development is not fitting lest it should inconvenience others the penalty follows when grass blades are crowded between walls and fences the more they can be made to look alike the more pleasing they are and when an acre of ground finds itself covered with a thousand people or a teacher of culture finds himself mobbed with pupils the law of nature is the same whenever crowding of any kind takes place whether it be in grass ideas or human nature the most pleasing as well as the most convenient and natural way of reducing a beautiful effect is with the lawn mower the dead level is the logic of crowded conditions the city grades down its heels for the convenience of reducing its sewer problem it makes its streets into blocks for the convenience of knowing where every home is and how far it is by a glance at a page and in order that the human beings in it one set of innumerable nobodies hurrying to another set of innumerable nobodies may never be made to turn out per chance for an elm on a sidewalk it cuts down centuries of trees and then out of its modern improvements its map of life its woods in rows its wheels on tracks and its souls in pigeon holes out of its huge checkerboard under the days and nights it lifts its eyes to the smoke in heaven at last and thanks God it is civilized the substantial fact in the case would seem to be that every human being born into the world has the right to be treated as a special creation all by himself society can only be said to be truly civilized in proportion as it acts on this fact it is because in the family each being is treated as one out of six or seven and in the school as one out of six hundred that the family with approximately good parents comes nearer to being a model school than anything we have if we deliberately prefer to live in crowds for the larger part of our lives we must expect our lives to be cut and fitted accordingly it is an aesthetic as well as a practical law that this should be so the law of nature where there is room for a man to be a man is not the law of nature where there is not room for him to be a man if there is no playground for his individual instincts except the street he must give them up as much as natural selection in overcrowded conditions means selecting things by taking them away from others it can neither be beautiful nor useful to practice it people who prefer to be educated in masses must conform to the law of mass which is inertia and to the law of the herd which is the dog as long as our prevailing idea of the best elective is the one with the largest class and the prevailing idea of culture is the degree from the most crowded college all natural gifts whether in teachers or pupils are under a penalty if we deliberately place ourselves where everything is done by the gross as a matter of course and in the nature of things the machine made man taught by the machine made teacher in a teaching machine will continue to be the typical scholar of the modern world and the gentleman scholar the man who made himself or who gave God a chance to make him will continue to be what he is now in most of our large teaching communities an exception culture which has not the power to win the emancipation of its teachers does not produce emancipated and powerful pupils the essence of culture is selection and the essence of selection is natural selection and teachers who have not been educated with natural selection cannot teach it teachers who have given up being individuals in the main activity of their lives who are not allowed to be individuals in their teaching do not train pupils to be individuals their pupils instead of being organic human beings are manufactured ones literary drill in college consists in drilling every man to be himself in giving him the freedom of himself probably it would be admitted by most of us who are college graduates that the teachers who loom up in our lives are those whom we remember as emancipated teachers men who dared to be individuals in their daily work and who every time they touched us helped us to be individuals the test of culture looking at our great institutions of learning in a general way one might be inclined to feel that literature cannot be taught in them because the classes are too large when one considers however the average class in literature as it actually is and the things that are being taught in it it becomes obvious that the larger such a class can be made and the less the pupil can be made to get out of it the better the best test of a man's knowledge of the Spanish language would be to put him in a balloon and set him down in dark night in the middle of Spain and leave him there with his Spanish words the best test of a man's knowledge of books is to see what he can do without them on the island in the sea when the ship's library over the blue horizon dwindles at last in its cloud of smoke and he is left without a shred of printed paper by him the supreme opportunity of education will come to him he will learn how vital and beautiful or boastful and empty his education is if it is true education the first step he takes he will find a use for it the first bird that floats from its great message from London straight to his soul if he has truly known them the spirits of all his books will flock to him if he has known Shakespeare the ghost of the great master will rise from beneath its Stratford stone and walk oceans to be with him if he knows Homer Homer is full of odysseys tripping across the seas shall he sit him down on the rocks lift his voice like a mere librarian and like a book raised a hungry babe cry to the surf for a Greek dictionary the rhythm of the beach is greased to him and the singing of the great Greek voice is on the tops of waves around the world a man's culture is his knowledge become himself it is in the seeing of his eyes and the hearing of his ears and the use of his hands is there not always the altar of the heavens and the earth laying down days and nights of joy before it and peace the scholar is always a scholar i.e. he is always at home to be cultured is to be so splendidly wrought of body and soul as to get the most joy out of the least and the fewest things wherever he happens to be whatever he happens to be without his culture is his being master he may be naked before the universe and it may be a pitiless universe or a gracious one but he is always master he will live in it knowing how to hunger and die in it or like Stevenson smiling out of his poor worn body to it he is the unconquerable man wherever he is in the world he cannot be old in the presence of the pageant of life from behind the fading of his face lye watches it child after child spring after spring as it flies before him he will not grow old while it still passes by it carries delight across the end he watches and sings with it to the end down to the edge of sleep a bird's shadow is enough to be happy with if a man is educated or the flicker of light on a leaf and when really a song is being lived in a man all nature plays its accompaniment to possess one's own senses to know how to conduct oneself is to be the conductor of orchestras in the clouds and in the grass the trained man is not dependent on having the thing itself he borrows the boom of the sea to live with it anywhere and the gladness of continents literary training consists in the acquiring of a state of mind and body to feel the universe with and becoming an athlete toward beauty a giver of great lifts of joy to this poor straining stumbling world with its immemorial burden on its back which going round and round for the most part with its eyes shut between infinities is the hope and sorrow of all of us for the very reason that its eyes are shut summary the proper conditions for literary drill in college would seem to sum themselves up in the general idea that literature is the spirit of life it can therefore only be taught through the spirit first it can only be taught through the spirit by being taught as an art through its own nature and activity reproductively giving the spirit body both the subject matter and the method in true literary drill can only be based on the study of human experience the intense study of human experience in a college course may be fairly said to involve three things that must be daily made possible to the pupil in college life everything that is given him to do and everything that happens to him in college should cultivate these three things in the pupil one personality an intense first person singular as a center for having experience two imagination the natural organ in the human soul for realizing what an experience is and for combining and condensing it three the habit of having time and room for re-experiencing an experience at will in the imagination until the experience is so powerful and vivid so fully realizes itself in the mind that the owner of the mind is an artist with his mind when he puts the experience of his mind down it becomes more real to other men on paper then their own experiences are to them in their own lives it is hardly necessary to point out that whatever our conventional courses in literature may be doing whether in college or anywhere else they are not bringing out this creative joy and habit of creative joy in the pupils those who are interested in literature courses such as we have for the most part do not believe in trying to bring out the creative joy of each pupil those who might believe in trying to do it do not believe it can be done they do not