 Section 6 of The Lost Art of Reading by Gerald Stanley Lee Book 1. Interferences with the Reading Habit The third interference. The unpopularity of the first person singular. The first person a necessary evil. Great emphasis is being laid at the present time upon the tools that readers ought to have to do their reading with. We seem to be living in a reference book age. Whatever else may be claimed for our own special generation, it stands out as having one inspiration that is quite its own. The inspiration of conveniences. That these conveniences have their place, that one ought to have the best of them, there can be no doubt, but it is very important to bear in mind, particularly in the present public mood, that if one cannot have all of these conveniences, or even the best of them, the one absolutely necessary reference book in reading the masters of literature is one that every man has. It is something of a common place, a rather modest volume with most of us, summed up on a tombstone generally, easily enough, but we are bound to believe after all is said and done that the great masterpiece among reference books for every man, the one originally intended by the creator for every man to use, is the reference book of his own life. We believe that the one direct and necessary thing for a man to do if he is going to be a good reader, is to make this reference book, his own private edition of it, as large and complete as possible. Everything refers to it, whatever his reading is. Shakespeare in the New York world, Homer and Harper's Bazaar, Victor Hugo and the Forum, Babyhood and the Bible all refer to it. Are all alike in making their references, when they are really looked up, to private editions. Other editions do not work. In proportion as they are powerful in modern life, all the books and papers that we have are engaged in the business of going about the world discovering people to themselves, unroofing first person singulars in it. Getting people to use their own reference books on all life. Literature is a kind of vast international industry of comparing life. We read to look up references in our own souls. The immortality of Homer and the circulation of the latest home journal both conform to this fact. And it is equally the secret of the last page of Harper's Bazaar and of Hamlet and of the grave and the monthly lunge of the Forum at passing events. The difference of appeal may be as wide as the east and the west, but the east and the west are in human nature and not in the nature of the appeal. The larger selves look themselves up in the greater writers and the smaller selves spell themselves out in the smaller ones. It is here we all behold as in some vast reflection or mirage of the reading world our own souls crowding and jostling little and great against the walls of their years, seeking to be let out, to look out, to look over, to look up, that they may find their possible selves. When men are allowed to follow what might be called the forces of nature in the reading world, they are seen to read first about themselves, second about people they know, third about people they want to know, fourth God. Next to their interest in persons is their interest in things. First things that they have themselves, second things that people they know have, third things they want to have, fourth things they ought to want to have, fifth other things, sixth the universe things God has, seventh God. A scale like this may not be very complementary to human nature. Some of us feel that it is appropriate and possibly a little religious to think that it is not. But the scale is here. It is mere psychological matter of fact. It is the way things are made and while it may not be quite complementary to human nature, it seems to be more complementary to God to believe in spite of appearances that this scale from I to God is made right and should be used as it stands. It seems to have been in general use among our more considerable men in the world and among all our great men and among all who have made others great. They do not seem to have been ashamed of it. They have climbed up frankly on it, most of them in full sight of all men, from I to God. They have claimed that everybody including themselves was identified with God and they have made people believe it. It is the few in every generation who have dared to believe in this scale and who have used it, who have been the leaders of the rest. The measure of a man's being seems to be the swiftness with which his nature runs from the bottom of this scale to the top. The swiftness with which he identifies himself says I in all of it. The measure of his ability to read on any particular subject is the swiftness with which he runs the scale from the bottom to the top on that subject, makes the trip with his soul from his own little eye to God. When he has mastered the subject, he makes the run almost without knowing it, sees it as it is, i.e. identifies himself with God on it. The principle is one which reaches under all mastery in the world from the art of prophecy even to the art of politeness. Though man makes the trip on any subject from the first person out through the second person to the farthest bounds of the third person, that is, who identifies himself with all men's lives, is called the poet or seer, the master-lover of persons. The man who makes the trip most swiftly from his own things to other men's things and to God's things, the universe, is called the scientist, the master-lover of things. The God is he who identifies his own personal life with all lives and his own things with all men's things, who says I forever everywhere. The reason that the Hebrew Bible has had more influence in history than all other literatures combined is that there are fewer emasculated men in it. The one really fundamental and astonishing thing about the Bible is the way that people have of talking about themselves in it. No other nation that has ever existed on the earth would ever have thought of daring to publish a book like the Bible. So far as the plot is concerned, the fundamental literary conception it is all the Bible comes to practically. Two or three thousand years of it, a long row of people talking about themselves. The Hebrew nation has been the leading power in history because the Hebrew man, in spite of all his faults, has always had the feeling that God sympathized with him in being interested in himself. He has dared to feel identified with God. It is the same in all ages, not in age but one sees a Hebrew in it. Out under his lonely heaven standing and crying God and I, it is the one great spectacle of the soul this little world has seen. Are not the mightiest faces that come to us flickering out of the dark, their faces? Who can look at the past who does not see? Who does not always see some mighty Hebrew in it singing and struggling with God? What is it? What else could it possibly be but the Hebrew soul? Like a kind of pageantry down the years between us and God who never have made us guess, men of the other nations, that a God belonged to us or that a God could belong to us and be a God at all, have not all the other races each in their turn spawning in the sun and lost in the night vanished because they could not say I before God. The nations that are left, the great nations of the modern world are but the moral passengers of the Hebrews hangers on to the race that can say to the nth power, the race that has dared to identify itself with God. The fact that the Hebrew instead of saying God and I has turned it around sometimes and said I and God is neither here nor there in the end. It is because the Hebrew has kept to the main point, has felt related to God, the main point a God cares about, that he has been the most heroic and athletic figure in human history, comes nearer to the God size. The rest of the nations sitting about and wondering in the dark have called this thing in the Hebrew religious genius. If one were to try to sum up what religious genius is in the Hebrew or to account for the spiritual and material supremacy of the Hebrew in history in a single fact it would be the fact that Moses their first great leader, when he wanted to say it seems to me said the Lord said unto Moses the Hebrews may have written a book that teaches of all others self renunciation but the way they taught it was self assertion. The Bible begins with a meek Moses who teaches by saying the Lord said unto Moses and it comes to its climax in a lowly and radiant man who dies on a cross to say I and the father are one. The man Jesus seems to have called himself God because he had a divine habit of identifying himself because he had kept on identifying himself until the first person and the second person and the third person were as one to him. The distinction of the New Testament is that it is the one book the world has seen which dispenses with pronouns. It is a book that sums up pronouns and numbers singular and plural first person, second and third person and all in the one great central pronoun of the universe the very stars speak it we. We is a developed I the first person may not be what it ought to be either as a philosophy or an experience but it has been considered good enough to make Bibles out of and it does seem as if a good word might occasionally be said for it in modern times as if someone ought to be born before long who will give it a certain standing a certain moral respectability once more in human life and in the education of human life. It would not seem to be an overstatement that the best of a child to read at any time is the one that makes the most cross references at that time to his undeveloped we. The art of being anonymous the main difficulty in getting a child to live in the whole of his nature to run the scale from the bottom to the top from I to God is to persuade his parents and teachers and the people who crowd around him to educate him that he must begin at the bottom. The unpopularity of the first person singular in current education naturally follows from the disgrace of the imagination in it. Our typical school is not satisfied with cutting off a boy's imagination about the outer world that lies around him. It amputates his imagination at its tap root. It stops a boy's imagination about himself and the issues, connections and possibilities of his own life. In as much as the education of a child his relation to books must be conducted either with reference to evading personality or accumulating it, the issue is one that must be squarely drawn from the first. Beginning at the bottom is found by society at large to be such an inconvenient and painstaking process that the children who are allowed to lay a foundation for personality to say I in its disagreeable stages seems to be confined for the most part to either one or the other of two classes. The incurable callous. The more thorough a child's nature is, the more real his processes are, the more incurable he is bound to be. Secretly if he is sensitive and offensively if he is callous. In either case the fact is the same. The child unconsciously acts on the principle that self-assertion is self-preservation. One of the first things that he discovers is that self-preservation is the last thing polite parents desire in a child. If he is to be preserved, they will preserve him themselves. The conspiracy begins in the earliest days. The world rolls over him. The home and the church and the school and the printed book roll over him. The story is the same in all. Education originally conceived as drawing a boy out becomes a huge elaborate overwhelming scheme for squeezing him in, for keeping him squeezed in. He is mobbed on every side. At schools teachers crowd round him and say I for him. At home his parents say I for him. At church the preacher says I for him. And when he retreats into the privacy of his own soul and betakes himself to a book, the book is a classic and the book says I for him. When he says I himself after a few appropriate years he says it in disguised quotation marks. If he cannot always avoid it, if in some unguarded moment you have about something and the eye comes out on it, society expects him to be ashamed of it. At least to avoid the appearance of not being ashamed of it. If he writes he is desired to say we. Sometimes he shades himself often to the present writer. Sometimes he capitulates in bare initials. There are very few people who do not live in quotation marks most of their lives. They would die in them and go to heaven in them if they could. And it is someone else's heaven they want to go to. The number of people who would know what to do or how to act in this world or the next without their quotation marks on is getting more limited every year. And yet one could not very well imagine a world more prostrate than this one is before a man without quotation marks. It dotes on personality. It spends hundreds of years at a time in yearning for a great man. But it wants its great man finished. It is never willing to pay what he costs. It is particularly unwilling to pay what he costs as it goes along. The great man as a boy has had to pay for himself. The bare feet of keeping out of quotation marks has cost him generally