Books and Culture / Mabie, Hamilton Wright, 1845-1916

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Title: Books and Culture

Author: Hamilton Wright Mabie

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BOOKS AND CULTURE


By

HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE



NEW YORK:
PUBLISHED BY
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

MDCCCCVII

_Copyright, 1896_,

BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY,
_All rights reserved._

University Press:
JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.



To
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN




CONTENTS


 CHAPTER                                          PAGE

    I. MATERIAL AND METHOD                           7

   II. TIME AND PLACE                               20

  III. MEDITATION AND IMAGINATION                   34

   IV. THE FIRST DELIGHT                            51

    V. THE FEELING FOR LITERATURE                   63

   VI. THE BOOKS OF LIFE                            74

  VII. FROM THE BOOK TO THE READER                  85

 VIII. BY WAY OF ILLUSTRATION                       95

   IX. PERSONALITY                                 109

    X. LIBERATION THROUGH IDEAS                    121

   XI. THE LOGIC OF FREE LIFE                      132

  XII. THE IMAGINATION                             143

 XIII. BREADTH OF LIFE                             154

  XIV. RACIAL EXPERIENCE                           165

   XV. FRESHNESS OF FEELING                        174

  XVI. LIBERATION FROM ONE'S TIME                  185

 XVII. LIBERATION FROM ONE'S PLACE                 195

XVIII. THE UNCONSCIOUS ELEMENT                     204

  XIX. THE TEACHING OF TRAGEDY                     217

   XX. THE CULTURE ELEMENT IN FICTION              229

  XXI. CULTURE THROUGH ACTION                      239

 XXII. THE INTERPRETATION OF IDEALISM              250

XXIII. THE VISION OF PERFECTION                    260

 XXIV. RETROSPECT                                  271




Chapter I.

Material and Method.


If the writer who ventures to say something more about books and their
uses is wise, he will not begin with an apology; for he will know
that, despite all that has been said and written on this engrossing
theme, the interest of books is inexhaustible, and that there is
always a new constituency to read them. So rich is the vitality of the
great books of the world that men are never done with them; not only
does each new generation read them, but it is compelled to form some
judgment of them. In this way Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, and
their fellow-artists, are always coming into the open court of public
opinion, and the estimate in which they are held is valuable chiefly
as affording material for a judgment of the generation which forms it.
An age which understands and honours creative artists must have a
certain breadth of view and energy of spirit; an age which fails to
recognise their significance fails to recognise the range and
splendour of life, and has, therefore, a certain inferiority.

We cannot get away from the great books of the world, because they
preserve and interpret the life of the world; they are inexhaustible,
because, being vitally conceived, they need the commentary of that
wide experience which we call history to bring out the full meaning of
the text; they are our perpetual teachers, because they are the most
complete expressions, in that concrete form which we call art, of the
thoughts, acts, dispositions, and passions of humanity. There is no
getting to the bottom of Shakespeare, for instance, or to the end of
his possibilities of enriching and interesting us, because he deals
habitually with that primary substance of human life which remains
substantially unchanged through all the mutations of racial, national,
and personal condition, and which is always, and for all men, the
object of supreme interest. Time, which is the relentless enemy of all
that is partial and provisional, is the friend of Shakespeare, because
it continually brings to the student of his work illustration and
confirmation of its truth. There are many things in his plays which
are more intelligible and significant to us than they were to the men
who heard their musical cadence on the rude Elizabethan stage, because
the ripening of experience has given the prophetic thought an
historical demonstration; and there are truths in these plays which
will be read with clearer eyes by the men of the next century than
they are now read by us.

It is this prophetic quality in the books of power which silently
moves them forward with the inaudible advance of the successive files
in the ranks of the generations, and which makes them contemporary
with each generation. For while the mediaeval frame-work upon which
Dante constructed the "Divine Comedy" becomes obsolete, the
fundamental thought of the poet about human souls and the identity of
the deed and its result not only remains true to experience but has
received the most impressive confirmation from subsequent history and
from psychology.

It is as impossible, therefore, to get away from the books of power as
from the stars; every new generation must make acquaintance with them,
because they are as much a part of that order of things which forms
the background of human life as nature itself. With every intelligent
man or woman the question is not, "Shall I take account of them?" but
"How shall I get the most and the best out of them for my enrichment
and guidance?"

It is with the hope of assisting some readers and students of books,
and especially those who are at the beginning of the ardours, the
delights, and the perplexities of the book-lover, that these chapters
are undertaken. They assume nothing on the part of the reader but a
desire to know the best that has been written; they promise nothing on
the part of the writer but a frank and familiar use of experience in a
pursuit which makes it possible for the individual life to learn the
lessons which universal life has learned, and to piece out its limited
personal experience with the experience of humanity. One who loves
books, like one who loves a particular bit of a country, is always
eager to make others see what he sees; that there have been other
lovers of books and views before him does not put him in an apologetic
mood. There cannot be too many lovers of the best things in these
pessimistic days, when to have the power of loving anything is
beginning to be a great and rare gift.

The word love in this connection is significant of a very definite
attitude toward books,--an attitude not uncritical, since it is love
of the best only, but an attitude which implies more intimacy and
receptivity than the purely critical temper makes possible; an
attitude, moreover, which expects and invites something more than
instruction or entertainment,--both valuable, wholesome, and
necessary, and yet neither descriptive of the richest function which
the book fulfils to the reader. To love a book is to invite an
intimacy with it which opens the way to its heart. One of the wisest
of modern readers has said that the most important characteristic of
the real critic--the man who penetrates the secret of a work of
art--is the ability to admire greatly; and there is but a short step
between admiration and love. And as if to emphasise the value of a
quality so rare among critics, the same wise reader, who was also the
greatest writer of modern times, says also that "where keen perception
unites with good will and love, it gets at the heart of man and the
world; nay, it may hope to reach the highest goal of all." To get at
the heart of that knowledge, life, and beauty which are stored in
books is surely one way of reaching the highest goal.

That goal, in Goethe's thought, was the complete development of the
individual life through thought, feeling, and action,--an aim often
misunderstood, but which, seen on all sides, is certainly the very
highest disclosed to the human spirit. And the method of attaining
this result was the process, also often and widely misunderstood, of
culture. This word carries with it the implication of natural, vital
growth, but it has been confused with an artificial, mechanical
process, supposed to be practised as a kind of esoteric cult by a
small group of people who hold themselves apart from common human
experiences and fellowships. Mr. Symonds, concerning whose
representative character as a man of culture there is no difference of
opinion, said that he had read with some care the newspaper accounts
of his "culture," and that, so far as he could gather, his newspaper
critics held the opinion that culture is a kind of knapsack which a
man straps on his back, and in which he places a vast amount of
information, gathered, more or less at random, in all parts of the
world. There was, of course, a touch of humour in Mr. Symonds's
description of the newspaper conception of culture; but it is
certainly true that culture has been regarded by a great many people
either as a kind of intellectual refinement, so highly specialised as
to verge on fastidiousness, or as a large accumulation of
miscellaneous information.

Now, the process of culture is an unfolding and enrichment of the
human spirit by conforming to the laws of its own growth; and the
result is a broad, rich, free human life. Culture is never quantity,
it is always quality of knowledge; it is never an extension of
ourselves by additions from without, it is always enlargement of
ourselves by development from within; it is never something acquired,
it is always something possessed; it is never a result of
accumulation, it is always a result of growth. That which
characterises the man of culture is not the extent of his information,
but the quality of his mind; it is not the mass of things he knows,
but the sanity, the ripeness, the soundness of his nature. A man may
have great knowledge and remain uncultivated; a man may have
comparatively limited knowledge and be genuinely cultivated. There
have been famous scholars who have remained crude, unripe,
inharmonious in their intellectual life, and there have been men of
small scholarship who have found all the fruits of culture. The man of
culture is he who has so absorbed what he knows that it is part of
himself. His knowledge has not only enriched specific faculties, it
has enriched him; his entire nature has come to ripe and sound
maturity.

This personal enrichment is the very highest and finest result of
intimacy with books; compared with it the instruction, information,
refreshment, and entertainment which books afford are of secondary
importance. The great service they render us--the greatest service
that can be rendered us--is the enlargement, enrichment, and unfolding
of ourselves; they nourish and develop that mysterious personality
which lies behind all thought, feeling, and action; that central force
within us which feeds the specific activities through which we give
out ourselves to the world, and, in giving, find and recover
ourselves.