believe it can be done because they do not realize that in the case of each and every pupil so far as he goes it is the only thing worth doing in our life so if you have any other commentaries and from out of their footnotes the fact that the one object in studying literature is joy that the one way of studying and knowing literature is joy and that the one way to attain joy is to draw out creative joy second and if literature is to be taught as an art it must be taught beings, there can be no wide and beautiful hope for either of them. The organs of literature are precisely the same organs, and they are trained on precisely the same principles as the organs of life. Except an education in books can bring to pass the right conditions of these organs, a state of being in the pupil, his knowledge of no matter how long a list of masterpieces is but a catalog of the names of things forever left out of his life, it is little wonder when the drudgery has done its work and the sorry show is over and the victim of the system is face to face with his empty soul at last if in his earlier years at least he seems over fond to some of us of receiving metals, honors, validictories for what he might have been and of flourishing a degree for what he has missed. There once was a master of arts who was nuts upon cranberry tarts. When he'd eaten his fill he was awfully ill, but he was still a master of arts. The power and habit of studying and enjoying human nature as it lives around us is not only a more human and alive occupation, but it is a more literary one than becoming another editor of Escalus or going down to posterity in footnotes as one of the most prominent boars that Shakespeare ever had. If a teacher of literature enjoys being the editor of Escalus or if he is happier in appearing on a title page with a poet than he could possibly be in being a poet, it is personally well enough, though it may be a disaster to the rest of us and to Escalus. Men who can be said as a class to care more about literature than they do about life who prefer the paper side of things to the real one are at liberty as private persons to be editors and footnote hunters to the top of their bent, but why should they call it the study of literature? To teach their pupils to be footnote hunters and editors. And how can they possibly teach anything else? And do they teach anything else? And if good teachers can only teach what they have, what shall we expect of poor ones? In the meantime, the manufacture of the cultured mind is going ruthlessly on and thousands of young men and women who left alone with the masters of literature might be engaged in accumulating and multiplying inspiration are engaged in analyzing, dividing what inspiration they have. And in the one natural creative period of their lives, their time is entirely spent in learning how inspired work was done or how it might have been done or how it should have been done in absorbing everything about it except its spirit, the power that did it, the power that makes being told how to do it uncalled for, the power that asks and answers its hows for itself, the serene powerlessness of it all without courage or passion or conviction, without self-discovery in it or self-forgetfulness or beauty in it or for one moment the great contagion of the great is one of the saddest sites in this modern day. In the meantime, the most practical thing that can be done with the matter of literary drill in college is to turn the eye of the public on it. Methods will change when ideals change and ideals will change when the public clearly sees ideals and when the public encourages colleges that see them. The time is not far off when it will be admitted by all concerned that the true study of masterpieces consists and always must consist in communing with the things that masterpieces are about in the learning and applying of the principles of human nature and a passion for real persons and a daily loving of the face of the universe. This idea may not be considered very practical. It stands for a kind of education in which it is difficult to exhibit in Rose actual results. We are not contending for an education that looks practical. We are contending merely for education that will be true and beautiful and natural. It will be practical the way the forces of nature are practical, whether anyone notices it or not. The following announcement can already be seen on the bulletin boards of universities around the world, if looked for twice. They are coming! Oh shades of learning! The lovers of joy! Imperious joy! Unconquerable! Their sails are flocking the east. The high seas are theirs. They shall command you, overwhelm you. Book lovers, paper plotters, shall be as though they were not. The youth of the earth shall be renewed in the morning. The suns and the stars shall be unlocked, and the evening shall go forth with joy. The mountains shall be freed from the pick and the shovel and the book, and lift themselves to heaven. Flowers shall again out blossom botanies, and gymnasts of music shall be laid low, and birds through an opera-glass shall sing. Joy shall come to knowledge, and the strength of joy upon it. They are coming! Oh ye shades of learning! A thousand to a thousand strong! Their sails flock the sea. The smoke and the throb of their engines is the promise of the east. The days of thirteen thousand ton three horsepower education are numbered. A note. It is one of the danger signs of the times that the men who have most closely observed our modern life in its social, industrial, artistic, educational, and religious aspects seem to be gradually coming to the point where they all but take it for granted in considering all social, industrial, and educational and political questions. That the conditions of modern times are such, and are going to be such, that imagination and personality might as well be dropped as practical forces, forces that must be reckoned with in the movement of human life. Nearly all the old-time outlooks of the soul as they stand in history have been taken for factory sites, bought up by syndicates, moral and otherwise, and are being used for chimneys. Nothing but smoke and steel and wooden things come out of them. Poets and brokers are both telling us on every hand that imagination is impossible and personality incredible in modern life. Imagination and personality are the spirit and the dust out of which all great nations and all great religions are made. The attempt has been made in the foregoing pages to point out that they are not dead. The alter smolders, in pointing out how imagination and personality can be wrought into one single branch of a man's education, his relation to books, principles may have been suggested which can be concretely applied by all of us, each in our own department to the education of the whole man. I never shall quite forget the time when the rumor was started in our town that old Mr. M, our librarian, a gentle, furtive, silent man, a man who, with a single exception of a long white beard, was all screwed up and bent around with learning, who was always slipping invisibly in and out of his high shelves, and who looked as if his whole life had been nothing but a kind of long perpetual salam to books, had been caught dancing one day with his wife, which only goes to show, broke in the MP, what a man of fixed literary habits mere book habits, if he keeps on, is reduced to. But as I was about to remark, for a good many weeks afterward, after the rumor was started, one kept seeing people, I was one of them, as they came into the library looking shyly at Mr. M, as if they were looking at him all over again. They looked at him as if they had really never quite noticed him before. He sat at his desk, quiet and busy, and bent over with his fine pointed pen and his labels, as usual, and his big leather-bound catalogue of the universe. A few of us had had reason to suspect, at least we had had hopes, that the pedantry in Mr. M was somewhat superimposed, that he had possibilities, human and otherwise, but none of us, it must be confessed, had been able to surmise quite accurately just where they would break out. We were filled with a gentle spreading joy with the very thought of it, a sense of having acquired a secret possession in a librarian. The community at large, however, as it walked into its library, looked at its acre of books, and then looked at its librarian, felt cheated. It was shocked. The community had always been proud of its books, proud of its bookworm. It had always paid a big salary to it, and the worm had turned. I have only been back to the old town twice since the day I left it, as a boy, about this time. The first time I went, he was there. I came across him in his big, splendid new library, his face like some live but wrinkled old parchment, twinkling and human, though, looking out from its dust heap. It seems to me, I thought, as I stood in the doorway, I saw him edging around an alcove in the Syriac department, that if one must have a great dreary heap to pile of books in a town, anyway, the spectacle of a man like this flitting around in it, doting on them, is what one ought to have to go with it. He always seemed to me a kind of responsive, every way at once, little man, book alive all through. One never missed it with him. He had the literary nerves of ten dead nations tingling in him. The next time I was in town they said he had resigned. They said he lived in the little grey house around the corner from the great