more than he thought he was worth and has had to be paid in advance. There is a certain sense in which it is true that every boy, at least at the point where he is especially alive, is a kind of selflessness. Has the same experience that is in growing. Many a boy who has been regularly represented to himself as a monster a curiosity of selfishness and who has believed it has had occasion to observe when he grew up that some of his selfishness was real selfishness and that some of it was life. The things he was selfish with he finds as he grows older are the things he has been making a man out of. As a boy however he does not get much inkling of this. He finds he is being brought up in a world where boys who so little know how to play with their things that they give them away and are pointed out to him as generous and where boys who are so bored with their own minds that they prefer other peoples are considered modest. If he knew in the days when models are being pointed out to him that the time would soon come in the world for boys like these when it would make little to the boys themselves or to anyone else whether they were generous or modest or not it would make his education happier. In the meantime in his disgrace he does not guess what a good example to models he is. Very few other people guess it. The general truth that when a man has nothing to be generous with and nothing to be modest about even his virtues are superfluous is realized by society at large in a pleasant helpless fashion in its bearing on the man but its bearing on the next man on education on the problem of human development is almost totally overlooked. The youth who grasps at everything in sight to have his experience with it who cares more for the thing than he does for the person it comes from and more for his experience with the thing than he does for the thing is by no means an inspiring spectacle while this process is going on and he is naturally in perpetual disgrace but in proportion as they are wise our best educators are aware that in all probability the same youth will wield more spiritual power in the world and do more good in it than nine or ten pleasantly smooth and adjustable persons. His boy faults are his man virtues wrong side out. There are very few lives of powerful men in modern times that do not illustrate this. The men who do not believe it or believe of illustrating it have illustrated it the most devoted their lives to it. It would be hard to find a man of any special importance in modern biography who has not been indebted to the sins of his youth. It is the things I ought not to have done see page 93.179.329 says the average autobiography which have been the making of me. They were all good things for me to do see page 526.632.720 but I did not think so when I did them. Neither did anyone else. Studying Shakespeare in the theater in the theological seminary and taking walks instead of examinations in college says the biography of Beecher between the lines meant definitely moral degeneration to me. I did habitually what I could not justify at the time either to myself or to others and I have had to make up since for all the moral degeneration item by item but the things I got with the degeneration when I got it habits of imagination and expression headway of personality are the things that have given me all my inspirations for being moral since. What love of liberty I have Wendell Phillips seems to say I got from loving my own. It is the boy who loves his liberty so much that he insists on having it to do wrong with as well as right who in the long run gets the most right done. The basis of character is moral experiment and almost all the men who have discovered different or beautiful or right habits of life for men have discovered them by doing wrong long enough. The ice is thin at this point gentle reader for many of us perhaps but it is held up our betters. The fact of the matter seems to be that a man's conscience in this world especially if it is an educated one or borrowed from his parents can get as much in his way as anything else. There is no doubt that the great spirit prefers to lead a man by his conscience but if it cannot be done if a man's conscience has no consequences for being led he leads him against his conscience. The doctrine runs along the edge of a precipice like all the best ones but if there is one gift rather than another to be prayed for in this world it is the ability to recognize the crucial moment that sometimes comes in a human life the moment when the almighty himself gets a man against his conscience to do right it seems to be the way that some consciences are meant to grow by trying wrong things on a little thousands of inferior people can be seen every day stumbling over their sins to heaven while the rest of us are holding back with our virtues it has been intimated from time to time in this world that all men are sinners in as much as things are arranged so that men can sin right things and sin in doing wrong ones both they can hardly miss it the real religion of every age seems to have looked a little a scans at perfection even at purity has gone its way in a kind of fine straightforwardness has spent itself in an inspired blundering in progressive noble culminating moral experiment the basis for a great character seems to be the capacity for intense experience with the character one already has so far as most of us can judge experience in proportion as it has been conclusive and economical has had to be literally or with one's imagination in the first person the world has never really wanted yet in spite of appearances its own way with a man it wants the man it is what he is that concerns it all that it asks of him and all that he has to give is the surplus of himself the trouble with our modern fashion of substituting the second person or the third person for the first in a man's education is that it takes his capacity for intense experience of himself his chance for having a surplus of himself entirely away egoism and society that the unpopularity of the first person singular is honestly acquired and heartily deserved it would be useless to deny everyone who has ever had a first person singular for a longer or shorter period in his life knows that it is a disagreeable thing and that everyone else knows it in 9 cases out of 10 at least and about 9 tenths of the time during its development the fundamental question does not concern itself with the first person singular being agreeable or disagreeable but with what to do with it it being the necessary evil that it is it seems to be a reasonable position that what should be reflected to in the interests of society is not egoism a man's being interested in himself but the lack of egoism a man's having a self that does not include others the trouble would seem to be not that people use their own private special monosyllable over much but that there is not enough of it that 9 times out of 10 when they write i it should be written small i in the face of the the objection of the state to the first person singular the egoist defends every man's reading for himself as follows any book that is allowed to come between a man and himself is doing him and all who know him a public injury the most important and interesting fact about a man to other people is his attitude toward himself determines his attitude toward everyone else the most fundamental question of every state is what is each man's attitude in this state toward himself what can it be a man's expectancy toward himself so far as the state is concerned is the moral center of citizenship it determines how much of what he expects he will expect of himself and how much he will expect of others and how much of books the man who expects too much of himself develops into the headlong and dangerous citizen who threatens society with his strength goes elbowing about in it insisting upon living other people's lives for them as well as his own the man who expects too much of others threaten society with weariness he is always expecting other people to do his living for him the man who expects too much of books lives neither in himself nor in anyone else the career of the paper doll is open to him history seems to be always taking turns with these three temperaments whether in art or religion or public affairs the over man the under man and the over red the tyrant the tramp and the paper doll between the man who keeps things in his own hands and the man who does not care to and the man who has no hands the state has a hard time nothing could be more important to the existence of the state then that every man in it shall expect just enough of himself and just enough of others and just enough of the world of books living is adjusting these worlds to one another the central fact about society is the way it helps a man with himself the society which cuts a man off from himself cuts him still farther off from everyone else a man's reading in the first person enough to have a first person enough to be identified with himself is one of the defenses of society I plus I that small I plus capital I equals we the most natural course for a human being who is going to identify himself with other people is to begin by practicing on himself if he has not succeeded in identifying himself with himself he makes very trying work of the rest of us a man who has not learned to say I and mean something very real by it has it not in his power without dullness or impertinence to say you to any living creature if a man has not learned to say you if he has not taken hold of himself interpreted and adjusted himself to those who are face to face with him the wider and more general privilege of saying they of judging any part of mankind or any temperament in it should be kept away from him it is only as one has experienced a temperament has in some mood of one's life said I in that temperament that one has the outfit for passing an opinion on it outfit for living with it or for being in the same world with it there are times it must be confessed when Christ's command that every man shall love his neighbor as himself seems inconsiderate there are some of us who cannot help feeling when we see a man coming along toward us proposing to love us a little while the way he loves himself that our permission might have been asked if there is one inconvenience rather than another in our modern Christian society it is the general unprotected sense one has in it the number of people there are about in it let loose by Sunday school teachers and others who are allowed to go around loving other people the way they love themselves a codicil or at least an explanatory footnote to the golden rule and the general interest of neighbors would be widely appreciated how shall a man dare to love his neighbor as himself until he loves himself that he really loves a self he can really love and loves it there is no more sad or constant spectacle that this modern world has to face than the spectacle of the man who has overlooked himself bustling about in it trying to give honor to other people the man who has never been able to help himself hurrying anxious to and fro as if he could help someone else it is not too much to say charity begins at home everything does the one person who has the necessary training for being an altruist is the alert egoist who does not know he is an altruist his service to society is a more intense and comprehensive selfishness he would be cutting acquaintance with himself not to render it when he says I he means we and the second and third persons are grown dim to him an absolutely perfect virtue is the conveying of a man's self to others the virtues that do not convey anything are cheap and common enough favors can be had almost any day from anybody if one is not too particular and so can blank staring self sacrifices one feels like putting up a sign over the door of one's life with some people let no man do me a favor except he do it as a self indulgence even kindness wears out shows through becomes impertinent if it is not a part of selfishness it may be that there are certain rudimentary virtues the outer form of which had better be maintained in the world whether they can be maintained spiritually that is thoroughly and egoistically or not if my enemy who lives under the hill will continue to not murder me I desire him to continue whether he enjoys not murdering me or not but it is no credit to him except in some baldly negative fashion this however it is literally true that a man's virtues are of little account to others except as they are of account to him and except he enjoys them as much as his vices the first really important shock that comes to young man's religious sentiment in this world is the number of bored looking people around doing right an absolutely substantial and perfect love is transfigured selfishness it is no mere playing with words to say this substituting a comfortable and pleasant doctrine for a strenuous altruism if it were as light and graceful and undertaking to have enough selfishness to go around to live in the whole of a universe like this as it is to slip out of even living in one's self in it like a mere shadow or altruist