Chapter II.

Time and Place.


To get at the heart of Shakespeare's plays, and to secure for
ourselves the material and the development of culture which are
contained in them, is not the work of a day or of a year; it is the
work and the joy of a lifetime. There is no royal road to the
harmonious unfolding of the human spirit; there is a choice of
methods, but there are no "short cuts." No man can seize the fruits of
culture prematurely; they are not to be had by pulling down the boughs
of the tree of knowledge, so that he who runs may pluck as he pleases.
Culture is not to be had by programme, by limited courses of reading,
by correspondence, or by following short prescribed lines of home
study. These are all good in their degree of thoroughness of method
and worth of standards, but they are impotent to impart an enrichment
which is below and beyond mere acquirement. Because culture is not
knowledge but wisdom, not quantity of learning but quality, not mass
of information but ripeness and soundness of temper, spirit, and
nature, time is an essential element in the process of securing it. A
man may acquire information with great rapidity, but no man can hasten
his growth. If the fruit is forced, the flavour is lost. To get into
the secret of Shakespeare, therefore, one must take time. One must
grow into that secret.

This does not mean, however, that the best things to be gotten out of
books are reserved for people of leisure; on the contrary, they are
oftenest possessed by those whose labours are many and whose leisure
is limited. One may give his whole life to the pursuit of this kind of
excellence, but one does not need to give his whole time to it.
Culture is cumulative; it grows steadily in the man who takes the
fruitful attitude toward life and art; it is secured by the clear
purpose which so utilises all the spare minutes that they practically
constitute an unbroken duration of time. James Smetham, the English
artist, feeling keenly the imperfections of his training, formulated a
plan of study combining art, literature, and the religious life, and
devoted twenty-five years to working it out. Goethe spent more than
sixty years in the process of developing himself harmoniously on all
sides; and few men have wasted less time than he. And yet in the case
of each of these rigorous and faithful students there were other, and,
for long periods, more engrossing occupations. Any one who knows men
widely will recall those whose persistent utilisation of the odds and
ends of time, which many people regard as of too little value to save
by using, has given their minds and their lives that peculiar
distinction of taste, manner, and speech which belong to genuine
culture.

It is not wealth of time, but what Mr. Gladstone has aptly called
"thrift of time," which brings ripeness of mind within reach of the
great mass of men and women. The man who has learned the value of five
minutes has gone a long way toward making himself a master of life and
its arts. "The thrift of time," says the English statesman, "will
repay in after life with a usury of profit beyond your most sanguine
dreams, and waste of it will make you dwindle alike in intellectual
and moral stature beyond your darkest reckoning." And Matthew Arnold
has put the same truth into words which touch the subject in hand
still more closely: "The plea that this or that man has no time for
culture will vanish as soon as we desire culture so much that we begin
to examine seriously into our present use of time." It is no
exaggeration to say that the mass of men give to unplanned and
desultory reading of books and newspapers an amount of time which, if
intelligently and thoughtfully given to the best books, would secure,
in the long run, the best fruits of culture.

There is no magic about this process of enriching one's self by
absorbing the best books; it is simply a matter of sound habits
patiently formed and persistently kept up. Making the most of one's
time is the first of these habits; utilising the spare hours, the
unemployed minutes, no less than those longer periods which the more
fortunate enjoy. To "take time by the forelock" in this way, however,
one must have his book at hand when the precious minute arrives. There
must be no fumbling for the right volume; no waste of time because one
is uncertain what to take up next. The waste of opportunity which
leaves so many people intellectually barren who ought to be
intellectually rich, is due to neglect to decide in advance what
direction one's reading shall take, and neglect to keep the book of
the moment close at hand. The biographer of Lucy Larcom tells us that
the aspiring girl pinned all manner of selections of prose and verse
which she wished to learn at the sides of the window beside which her
loom was placed; and in this way, in the intervals of work, she
familiarised herself with a great deal of good literature. A certain
man, now widely known, spent his boyhood on a farm, and largely
educated himself. He learned the rudiments of Latin in the evening,
and carried on his study during working hours by pinning ten lines
from Virgil on his plough,--a method of refreshment much superior to
that which Homer furnished the ploughman in the well-known passage in
the description of the shield. These are extreme cases, but they are
capital illustrations of the immense power of enrichment which is
inherent in fragments of time pieced together by intelligent purpose
and persistent habit.

This faculty of draining all the rivulets of knowledge by the way was
strikingly developed by a man of surpassing eloquence and tireless
activity. He was never a methodical student in the sense of following
rigidly a single line of study, but he habitually fed himself with any
kind of knowledge which was at hand. If books were at his elbow, he
read them; if pictures, engravings, gems were within reach, he studied
them; if nature was within walking distance, he watched nature; if men
were about him, he learned the secrets of their temperaments, tastes,
and skills; if he were on shipboard, he knew the dialect of the vessel
in the briefest possible time; if he travelled by stage, he sat with
the driver and learned all about the route, the country, the people,
and the art of his companion; if he had a spare hour in a village in
which there was a manufactory, he went through it with keen eyes and
learned the mechanical processes used in it. "Shall I tell you the
secret of the true scholar?" says Emerson. "It is this: every man I
meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him."

The man who is bent on getting the most out of life in order that he
may make his own nature rich and productive will learn to free himself
largely from dependence on conditions. The power of concentration
which issues from a resolute purpose, and is confirmed by habits
formed to give that purpose effectiveness, is of more value than
undisturbed hours and the solitude of a library; it is of more value
because it takes the place of things which cannot always be at
command. To learn how to treat the odds and ends of hours so that they
constitute, for practical purposes, an unbroken duration of time, is
to emancipate one's self from dependence on particular times, and to
appropriate all time to one's use; and in like manner to accustom
one's self to make use of all places, however thronged and public, as
if they were private and secluded, is to free one's self from bondage
to a particular locality, or to surroundings specially chosen for the
purpose. Those who have abundance of leisure to spend in their
libraries are beyond the need of suggestions as to the use of time and
place; but those whose culture must be secured incidentally, as it
were, need not despair,--they have shining examples of successful use
of limited opportunities about them. It is not only possible to make
all time enrich us, but to use all space as if it were our own. To
have a book in one's pocket and the power of fastening one's mind upon
it to the exclusion of every other object or interest is to be
independent of the library, with its unbroken quietness. It is to
carry the library with us,--not only the book, but the repose.

One bright June morning a young man, who happened to be waiting at a
rural station to take a train, discovered one of the foremost of
American writers, who was, all things considered, perhaps the most
richly cultivated man whom the country has yet produced, sitting on
the steps intent upon a book, and entirely oblivious of his
surroundings. The young man's reverence for the poet and critic filled
him with desire to know what book had such power of beguiling into
forgetfulness one of the noblest minds of the time. He affirmed within
himself that it must be a novel. He ventured to approach near enough
to read the title, holding, rightly enough, that a book is not
personal property, and that his act involved no violation of privacy.
He discovered that the great man was reading a Greek play with such
relish and abandon that he had turned a railway station into a private
library! One of the foremost of American novelists, a man of real
literary insight and of genuine charm of style, says that he can write
as comfortably on a trunk in a room at a hotel, waiting to be called
for a train, as in his own library. There is a good deal of discipline
behind such a power of concentration as that illustrated in both these
cases; but it is a power which can be cultivated by any man or woman
of resolution. Once acquired, the exercise of it becomes both easy and
delightful. It transforms travel, waiting, and dreary surroundings
into one rich opportunity. The man who has the "Tempest" in his
pocket, and can surrender himself to its spell, can afford to lose
time on cars, ferries, and at out-of-the-way stations; for the world
has become an extension of his library, and wherever he is, he is at
home with his purpose and himself.




Chapter III.

Meditation and Imagination.