new, glaring stone library. No one ever saw him except in one of his long, hesitating walks, or sometimes perhaps by the little study window pouring himself over into a book there. It was there that I saw him, myself, that last morning, older and closer to the light turning leaves, the same still, swift eagerness about him. I stepped into the library next door and saw the new librarian, an efficient person. He seemed to know what time it was while we stood and chatted together, that is the main impression one had of him, that he would always know what time it was, put him anywhere, one felt it, CF, as in confer or compare. Our new librarian troubles me a good deal. I have not quite made out why. Perhaps it is because he has a kind of chipper air with the books. I am always coming across him in the shelves, but I do not seem to get used to him. Of course, I pull myself together, bow and say things, make it a point to assume he is literary, go through the form of not letting him know what I think, as well as may be, but we do not get on. And yet all the time down underneath I know perfectly well that there is no real reason why I should find fault with him. The only thing that seems to be the matter with him is that he keeps right on, every time I see him, making me try to. I have had occasion to notice that as a general rule, when I find myself finding fault with a man in this fashion, this vague, eager fashion, the gist of it is that I merely want him to be someone else. But in this case, well, he is someone else. He is almost anybody else. He might be a head salesman in a department store, or a hotel clerk, or a train dispatcher, or a broker, or a treasurer of something. There are thousands of things he might be, ought to be, except our librarian. He has an odd displaced look behind the great desk. He looks as if he had gotten in by mistake and was trying to make the most of it. He has a business-like, worldly-minded, foreign air about him, a kind of offhand, pert, familiar way with books. He does not know how to bend over like a librarian, and when one comes on him in an alcove the way one ought to come on a librarian with a great folio on his knees, he is, well, there are those who think that have seen it, that he is positively comic. I followed him around only the other day for fifteen or twenty minutes, from one alcove to another, and watched him taking down books. He does not even know how to take down a book. He takes all the books down alike, the same pleasant dapper capable manner, the same peek and clap for all of them. He always seems to have the same, indefatigable unconsciousness about him, going up and down his long aisles, no more idea of what he is about or of what the books are about. Everything about him seems disconnected with a library. I find I cannot get myself to notice him as a librarian, or comrade, or book-mind. He does not seem to have noticed himself in this capacity exactly. So far as I can get at his mind at all, he seems to have decided that his mind, any librarian's mind, is a kind of pneumatic tube, or carrier system, apparently, for shoving immortals at people. Any higher or more thorough use for a mind, such as being a kind of spirit of the books for people, making a kind of spiritual connection with them down underneath, does not seem to have occurred to him. Time was when librarians really had something to do with books. They looked at it. One could almost tell a librarian on the street, tell him at sight, if he had been one long enough. One could feel a library in a man somehow. It struck in. Librarians were allowed to be persons. It was expected of them. They have not always been what so many of them are now, mere couplings, conveniences, connecting rods, literary beltings. They were identified, wrought in with books. They could not be unmixed. They ate books. And like the little green caterpillars that eat green grass, the color showed through. A sort of general brown, faded color, a little undusted around the edges, was the proper color for librarians. It is true that people did not expect librarians to look quite human, at least on the outside sometimes, and doubtless the whole matter was carried too far. But it does seem to me it is some comfort, if one has to have a librarian in a library, to have one that goes with the books. Same color, tone, feeling, spirit, and everything. The kind of librarian that slips in and out among the books without being noticed there, one way or the other, like the overtone in a symphony. At Al. But the trouble with our library is not merely the new librarian, who permeates, penetrates, and ramifies the whole library within and without, percolating efficiency into its farthest and loneliest alcoves. Our new librarian has a core of assistance. And even if you manage by slipping around a little to get over to where a book is alone and get settled down with it, there is always someone who has been or will be looking over your shoulder. I daresay it's a defective temperament, that's having one's shoulder looked over in libraries. Other people do not seem to be troubled much, and I suppose I ought to admit, while I am about it, that having one's shoulder looked over in a library does not in the least depend upon anyone's actually looking over it. That is merely a matter of form. It is a little hard to express. What one feels, at least in our library, is that one is in a kind of side-looking place. One feels a kind of literary detective system going silently on, in and out, all around one, a polite, absent-minded, looking watchfulness. Now I am not for one moment flattering myself that I can make my fault-finding with our librarian's assistance amount too much, fill out a blank with it. No one can feel more strongly than I do my failure to put my finger on the letter of our librarian's faults. I cannot even tell the difference between the faults and the virtues of our librarian's assistance. Either by doing the right thing with the wrong spirit, or the wrong thing with the right spirit, they do their faults and virtues all up together. Their intrafatigable unobtrusiveness, their kindly faithful service I both dread and appreciate. I have tried my utmost to notice and emphasize every day the pleasant things about them, but I always get tangled up. I have started out to think with approval, for instance, of the hush, the hush that clothes them as a garment. That it has all ended in my merely wondering where they got it and what they thought they were doing with it. One would think that a hush, a hush of almost any kind, could hardly help, but I have said enough. I do not want to seem sensorious, but if ever there was a visible, unctuous, tangible, actual thick silence, a silence that can be proved, if ever there was a silence that stood up and flourished and swung its hat, that silence is in our library. The way our librarian's assistants go tiptoeing and reverberating around the room, well, it's one of those things that follow a man always, follow his inmost being all his life. It gets in with the books after a few years or so. One can feel the tiptoeing going on in a book, one of our library books, when one gets home with it. It is the spirit of the place, everything that comes out of it is followed and tiptoed around by our librarian's assistants' silence. They are followed about by themselves. The thick little blonde one with the high yellow hair lives in our ward. One feels a kind of hush rimming her around when one meets her on the street. Now I do not wish to claim that librarian's assistants can possibly be blamed in so many words either for this or for any of the other things that seem to make them, in our library at least, more prominent than the books. Everything in a library seems to depend upon something in it that cannot be put into words. It seems to be a kind of spirit. If the spirit is the wrong spirit, not all the librarians in the world, not even the books themselves can do anything about it. Post script, I do hope that no one will suppose from this chapter that I am finding fault or think I am finding fault with our assistant librarians. I am merely finding fault with them, may heaven forgive them, because I cannot. It doesn't seem to make very much difference. They're doing certain things or not doing them. They either do them or they don't do them, whichever it is, with the same spirit. They are not really down in their hearts true to the books. One can hardly help feeling vaguely persistently resentful over having them about presiding over the past. One never catches them, at least I never do, forgetting themselves. One never comes on one loving a book. They seem to be servants, most of them, book chambermaids. They do not care anything about a library as a library. They just seem to be going around remembering rules in it, etc. The PGS of M, as good as said the other day, when I had been trying as well as I could to express something of this kind, that the real trouble with the modern library was not with the modern library, but with me. He thought I tried to carry too many likes and dislikes around with me, but I was too sensitive. He seemed to think that I should learn to be callous in places of public resort. I said I had no very violent dislikes to deal with. The only thing I could think of was that the matter with me in a library was that I had a passion for books. I didn't like climbing over a barricade of catalogs to get to books. I hated to feel partitioned off from them, to stand and watch rows