egoism were superficial enough as it is egoism being terribly or beautifully alive so far as it goes is now and always has been and always must be the running gear of the spiritual world egoism socialized the first person is what the second and third persons are made out of altruism as opposed to egoism except in a temporary sense is a contradiction in terms unless a man has a life to identify other lives with a self which is the symbol through which he loves all other selves and all other experiences he is selfish in the true sense with all our Galileo's, Agaziz's and Shakespeare's the universe has not grown in its countless centuries it has not been getting higher and wider over us since the human race began it is not a larger universe it is lived in by larger men more all absorbing all identifying and selfish men it is a universe in which a human being is duly born in a place with such a self as he happens to have and he is expected to grow up to it barring a certain amount of wear and tear and a few minor rearrangements on the outside it is the same universe that it was in the beginning and is now and always will be quite the same universe whether a man grows up to it or not the larger universe is not one that comes with the telescope it comes with the larger self the self that by reaching farther and farther out it is as if the sky were a splendor that grew by night out of his own heart the tent of his love of God spreading its roof over the nature of things the greater distance knowledge reaches the more it has to be personal because it has to be spiritual the one thing that it is necessary to do in any part of the world to make any branch of knowledge or deed of mercy a living and eager thing is to get men how direct its bearing is upon themselves the man who does not feel concerned when the Armenians are massacred thousands of miles away because there is a sea between us is not a different man in kind from the man who does feel concerned the difference is one of degree it is a matter of area in living the man who does feel concerned has a larger self he sees further feels the cry as the cry of his own children he has learned the oneness and is touched with the closeness of the great family of the world the autobiography of beauty but the brunt of the penalty of the unpopularity of the first person singular in modern society falls upon the individual the hard part of it for a man who has not the daily habit of being a companion to himself is his own personal private sense of emptiness of missing things all the universe gets itself addressed to someone else a great showy heartless pantomime it rolls over him beckoning with its nights and days and winds and faces always beckoning but to someone else all that seems to be left to him in a universe is a kind of keeping up appearances in it a looking as if he lived a hurrying dishonest trying to forget he dare not sit down and think he spends his strength in racing to get away from himself and those greatest days of all in human life the days when men grow old world gentle and still and deep before their god are the days he dreads the most he can only look forward to old age as the time when a man sits down with his lie at last and day after day and night after night faces infinite and eternal loneliness in his own heart it is the man who cuts acquaintance with himself and is lonely with himself who dares the supreme daring in this world he and his loneliness are hermetically sealed up together in infinite time, infinite space not a great man of all that have been not a star or flower, not even a great book that can get at him it is the nature of a great book that in proportion as it is beautiful it makes itself helpless before a human soul like music or poetry or painting radiant and open before all that lies before it to everything or to nothing whatever it may be it makes the direct appeal before the days and years of a man's life it stands is not this so it says it never says less than this it does not know how to say more a bear and trivial book stops with what it says itself a great book depends now and forever upon what it makes a man say back and if he does not say anything, if he does not bring anything to it to say nothing out of his own observation, passion experience to be called out by the passing words upon the page the most living book in its board and paper prison is a dead and helpless thing before a dead soul, the helplessness of the dead soul lies upon it perhaps there is no more important distinction between a great book and a little book than this that the great book is always a listener in life and the little book takes nothing for granted of a reader it does not expect anything of him the littler it is the less it expects and the more it explains nothing that is really great and living explains living is enough if greatness does not explain by being great nothing smaller can explain it God never explains he merely appeals to every man's first person singular religion is not what he has told to man it is what he has made men wonder about until they have been determined to find out the stars have never been published with footnotes the sun with its huge soft shining on people kept on with the shining even when the people thought it was doing so trivial and undignified and provincial a thing as to spend its whole time going around them and around their little earth that they might have light on it per chance and be kept warm the moon has never gone out of its way to prove that it is not made of green cheese and this present planet we are allowed the use of from year to year which was so little observed for thousands of generations that all the people on it supposed it was flat made no answer through the centuries it kept on burying them one by one and waited like a work of genius or a masterpiece in proportion as a thing is beautiful whether of man or God it has this heroic helplessness about it with the passing soul or generation of souls if people are foolish it can but appeal from one dear pitiful fool to another until enough of us have died to make it time for a wise man again history is a series of crises like this in which once in so often men who say I have crossed the lives of mortals have puzzled the world enough to be remembered in it like Socrates or been abused by it to make it love them forever like Christ the greatest revelation of history is the patience of the beauty in it and truth can always be known by the fact that it is the only thing in the wide world that can afford to wait a true book does not go about advertising itself huckstering for souls arranging its greatness small enough it waits sometimes for 20 years it waits for us sometimes for 40 sometimes 60 and then when the time is fulfilled and we come at length and lay before it the burden of the blind and blundering years we have tried to live it does little with us after all but to bring these same years singing and crying and struggling back to us that through their shadowy doors we may enter at last the confessional of the human heart and cry out there or stammer or whisper or sing there the prophecy of our own lives dead words out of dead dictionaries the book brings to us it is a great book because it is a listening book because it makes the unspoken to speak and the dead to live in it to the vanished pen and the yellowed paper of the man who writes to us thy soul and mind gentle reader shall call back this is the truth if a book has force in it whatever its literary form may be or however disguised it is biography appealing to biography if a book has great force in it it is biography appealing to autobiography the great book is always a confession a moral adventure with its reader an incredible confidence and of section six section seven of the lost art of reading by Gerald Stanley Lee this LibriVox recording is in the public domain book one interferences with the reading habit the fourth interference the habit of not letting one's self go the country boy in literature let not any parliament member says Carlisle ask of the present editor what is to be done editors are not here to say how which is both ungracious and tantalizingly elusive suggest a professor of literature who has been recently criticizing the 19th century this criticism as a part of an estimate of Thomas Carlisle is not only a criticism on itself and an autobiography besides but it sums up in a more or less characteristic fashion perhaps what might be called the ultra academic attitude in reading the ultra academic attitude may be defined as the attitude of sitting down and being told things and of expecting all other persons to sit down and be told things and of judging all authors principles men and accordingly if the universe were what in most libraries and clubs today it is made to seem a kind of infinite institution of learning a lecture room on a larger scale and if all the men in it instead of doing and singing in it had spent their days in delivering lectures to it there would be every reason in a universe arranged for lectures why we should exact of those who give them that they should make the truth plain to us so plain for us to do with truth but to read it in the printed book and then analyze the best analysis of it and die it seems to be quite generally true of those who have been the great masters of literature however that in proportion as they have been great they have proved to be as ungracious and tantalizingly elusive as the universe itself they have refused without exception to bear down on the word how they have almost told men what to do and have confined themselves to saying something that would make them do it and make them find a way to do it this something that they have said like the something that they have lived has come to them they know not how and has gone from them they know not how sometimes not even when it has been incommunicable incalculable infinite the subconscious self of each of them the voice beneath the voice of the world if a boy from the country were to stand in a city street before the window of a shop gazing into it with open mouth he would do more than five or six minutes to measure the power and caliber of the passing men and women then almost any device that could be arranged ninety five out of a hundred of them probably would smile a superior smile at him and hurry on out of the remaining five four would look again and pity him one perhaps would honor and envy him the boy who in a day like the present one is still vital enough to forget how he looks and enjoying something is not only a rare and refreshing spectacle but he is master of the most important intellectual and moral superiority a boy can be master of and if in spite of teachers and surroundings he can keep this superiority long enough or until he comes to be a man he is a man whose very faults shall be remembered better and cherished more by a doting world than the virtues of the rest of us the most important fact perhaps the only important fact about James Boswell the country boy of literature is that whatever may have been his limitations he had the most important gift that life can give to a man the gift of forgetting himself in it the fleet street of letters smiling at him and who does not always see James Boswell completely lost to the street gaping at the soul of Samuel Johnson as if it were the show window of the world as if to be allowed to look at a soul like this were almost to have a soul oneself Boswell's life of Johnson is a classic because James Boswell had the classic power in him of unconsciousness to book laborers college employees analysis hands of whatever kind his book is a standing notice that the prerogative of being immortal is granted by a man even to a fool if he has the grace not to know it for that matter even if the fool knows he is a fool if he cares more about his subject than he cares about not letting anyone else know it he is never forgotten the world cannot afford to leave such a fool out is it not a world in which there is not a living man of us who does not cherish in his heart a secret like this of his own we are bound to admit that the main difference between James Boswell and the rest consists in the fact that James Boswell found something in the world so much more worth living for than not letting the common secret out that he lived for it and like all the other great naïves he will never get over living for it even allowing that Boswell's consistent and unfailing motive in cultivating Samuel Johnson was vanity this very vanity Boswell's has more genius in it than Johnson's vocabulary and the important and inspiring fact remains that James Boswell a flagrantly common place man in every single respect by the law of letting himself go has taken his stand forever in English literature as the one common place man in it who has produced a work of genius the main quality of a man of genius his power of sacrificing everything to his main purpose belonged to him he was not only willing to seem the kind of fool he was but he did not hesitate to seem several kinds that he was not to fulfill his main purpose that Samuel Johnson might be given the ponderous and gigantic and looming look that a Samuel