There is a book in the British Museum which would have, for many
people, a greater value than any other single volume in the world; it
is a copy of Florio's translation of Montaigne, and it bears
Shakespeare's autograph on a flyleaf. There are other books which must
have had the same ownership; among them were Holinshed's "Chronicles"
and North's translation of Plutarch. Shakespeare would have laid
posterity under still greater obligations, if that were possible, if
in some autobiographic mood he had told us how he read these books;
for never, surely, were books read with greater insight and with more
complete absorption. Indeed, the fruits of this reading were so rich
and ripe that the books from which their juices came seem but dry
husks and shells in comparison. The reader drained the writer dry of
every particle of suggestiveness, and then recreated the material in
new and imperishable forms. The process of reproduction was
individual, and is not to be shared by others; it was the expression
of that rare and inexplicable personal energy which we call genius;
but the process of absorption may be shared by all who care to submit
to the discipline which it involves. It is clear that Shakespeare read
in such a way as to possess what he read; he not only remembered it,
but he incorporated it into himself. No other kind of reading could
have brought the East out of its grave, with its rich and languorous
atmosphere steeping the senses in the charm of Cleopatra, or recalled
the massive and powerfully organised life of Rome about the person of
the great Caesar. Shakespeare read his books with such insight and
imagination that they became part of himself; and so far as this
process is concerned, the reader of to-day can follow in his steps.

The majority of people have not learned this secret; they read for
information or for refreshment; they do not read for enrichment.
Feeding one's nature at all the sources of life, browsing at will on
all the uplands of knowledge and thought, do not bear the fruit of
acquirement only; they put us into personal possession of the
vitality, the truth, and the beauty about us. A man may know the plays
of Shakespeare accurately as regards their order, form, construction,
and language, and yet remain almost without knowledge of what
Shakespeare was at heart, and of his significance in the history of
the human soul. It is this deeper knowledge, however, which is
essential for culture; for culture is such an appropriation of
knowledge that it becomes a part of ourselves. It is no longer
something added by the memory; it is something possessed by the soul.
A pedant is formed by his memory; a man of culture is formed by the
habit of meditation, and by the constant use of the imagination. An
alert and curious man goes through the world taking note of all that
passes under his eyes, and collects a great mass of information, which
is in no sense incorporated into his own mind, but remains a definite
territory outside his own nature, which he has annexed. A man of
receptive mind and heart, on the other hand, meditating on what he
sees, and getting at its meaning by the divining-rod of the
imagination, discovers the law behind the phenomena, the truth behind
the fact, the vital force which flows through all things, and gives
them their significance. The first man gains information; the second
gains culture. The pedant pours out an endless succession of facts
with a monotonous uniformity of emphasis, and exhausts while he
instructs; the man of culture gives us a few facts, luminous in their
relation to one another, and freshens and stimulates by bringing us
into contact with ideas and with life.

To get at the heart of books we must live with and in them; we must
make them our constant companions; we must turn them over and over in
thought, slowly penetrating their innermost meaning; and when we
possess their thought we must work it into our own thought. The
reading of a real book ought to be an event in one's history; it ought
to enlarge the vision, deepen the base of conviction, and add to the
reader whatever knowledge, insight, beauty, and power it contains. It
is possible to spend years of study on what may be called the
externals of the "Divine Comedy," and remain unaffected in nature by
this contact with one of the masterpieces of the spirit of man as well
as of the art of literature. It is also possible to so absorb Dante's
thought and so saturate one's self with the life of the poem as to add
to one's individual capital of thought and experience all that the
poet discerned in that deep heart of his and wrought out of that
intense and tragic experience. But this permanent and personal
possession can be acquired by those alone who brood over the poem and
recreate it within themselves by the play of the imagination upon it.
A visitor was shown into Mr. Lowell's room one evening not many years
ago, and found him barricaded behind rows of open books; they covered
the table and were spread out on the floor in an irregular but magic
circle. "Still studying Dante?" said the intruder into the workshop of
as true a man of culture as we have known on this continent. "Yes,"
was the prompt reply; "always studying Dante."

A man's intellectual character is determined by what he habitually
thinks about. The mind cannot always be consciously directed to
definite ends; it has hours of relaxation. There are many hours in the
life of the most strenuous and arduous man when the mind goes its own
way and thinks its own thoughts. These times of relaxation, when the
mind follows its own bent, are perhaps the most fruitful and
significant periods in a rich and noble intellectual life. The real
nature, the deeper instincts of the man, come out in these moments, as
essential refinement and genuine breeding are revealed when the man is
off guard and acts and speaks instinctively. It is possible to be
mentally active and intellectually poor and sterile; to drive the mind
along certain courses of work, but to have no deep life of thought
behind these calculated activities. The life of the mind is rich and
fruitful only when thought, released from specific tasks, flies at
once to great themes as its natural objects of interest and love, its
natural sources of refreshment and strength. Under all our definite
activities there runs a stream of meditation; and the character of
that meditation determines our wealth or our poverty, our
productiveness or our sterility.

This instinctive action of the mind, although largely unconscious, is
by no means irresponsible; it may be directed and controlled; it may
be turned, by such control, into a Pactolian stream, enriching us
while we rest and ennobling us while we play. For the mind may be
trained to meditate on great themes instead of giving itself up to
idle reverie; when it is released from work it may concern itself with
the highest things as readily as with those which are insignificant
and paltry. Whoever can command his meditations in the streets, along
the country roads, on the train, in the hours of relaxation, can
enrich himself for all time without effort or fatigue; for it is as
easy and restful to think about great things as about small ones. A
certain lover of books made this discovery years ago, and has turned
it to account with great profit to himself. He thought he discovered
in the faces of certain great writers a meditative quality full of
repose and suggestive of a constant companionship with the highest
themes. It seemed to him that these thinkers, who had done so much to
liberate his own thought, must have dwelt habitually with noble ideas;
that in every leisure hour they must have turned instinctively to
those deep things which concern most closely the life of men. The vast
majority of men are so absorbed in dealing with material that they
appear to be untouched by the general questions of life; but these
general questions are the habitual concern of the men who think. In
such men the mind, released from specific tasks, turns at once and by
preference to these great themes, and by quiet meditation feeds and
enriches the very soul of the thinker. And the quality of this
meditation determines whether the nature shall be productive or
sterile; whether a man shall be merely a logician, or a creative force
in the world. Following this hint, this lover of books persistently
trained himself, in his leisure hours, to think over the books he was
reading; to meditate on particular passages, and, in the case of
dramas and novels, to look at characters from different sides. It was
not easy at first, and it was distinctively work; but it became
instinctive at last, and consequently it became play. The stream of
thought, once set in a given direction, flows now of its own
gravitation; and reverie, instead of being idle and meaningless, has
become rich and fruitful. If one subjects "The Tempest," for instance,
to this process, he soon learns it by heart; first he feels its
beauty; then he gets whatever definite information there is in it; as
he reflects, its constructive unity grows clear to him, and he sees its
quality as a piece of art; and finally its rich and noble disclosure
of the poet's conception of life grows upon him until the play belongs
to him almost as much as it belonged to Shakespeare. This process of
meditation habitually brought to bear on one's reading lays bare the
very heart of the book in hand, and puts one in complete possession of
it.

This process of meditation, if it is to bear its richest fruit, must
be accompanied by a constant play of the imagination, than which there
is no faculty more readily cultivated or more constantly neglected.
Some readers see only a flat surface as they read; others find the
book a door into a real world, and forget that they are dealing with a
book. The real readers get beyond the book, into the life which it
describes. They see the island in "The Tempest;" they hear the tumult
of the storm; they mingle with the little company who, on that magical
stage, reflect all the passions of men and are brought under the spell
of the highest powers of man's spirit. It is a significant fact that
in the lives of men of genius the reading of two or three books has
often provoked an immediate and striking expansion of thought and
power. Samuel Johnson, a clumsy boy in his father's bookshop,
searching for apples, came upon Petrarch, and was destined henceforth
to be a man of letters. John Keats, apprenticed to an apothecary, read
Spenser's "Epithalamium" one golden afternoon in company with his
friend, Cowden Clarke, and from that hour was a poet by the grace of
God. In both cases the readers read with the imagination, or their own
natures would not have kindled with so sudden a flash. The torch is
passed on to those only whose hands are outstretched to receive it. To
read with the imagination, one must take time to let the figures
reform in his own mind; he must see them with great distinctness and
realise them with great definiteness. Benjamin Franklin tells us, in
that Autobiography which was one of our earliest and remains one of
our most genuine pieces of writing, that when he discovered his need
of a larger vocabulary he took some of the tales which he found in an
odd volume of the "Spectator" and turned them into verse; "and after a
time, when I had pretty well forgotten the prose, turned them back
again. I also sometimes jumbled my collections of hints into
confusion, and after some weeks endeavoured to reduce them into the
best order before I began to form the full sentences and compleat the
paper." Such a patient recasting of material for the ends of verbal
exactness and accuracy suggests ways in which the imagination may deal
with characters and scenes in order to stimulate and foster its own
activity. It is well to recall at frequent intervals the story we read
in some dramatist, poet, or novelist, in order that the imagination
may set it before us again in all its rich vitality. It is well also
as we read to insist on seeing the picture as well as the words. It is
as easy to see the bloodless duke before the portrait of "My Last
Duchess," in Browning's little masterpiece, to take in all the
accessories and carry away with us a vivid and lasting impression, as
it is to follow with the eye the succession of words. In this way we
possess the poem, and make it serve the ends of culture.