of people marking things between me and books. I thought that things had come to a pretty pass if a man could not so much as touch elbows with a poet nowadays, with Plato for instance, without carrying a redoubt of terrible, beautiful young ladies. I said I thought a great many other people felt the way I did. I admitted there were other sides to it, but there were times I said when it almost seemed to me that this spontaneous uprising in our country, this movement of the book lovers, for instance, was simply a struggle on the part of the people to get away from Mr. Carnegie's libraries. They are hemming literature and human nature in on every side, or they are going to unless Mr. Carnegie can buy up occasional old-fashioned librarians, some other kind than are turned out in steelworks to put into them. Libraries are getting to be huge separators. Books that have been put through libraries are separated from themselves. They are depersonalized. The human nature all taken off. And yet when one thinks of it, when nine people out of ten, the best people and the worst both, the sense of having a personal relation to a book, the sense of snuggling up with one's own little life to a book is what books are for. To a man, I said, to whom books are people, and the livest kind of people, brothers of his own flesh, cronies of his life, the whole business of getting a book in a library is full of resentment and rebellion. He finds his rights, or what he thinks are his rights, being treated as privileges, his most sacred and confidential relations, his relations with the great meddled with by strangers. Pleasant enough strangers, but still strangers. Perhaps he wishes to see John Milton. He goes downtown to a great unhome-like-looking building and slides in at the door. He steps up to a wall and asks permission to see John Milton. He waits in a kind of vague, unsatisfied fashion, but he feels that machinery is being set in motion. While it is being set in motion, he sits down before the wall on one of the seats or pews, where a large audience of other comfortless and lonely-looking people are. He feels the great heartless building, gathering itself together, going after John Milton for him, while he sits and waits. One after the other, he hears human beings' names, being called out in space, and one by one, poor, scared-looking people who seem to be ashamed to go with their names, most of them, step up before the audience. He sees a book being swung out to them, watches them slink gratefully away, and finally his own name, echoing about among the immortals, startles its way down to him. Then he steps up to the wall again, and John Milton at last, as on some huge, transcendental derrick belonging to the city of blank, is swung into his arms. He feels of the outside gropingly, takes it home. If he can get John Milton to come to life again after all this, he communes with him. In two weeks he takes him back, then the derrick again. The only kind of book that I ever feel close to in the average library is a book on war. Even if I go in in a gentle, harmless, happy, singing sort of way, thinking I want a volume of pastoral poems, by the time I get it, I wish it were something that could be loaded and that would go off. As for asking for a book and reading it in cold blood right in the middle of such a place, it will always be beyond me. I have never found a book I could do it with yet. However, I struggle to follow the train of thought in it. It's a fuse. I find myself breaking out when I see all these far away looking people coming up in rows to their far away books. A library, I say to myself, is a huge barbaric, medieval institution where behind stone and glass a man's dearest friends in the world, the familiars of his life lie helpless in their cells. It is the penitentiary of immortals. There are certain visiting days when friends and relatives are allowed to come, but it only, at this point a gong sounds and tells me to go home, are not books bone of a man's bone and flesh of his flesh? Aren't they to be? Shall a man ask permission to see his wife? Why should I fill out a slip to a pretty girl when I want to be in Greece with Homer or to go to hell with Dante? Why should I write on a piece of paper? I promise to return infinity by six o'clock. A library is a huge machine for keeping the letter with books and violating their spirit. The fact that the machinery is filled with a mirage of pleasant faces does not help. Pleasant faces make machinery worse. If they are part of it, they make one expect something better. The PGS of AM wished me to understand at this point that I was not made right, that I was incapable, helpless in a library, that I did not seem to know what to do unless I could have a simple, natural or country relation to books. It doesn't follow, he said. Because you are bashful in a library, cannot get your mind to work there with other people around, that the other people oughtn't to be around. There are a great many ways of using a library and the more people there are crowded in with the books there, other things being equal, the better. It's what a library is for, he said, and a great deal more to the same effect. I listened a while and told him that I supposed he was right. I supposed I had naturally a kind of wild mind. I allowed that the more a library in a general way took after a piece of woods, the more I enjoyed it. I did not attempt to deny that a library was made for the people, but I did think there ought to be places in libraries, all libraries, where wild ones like me could go. There ought to be in every library some uncultivated, uncatalogued, unlibraryened, tract where a man with a skittish or country mind will have a chance, where a man who likes to be alone with books, with books just as books, will be permitted to browse unnoticed, bars all down and frisk with his mind and roll himself without turning over all of a sudden only to find a librarian's assistant standing there wondering at him, looking down to the bottom of his soul. I am not in the least denying that librarians are well enough, that is, might be well enough, but as things are going today, they all seem to contribute somehow toward making a library a conscious and stilted place. They hold one up to the surface of things with books. They make it impossible to amend those freedoms of the spirit, those best times of all in a library when one feels free to find one's mood, when one gets hold of one's divining rod, opens down into a book, discovers a new unconscious subterranean self there. The PGS of M broke in at this point and said this was all subjective, falder all on my part, that I had better drop it, a kind of habit I had gotten into lately of splitting the hairs of my emotions or something to that effect. He went on at some length and took the general ground before he was through that absolutely everything in modern libraries depended on the librarians. I should judge, in a modern library were what books were for. He said that the more intelligent people were nowadays, the more they enjoyed librarians, knew how to use them, doted on them, et cetera, ad infinitum. The kind of people one sees at operas, I interrupted, listening with librettos, the kind of people who puff up mountains to see views and extract geography from them, the people one meets in the fields nowadays, flower in one hand, botany in the other, the kind of people who have to have charts to enjoy stars with, these are the people who want librarians between them and their books. The more librarians they can get standing in a row between them and a masterpiece, the more they feel they are appreciating it, the more card catalogs, gazetteers, dictionaries, derricks and other machinery they can have pulling and hauling above their heads in a library, the more literary they feel in it. They feel culture somehow stirring around them. They are not exactly sure what culture is, but they feel that a great deal of it, whatever it is, is being poured over them. But I must begin to bring these wanderings about libraries to a close. I can do no harm to remark perhaps that I am not maintaining, do not wish to maintain, I could not if I dared, that the modern librarian with all his faults is not useful at times, as a sort of Pianola or Aeolian attachment for a library as a mechanical contrivance for making a comparatively ignorant man draw perfectly enormous harmonies out of it, which he does not care anything about, a modern librarian helps. All that I am maintaining is that I am not this comparatively ignorant man, I am another one, I am merely saying that the Pianola way of dealing with ignorance, in my own case, up to the present at least, does not grow on me. Oh, I suppose that the Boston Public Library would say if it said anything, that I had a mere old Athenaeum kind of a mind. I am obliged to confess that I don't on the old Athenaeum, it protects one's optimism, one is made to feel there, let right down in the midst of civilization within a stone's throw of the State House, that it is barely possible to keep civilization off. One feels it rolling itself along, heaping itself up on Tremont Street and the common, the very trees cannot live in it, but one is out of reach. When one has to live in civilization, as most of us do, nearly all of one's time every day in the week, it means a great deal. I can hardly say how much it means to me in the daily struggle with it to be able to dodge behind the Athenaeum, to be able to go in and sit down there, if