Johnson ought to have Boswell painted himself into his picture with more relentlessness than any other author that can be called to mind except three or four similarly inspired and self-forgetful persons in the New Testament there has never been any other biography in England with the single exception of Peeps in which the author has so completely lost himself in his subject if the author of Johnson's life had written his book with the inspiration of not being laughed at which is the inspiration that nine out of ten who love to laugh are likely to write with James Boswell would never have been heard the burly figure of Samuel Johnson would be a blur behind a dictionary it may be set down as one of the necessary principles of the reading habit that no true and vital reading is possible except as the reader possesses and employs the gift of letting himself go it is a gift that William Shakespeare and James Boswell and Elijah and Charles Lamb and a great many other happy but unimportant people have had in common genius a man who puts his best in his most unconscious self into his utterance can be read or listen to or interpreted for one moment without it except from those who bring to him the greeting of their own unconscious selves he hides himself he gives himself only to those with whom unconsciousness is a daily habit with whom the joy of letting oneself go as one of the great resources of life this joy is back of every great act and every great deep appreciation in the world and it is the charm and delight of the smaller ones on its higher levels it is called genius and inspiration in religion it is called faith it is the primal energy both of art and religion probably only the man who has very little would be able to tell what faith is as a basis of art or religion but we have learned some things that it is not we know that faith is not a dead lift of the brain a supreme effort either for God or for ourselves it is the soul giving itself up finding itself feeling itself drawn to its own into infinite space face to face with strength it is the supreme swinging free of the spirit the becoming a part of the running gear of things faith is not an act of the imagination to the man who knows it the infinite fact the infinite crowding of facts the drawing of the man self upward and outward where he is surrounded with the infinite man self perhaps a man can make himself not believe he can not make himself believe he can only believe by letting himself go by trusting the force of gravity and the law of space around him faith is the universe flowing silently implacably through his soul up to it in the tiniest noisiest noon his spirit is flooded with the stars he is let out to the boundaries of heaven and the night sky bears him up in the heat of the day in the presence of a great work of art a work of inspiration or faith there is no such thing as appreciation without letting oneself go the subconscious self the criticism of Carlisle's remark editors are not here to say how that it is ungracious and tantalizingly elusive is a fair illustration of the mood to which the habit of analysis leads its victims the explainer cannot let himself go the puttering love of explaining and the need of explaining dog his soul at every turn of thought or thought of having a thought he not only puts a microscope to his eyes to know with but his eyes have ingrown microscopes the microscope has become a part of his eyes he cannot see anything without putting it on a slide and when his microscope will not focus on it and it cannot be reduced and explained he explains that it is not there the man of genius on the other hand with whom truth is an experience instead of a specimen has learned that the probabilities are that the more impossible it is to explain a truth the more truth there is in it insofar as the truth is an experience to him he is not looking for slides he will not mount it as a specimen and he is not interested in seeing it explained or focused he lives with it in his own heart insofar as he possesses it and he looks at it with a telescope for a greater part which he cannot possess the microscope is perpetually mislaid he has the experience itself and the one thing he wants to do with it is to convey it to others he does this by giving himself up to it the truth having become a part of him by his thus giving himself up it becomes a part of his reader by his readers giving himself up reading a work of genius is one man's unconsciousness greeting another man's no author of the highest class can possibly be read without this mutual exchange of unconsciousness he cannot be explained he cannot explain himself and he cannot appreciate it or criticize by those who expect him to spiritual things are spiritually discerned that is experienced things are discerned by experience they are ungracious and tantalizingly elusive when the man who has a little talent tells a truth he tells the truth so ill that he is obliged to tell how to do it the artist on the other hand having given himself up to the truth almost always tells it as if he were listening to it as if he were being born up by it as by some great delight even while he speaks to us it is the power of the artist's truth when he writes like this that it shall haunt his reader as it has haunted him he lives with it and is haunted by it day after day whether he wants to be or not and when a human being is obliged to live with a burning truth inside of him every day of his life he will find some way of saying it of getting it outside of him of doing it if only for the common and obvious reason that it burns the heart out of a man who does not if the truth is really in a man a truth to be done he finds out how to do it as a matter of self-preservation the average man no doubt will continue now as always to consider Carlisle's editors are not here to say how ungracious and tantalizingly elusive he demands of every writer not only that he shall write the truth for every man but that he shall practically read it for him that is tell him how to read it the best part of reading it it is by this explaining the truth too much by making a small enough for small people that so many lies have been made out of it the gist of the matter seems to be that if the spirit of the truth does not inspire a man to some more eager way of finding out how to do a truth than asking some other man how to do it it must be some other spirit the way out for the exploiterating or weak man does not consist in the scientists or the commentators how or the artists how or in any other strain of helping the ground to hold one up it consists in the power of letting oneself go to say nothing of appreciation of power criticism of power is impossible without letting oneself go criticism which is not the faithful remembering and reporting of an unconscious mood is not worthy of being called criticism at all a critic cannot find even the faults of a book who does not let himself go in it and there is not a living man who can expect to write a criticism of a book until he has given himself a chance to have an experience with it to write his criticism with the larger part of the professional criticism of the ages that are passed has proved worthless to us because the typical professional critic has generally been a man who professes not to let himself go and who is proud of it if it were not for the occasional possibility of his being stunned by a book made unconscious by it the professional critic of the lesser sort would never say anything of interest to us at all and even if he did being a maimed and defective conscious person the importance that he was stunned is likely to be of more significance than anything he may say about the book that stunned him or about the way he felt when he was being stunned having had very little practice in being unconscious the bare fact is all that he can remember about it the unconsciousness of a person who has long lost the habit of unconsciousness is apt to be a kind of groping stupor or deadness at its best the artist a state of being a way of being incalculably alive and of letting in infinite life it is a small joy that is not unconscious the man who knows he is reading when he has a book in his hand does not know very much about books people who always know what time it is who always know exactly where they are and exactly how they look have it not in their power to read a great book that comes to the reader as a great book is always one that shares with him the infinite and the eternal in himself there is a time to know what time it is and there is a time not to and there are many places small enough to know where they are the book that knows what time it is in every sentence will always be read by the clock but the great book the book with infinite vistas in it shall not be read by men with a rim of time around it and there is no sound that men can make which shall tick in that place the organic principle of inspiration letting oneself go is but a half principle however to do one's reading with the other half consists in getting oneself together again in proportion as we truly appreciate what we read we find ourselves playing at being Boswell to a book and being Johnson to it by turns the vital reader lets himself go and collect himself as the work before him demands there are some books where it is necessary to let oneself go from beginning to end there are others where a man may sit as he sits at a play being himself between acts or at proper intervals when the author lets down the curtain and being translated the rest of the time our richest moods are those in which as we look back upon them we seem to have been impressing impressionable, creative and receptive at the same time the alternating currents of these moods are so swift that they seem simultaneous and the immeasurable swiftness with which they pass from one to the other is the soul's instinctive method of kindling itself the very act of inspiration sometimes the subconscious self has it all its own way with us and the subconscious self is crowded at the horizon's edge like northern lights still playing in the distance but the result is the same the dim presence of one of these moods and the other when one's power is least effective and the gradual alternating of the currents of the moods as power grows more effective in the higher states of power the moods are seen alternating with increasing heat and swiftness until in the highest state of power of all they are seen in their mutual glow and splendor working mood creating miracles the orator and the listener the writer and the reader and proportion as they become alive to one another come into the same spirit the spirit of mutual listening and utterance at the very best and in the most inspired mood the reader reads as if he were a reader and writer both and the writer writes as if he were a writer and reader both while it is necessary in the use and development of power all varieties and combinations of these moods should be familiar experiences with the artist and with the reader of the artist it remains as the climax an ideal of all energy and beauty in the human soul that these moods shall be found alternating very swiftly to all appearances together the artist's command of this alternating current the swiftness with which he modulates these moods into one another is the measure of his power the violinist who plays best is the one who sings the most things together in his playing he listens to his bow to the heart of his audience and to the soul of the composer all at once his instrument sings a singing that blends them together the effect of their being together is called art the effect of their being together is produced by the fact that they are together that they are born and living and dying together in the man himself the strings are singing to us they are the spirit within the strings his letting himself go to them his gathering himself out of them his power to receive and create at once is the secret of the effect he produces the power to be receptive and creative by turns is only obtained by constant and daily practice and when the modulating of one of these moods into the other becomes a swift an unconscious habit of life what is called temperament is attained at last and inspiration is a daily occurrence it is as hard for such a man to keep from being inspired as it is for the rest of us to make ourselves inspired he has to go out of his way to avoid inspiration in proportion as this principle is recognized and allowed free play in the habits that obtain amongst men who know books their habits will be inspired habits books will be read and lived in the same breath and books that have been lived will be written the most serious menace in the present epidemic of analysis in our colleges is not that it is teaching men to analyze masterpieces until they are dead to them but that it is teaching men to analyze their own lives until they are dead to themselves when the process of education is such that it narrows the area of unconscious thinking and feeling in a man's life it cuts him off in friendship with the gods from his habit of being unconscious enough of what he has to enter into the joy of what he