Chapter IV.

The First Delight.


"We were reading Plato's Apology in the Sixth Form," says Mr. Symonds
in his account of his school life at Harrow. "I bought Cary's crib,
and took it with me to London on an _exeat_ in March. My hostess,
a Mrs. Bain, who lived in Regent's Park, treated me to a comedy one
evening at the Haymarket. I forget what the play was. When we returned
from the play I went to bed and began to read my Cary's Plato. It so
happened that I stumbled on the 'Phaedrus.' I read on and on, till I
reached the end. Then I began the 'Symposium;' and the sun was shining
on the shrubs outside the ground floor on which I slept before I shut
the book up. I have related these unimportant details because that
night was one of the most important nights of my life.... Here in the
'Phaedrus' and the 'Symposium,' in the 'Myth of the Soul,' I discovered
the revelation I had been waiting for, the consecration of a
long-cherished idealism. It was just as though the voice of my own
soul spoke to me through Plato. Harrow vanished into unreality. I had
touched solid ground. Here was the poetry, the philosophy of my own
enthusiasm, expressed with all the magic of unrivalled style." The
experience recorded in these words is typical; it comes to every one
who has the capacity for the highest form of enjoyment and the highest
kind of growth. It was an experience which was both emotional and
spiritual; delight and expansion were involved in it; the joy of
contact with something beautiful, and the sudden enlargement which
comes from touch with a great nature dealing with fundamental truth.
In every experience of this kind there comes an access of life, as if
one had drunk at a fountain of vitality.

A thrilling chapter in the spiritual history of the race might be
written by bringing together the reports of such experiences which are
to be found in almost all literatures,--experiences which vary greatly
in depth and significance, which have in common the unfailing interest
of discovery and growth. If this collocation of vital contacts could
be expanded so as to include the history of the intellectual commerce
of races, we should be able to read the story of humanity in a new and
searching light. For the transmission of Greek thought and beauty to
the Oriental world, the wide diffusion of Hebrew ideas of man and his
life, the contact of the modern with the antique world in the
Renaissance, for instance, effected changes in the spiritual
constitution of man more subtle, pervasive, and radical than we are
yet in a position to understand. The spiritual history of men is
largely a history of discovery,--the record of those fruitful moments
when we come upon new things, and our ideas are swiftly or slowly
expanded to include them. That process is generally both rapid and
continuous; the discovery of this continent made an instant and
striking impression on the older world, but that older world has not
yet entirely adjusted itself to the changes in the social order which
were to follow close upon the rising of the new world above the once
mysterious line of the western horizon.

Now, this process of discovery goes on continuously in the experience
of every human soul which has capacity for growth; and it is the
peculiar joy of the lover of books. Literature is a continual
revelation to every genuine reader; a revelation of that quality which
we call art, and a revelation of that mysterious vital force which we
call life. In this double disclosure literature shares with all art a
function which ranges it with the greatest resources of the spirit;
and the reader who has the trained vision has the constant joy of
discovery: first, of beauty and power; next, of that concrete or vital
form of truth which is one with life. One who studies books is in
constant peril of losing the charm of the first by permitting himself
to be absorbed in the interest of the second discovery. When one has
begun to see the range and veracity of literature as a disclosure of
the soul and life of man, the definite literary quality sometimes
becomes of secondary importance. In academic teaching the study of
philology, of grammar, of construction, of literary history, has often
been mistaken or substituted for the study of literature; and in
private study the peculiar enrichment which comes from art simply as
art is often needlessly sacrificed by exclusive attention to books as
documents of spiritual history.

It must not be forgotten that books become literature by virtue of a
certain quality which is diffused through every true literary work,
and which separates it at once and forever from all other writing. To
miss this quality, therefore, is to miss the very essence of the thing
with which we are in contact; to treat the inspired books as if they
were uninspired. The first discovery which the real reader makes is
the perception of some new and individual beauty or power; the
discovery of life and truth is secondary in order of time, and depends
in no small measure on the sensitiveness of the spirit to the first
and obvious charm. If one wishes to study the life--not the mere
structure--of an apple-tree in bloom, he must surrender himself at the
start to the bloom and fragrance; for these are not mere external
phases of the growth of the tree,--they are most delicate and
characteristic disclosures of its life. In like manner he who would
master "As You Like It" must give himself up in the first place to its
wonderful and significant beauty. For this lovely piece of literature
is a revelation in its art quite as definitely as in its thought; and
the first care of the reader must be to feel the deep and lasting
charm contained in the play. In that charm resides something which may
be transmitted, and the reception of which is always a step in
culture.

To feel freshly and deeply is not only a characteristic of the artist,
but also of the reader; the first finds delight in creation, the
second finds delight in discovery: between them they divide one of the
greatest joys known to men. Wagner somewhere says that the greatest
joy possible to man is the putting forth of creative activity so
spontaneously that the critical faculty is, for the time being,
asleep. The purest joy known to the reader is a perception of the
beauty and power of a work of art so fresh and instantaneous that it
completely absorbs the whole nature. Analysis, criticism, and judicial
appraisement come later; the first moment must be surrendered to the
joy of discovery.

Heine has recorded the overpowering impression made upon him by the
first glimpse of the Venus of Melos. An experience so extreme in
emotional quality could come only to a nature singularly sensitive to
beauty and abnormally sensitive to physical emotion; but he who has no
power of feeling intensely the power of beauty in the moment of
discovery, has missed something of very high value in the process of
culture. One of the signs of real culture is the power of enjoyment
which goes with fresh feeling. All great art is full of this feeling;
its characteristic is the new interest with which it invests the most
familiar objects; and one evidence of capacity to receive culture from
art is the development of this feeling. The reader who is on the way
to enrich himself by contact with books cultivates the power of
feeling freshly and keenly the charm of every book he reads simply as
a piece of literature. One may destroy this power by permitting
analysis and criticism to become the primary mood, or one may develop
it by resolutely putting analysis and criticism into the secondary
place, and sedulously developing the power to enjoy for the sake of
enjoyment. The reader who does not feel the immediate and obvious
beauty of a poem or a play has lost the power, not only of getting the
full effect of a work of art, but of getting its full significance as
well. The surprise, the delight, the joy of the first discovery are
not merely pleasurable; they are in the highest degree educational.
They reveal the sensitiveness of the nature to those ultimate forms of
beauty and power which art takes on, and its power of responding not
only to what is obviously beautiful but is also profoundly true. For
the harmonious and noble beauty of "As You Like It" is not only
obvious and external; it is wrought into its structure so completely
that, like the blossom of the apple, it is the effluence of the life
of the play. To get delight out of reading is, therefore, the first
and constant care of the reader who wishes to be enriched by vital
contact with the most inclusive and expressive of the arts.




Chapter V.

The Feeling for Literature.


The importance of reading habitually the best books becomes apparent
when one remembers that taste depends very largely on the standards
with which we are familiar, and that the ability to enjoy the best and
only the best is conditioned upon intimate acquaintance with the best.
The man who is thrown into constant association with inferior work
either revolts against his surroundings or suffers a disintegration of
aim and standard, which perceptibly lowers the plane on which he
lives. In either case the power of enjoyment from contact with a
genuine piece of creative work is sensibly diminished, and may be
finally lost. The delicacy of the mind is both precious and
perishable; it can be preserved only by associations which confirm and
satisfy it. For this reason, among others, the best books are the only
books which a man bent on culture should read; inferior books not only
waste his time, but they dull the edge of his perception and diminish
his capacity for delight.