only for a minute, to be behind glass as it were, to hear great hungry Tremont Street chewing men up hundreds of trainloads at a time into wood pulp, smoothing them out into nobody or everybody, it makes one feel while it is not as it ought to be as if after all there might be some way out as if some provision had been made in this world or might be made for letting human beings live on it. The general sense of unsensitiveness in a modern library of hurry and rush and efficiency above all the kind of moral smugness one feels there, the book Self-Consciousness, the unprotected public street feeling one has, all these things are very grave and important obstacles, which are great librarians with their great systems, most of them, have yet to reckon with. A little more mustiness, gentlemen, please, silence, slowness, solitude with books as if they were woods, unattainableness, and oh, will anyone understand it, a little inconvenience, a little old fashioned, happy inconvenience, a chance to gloat and take pains and love things with difficulties, a chance to go around the corners of one's knowledge to make modest discoveries all by oneself. It is no small thing to go about a library having books happen to one, to feel oneself sitting down with a book one's own private providence, turning the pages of events. One cannot help feeling that if a part of the money that is being spent carneguying nowadays, that is, in arranging for a great many books and a great many people to pile up order among a great many books could be spent in providing hundreds of thousands of small libraries or small places in large ones, where men who would like to do it would feel safe to creep in sometimes and open their souls. Nobody looking, it would be no more than fair. Post script, one has to be so much of one's time helpless before a librarian in this world. One has to put him on his honor as a gentleman so much to expose such vast incredible tracks of ignorance to him that I know only too well that I of all men cannot afford in these pages or anywhere else to say anything that will permanently offend librarians. I do hope I have not. It is only through knowing so many good ones that I know enough to criticize the rest. If I am right, it is because I am their spokesman. If I am wrong, I am not a well informed person and I do not count anywhere in particular on anything. The best way I suspect for a librarian to deal with me is not to try to classify me. I ought to be put out of the way on this subject, tucked back into any general pigeonhole of odds and ends of temperament. If I had not felt that I could be cheerfully sorted out at the end of this page, filed away by everybody, almost anybody, as not making very much difference, I would not have spoken so freely. There is not a librarian who has read as far as this in this book, who though he may have had moments of being troubled in it, will not be able to dispose of me with a kind, grateful, relieved certainty. However, that may be, I can only beg you, oh librarians and all ye kindly learned ones, be generous with me wherever you put me. I leave my poor, naked, shivering, miscellaneous soul in your hands. And of section 11. Section 12 of the Lost Art of Reading by Gerald Stanley Lee. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Book two, Possibilities, The Issue. I dreamed I lived in a day when men dared have visions. I lay in a great white silence as one who waited for something, and as I lay and waited, the silence groped toward me and I felt it gathering nearer and nearer about me. Then it folded me to itself. I made time my bedside, and it seemed to me when I rested my soul with years and when I had found space and had stretched myself upon it, I awoke. I lay in a great white empty place and the whole world like solemn music came to me. And I looked and behold in the shadow of the earth which came and went, I saw human lives being tossed about. On the solemn rhythmic music back and forth and I saw them lifted across silence. And I said to my spirit, what is it they are doing? They are living, the spirit said. So they floated before me while the great shadow came and went. Oh, my soul has thou forgotten thy days in the world when thou didst watch the processional of it when the faces daylighted, nightlighted faces trooped before thee and thou didst look upon them and delight in them. What didst thou see in the world? I saw two immeasurable hands in it, said my soul. Over every man I saw that the man did not see the hands. I saw that they reached out of infinity for him down through the days and the nights. And whether he slept or prayed or wrought, I saw that they still reached out for him and folded themselves about him. And I asked God what the hands were. The man calls them heredity and environment. God said and God laughed. Words came from far for me and waited in tumult within me but my mouth was filled with silence. I know not what I do not know the world but out of my little corner of time and space I have watched in it. Watched men and truths struggling in it and in the struggle it has seemed to me I have seen three kinds of men. I have seen the man who feels that he is being made. And the man who feels that he is making himself but I have seen also another kind of man. The man who feels that the universe is at work on him but within limits under his own supervision. I have made a pact in my soul with this man for a new world. He is not willing to be a mere manufactured man, one more being turned out from the factory of circumstance. Neither does he think very much of the man who makes himself, who could make himself. If he were to try such a thing, try to make a man himself he would really rather try it if the truth must be told on someone else. As near as he can define it life seems to be to the normal or inspired man a kind of alternate grasping and being grasped. Sometimes he feels his destiny is to be tossed between the two immeasurable hands. Sometimes he feels that they have paused that the immeasurable hands have been lent to him that the toss of destiny is made his own. He watches these two great forces playing under heaven before his eyes with his immortal life every day. His soul takes these powers of heaven as the mariner takes the winds of the sea. He taxed to destiny. He takes the same attitude toward the laws of heredity and environment that the Creator took when he made them. He takes it for granted that a God who made these laws as conveniences for himself in running a universe must have intended them for men as conveniences in living in it. In proportion as men have been like God they have been treated these laws as he does. As conveniences. Thousands of men are doing it today. Men did it for thousands of years before they knew what the laws were when they merely followed their instincts with them. In a man's answer to the question, how can I make a convenience of the law of heredity and environment? Education before being born and education after being born will be found to lie always the secret glory or the secret shame of his life. The first selection. If the souls of the unborn could go about reconnoitering the earth a little before they settled on it selecting the parents they would have, the places where it pleased them to be born, nine out of 10 of them, judging from the way they conduct themselves in the flesh would spend nearly all their time in looking for the best house and street to be born in, the best things to be born to. Such a little matter as selecting the right parents would be left probably to the last moment or they would expect it to be thrown in. We are all of us more or less aware especially as we advance in life that overlooking the importance of parents is a mistake. There have been times in the lives of some of us when having parents at all seemed a mistake. We can remember hours when we were sure we had the wrong ones. After our first disappointment, that is when we have learned how unmanageable parents are, we have our time, most of us, of making comparisons of trying other people's parents on. This cannot be said to work very well taken as a whole and it is generally admitted that people who are most serious about it who take unto themselves fathers and mothers in law seldom do any better than at first. The conclusion of the whole matter would seem to be since a man cannot select his parents and his parents cannot select him, he must select himself. That is what books are for. Conveniences. It is the first importance of a true book that a man can select his neighbors with it, can overcome space, riches, poverty, and time with it, and the grave and break bread with the dead. A book is a portable miracle. It makes a man's native place all over for him for a dollar and a quarter. And many a man in the somewhat hard and despairing world has been furnished with a new heaven and a new earth for 25 cents. Out of a public library he has felt reached down to him the grasp of heroes. Hurrying home in the night, perhaps with his tiny life hid under stars but with a book under his arm, he has felt a greeting against his breast and held it tight. Who art thou, my lad? It said, who art thou? And the saying was not forgotten. If it is true that the spirits of the mighty dead are abroad in the night, they are turning the leaves of books. There are other inspiring things in the world but there is nothing else that carries itself among the sons of men like the book. With such divine plenteousness, seeds of the world's