has not the best that can be said of such an education is that it is a patient painstaking laborious training in locking one's self up it dooms a man to himself the smallest part of himself and walls him out of the universe he comes to its doorways one by one the shining of them falls as it falls on all of us he sees the shining of them and hastens to them one by one they are shut in his face his soul is damned is sentenced to perpetual consciousness of itself what is there that he can do next turning round and round inside himself learning how little worth while it is there is but one fate left open to such a man a blind and desperate lunge into the roar of life he cannot see for facts the usual LHD PhD fate if he piles around him the huge hollow sounding outsides of things in the universe that have lived bones of soul, matter of bodies, skeletons of lives that men have lived who shall blame him he wonders why they have lived why anyone lives and if when he has wondered long enough why anyone lives we choose to make him the teacher why anyone lives, why should we call him to account he cannot but teach what he has what has been given him and we have but ourselves to think that as every radiant june comes round diplomas for ennui are being handed out thousands of them to specially favor children through all this broad and glorious land end of section 7 section 8 of the lost art of reading by Gerald Stanley Lee this Lieber-Vox recording is in the public domain the fifth interference the habit of analysis if Shakespeare came to Chicago it is one of the supreme literary excellences of the bible that until the other day almost it had never occurred to anyone that it is literature at all it has been read by men and women and children and priests and popes and kings and slaves and the dying of all ages and it has come to them not as a book but as if it were something happening to them it has come to them as nights and mornings come and sleep and death as one of the great simple infinite experiences of human life it has been the habit of the world to take the greatest works of art like the greatest works of God in this simple and straightforward fashion as great experiences the masterpiece really is a masterpiece and reigns and shines its instincts on us as masterpieces should we do not think whether it is literary or not any more than we gaze on mountains and stop to think how sublimely scientific, rapidly geological and logically chemical they are these things are true about mountains and have their place but it is the nature of a mountain to insist upon its own place to be an experience first and to be as scientific and geological and chemical as it pleases afterward it is the nature of anything powerful to be an experience first and to appeal to experience when we have time or when the experience is over a mountain or a masterpiece can be analyzed, the worst part of it but we cannot make a masterpiece by analyzing it and a mountain has never been appreciated by making it into trap quartz and conglomerate and it still holds good as a general principle that making a man appreciate a mountain by pounding it takes nearly as long as making the mountain and is not nearly so worthwhile not many years ago in one of our journals of the more literary sort there appeared a few directions from Chicago University to the late John Keats to the nightingale these directions were from the head of a department who in a previous paper in the same journal had rewritten the Ode to a Grecian Urn the main point the head of the department made with regard to the nightingale was that it was not worth rewriting the Ode to the nightingale says he offers me no such temptation there is almost nothing in it that properly belongs to the subject treated the faults of the Grecian Urn are such as the poet himself under wise criticism see catalog of Chicago University might easily have removed the faults of the nightingale are such that they cannot be removed they are in here in the idea and structure the head of the department dwells at length upon the hopeless fortune of the poem expressing his regret that it can never be retrieved after duly analyzing what he considers the poem's leading thought he regrets that a poet like John Keats should go so far apropos of a nightingale as to sigh in his immortal stanzas for something which whatever it may be is nothing short of a dead drunk one hears the soul of Keats from out its eternal Italy is there no one near to help me no fair dawn of life from charitable voice sweet saying to set my dull and saddened spirit playing the head of the department goes on and the lines still what's thou seeing and I have ears in vain to thy high requiem become a sod are passed through analysis what the fitness is he says or what the poetic or other effectiveness of suggesting that the corpse of a person who has ceased upon the midnight still has ears only to add who has them in vain I cannot pretend to understand one of a great many other things that the head of the department does not pretend to understand it is probably with the same outfit of not pretending to understand that for the edification of the merely admiring mind the ode to a Grecian urn was rewritten to Keats lines oh attic shape fair attitude with breed of marble men and maidens overwrought with forest branches and the trodden weed thou silent form dust tease us out of thought as doth eternity cold pastoral when old age shall this generation waste thou shall remain in midst of other woe than ours a friend to man to whom thou sayest beauty is truth truth beauty that is all you know on earth and all you need to know he makes various corrections offering a substitute conclusion to the poet's song the following outburst preaching this wisdom with thy cheerful mean possessing beauty thou possessest all pause at that goal not farther from thy quest it would not be just to present the present state of academic instruction and literature to illustrate it by such an extreme instance as this of the damage the educated mind debauched with analysis is capable of doing to the reading habit it is probable that a large proportion of the teachers of literature in the united states both out of their sense of John Keats and out of respect to themselves would have publicly resented this astonishing exhibit of the extreme literary academic mind in a prominent journal had they not suspected that its editor having discovered a literary academic mind that could itself as seriously as this had deliberately brought it out as a spectacle it could do no harm to Keats certainly or to anyone else and would afford an infinite deal of amusement the journal argued to let a mind like this clutter down a column to oblivion so it did it was taken by all concerned teachers critics and observers alike as one of the more interesting literary events of the season unfortunately however entertainments of this kind have a very serious side to them it is one thing to smile at an individual when one knows that standing where he does he stands by himself and another to smile at an individual when one knows that he is not standing by himself that he is a type that there must be a great many others like him or he would not be standing where he does it all taking his stand over his own soul in public print summing up its emptiness there and gloating over it we are in the presence of a disheartening fact it can be covered up however and in what on the whole is such a fine true ringing hearty old world is this it need not be made much of but when we find that a mind like this has been placed at the head of a department of poetry great representative american university the last thing that should be done with it is to cover it up the more people know where the analytical mind is today where it is getting to be and the more they think what it's being their means the better the signs of the times the destiny of education and the fate of literature are all involved in a fact like this the mere possibility of having the analyzing grinding mind engaged in teaching a spontaneous art in a great educational institution would be of great significance the fact that it is actually there and that no particular comment as excited by its being there is significant it betrays not only what the general national academic attitude toward literature is but that that attitude has become habitual that it is taken for granted one would be inclined to suppose looking at the matter abstractly that all students and teachers of literature would take it for granted that the practice of making a dispassionate criticism of a passion would be a dangerous practice for any vital and spontaneous nature certainly the last kind of practice that a student of the art of poetry that is the art of literature in the essential sense would wish to make himself master of the first item in a critics outfit for criticizing a passion is having one the fact that this is not regarded as an axiom in our current education in books is a very significant fact it goes with another significant fact the assumption in most courses of literature as at present conducted that a little man that is a man incapable of a great passion who is not able to read a book with a great passion in it can somehow teach other people to read it it is not necessary to deny that analysis occasionally plays a valuable part in bringing a pupil to a true method and knowledge of literature but unless the analysis is inspired by nothing can be more dangerous to a pupil under his 30th year even for the shortest period of time or more likely to move him over farthest confines of the creative life or more certain if continued long enough to set him forever outside all power or possibility of power either in the art of literature or in any of the other arts the first objection to the analysis of one of Shakespeare's plays as ordinarily practiced in courses of literature is that it is of doubtful value to 999 pupils in a thousand if they do it the second is that they cannot do it the analyzing of one of Shakespeare's plays requires more of a commonplace pupil than Shakespeare required of himself the apology that is given for the analyzing method is that the process of analyzing a work of Shakespeare's will show the pupil how Shakespeare did it and that by seeing how Shakespeare did it he will see how to do it himself in the fourth place analysis will not show how Shakespeare did it and in the second place if it does it will show that he did not do it by analysis in the third place to say nothing of not doing it by analysis if he had analyzed it before he did it he could not have analyzed it afterward in the literal and modern sense in the fourth place even if Shakespeare were able to do his work by analyzing it before he did it so that undergraduate students can a man of genius with all his onset of natural passion his natural power of letting himself go could doubtless do more analyzing both before and after his work than anyone else without being damaged by it what shall be said of the folly of trying to teach men of talent and the mere pupils of men of talent by analysis by a method that is which even if it succeeds in doing what it tries to do can only at the very best reveal to the pupil the roots of his instincts before they have come up and why is it that our courses of literature may be seen assuming today on every hand almost without the exception that by teaching men to analyze their own inspirations the inspirations they have and teaching them to analyze the inspirations of other men inspirations they can never have we are somehow teaching them English literature it seems to have been overlooked while we are all analytically falling at Shakespeare's feet that Shakespeare did not become Shakespeare by analytically falling at anyone's feet not even at his own and that the most important difference between being a Shakespeare and being an analyzer of Shakespeare is that with the man Shakespeare no submitting of himself to the analysis gymnast would ever have been possible and with the students of Shakespeare as students go and if they are caught young enough the habit of analysis is not only a possibility but a sleek, industrious and complacent certainty after a little furtive looking backward perhaps and a few trembling and doubts they shall all be seen almost to a man offering their souls to Malak as though the not having a soul and not missing it were one final and consummate triumph that literary culture could bring flocks of them can be seen with the shining in their faces year after year, term after term almost anywhere on the civilized globe doing this very thing doing it under the impression that they are learning something and not until the shining in their faces is gone will they be under the impression that they have learned it whatever it is and that they are educated the fact that the analytic mind is establishing itself in a greater or lesser degree as the sentinel in college life of the entire creative literature of the world is a fact with many meanings in it it means not only that there are a great many more minds like it in literature but that a great many other minds, nearly all college educated minds are being