This delight, born afresh of every new contact of the mind with a real
book, furnishes indubitable evidence that the reader has the feeling
for literature,--a possession much rarer than is commonly supposed. It
is no injustice to say that the majority of those who read have no
feeling for literature; their interest is awakened or sustained not by
the literary quality of a book, but by some element of brightness or
novelty, or by the charm of narrative. Reading which finds its reward
in these things is entirely legitimate, but it is not the kind of
reading which secures culture. It adds largely to one's stock of
information, and it refreshes the mind by introducing new objects of
interest; but it does not minister directly to the refining and
maturing of the nature. The same book may be read in entirely
different ways and with entirely different results. One may, for
instance, read Shakespeare's historical plays simply for the story
element which runs through them, and for the interest which the
skilful use of that element excites; and in such a reading there will
be distinct gain for the reader. This is the way in which a healthy
boy generally reads these plays for the first time. From such a
reading one will get information and refreshment; more than one
English statesman has confessed that he owed his knowledge of certain
periods of English history largely to Shakespeare. On the other hand,
one may read these plays for the joy of the art that is in them, and
for the enrichment which comes from contact with the deep and
tumultuous life which throbs through them; and this is the kind of
reading which produces culture, the reading which means enlargement
and ripening.

The feeling for literature, like the feeling for art in general, is
not only susceptible of cultivation, but very quickly responds to
appeals which are made to it by noble or beautiful objects. It is
essentially a feeling, but it is a feeling which depends very largely
on intelligence; it is strengthened and made sensitive and responsive
by constant contact with those objects which call it out. No rules can
be laid down for its development save the very simple rule to read
only and always those books which are literature. It is impossible to
give specific directions for the cultivation of the feeling for
Nature. It is not to be gotten out of text-books of any kind; it is
not to be found in botanies or geologies or works on zooelogy; it is to
be gotten only out of familiarity with Nature herself. Daily
fellowship with landscapes, trees, skies, birds, with an open mind and
in a receptive mood, soon develops in one a kind of spiritual sense
which takes cognisance of things not seen before and adds a new joy
and resource to life. In like manner the feeling for literature is
quickened and nourished by intimate acquaintance with books of beauty
and power. Such an intimacy makes the sense of delight more keen,
preserves it against influences which tend to deaden it, and makes the
taste more sure and trustworthy. A man who has long had acquaintance
with the best in any department of art comes to have, almost
unconsciously to himself, an instinctive power of discerning good work
from bad, of recognising on the instant the sound and true method and
style, and of feeling a fresh and constant delight in such work. His
education comes not by didactic, but by vital methods.

The art quality in a book is as difficult to analyse as the feeling
for it; not because it is intangible or indefinite, but because it is
so subtly diffused. It is difficult to analyse because it is the
breath of life in the book, and life always evades us, no matter how
keen and exhaustive our search may be. Most of us are so entirely out
of touch with the spirit of art in this busy new world that we are not
quite convinced of its reality. We know that it is decorative, and
that a certain pleasure flows from it; but we are sceptical of its
significance in the life of the race, of its deep necessity in the
development of that life, and of its supreme educational value. And
our scepticism, it must be frankly said, like most scepticism, grows
out of our ignorance. True art has nothing in common with the popular
conception of its nature and uses. Instead of being decorative, it is
organic; when men arrive at a certain stage of ripeness and power they
express themselves through its forms as naturally as the tree puts
forth its flowers. Nothing which lies within the range of human
achievement is more real or inevitable. This expression is neither
mechanical nor artificial; it is made under certain inflexible laws,
but they are the laws of the human spirit, not the rules of a craft;
they are rooted in that deeper psychology which deals with man as an
organic whole and not as a bundle of separate faculties.

It was once pointed out to Tennyson that he had scrupulously
conformed, in a certain poem, to a number of rules of versification
and to certain principles in the use of different sound values. "Yes,"
answered the poet in substance, "I carefully observed all those rules
and was entirely unconscious of them!" There was no contradiction
between the Laureate's practice of his craft and the technical rules
which govern it. The poet's instinct kept him in harmony with those
essential and vital principles of language of which the formal rules
are simply didactic statements.

Art, it need hardly be said, is never artifice; intelligence and
calculation enter into the work of the artist, but in the last
analysis it is the free and noble expression of his own personality.
It expresses what is deepest and most significant in him, and
expresses it in a final rather than a provisional form. The secret of
the reality and power of art lies in the fact that it is the
culmination and summing up of a process of observation, experience,
and feeling; it is the deposit of whatever is richest and most
enduring in the life of a man or a race. It is a finality both of
experience and of thought; it contains the ultimate and the widest
conception of man's nature and life, or of the meaning and reality of
Nature, which an age or a race reaches. It is the supreme flowering of
the genius of a race or an age. It has, therefore, the highest
educational value. For the very highest products of man's life in this
world are his ideas and ideals; they grow out of his highest nature;
they react on his character; they are the precious deposit of all that
he has thought, felt, suffered, and done in word and work, in feeling
and action. The richest educational material upon which modern men are
nourished are these ultimate conclusions and convictions of the
Hebrew, the Greek, and the Roman. These ultimate inferences, these
final interpretations of their own natures and of the world about
them, contain not only the thought of these races, but their life as
well. They have, therefore, a vital quality which not only assures
their own immortality, but has the power of transmission to others.
These ultimate results of experience are embodied in art, and
especially in literature; and that which makes them art is this very
vitality. For this reason art is absolutely essential for culture; it
has the power of enriching and expanding the natures which come in
contact with it by transmitting to them the highest results of the
life of the past, by sharing with them the ripeness and maturity of
the human spirit in its universal experience.




Chapter VI.

The Books of Life.


The books of power, as distinguished from the books of knowledge,
include the original, creative, first-hand books in all literatures,
and constitute, in the last analysis, a comparatively small group,
with which any student can thoroughly familiarise himself. The
literary impulse of the race has expressed itself in a great variety
of works, of varying charm and power; but the books which are
fountain-heads of vitality, ideas, and beauty, are few in number.
These original and dominant creations may be called the books of life,
if one may venture to modify De Quincey's well-worn phrase. For that
which is deepest in this group of masterpieces is not power, but
something greater and more inclusive, of which power is but a single
form of expression,--life; that quintessence of the unbroken
experience and activity of the race which includes not only thought,
power, beauty, and every kind of skill, but, below all these, the
living soul of the living man.

If it be true, as many believe, that the fundamental process of the
universe, so far as we can understand it, is not intellectual, but
vital, it follows that the deepest things which men have learned have
come to them not as the result of processes of thought, but as the
result of the process of living. It is evident that certain definite
purposes are being wrought out through physical forms, processes, and
forces; science reveals clearly enough certain great lines of
development. In like manner, although with very significant
differences, certain deep lines of growth and expansion become more
and more clear in human history. Through the bare process of living,
men not only learn fundamental facts about themselves and their world,
but they are evidently working out certain purposes. Of these purposes
they do not, it is true, possess full knowledge; but complete
knowledge is necessary neither for the demonstration of the existence
of the purpose nor for those ethical and intellectual uses which that
knowledge serves. The life of the race is a revelation of the nature
of man, of the character of his relations with his surroundings, and
of the certain great lines of development along which the race is
moving. Every leading race has its characteristic thought concerning
its own nature, its relation to the world, and the character and
quality of life. These various fundamental conceptions have shaped all
definite thinking, and have very largely moulded race character, and,
therefore, determined race destiny. The Hebrew, the Greek, and the
Roman conceptions of life constitute not only the key to the diverse
histories of the leaders of ancient civilisation, but also their most
vital contribution to civilisation. These conceptions were not
definitely thought out; they were worked out. They were the result of
the contact of these different peoples with Nature, with the
circumstances of their own time, and with those universal experiences
which fall to the lot of all men, and which are, in the long run, the
prime sources and instruments of human education.