in it, it goes about flocking on the souls of men. There is something so broadcast, so universal about the way of a book with a man, boundless, subtle, ceaseless, irresistible, following him and loving him, renewing him, delighting in him, and hoping for him, like a God. It is as the way of nature herself with a man. One cannot always feel it but somehow when I am really living a real day, I feel as if some great book were around me, were always around me. I feel myself all enfolded, penetrated, surrounded with it, the vast gentle force of it, sky and earth of it. It is as if I saw it sometimes building new boundaries for me out there, softly, gently on the edges of the night, for me and for all human life. Other inspiring things seem to be less steadfast for us. They cannot always free themselves and then come and free us. Music can not be depended upon. It sings sometimes for and sometimes against us. Sometimes also music is still, absolutely still, all the way down from the stars to the grass. At best it is for some people and for others not and is addicted to places. It is a part of the air, part of the climate in Germany, but there is but one country in the world made for listening in, where anyone, everyone listens, the way one breathes. The great pictures inspire on the whole, but few people, most of them with tickets. Cathedrals cannot be unmoored, have never been seen by the majority of men at all, except in dreams and photographs. They see a look at the middle of it is controlled by two or three syndicates. The sky, the last stronghold of freedom is rented out for the most part where most men live in cities and in New York and London, the people who can afford it pay taxes for air and grass is a dollar a blade. Being born is the only really free thing and dying. Next to these in any just climate of the comparatively free raw material that goes to the making of a human life comes the printed book. A library on the whole is the purest and most perfect form of power that exists because it is a lever on the nature of things. If a man is born with the wrong neighbors, it brings the right ones flocking to him. It is the universe to order. It makes the world like a globe in a child's hands. He turns up the part where he chooses to live. Now one way and now another, that he may delight in it and live in it. If he is a poet, it is the meaning of life to him that he can keep on turning it until he has delighted and tasted and lived in all of it. The second importance of true books is that they are not satisfied with the first. They are not satisfied to be used to influence a man from the outside as a kind of house furnishing for his soul. A true book is never a mere contrivance for arranging the right bit of sky for a man to live his life under or the right neighbors for him to live his life with. It goes deeper than this. A mere playing upon a man's environment does not seem to satisfy a true book. It plays upon the latent infinity in the man himself. The majority of men are not merely conceived in sin and born in lies, but they are the lies and lies as well as truths flow in their veins. Lies hold their souls back thousands of years. When one considers the actual facts about most men, the law of environment seems a clumsy and superficial law enough. If all that a book can do is to appeal to the law of environment for a man, it does not do very much. The very trees and stones do better for him and the little birds and their nests. No possible amount of environment crowded on their frail souls would ever make it possible for most men to catch up to overtake enough truth before they die to make their 70 years worth while. The majority of men, one hardly dares to deny, can be seen sooner or later drifting down to death either bitterly or indifferently. The shadows of their lives haunt us a little, then they vanish away from us and from the sound of our voices. Oh, God, from behind thy high heaven from out of thy infinite wealth of years hast thou but the one same pittance of three score and ten for every man? Some of us are born with the handicap of a thousand years, woven in the nerves of our bodies, the swiftness of our minds and the delights of our limbs. Others of us are born with the thousand years, binding us down to blindness and hobbling, holding us back to disease, but all with the same imperious timepiece held above us to run the same race to overtake the same truth before the iron curtain and the dark. Some of us, a few men in every generation, have two or 300 years given to us outright the day we are born. Then we are given 70 more. Others of us have 200 years taken away from us the day we are born. Then we are given 70 years to make them up in and it is called life. If we are to shut ourselves up with one law, either the law of environment or the law of heredity, it is obvious that the best illogical man could do would be to be ashamed of a universe like this and creep out of it as soon as he could. The great glory of a great book is that it will not let itself be limited to the law of environment in dealing with a man. It deals directly with the man himself. It appeals to the law of heredity. It reaches down into the infinite depth of his life. If a man has started a life with parents he had better not have, for all practical purposes, it furnishes him with better ones. It picks and chooses in behalf of his life out of his very grandfathers for him. It not only supplies him with a new set of neighbors as often as he wants them. It sees that he is born again every morning on the wide earth and that he has a new set of parents to be born to. It is a part of the infinite and irrepressible hopefulness of this mortal life that each man of us who dwells on the earth is a child of an infinite marriage. We are all equipped, even the poorest of us, from the day we begin with an infinite number of fathers and an infinite number of mothers, no telling as we travel down the years which shall happen to us next. If what we call heredity were a matter of a few months, a narrow pitiful two-parent affair, if the fate of a human being could be shut in with what one man and one woman playing and working, eating and drinking under heaven for a score of years or more, would be likely to have to give him from out of their very selves, heredity would certainly be a whimsical, unjust, undignified law to come into a world by to don an immortal soul with. A man who has had his life so recklessly begun for him could hardly be blamed for being reckless with it afterward. But it is not true that the principle of heredity in a human life can be confined to a single accident in it. We are all infinite and our very accidents are infinite. In the very flesh and bones of our bodies we are infinite, brought from the furthest reaches of eternity and the utmost bounds of created life to be ourselves. If we were to do nothing else for three score years, it is not in our human breath to recite our father's names upon our lips. Each of us is the child of an infinite mother and from her breast, veiled in a thousand years, we draw life, glory, sorrow, sleep and death. The ones we call fathers and mothers are but ambassadors to us, delegates from a million graves appointed for our birth. Every boy is a summed up multitude. The infinite crowd of his fathers beckons for him as in some vast amphitheater he lives his life before the innumerable audience of the dead. Each from its circle of centuries calls to him, contends for him, draws him to himself. In as much as every man who was born in the world is born with an infinite outfit for living in it, it is the office of all books that are true and beautiful books, true to the spirit of a man, that they shall play upon the latent infinity in him, that they shall help him to select his largest self, that they shall help him to give as the years go on the right accent to the right fathers in his life. Books are more close to the latent infinity in a human being than anything else can be because the habit of the infinite is their habit. As books are more independent of space and time than all other known forces in the lives of men, they seem to make all the men who love them independent also. If a man has not room for his life, he takes a book and makes room for it. When the habit of books becomes the habit of a man, he unhands himself at will from space and time. He finds the universe is his universe. He finds ancestors and neighbors alike, flocking to him, doing his bidding. God himself says yes to him and delights in him. He has entered into conspiracy with the nature of things. He does not feel that he is being made. He does not feel that he is making himself. The universe is at work on him under his own supervision. The Charter of Possibility. In reading to select one's parents and one's self, there seem to be two instincts involved. These instincts may vary more or less according to the book and the mood of the reader, but the object of all live reading, of every live experience with a book is the satisfying of one or both of them. A man whose reading means something to him is either letting himself go in a book or letting himself come in it. He is either reading himself out or reading himself in. It is as if every human life were a kind of port on the edge of the universe when it reads, possible selves outward bound and inward bound and trooping before it. Some of these selves are exports and some are imports. If the principle of selection is conceived in a large enough