made like it it means that unless the danger and acted upon the next generation of American citizens can neither expect to be able to produce literature of its own nor to appreciate or enjoy literature that has been produced it means that another 18th century is coming to the world and as the analysis is deeper than before and more deadly clever with the deeper things than before it is going to be the longest 18th century the world has ever seen generations with machines for hands and feet machines for minds machines outside their minds to enjoy the machines inside their minds with every man with his information machine to be cultured with his religious machine to be good with and his private analysis machine to be beautiful with shall take his place in the world shall add his soul to the machine we make a world with for every man that is born on the earth crowded out of it one more analysis of joy shall take its place go round and round under the stars do dawn and darkness until it stops how a sunrise is made and why a cloud is artistic and how pines should be composed in a landscape all men shall know we shall criticize the technique of thunderstorms and what is a sunset after all the reflection of a large body air through analyzed heaven and over analyzed fields it trails its joylessness around the earth time was when the setting of the sun was the playing of two worlds upon a human being's life on the edge of the little day the blending of sense and spirit for him earth and heaven out in the still west his whole being went forth to it he watched with it and prayed and sang with it the presence his soul walked down to the stars out of the joy of his life the finite sorrow and the struggle of his life he gazed upon it it was the portrait of his infinite self every setting sun that came to him was a compact with eternal joy the night itself his figure faint before it in the flicker of the east whispered to him thou also hills and heavens around thee hills and heavens within thee oh child of time thou also art God ah me how I could love my soul doth melt Christ keeps ye deaf and senseless minutes of the day and thou old forest hold ye this for true there is no lightning no authentic do but in the eye of love there is not a sound melodious how so ever can confound the heavens on the earth to such a death as doth the voice of love there is not a breath that will mingle kindly with the meadow air till it has painted round and stolen a share of passion from the heart John Keats and William Shakespeare wrote masterpieces because they had passions spiritual experiences and the daily habit of inspiration and so far as these masterpieces are being truthfully taught they are taught by teachers who themselves know the passion of creation John Keats and William Shakespeare by rousing the same passions and experiences in the pupil that Keats and Shakespeare had and by daily appealing to them analysis analyzed there are great many men in the world today faithfully doing their stint in it they are commonly known as men of talent who would have been men of genius if they had dared education has made cowards of us all and the habit of examining the roots of one's instincts before they come up is an incurable habit the essential principle in a true work of art is always the poem or the song that is hidden in it a work of art by a man of talent is generally ranked by the fact that it is the work of a man who analyzes a song before he sings it he puts down the words of the song first writes it that is in prose then he lumbers it over into poetry then he looks around for some music for it then he practices that singing it and then he sings it the man of genius on the other hand whether he be a great one or a very little one is known by the fact that he has a song sent to him he sings it he has a habit of humming it over afterwards his humming it over afterwards is his analysis it is the only possible inspired analysis the difference between these two types of men is so great that anything that the smaller of them has to say about the spirit or the processes of the other is of little value when one of them tries to teach the work of the other which is what almost always occurs the man of talent being the typical professor of works of genius the result is fatal the singer who is so little capable of singing that he can give a prose analysis of his own song while it is coming to him before he sings it can hardly be expected to extemporize an inspired analysis of another man's song after reading it if a man cannot apply inspired analysis to a little common passion in a song he has of his own he is placed in a hopeless position when he tries to give an inspired analysis of a passion that only another man could have and that only a great man would forget himself long enough to have an inspired analysis may be defined as the kind of analysis that the real poet in his creatively critical mood is able to give to his work a low singing or humming analysis in which all the elements of the song are active and all the faculties and all the senses work on the subject at once the proportions and relations of a living thing are all kept perfect in an inspired analysis and the song is made perfect at last not by being taken apart but by being made to pass its delight more deeply and more slowly through the singer's utmost self to its fulfillment what is ordinarily taught as analysis is very different from this it consists in the deliberate and triumphant separation of the faculties from one another and from the thing they have produced the dull, bare, pitiless process of passing a living and beautiful thing before one vacant, staring faculty at a time this faculty being left in the stupor of being all by itself sits in complacent judgment upon a work of art the very essence of the life and beauty of which is its appealing to all of the faculties and senses in their true proportion glowing them together into a unit namely several things made into one thing that is several things occupying the same time and the same place that is synthesis an inspired analysis is the rehearsal of a synthesis an analysis is not inspired unless it comes as a flash of light and a burst of music and a breath of fragrance all in one such an analysis cannot be secured with painstaking and slowness unless the painstaking and slowness are the rehearsal of a synthesis and all the elements in it are labored on and delighted in at once it must be a low singing or humming analysis the expert student or teacher of poetry who makes a dispassionate criticism of a passion who makes it his special boast that he is able to apply his intellect severely by itself to a great poem most of the devastation of the highest power a human being can attain the comest man that lives whatever his powers may be if they are powers that act together can look down on a man whose powers cannot as a mutilated being while it cannot be denied that a being who has been thus especially mutilated is often possessed of a certain literary ability the acrobats of literature rather than to the literature itself the contortionist who separates himself from his hands and feet for the delectation of audiences the circus performer who makes a battering round of his head and who glories in being shot out of a cannon into space an amazement goes through his motions with essentially the same pride in his strengths and sustains the same relation to the strengths of the real man of the world whatever a course of literary criticism may be or its value may be to the pupils who take it it consists more often than not on the part of pupil and teacher both in the dislocating of one faculty from all the others and bearing it down hard on a work of art as if what it was made of or how it was made could only be seen by scratching it it is to be expected now and then in the outside world that a newspaper critic will be found writing a cerebellum criticism of a work of the imagination but the student of literature in the comparative quiet and leisure of the college atmosphere who works in the same separated spirit who estimates a work by dislocating his faculties on it is infinitely more blame worthy and the college teacher who teaches a work of genius in the final before one of his faculties at a time when all of them would not be enough who does this in the presence of young persons and trains them to do it themselves is a public menace the attempt to master a masterpiece as it were by reading it first with the sense of sight and then with the sense of smell and with all the senses in turn keeping them carefully guarded from their habit of sensing things together that is subjective but a hopeless attempt even if it would attempt to master anything in this way would find it hopeless and the attempt to learn a great work of art a great whole by applying the small parts of a small mind to it one after the other is more hopeless still it can be put down as a general principle that a human being is so little alive that he finds his main pleasure in life in taking himself apart can find little value for others in a masterpiece a work of art which is so much alive that it cannot be taken apart and which is eternal because its secret is eternally its own if the time ever comes when it can be taken apart it will be done only by a man who could have put it together who is more alive than the masterpiece is alive until the masterpiece meets with a master who is more creative than its first master was the less the emotions of analysis are gone through with by those who are not masters the better a masterpiece cannot be analyzed by the cold and negative process of being taken apart it can only be analyzed by being melted down it can only be melted down by a man who has creative heat in him to melt it down and the daily habit of glowing with creative heat it is a matter of common observation what resources an artist has the more things there are in nature and in the nature of life which he thinks are not beautiful the making of an artist is his sense of selection if he is an artist of the smaller type he selects beautiful subjects subjects with ready made beauty in them if he is an artist of the larger type he can hardly miss making almost any subject beautiful because he has so many beautiful things to put it with he sees every subject the way it is that is in relation to a great many other subjects the way God saw it when he made it and the way it is the essential difference between a small mood and a large one is that in the small one we see each thing we look on comparatively by itself or with reference to one or two relations to persons and events in our larger mood politically we see it as it is and as it lives and as a God would see it playing its meaning through the whole created scheme into everything else the soul of beauty is synthesis in the presence of a mountain the sound of a hammer is as rich as a symphony it is like the little word of a great man great in its great relations when the spirit is waked and the man within the man is listening to it the sound of a hoof on a lonely road in the great woods is the footstep of cities to him coming through the trees and the low chocking sound of a cartwheel in the still and radiant valley throngs his being like an opera all sights and echoes and thoughts and feelings revel in it it is music for the smoke wrapped and beautiful rising from the chimneys at his feet a sheet of water making heaven out of nothing is beautiful to the dullest man because he cannot analyze it could not even if he would contrive to see it by itself skies come crowding on it there is enough poetry in the mere angle of a sinking sun to flood the prose of a continent with because the gentle earth long shadows that follow it lay their fingers upon all life and creep together innumerable separated things in the meadow where our birds are there is scarcely a tree in sight to tangle the singing in it is a meadow with miles of sunlight in it it seems like a kind of world melody to walk in the height of noon there infinite grass infinite sky gusts of bobbling's voices it's as if the air that drifted down made music of itself and the song of all the singing everywhere the song the soul hears comes on the slow winds half the delight of a bobbling is that he is more synthetic more of a poet than other birds has a duet in his throat he bursts from the grass and sings in bursts plays his own obligato while he goes one can never see him in his eager flurry between his low heaven and his low nest without catching the lilt of inspiration like the true poet he suits the action to the word in a weary world and does his flying and singing together the song that he throws around him is the very spirit of his wings of all wings more beauty is always the putting of more things together they were created to be together the spirit of art is the spirit that finds this out even the bobbling is cosmic if he sings with room enough and when the heart wakes the song of the cricket is infinite we hear it across stars end of section 8 section 9 reading by Gerald Stanley Lee this LibriVox recording is in the public domain the sixth interference literary drill in college seeds and blossoms