The interpretations of life which each of these races has left us are
revelations both of race character and of life itself; they embody the
highest thought, the deepest feeling, the most searching experiences,
the keenest suffering, the most strenuous activity. In these
interpretations are expressed and represented the inner and essential
life of each race; in them the soul of the elder world survives. Now,
these interpretations constitute, in their highest forms, not only the
supreme art of the world, but they are also the richest educational
material accessible to men. Information and discipline may be drawn
from other sources, but that culture which means the enrichment and
unfolding of a man's self is largely developed by familiarity with
those ultimate conclusions of man about himself which are the deposit
of all that he has thought, suffered, wrought, and been,--those deep
deposits of truth silently formed in the heart of the race in the long
and painful working out of its life, its character, and its destiny.
For these rich interpretations we must turn to art, and especially to
the art of literature; and in literature we must turn especially to
the small group of works which, by reason of the adequacy with which
they convey and illustrate these interpretations, hold the first
places,--the books of life.

The man who would get the ripest culture from books ought to read
many, but there are a few books which he must read; among them, first
and foremost, are the Bible, and the works of Homer, Dante,
Shakespeare, and Goethe. These are the supreme books of life as
distinguished from the books of knowledge and skill. They hold their
places because they combine in the highest degree vitality, truth,
power, and beauty. They are the central reservoirs into which the
rivulets of individual experience over a vast surface have been
gathered; they are the most complete revelations of what life has
brought and has been to the leading races; they bring us into contact
with the heart and soul of humanity. They not only convey information,
and, rightly used, impart discipline, but they transmit life. There is
a vitality in them which passes on into the nature which is open to
receive it. They have again and again inspired intellectual movements
on a wide scale, as they are constantly recreating individual ideals
and aims. Whatever view may be held of the authority of the Bible, it
is agreed that its power as literature has been incalculable by reason
of the depth of life which it sounds and the range of life which it
compasses. There is power enough in it to revive a decaying age or
give a new date and a fresh impulse to a race which has parted with
its creative energy. The reappearance of the New Testament in Greek,
after the long reign of the Vulgate, contributed mightily to that
renewal and revival of life which we call the Reformation; while its
translation into the modern languages liberated a moral and
intellectual force of which no adequate measurement can be made. In
like manner, though in lesser degree, the "Iliad" and "Odyssey," the
"Divine Comedy," the plays of Shakespeare, and "Faust" have set new
movements in motion and have enriched and enlarged the lives of races.

With these books of life every man ought to hold the most intimate
relationship; they are not to be read once and put on the upper
shelves of the library among those classics which establish one's
claim to good intellectual standing, but which silently gather the
dust of isolation and solitude; they are to be always at hand. The
barrier of language has disappeared so far as they are concerned; they
are to be had in many and admirable translations; one evidence of
their power is afforded by the fact that every new age of literary
development and every new literary movement feels compelled to
translate them afresh. The changes of taste in English literature and
the notable phases through which it has passed since the days of the
Elizabethans might be traced or inferred from the successive
translations of Homer, from the work of Chapman to that of Andrew
Lang. One needs to read many books, to browse in many fields, to know
the art of many countries; but the books of life ought to form the
background of every life of thought and study. They need not, indeed
they cannot, be mastered at once; but by reading in them constantly,
for brief or for long intervals, one comes to know them familiarly,
and almost insensibly to gain the enrichment and enlargement which
they offer. Moreover, they afford tenfold greater and more lasting
delight, recreation, and variety than all the works of lesser writers.
Whoever knows them in a real sense knows life, humanity, art, and
himself.




Chapter VII.

From the Book to the Reader.


The study which has found its material and its reward in Dante's
"Divine Comedy" or in Goethe's "Faust" is the best possible evidence
of the inexhaustible interest in the masterpieces of these two great
poets. Libraries of considerable dimensions have been written in the
way of commentaries upon, and expositions of, their notable works.
Many of these books are, it is true, deficient in insight and
possessed of very little power of interpretation or illumination; they
are the products of a barren, dry-as-dust industry, which has expended
itself upon external characteristics and incidental references.
Nevertheless, the very volume and mass of these secondary books
witness to the fertility of the first-hand books with which they deal,
and show beyond dispute that men have an insatiable desire to get at
their interior meanings. If these great poems had been mere
illustrations of individual skill and gift, this interest would have
long ago exhausted itself. That singular and unsurpassed qualities of
construction, style, and diction are present in "Faust" and the
"Divine Comedy" need not be emphasised, since they both belong to the
very highest class of literary production; but there is something
deeper and more vital in them: there is a philosophy or interpretation
of life. Each of these poems is a revelation of what man is and of
what his life means; and it is this deep truth, or set of truths, at
the heart of these works which we are always striving to reach and
make clear to ourselves.

In the case of neither poem did the writer content himself with an
exposition of his own experience; in both cases there is an attempt to
embody and put in concrete form an immense section of universal
experience. Neither poem could have been written if there had not been
a long antecedent history, rich in every kind and quality of human
contact with the world, and of the working out of the forces which are
in every human soul. These two forms of activity represent in a
general way what men have learned about themselves and their
surroundings; and, taken together, they constitute the material out of
which interpretations and explanations of human life have been made.
These explanations vary according to the genius, the environment, and
the history of races but in every case they represent the very soul of
race life, for they are the spiritual forms in which that life has
expressed itself. Other forms of race activity, however valuable or
beautiful, are lost in the passage of time, or are taken up and
absorbed, and so part with their separate and individual existence;
but the quintessence of experience and thought expressed in great
works of art is gathered up and preserved, as Milton said, for "a life
beyond life."

Now, it is upon this imperishable food which the past has stored up
through the genius of great artists that later generations feed and
nourish themselves. It is through intimate contact with these
fundamental conceptions, worked out with such infinite pain and
patience, that the individual experience is broadened to include the
experience of the race. This contact is the mystery as it is the
source of culture. No one can explain the transmission of power from a
book to a reader; but all history bears witness to the fact that such
transmissions are made. Sometimes, as during what is called the
Revival of Learning, the transmission is so general and so genuine
that the life of an entire society is visibly quickened and enlarged;
indeed, it is not too much to say that an entire civilisation feels
the effect. The transmission of power, the transference of vitality,
from books to individuals are so constant and common that they are
matters of universal experience. Most men of any considerable culture
date the successive enlargements of their intellectual lives from the
reading, at successive periods, of the books of insight and
power,--the books that deal with life at firsthand. There are, for
instance, few men of a certain age who have read widely or deeply who
do not recall with perennial enthusiasm the days when Carlyle and
Emerson fell into their hands. They may have reacted radically from
the didactic teaching of both writers, but they have not lost the
impulse, nor have they parted with the enlargement of thought received
in those first rapturous hours of discovery. There was wrought in them
then changes of view, expansions of nature, a liberation of life which
can never be lost. This experience is repeated so long as the man
retains the power of growth and so long as he keeps in contact with
the great writers. Every such contact marks a new stage in the process
of culture. This means not merely the deep satisfaction and delight
which are involved in every fresh contact with a genuine work of art;
it means the permanent enrichment of the reader. He has gained
something more lasting than pleasure and more valuable than
information: he has gained a new view of life; he has looked again
into the heart of humanity; he has felt afresh the supreme interest
which always attaches to any real contact with the life of the race.
And all this comes to him not only because the life of the race is
essentially dramatic and, therefore, of quite inexhaustible interest,
but because that life is essentially a revelation. A series of
fundamental truths is being disclosed through the simple process of
living, and whoever touches the deep life of men in the great works of
art comes in contact also with these fundamental truths. Whoever reads
the "Divine Comedy" and "Faust" for the first time discovers new
realms of truth for himself, and gains not only the joy of discovery,
but an immense addition of territory as well.

The most careless and superficial readers do not remain untouched by
the books of life; they fail to understand them or get the most out of
them, but they do not escape the spell which they all possess,--the
power of compelling the attention and stirring the heart. Not many
years ago the stories of the Russian novelists were in all hands. That
the fashion has passed is evident enough, and it is also evident that
the craving for these books was largely a fashion. Nevertheless, the
fashion itself was due to the real power which those stories revealed,
and which constitutes their lasting contribution to the world's
literature. They were touched with a profound sadness, which was
exhaled like a mist by the conditions they portrayed; they were full
of a sympathy born of knowledge and of sorrow; their roots were in the
rich soil of the life they described. The latest of them, Count
Tolstoi's "Master and Man," is one of those masterpieces which take
rank at once, not by reason of their magnitude, but by reason of a
certain beautiful quality which comes only to the man whose heart is
pressed against the heart of his theme, and who divines what life is
in the inarticulate soul of his brother man. Such books are the rich
material of culture to the man who reads them with his heart, because
they add to his experience a kind of experience otherwise inaccessible
to him, which quickens, refreshes, and broadens his own nature.