spirit and is set in operation soon enough and is continued long enough, there is not a child that can be born on the earth who shall not be able to determine by the use of books in the course of the years what manner of man he shall be. He may not be able to determine how soon he shall be that man or how much of that man shall be fulfilled in himself before he dies and how much of him shall be left over to be fulfilled in his children. But the fact remains that to an extraordinary degree through a live use of books, not only a man's education after he is born but his education before he is born is placed in his hands. It is the supreme office of books that they do this, that they place the laws of heredity and environment where a man with a determined spirit can do something besides cringing to them. Neither environment nor heredity taken by itself can give a man a determined spirit but it is everything to know that given a few books and the determined spirit both a man can have any environment he wants for living his life and his own assorted ancestors for living it. It is only by means of books that a man can keep from living a partitioned off life in the world can keep toned up to the divine sense of possibility in it. We hear great men every day across space and time allowing to one another in books and across things as we feel and read is the call of our possible selves. Even the impossible has been achieved. Books tell us in history again and again it has been achieved by several men. This may not prove very much but if it does not prove anything else it proves that the possible at least is the privilege of the rest of us. It has its greeting for every man the sense of the possible crowds around him and not merely in his books nor merely in his life but in the place where his life and books meet in his soul. However or wherever a man may be placed it is the great book that reminds him who he is. It reminds him who his neighbor is. It is his charter of possibility having seen he acts on what he sees and reads himself out and reads himself in accordingly. The great game. It would be hard to say which is the more important reading for exports or imports reading oneself out or reading oneself in but in as much as the importance of reading oneself out is more generally overlooked it may be well to dwell upon it. Most of the reading theories of the best people today judging from the prohibitions of certain books overlook the importance altogether in vital and normal persons especially the young of reading oneself out. It is only as some people keep themselves read out and read out regularly that they can be kept from bringing evil on the rest of us. If Eve had had a novel she would have sat down under the tree and read about the fruit instead of eating it. If Adam had had a morning paper he would hardly have listened to his wife's suggestion. If the evil one had come up to Eve in the middle of Les Miserables or one of Rosetti's sonnets no one would ever have heard of him. The main misfortune of Adam and Eve was that they had no arts to come to the rescue of their religion. If Eve could have painted the apple she would not have eaten it. She put it into her mouth because she could not think of anything else to do with it and she had to do something. She had the artistic temperament inherited from her mother's sleep, probably, or from being born in a dream and the temptation of the artistic temperament is that it gets itself expressed or breaks something. She had tried everything, flowers, birds, clouds and her shadow in the stream but she found that they were all inexpressible. She could not express them. She could not even express herself taking walks in paradise and talking with the one man the place afforded was not a complete and satisfying self-expression. Adam had his limitations, like all men. There were things that could not be said. Standing as we do on the present height of history with all the resources of sympathy in the modern world it's countless arts drawing the sexes together going about understanding people, communing with them and expressing them making a community for every man even in his solitude it is not hard to see that the comparative failure of the first marriage was a matter of course. The real trouble was that Adam and Eve standing in their brand new world could not express themselves to one another. As there was nothing else to express them they were bored. It is to Eve's credit that she was more bored than Adam was and that she resented it more and while a fall under the circumstances was as painful as it was inevitable and a rather extreme measure on Eve's part no one will deny that it afforded relief on the main point. It seems to be the universal instinct of all Eve's sons and daughters that have followed since that an expressive world is better than a dull one. An expressive world is a world in which all the men and women are getting themselves expressed either in their experiences or in their arts. That is in other people's experiences. The play, the picture and the poem and the novel and the symphony have all been the outgrowth of Eve's infinity. She could not contain herself. She either had more experience than she could express or she had more to express than she could possibly put into experience. One of the worst things we know about the Japanese is that they have no imperative mood in the language. To be able to say of a nation that it has been able to live for thousands of years without feeling the need of an imperative is one of the most terrible and sweeping accusations that has ever been made against a people on the earth. Swearing may not be respectable but it is a great deal more respectable than never wanting to. Either a man is dead in this world or he is out looking for words on it. There's a great place left over in him and as long as that place is left over it is one of the practical purposes of books to make it of some use to him. Whether the place is a good one or a bad one something must be done with it and books must do it. If there were wordlessness of our 500 years a man would seek vast inarticulate words for himself. Cathedral's would rise from the ground undreamed as yet to say we worshiped. Music would be the daily necessity of the humblest life. Orchestras all around the world would be created would float language around the dumbness in it. Composers would become the greatest the most practical man in all the nations. Viaducts would stretch their mountains of stone across the valleys to find a word that said we were strong. Out of the stones of the hills the mists of rivers out of electricity even out of silence itself we would force expression. From the time a baby first moves his limbs to when an old man he struggles for his last breath the one imperious divine necessity of life is expression. Hence the artist now and forever the ruler of history whoever makes it. And if he cannot make it he makes the makers of it. The artist is the man who failing to find neighbors for himself makes his neighbors with his own hands. If a woman is childless she paints Madonna's. It is the inspiration the despair that rests over all life. If we cannot express ourselves in things that are made we make things and if we cannot express ourselves in the things we make we turn to words and if we cannot express ourselves in words we turn to other men's words. The man who is satisfied with one life does not exist. The suicide does not commit suicide because he is tired of life but because he wants so many more lives that he cannot have. The native of the tropics buys a book to the North Pole. If we are poor we grow rich on paper we roll in carriages through the highway of letters. If we are rich we revel in a printed poverty. We cry our hearts out over our starving paper children and hold our shivering aching magazine hands over dying coals and garrets. We live in by subscription at $3 a year. The Bible is the book that has influenced men most in the world because it has expressed them the most. The moment it ceases to be the most expressive book it will cease to be the most practical and effective one in human life. There is more of us than we can live. The touch of the infinite through which our spirits wandered is still with us. The world cries to the poet give me a new word, a word, a word, I will have a word. It cries to the great man out of all its narrow places give me another life, I will have another life. And every hero the world has known has worn threadbare with worship because his life says for other men what their lives have tried to say. Every masterful life calls across the world a cry of liberty to pent up dreams to the ache of faith in all of us. Here though art my brother this is thy heart that I have lived. A hero is immortalized because his life is every man's larger self. So through the day span of our years a tale that is never told we wander on the infinite heart of each of us prisoned in blood and flesh and the cry of us everywhere throughout all being give me room. It cries to the composer make a high wide place for me and on the edge of the silence between life and words to music we come at last because it is the supreme confident of the human heart the confessional the world priests between the actual self and the larger self of all of us with all the multiplying of arts and the piling of a books that have come to us the most important experience that men have had in this world since they began on it is that they are infinite