four men stood before God at the end of the first week watching him whirl his little globe the first man said to him tell me how you did it the second man said let me have it the third man said the fourth man said nothing and fell down and worshipped having worshipped he rose to his feet and made a world himself these four men have been known in history as the scientist the man of affairs the philosopher and the artist they stand for the four necessary points of view in reading books most of the readers of the world are content to be partitioned off and having been duly set down they take sides from beginning to end with one or the other of these four men it is the distinction of the scholar of the highest class in every period that he declines to do this insofar as he finds each of the four men taking sides against each other he takes sides against each of them in behalf of all he insists on being able to absorb knowledge to read and write in all four ways if he is a man of genius being able to read and write as a rule in all four ways at once if his genius is of the lesser kind in two or three ways at once the eternal books are those that stand this foresighted test they are written from all of these points of view they have absorbed into themselves the four moods of creation mourning it is thus that they bring the mourning back to us the most important question in regard to books that are schools and institutions of learning what knowledge to face at present is how shall we produce conditions that will enable the ordinary man to keep the proportions that belong to a man to absorb knowledge to do his reading and writing in all four ways at once in other words how shall we enable him to be a natural man a man of genius as far as he goes a masterpiece is a book that can only be read by a man who is a master in some degree of the things the book is master of the man who has mastered things the most is the man who can make those things the man who makes things is the artist he has bowed down and worshipped and he has arisen and stood before God and created before him and the spirit of the creator is in him to take the artist's point of view is to take the point of view that absorbs and sums up the others the supremacy and comprehensiveness of this point of view is a matter of fact rather than an argument the artist is the man who makes the things that science and practical affairs and philosophy are merely about the artist of the higher order is more scientific than the scientist more practical than the man of affairs and more philosophic than the philosopher because he combines what these men do about things and what these men say about things into the things themselves and makes the things live to combine these four moods at once in once the argument toward an idea is to take the artists that is the creative point of view toward it the only fundamental outfit a man can have for reading books in all four ways at once is his ability to take the point of view of the man who made the book in all four ways at once and feel the way he felt when he made it the organs that appreciate literature are the organs that made it true reading is latent writing the more one feels like writing a book when he reads it the more alive his reading is and the more alive the book is the measure of culture is its originating and reproductive capacity the amount of seed and blossom there is in it the amount it can afford to throw away and secure divine results unless the culture and books we are taking such national pains to acquire in the present generation can be said to have this pollen quality in it unless it is contagious can be summed up in its pollen and transmitted unless it is nothing more or less than life itself made catching unless like all else that is allowed to have rights in nature it has powers also has an almost infinite power of self multiplication self perpetuation the more cultured we are the more emasculated we are the vegetables of the earth and the flowers of the field the very codfish of the sea become our superiors what is more to the point in the minds and interests of all living human beings their culture becomes ours out nature may be somewhat coarse and simple minded and naive but reproduction is her main point and she never misses it her prejudice against dead things is immutable if a man objects to this prejudice against dead things his only way of making himself count is to die nature uses such men over again makes them into something more worthwhile something terribly or beautifully alive and goes on her way if this principle namely that the reproductive power of culture is the measure of its value we're as fully introduced and recognized in the world of books as it is in the world of commerce and in the natural world it would revolutionize from top to bottom and from entrance examination to diploma the entire course of study policy and spirit of most of our educational institutions allowing for exceptions in every faculty memorable to all of us who have been college students it would require a new core of teachers entrance examinations for pupils and teachers alike would determine two points first what does this person know about things second what is the condition of his organs what can he do with them if the privilege of being a pupil in the standard college were conditioned upon the second of these questions the condition of his organs as well as upon the first fifty out of a hundred pupils as prepared at present would fall short of admission if the same test were applied for admission to the faculty ninety out of a hundred teachers would fall short of admission having had analytic self-destructive learned habits for a longer time than their pupils the condition of their organs is more hopeless the man who has the greatest joy in a symphony is first the man who composes it second the conductor third the performers fourth those who might be composers of such music themselves fifth those in the audience who have been performers sixth those who are going to be seventh those who are composers of such music for other instruments eighth those who are composers of music in other arts literature painting sculpture and architecture ninth those who are performers of music on other instruments tenth those who are performers of music in other arts 11. Those who are creators of music with their own lives. 12. Those who perform and interpret in their own lives the music they hear in other lives. 13. Those who create anything whatever and who love perfection in it. 14. The public. 15. The professional critic, almost inevitably at the 15th remove from the heart of things because he is the least creative, unless he is a man of genius or has pluck and talent enough to work his way through the other 14 moods and sum them up before he ventures to criticize. The principles that have been employed in putting life into literature must be employed on drawing life out of it. These principles are the creative principles, principles of joy. All influences in education, family training, and a man's life that tend to overaw crowd out and make impossible his own private personal daily habit of creative joy are enemies of books. Private Road, Dangerous The impotence of the study of literature as practice in the schools and colleges of the present day turns largely on the fact that the principle of creative joy of knowing through creative joy is overlooked. The field of vision is the book and not the world. In the average course in literature the field is not even the book. It is still farther from the creative point of view. It is the book about the book. It is written generally in the laborious, unreadable, well-read style, the book about the book. You are as one when you are in the book about the book, thrust into the shadow of the endless aisles of other books, not that they are referred to boldly or vulgarly, or in the text. It is worse than this, for this could be skipped, but you are surrounded helplessly. Invisible lexicons are on every page. Grammers and rhetorics piled up in paragraphs and between the lines thrust at you everywhere, hardly a chapter that does not convey its sense of struggling, faithfulness, of infinite forlorn and empty plotting, and all for something a man might have known anyway. I have toted a thousand books, each chapter seems to say. This one paragraph, page 1993, you feel it in the paragraph, has had to have forty-seven books carried to it, not once, except in loopholes in his reading, which come now and then, does the face of the man's soul peep forth? One does not expect to meet anyone in the book about the book, not oneself, not even the man who writes it, nor the man who writes the book that the book is about. One is confronted with a mob. Two things are apt to be true of students who study the great masters in courses employing the book about the book. Even if the books about the book are what they ought to be, the pupils of such courses find that, one, studying the master instead of the things he mastered, they lose all power over the things he mastered. Two, they lose, consequently, not only the power of creating masterpieces out of these things themselves, but the power of enjoying those that have been created by others, of having the daily experiences that make such joy possible. They are out of range of experience. They are barricaded against a life. In as much as the creators of literature, without a single exception, have been more interested in life than in books, and have written books to help other people to be more interested in life than in books, this is the gravest possible effect. To be more interested in life than in books is the first essential for creating a book or for understanding one. The typical course of study now offered in literature carries on its process of paralysis in various ways. First, it undermines the imagination by giving it paper things instead of real ones to work on. Second, by seeing that these things are selected instead of letting the imagination select its own things, the essence of having an imagination. Third, by requiring of the student a rigorous and ceaselessly unimaginative habit, the paralysis of the learned is forced upon him. He finds little escape from the constant reading of books that have all the imagination left out of them. Fourth, by forcing the imagination to work so hard in its capacity of packhorse and memory that it has no power left to go anywhere of itself. Fifth, by overawing individual initiative, undermining personality in the pupil, crowding great classics into him instead of attracting little ones out of him. Attracting little classics out of a man is a thing that great classics are always intended to do, the thing that they always succeed in doing when left to themselves. Sixth, the teacher of literature so-called, having succeeded in destroying the personality of the pupil, puts himself in front of the personality of the author. Seventh, a teacher who destroys personality in a pupil is the wrong personality to put in front of an author. If he were the right one, if he had the spirit of the author, his being in front now and then at least would be interpretation and inspiration. Not having the spirit of the author, he is intimidated by him or has all he can do not to be. A classic cannot reveal itself to a groveler or to a critic. It is a book that was written standing up and it can only be studied and taught by those who stand up without knowing it. The decorous and beautiful despising of oneself, that the study of the classics has come to be as conducted under unclassic teachers, is a fact that speaks for itself. Eighth, even if the personality of the teacher of literature is so fortunate as not to be the wrong one, there is not enough of it. There is hardly a course of literature that can be found in a college catalog at the present time that does not base itself on the dictum that a great book can somehow, by some mysterious process, be taught by a small person. The axiom that necessarily undermines all such courses is obvious enough. A great book cannot be taught except by a teacher who is literally living in a great spirit. The spirit the great book lived in before it became a book. A teacher who has the great book in him, not over him, who if he took time for it might be capable of writing, in some sense, at least, a great book himself. When the teacher is a teacher of this kind, teaches the spirit of what he teaches, that is, teaches the inside, a classic can be taught. Otherwise, the best course in literature that can be devised is the one that gives the master pieces the most opportunity to teach themselves. The object of a course in literature is best served in proportion as the courses arranged and all associated studies are arranged in such a way as to secure sensitive and contagious conditions for the pupil's mind in the presence of the great masters. Such conditions as give the pupil time, freedom, space, and atmosphere, the things out of which a master piece is written and with which alone it can be taught or can teach itself. All that comes between a master piece and its thus teaching itself spreads ruin both ways. The master piece is partitioned off from