Chapter VIII.

By Way of Illustration.


The peculiar quality which culture imparts is beyond the comprehension
of a child, and yet it is something so definite and engaging that a
child may recognise its presence and feel its attraction. One of the
special pieces of good fortune which fell to my boyhood was
companionship with a man whose note of distinction, while not entirely
clear to me, threw a spell over me. I knew other men of greater force
and of larger scholarship; but no one else gave me such an impression
of balance, ripeness, and fineness of quality. I not only felt a
peculiarly searching influence flowing from one who graciously put
himself on my level of intelligence, but I felt also an impulse to
emulate a nature which satisfied my imagination completely. Other men
of ability whose conversation I heard filled me with admiration; this
man made the world larger and richer to my boyish thought. There was
no didacticism on his part; there was, on the contrary, a simplicity
so great that I felt entirely at home with him; but he was so
thoroughly a citizen of the world that I caught a glimpse of the world
in his most casual talk. I got a sense of the largeness and richness
of life from him. I did not know what it was which laid such hold on
my mind, but I saw later that it was the remarkable culture of the
man,--a culture made possible by many fortunate conditions of wealth,
station, travel, and education, and expressing itself in a peculiar
largeness of vision and sweetness of spirit. In this man's friendship
I was for the moment lifted out of my own crudity into that vast
movement and experience in which all the races have shared.

I am often reminded of this early impulse and enthusiasm, but there
are occasions when its significance and value become especially clear
to me. It was brought forcibly to my mind several years ago by an hour
or two of talk with one who, as truly as any other American, stands as
a representative man of culture; one, that is, whose large scholarship
has been so completely absorbed that it has enriched the very texture
of his mind, and given him the gift of sharing the experience of the
race. It was on an evening when a play of Sophocles was to be rendered
by the students of a certain university in which the tradition of
culture has never wholly died out, and I led the talk along the lines
of the play. I was rewarded by an hour of such delight as comes only
from the best kind of talk, and I felt anew the peculiar charm and
power of culture. For what I got that enriched me and prepared me for
real comprehension of one of the greatest works of art in all
literature was not information, but atmosphere. I saw rising about me
the vanished life, which the dramatist knew so well that its secrets
of conviction and temperament were all open to him; in architecture,
poetry, religion, politics, and manners, it was quietly rebuilded for
me in such wise that my own imagination was stirred to meet the talker
half-way, and to fill in the outlines of a picture so swiftly and
skilfully sketched. When I went to the play I went as a contemporary
of its writer might have gone. I did not need to enter into it, for it
had already entered into me. A man of scholarship could have set the
period before me in a mass of facts; a man of culture alone could give
me power to share, for an evening at least, its spirit and life.

These personal illustrations will be pardoned, because they bring out
in the most concrete way that special quality which marks the
possession of culture in the deepest sense. That quality allies it
very closely with genius itself, in certain aspects of that rare and
inexplicable gift. For one of the most characteristic qualities of
genius is its power of divination, of sharing alien or diverse
experiences. It is this peculiar insight which puts the great
dramatists in possession of the secrets of so many temperaments, the
springs of so many different personalities, the atmosphere of such
remote periods of time,--which, in a way, gives them power to make the
dead live again; for Shakespeare can stand at the tomb of Cleopatra
and evoke not the shade, but the passionate woman herself out of the
dust in which she sleeps. There has been, perhaps, no more luminous
example of the faculty of sharing the experience of a past age, of
entering into the thought and feeling of a vanished race, than the
peculiar divination and rehabilitation of certain extinct phases of
emotion and thought which one finds in the pages of Walter Pater. In
those pages there are, it is true, occasional lapses from a perfectly
sound method; there is at times a loss of simplicity, a cloying
sweetness in the style of this accomplished writer. These are,
however, the perils of a very sensitive temperament, an intense
feeling for beauty, and a certain seclusion from the affairs of life.
That which characterises Mr. Pater at all times is his power of
putting himself amid conditions that are not only extinct, but obscure
and elusive; of winding himself back, as it were, into the primitive
Greek consciousness and recovering for the moment the world as the
Greeks saw, or, rather, felt it. It is an easy matter to mass the
facts about any given period; it is a very different and a very
difficult matter to set those facts in vital relations to each other,
to see them in true prospective. And the difficulties are immensely
increased when the period is not only remote, but deficient in
definite registry of thought and feeling; when the record of what it
believed and felt does not exist by itself, but must be deciphered
from those works of art in which is preserved the final form of
thought and feeling, and in which are gathered and merged a great mass
of ideas and emotions.

This is especially true of the more subtle and elusive Greek myths,
which were in no case creations of the individual imagination or of
definite periods of time, but which were fed by many tributaries, very
slowly taking shape out of general but shadowy impressions, widely
diffused but vague ideas, deeply felt but obscure emotions. To get at
the heart of one of these stories one must be able not only to enter
into the thought of the unknown poets who made their contributions to
the myth, but must also be able to disentangle the threads of idea and
feeling so deftly woven together, and follow each back to its shadowy
beginning. To do this, one must have not only knowledge, but sympathy
and imagination,--those closely related qualities which get at the
soul of knowledge and make it live again; those qualities which the
man of culture shares in no small measure with the man of genius. In
his studies of such myths as those which gather about Dionysus and
Demeter this is precisely what Mr. Pater did. He not only marked out
distinctly the courses of the main streams, but he followed back the
rivulets to their fountain-heads; he not only mastered the thought of
an extinct people, but, what is much more difficult, he put off his
knowledge and put on their ignorance; he not only entered into their
thought about the world of nature which surrounded them, but he
entered into their feeling about it. Very lightly touched and charming
is, for instance, his description of the habits and haunts and worship
of Demeter, the current impressions of her service and place in the
life of the world:--

  "Demeter haunts the fields in spring, when the young lambs are
  dropped; she visits the barns in autumn; she takes part in mowing
  and binding up the corn, and is the goddess of sheaves. She
  presides over the pleasant, significant details of the farm, the
  threshing-floor, and the full granary, and stands beside the
  woman baking bread at the oven. With these fancies are connected
  certain simple rites, the half-understood local observance and
  the half-believed local legend reacting capriciously on each
  other. They leave her a fragment of bread and a morsel of meat at
  the crossroads to take on her journey; and perhaps some real
  Demeter carries them away, as she wanders through the country.
  The incidents of their yearly labour become to them acts of
  worship; they seek her blessing through many expressive names,
  and almost catch sight of her at dawn or evening, in the nooks of
  the fragrant fields. She lays a finger on the grass at the
  roadside, and some new flower comes up. All the picturesque
  implements of country life are hers; the poppy also, emblem of an
  exhaustless fertility, and full of mysterious juices for the
  alleviation of pain. The country-woman who puts her child to
  sleep in the great, cradle-like basket for winnowing the corn
  remembers Demeter _Kourotrophos_, the mother of corn and
  children alike, and makes it a little coat out of the dress worn
  by its father at his initiation into her mysteries.... She lies
  on the ground out-of-doors on summer nights, and becomes wet with
  the dew. She grows young again every spring, yet is of great age,
  the wrinkled woman of the Homeric hymn, who becomes the nurse of
  Demophoon."

This bit of description moves with so light a foot that one forgets,
as true art always makes one forget, the mass of hard and scattered
materials which lie back of it, materials which would not have yielded
their secret of unity and vitality save to imagination and sympathy;
to knowledge which has ripened into culture. But the recovery of such
a story, the reconstruction of such a figure, are not affected by
description alone; one must penetrate to the heart of the myth, and
master the significance of the woman transformed by idealisation into
a beneficent and much labouring goddess. We must go with Mr. Pater a
step farther if we would understand how a man of culture divines the
deeper experiences of an alien race:--

  "Three profound ethical conceptions, three impressive sacred
  figures, have now defined themselves for the Greek imagination,
  condensed from all the traditions which have now been traced,
  from the hymns of the poets, from the instinctive and
  unformulated mysticism of primitive minds. Demeter is become the
  divine, sorrowing mother. Kore, the goddess of summer, is become
  Persephone, the goddess of death, still associated with the forms
  and odours of flowers and fruit, yet as one risen from the dead
  also, presenting one side of her ambiguous nature to men's
  gloomier fancies. Thirdly, there is the image of Demeter
  enthroned, chastened by sorrow, and somewhat advanced in age,
  blessing the earth in her joy at the return of Kore. The myth has
  now entered upon the third phase of its life, in which it becomes
  the property of those more elevated spirits, who, in the decline
  of the Greek religion, pick and choose and modify, with perfect
  freedom of mind, whatever in it may seem adapted to minister to
  their culture. In this way the myths of the Greek religion become
  parts of an ideal, visible embodiments of the susceptibilities
  and intentions of the nobler kind of souls; and it is to this
  latest phase of mythological development that the highest Greek
  sculpture allies itself."