that they cannot be expressed on it. It is not infrequently said that men must get themselves expressed in living but the fact remains that no one has ever heard of a man as yet who really did it or who was small enough to do it. There was one who seemed to express himself by living and by dying both but if he had any more than succeeded in beginning to express himself no one would have believed that he was the son of God even that he was the son of man. It was because he could not crowd all that he was into 33 short years and 12 disciples and one garden of Gethsemane and one cross that we know who he was. Riveted down to its little place with iron circumstance the actual self in every man depends upon the larger possible self for the something that makes the actual self worthwhile. It is hard to be held down by circumstance but it would be harder to be contented there to live without those intimations of our divine birth that come to us in books. Books that weave some of the glory we have missed in our actual lives into the glory of our thoughts. Even if life be to the uttermost the doing of what are called practical things it is only by the occasional use of his imagination in reading or otherwise that the practical man can hope to be in physical or mental condition to do them. He needs a rest from his actual self. A man cannot even be practical without this imaginary or larger self. Unless he can work off his unexpressed remnant his limbs are not free. Even down to the meanest of us we are incurably larger than anything we can do. Reading a book is a game a man plays with his own infinity. Outward bound if there could only be arranged some mystical place over the edge of human existence where we all could go and practice at living have full dress rehearsals of our parts before we are hustled in front of the footlights in our very swaddling clothes how many people are there who have reached what are fabulously called years of discretion who would not believe in such a place and who would not gladly go back to it and spend most of the rest of their lives there. This is one of the things that the world of books is for. Most of us would hardly know what to do without yet. The world of books if only as a place to make mistakes and to feel foolish in. It seems to be the one great unobserved retreat where all the sons of men may go may be seen flocking day and night to get the experiences they would not have to be ready for those they cannot help having. It is the rehearsal room of history. The gods watch it, this place of books as we who live go silent trooping back and forth in it the ceaseless heartless awful beautiful pantomime of life. It seems to be the testimony of human nature after a somewhat immemorial experience that some things in us had better be expressed by being lived and that other things had better be expressed if possible in some other way. There are a great many men even amongst the wisest and strongest of us who benefit every year of their lives by what might be called the purgative function of literature. Men who if they did not have a chance at the right moment to commit certain sins with their imaginary selves would commit them with their real ones. Many a man of the larger and more comprehensive type hungering for the heart of all experience bound to have its spirit if not itself has run the whole gamut of his possible selves in books until all the sins and all the songs of men have coursed through his being. He finds himself reading not only to fill his lungs with ozone and his heart with the strength of the gods but to work off the humor in his blood to express his under self and get it out of the way. Women who never cry their tears out, it is said, are desperate and men who never read their sins away are dangerous. Men who are tired of doing wrong on paper do right. To be sick of one's sins in a book saves not only one's self but everyone else a deal of trouble. A man has not learned how to read until he reads with his veins as well as his arteries. It would be useless to try to make out that evil passions in literature accomplish any absolute good but they accomplish a relative good which the world can by no means afford to overlook. The amount of crime that is suggested by reading can be more than offset by the extraordinary amount of crime wading in the hearts of men aimed at the world and glanced off on paper. There are many indications that this purgative function of literature is the main thing it is for in our present modern life. Modern life is so constituted that the majority of people who live in it are expressing their real selves more truly in their reading than they are in their lives. When one stops to consider what these lives are, most of them there can be but one conclusion about the reading of the people who have to live them and that is that while sensational reading may be an evil as compared with the evil that has made it necessary, it is an immeasurable blessing. The most important literary and artistic fact of the 19th century is the subdivision of labor. That is the subdividing of every man's life and telling him he must only be alive and a part of it. In proportion as an age takes sensation out of men's lives, it is obliged to put them into their literature. Men aren't used to sensations on the earth as long as they stay on it and they are bound to have them in one way or another. An age which narrows the actual lives of men which so adjusts the labor of the world that nearly every man in it not only works with a machine spiritual or otherwise but is a machine himself and a small part of a machine must not find fault with its art for being full of hysterics and excitement or with its newspapers for being sensational. Instead of finding fault it has every reason to be grateful to thank a most merciful heaven that the men in the world are still alive enough in it to be capable of feeling sensation in other men's lives though they have ceased to be capable of having sensations in their own or of feeling sensations if they had them. It was when the herds of her people were buried in routine and peace that Rome had bullfights. New York with its hordes of drudges, ledger slaves, machinists and clerks has the New York world. It lasts longer than a bullfight and it can be had every morning before a man starts off to be a machine and every evening when he gets back from being a machine for one cent. On Sunday a whole Coliseum fronts him and he is gletted with gore from morning until night. To a man who is a penholder by the week or a line of type machine or a ratchet in a factory a fight is infinite peace. Obedience to the command of scripture making the Sabbath a day of rest is entirely relative. Some of us are rested by taking our under-interested lives to a Sunday paper and others are rested by taking our over-interested lives to church. Men read dime novels in proportion as their lives are staid and mechanical. Men whose lives are their own dime novels are bored by printed ones. Men whose years are crowded with crises culminations and events who run the most risks in business are found with the steadiest papers in their hands. The train boy knows that the people who buy the biggest headlines are all on salaries and that danger and blood and thunder are being read nowadays by effeminately safe men because it is the only way they can be had. But it is not only the things that are left out of men's lives but the things they have too much of which find their remedy in books. They are the levers with which the morbid is controlled. Similia Similebus Courantour may be a dangerous principle to be applied by everybody but thousands of men and women mulling away on their lives and worrying themselves with themselves cutting a wide swath of misery wherever they go have suddenly stopped in a book have purged away jealousy and despair and passion and nervous prostration in it. A paper person with melancholia is a better cure for gloom than a live clown can be who merely goes about reminding people how sad they are. A man has often heard to say that he has more tragedy enough in his own life not to want to go to a play for more but this much having been said and truly said he almost always goes to the play to see how true it is. The stage is his huge confidant pitying oneself as a luxury but it takes a great while and one can never do it enough. Being pityed by a $5,000 house and with incidental music all for a dollar and a half is a sure and quick way to cheer up. Being pityed by Victor Hugo is a sure way also. Hardy can do people's pitying for them much better than they can do it and it's soon over and done with. It is noticeable that while the impressive books, the books that are written to impressed people have a fair and nominal patronage it is the expressive books, the books that let people out which have the enormous sales. They seems to be true of the big sale books whether the people expressed in them are worth expressing to anyone but themselves or not. The principle of getting oneself expressed is so largely in evidence that not only the best but the worst of our books illustrate it. Our popular books are carbuncles mostly. They are the inevitable and irrepressible form of the instinct of health in us struggling with disease. On the whole it makes being an optimist in modern life a little less of a tightrope walk. If even the bad elements in literature which are discouraging enough are making us better what shall be said of good. And of section 12.