the pupil, guarded to be kept aloof from him, outside of him. The pupil is locked up from himself, his possible self. Not too much stress could possibly be laid upon intimacy with the great books or on the constant habit of living with them. They are the movable Olympus. All who create camp out between the heavens and the earth on them and breathe and live and climb upon them. From their mighty sides they look down on human life, but classics can only be taught by classics. The creative paralysis of pupils who have dredged most deeply in classical training, English or otherwise, is a fact that no observer of college life can overlook. The guilt for this state of affairs must be laid at the door of the classics or at the door of the teachers. Either the classics are not worth teaching or they are not being taught properly. In either case the best way out of the difficulty would seem to be for teachers to let the classics teach themselves, to furnish the students with the atmosphere, the conditions, the point of view in life, which will give the classics a chance to teach themselves. This brings us to the important fact that teachers of literature do not wish to create the atmosphere, the conditions, and points of view that give the classics a chance to teach themselves. Creating the atmosphere for a classic in the life of a student is harder than creating a classic. The more obvious and practicable course is to teach the classic, teach it one's self, whether there is atmosphere or not. It is admitted that this is not the ideal way to do with college students who suppose they are studying literature, but it is contended, college students and college electives being what they are, that there is nothing else to do. The situation sums itself up in the attitude of self-defense. It may be, as no one needs to point out, that the teaching of literature as at present conducted in college is a somewhat faithful and dogged farce, but whatever may be the faults of modern college teaching in literature it is as good as our pupils deserve. In other words, the teachers are not respecting their pupils. It may be said that the constitution and bylaws of the literature class, as generally conducted, that the teachers cannot and must not respect their pupils they cannot afford to. It costs more than most pupils are mentally worth. It is plausibly contended to furnish students in college with the conditions of life and the conditions in their own minds that will give master pieces a fair chance at them. Ergo, in as much as the average pupil cannot be taught a classic, he must be choked with it. The fact that the typical teacher of literature is more or less grudgingly engaged in doing his work and conducting his classes under the practical working theory that his pupils are not good enough for him suggests two important principles. First, if his pupils are good enough for him, they are good enough to be taught the best there is in him. And they must be taught this best there is in him as far as it goes whether all of them are good enough for it or not. There is as much learning in watching others being educated as there is in appearing to be educated oneself. Second, if his pupils are not good enough for him, the most literary thing he can do with them is to make them good enough. If he is not a sufficiently literary teacher to divine the central ganglion of interest in a pupil and play upon it and gather delight about it, and make it gather delight itself, the next most literary thing he can do is protect both the books and the pupil by keeping them faithfully apart until they are ready for one another. If the teacher cannot recognize, arouse, and exercise such organs as his pupil has, and carry them out into themselves and free them in self-activity, the pupil may be unfortunate in not having a better teacher, but he is fortunate in having no better organs to be blundered on. The drawing out of a pupil's first faint but honest and lasting power of really reading a book, of knowing what it is to be sensitive to a book, does not produce a very literary looking result, of course, and it is hard to give the result an impressive or learned look in a catalogue, and it is a difficult thing to do without considering each pupil as a special human being by himself. Worthy of some attention on that account, but it is the one upright worthy and beautiful thing a teacher can do. Any easier course he may choose to adopt in an institution of learning, even when it is taken helplessly or thoughtlessly as it generally is, is insincere and spectacular, a despising not only of the pupil but of the college public and of oneself. If it is true that the right study of literature consists in exercising and opening out the human mind instead of making it a place for cold storage, it is not necessary to call attention to the essential pretentiousness and shoddiness of the average college course in literature. At its best, that is if the pupils do not do the work, the study of literature in college is a sorry spectacle enough, a kind of huge girl school with a chaperone taking its park walk. At its worst, that is when the pupils do do the work, it is a site that would break a homer's heart. If it were not for a few inspired and inconsistent teachers blessing particular schools and scholars here and there doing a little guilty furtive teaching, whether or no, discovering shortcuts, climbing fences, breaking through the fields and walking on the grass, the whole modern scheme of elaborate, tireless endless laboriousness would come to nothing, except the sight of larger piles of paper in the world, perhaps and rows of dreary dogged people with degrees lugging them back and forth in it, one pile of paper to another pile of paper, and a general sense that something is being done. In the meantime, human life around us, trudging along in its anger, sorrow, or bliss, wonders what this thing is that is being done, and has a vague and troubled respect for it, but it is to be noted that it buys and reads the books, and that it has always bought and read the books, of those who have not done it, and who are not doing it, those who, standing in the spectacle of the universe, have been sensitive to it, have had a mighty love in it, or a mighty hate, or a true experience, and who have laughed and cried with it through the hearts of their brothers to the ends of the earth, the organs of literature. The literary problem, the problem of possessing or appreciating or teaching a literary style, resolves itself at last into a pure problem of personality. A pupil who is being trained in literature in proportion as his spiritual and physical powers are being brought out by the teacher and played upon until they permeate each other in all that he does and in all that he is, in all phases of his life. Unless what a pupil is glows to the fingertips of his words, he cannot write, and unless what he is makes the words of other men glow when he reads, he cannot read. In proportion as it is great literature is addressed to all of a man's body and to all of his soul. It matters nothing how much a man may know about books, unless the pages of them play upon his senses while he reads. He is not physically a cultivated man, a gentleman, or scholar with his body. Unless books play upon all his spiritual and mental sensibilities when he reads, he cannot be considered a cultivated man, a gentleman, and a scholar in his soul. It is the essence of all great literature that it makes its direct appeal to sense perceptions permeated with spiritual suggestion. There is no such thing possible as being a literary authority, a cultured or scholarly man, unless the permeating of the sense perceptions with spiritual suggestion is a daily and unconscious habit of life. Every man his own poet is the underlying assumption of every genuine work of art, and a work of art cannot be taught to a pupil in any other way than by making the same people a poet by getting him to discover himself. Continued and unfaltering disaster is all that can be expected of all methods of literary training that do not recognize this. To teach a pupil all that can be known about a great poem is to take the poetry out of him and to make the poem prose to him forever. A pupil cannot even be taught great prose except by making a poet of him in his attitude toward it and by so governing the conditions, excitements, duties and habits of his course of study that he will discover he is a poet in spite of himself. The essence of Walter Pater's essays cannot be taught to a pupil except by making a new creature of him in the presence of the things the essays are about. Unless the conditions of a pupil's course are so governed in college or otherwise as to ensure and develop the delicate and strong response of all his bodily senses at the time of his life when nature decrees that his senses must be developed, that the spirit must be waked in them, or not at all, the study of Walter Pater will be in vain. The physical organization, the mere bodily state of the pupil, necessary to appreciate either the form or the substance of a bit of writing like the child in the house, is the first thing a true teacher is concerned with. A college graduate whose nostrils have not been trained for years steeped in the great still delights of the ground who has not learned the spirit and fragrance of the soil beneath his feet is not a sufficiently cultivated person to pronounce judgment either upon Walter Pater's style or upon his definition of style. To be educated in the great literatures of the world is to be trained in the drawing out in one's own body and mind of the physical and mental powers of those who write great literatures. Culture is the feeling of the induced current, the thrill of the lives of the dead, the charging the nerves of the body and powers of the spirit with the genius that has walked the earth before us. In the borrowed glories of the great one's swift and passing page we walk before heaven with them, breathe the long breath of the centuries with them, know the joy of the gods and live. The man of genius is the man who literally gives himself. He makes every man a man of genius for the time being. He exchanges souls with us and for one brief moment we are great. We are beautiful. We are immortal. We are visited with our possible selves. Literature is the transfiguring of the senses in which men are dwelling every day and of the thoughts of the mind in which they are living every day. It is the commingling of one's life in one vast network of sensibility, communion and eternal comradeship with all the joy and sorrow, taste, order and sound, passion of men and love of women, and worship of God that ever has been on the earth since the watching of the first night above the earth or since the look of the first morning on it when it was loved for the first time by a human life. The artist is recognized as an artist in proportion as the senses of his body drift their glow and splendor over into the creations of his mind. He is an artist because his flesh is informed with the spirit because in whatever he does he incarnates the spirit and the flesh. The gentle stroking delight in this universe that Dr. Holmes took all his days, his contagious gladness in it and approval of it, his impressionableness to its moods, its Oliver Wendell ones, who really denies in his soul that this capacity of Dr. Holmes to enjoy this delicate, ceaseless tasting with sense and spirit of the essence of life was the very substance of his culture. The books that he wrote and the things that he knew were merely the form of it. His power of expression was the blending of sense and spirit in him, and because his mind was trained into the texture of his body people delighted in his words in form and spirit both. There is no training in the art of expression or study of those who know how to express it that shall not consist not in a pupil's knowing wherein the power of a book lies but in his experiencing the power himself, in his entering the life behind the book and the habit of life that made writing such a book and reading it possible. This habit is the habit of incarnation. A true and classic book as always the history some human soul has had in its tent of flesh, camped out beneath the stars, groping for the thing they shine to us, trying to find a body for it. In the great wide plain of wonder there they sing the wonder a little time to us if we listen. Then they pass on to it. Literature is but the faint echo tangled in thousands of years of this mighty lonely singing of theirs under the dome of life in the presence of the things that books are about. The power to read a great book is the power to glory in these things and to use that glory every day to do one's living and reading with. Knowing what is in the book may be called learning but the test of culture always is that it will not be content with knowledge unless it is inward knowledge. Inward knowledge is the knowledge that comes to us from behind the book, from living for weeks with the author until his habits have become our habits, until God himself through days and nights and deeds and dreams has blended our souls together. End of section nine.