This illustration of the divination by which the man of culture
possesses himself of a half-forgotten and obscurely recorded
experience and rehabilitates and interprets it, is so complete that it
makes amplification superfluous.




Chapter IX.

Personality.


"It is undeniable," says Matthew Arnold, "that the exercise of a
creative power, that a free creative activity is the highest function
of man; it is proved to be so by man's finding in it his true
happiness." If this be true, and the heart of man apart from all
testimony affirms it, then the great books not only embody and express
the genius and vital knowledge of the race which created them, but
they are the products of the highest activity of man in the finest
moments of his life. They represent a high felicity no less than a
noble gift; they are the memorials of a happiness which may have been
brief, but which, while it lasted, had a touch of the divine in it;
for men are never nearer divinity than in their creative impulses and
moments. Homer may have been blind; but if he composed the epics which
bear his name he must have known moments of purer happiness than his
most fortunate contemporary; Dante missed the lesser comforts of life,
but there were hours of transcendent joy in his lonely career. For the
highest joy of which men taste is the full, free, and noble putting
forth of the power that is in them; no moments in human experience are
so thrilling as those in which a man's soul goes out from him into
some adequate and beautiful form of expression. In the act of creation
a man incorporates his own personality into the visible world about
him, and in a true and noble sense gives himself to his fellows. When
an artist looks at his work he sees himself; he has performed the
highest task of which he is capable, and fulfilled the highest purpose
for which he was planned by an artist greater than himself.

The rapture of the creative mood and moment is the reward of the little
group whose touch on any kind of material is imperishable. It comes
when the spell of inspired work is on them, or in the moment which
follows immediately on completion and before the reaction of
depression--which is the heavy penalty of the artistic temperament--has
set in. Balzac knew it in that frenzy of work which seized him for days
together; and Thackeray knew it, as he confesses, when he had put the
finishing touches on that striking scene in which Rawdon Crawley
thrashes Lord Steyne within an inch of his wicked life. The great
novelist, who happened also to be a great writer, knew that the whole
scene, in conception and execution, was a stroke of genius. But while
this supreme rapture belongs to a chosen few, it may be shared by all
those who are ready to open the imagination to its approach. It is one
of the great rewards of the artist that while other kinds of joy are
often pathetically short-lived, his joy, having brought forth enduring
works, is, in a sense, imperishable. And it not only endures; it renews
itself in kindred moments and experiences which it bestows upon those
who approach it sympathetically. There are lines in the "Divine Comedy"
which thrill us to-day as they must have thrilled Dante; there are
passages in the Shakespearian plays and sonnets which make a riot in
the blood to-day as they doubtless set the poet's pulses beating three
centuries ago. The student of literature, therefore, finds in its
noblest works not only the ultimate results of race experience and the
characteristic quality of race genius, but the highest activity of the
greatest minds in their happiest and most expansive moments. In this
commingling of the best that is in the race and the best that is in
the individual lies the mystery of that double revelation which makes
every work of art a disclosure not only of the nature of the man
behind it, but of all men behind him. In this commingling, too, is
preserved the most precious deposit of what the race has been and
done, and of what the man has seen, felt, and known. In the nature of
things no educational material can be richer; none so fundamentally
expansive and illuminative.

This contact with the richest personalities the world has produced is
one of the deepest sources of culture; for nothing is more truly
educative than association with persons of the highest intelligence
and power. When a man recalls his educational experience, he finds
that many of his richest opportunities were not identified with
subjects or systems or apparatus, but with teachers. There is
fundamental truth in Emerson's declaration that it makes very little
difference what you study, but that it is in the highest degree
important with whom you study. There flows from the living teacher a
power which no text-book can compass or contain,--the power of
liberating the imagination and setting the student free to become an
original investigator. Text-books supply methods, information, and
discipline; teachers impart the breath of life by giving us
inspiration and impulse. Now, the great books are different from all
other books in their possession of this mysterious vital force; they
are not only text-books by reason of the knowledge they contain, but
they are also books of life by reason of the disclosure of personality
which they make. The student of "Faust" receives from that drama not
only the poet's interpretation of man's life in the world, but he is
also brought under the spell of Goethe's personality, and, in a real
sense, gets from his book that which his friends got from the man.
This is not true of secondary books; it is true only of first-hand
books. Secondary books are often products of skill, pieces of
well-wrought but entirely self-conscious craftsmanship; first-hand
books are always the expression of what is deepest, most original and
distinctive in the nature which produces them. In such books,
therefore, we get not only the skill, the art, the knowledge; we get,
above all, the man. There is added to what he has to give us of
thought or form the inestimable boon of his companionship.

The reality of this element of personality and the force for culture
which resides in it are clearly illustrated by a comparison of the
works of Plato with those of Aristotle. Aristotle was for many
centuries the first name in philosophy, and is still one of the
greatest; but Aristotle, although a student of the principles of the
art of literature and a critic of deep philosophical insight, was
primarily a thinker, not an artist. One goes to him for discipline,
for thought, for training in a very high sense; one does not go to him
for form, beauty, or personality. It is a clear, distinct, logical
order of ideas, a definite system which he gives us; not a view of
life, a disclosure of the nature of man, a synthesis of ideas touched
with beauty, dramatically arranged and set in the atmosphere of
Athenian life. For these things one goes to Plato, who is not only a
thinker, but an artist of wonderful gifts,--one who so closely and
beautifully relates Greek thought to Greek life that we seem not to be
studying a system of philosophy, but mingling with the society of
Athens in its most fascinating groups and at its most significant
moments. To the student of Aristotle the personality of the writer
counts for nothing; to the student of the "Dialogues," on the other
hand, the personality of Plato counts for everything. If we approach
him as a thinker, it is true, we discard everything except his ideas;
but if we approach him as a great writer, ideas are but part of the
rich and illuminating whole which he offers us. One can imagine a man
fully acquainting himself with the work of Aristotle and yet remaining
almost devoid of culture; but one cannot imagine a man coming into
intimate companionship with Plato and remaining untouched by his rich,
representative personality.

From such a companionship something must flow besides an enlargement
of ideas or a development of the power of clear thinking; there must
flow also the stimulating and illuminating impulse of a fresh contact
with a great nature; there must result a certain liberation of the
imagination, a certain widening of experience, a certain ripening of
the mind of the student. The beauty of form, the varied and vital
aspects of religious, social, and individual character, the splendour
and charm of a nobly ordered art in temples, speech, manners, and
dress, the constant suggestion of the deep humanism behind that art
and of the freshness and reality of all its forms of expression,--these
things are as much and as great a part of the "Dialogues" as the
thought; and they are full of that quality which enriches and ripens
the mind that comes under their influence. In these qualities of his
style, quite as much as in his ideas, is to be found the real Plato,
the great artist, who refused to consider philosophy as an abstract
creation of the mind, existing, so far as man is concerned, apart from
the mind which formulates it, but who saw life in its totality and
made thought luminous and real by disclosing it at all points against
the background of the life, the nature, and the habits of the thinker.
This is the method of culture as distinguished from that of scholarship;
and this is also the disclosure of the personality of Plato as
distinguished from his philosophical genius. Whoever studies the
"Dialogues" with his heart as well as with his mind comes into
personal relations with the richest mind of antiquity.




Chapter X.

Liberation through Ideas.


Matthew Arnold was in the habit of dwelling on the importance of a
free movement of fresh ideas through society; the men who are in touch
with such movements are certain to be productive, while those whose
minds are not fed by this stimulus are likely to remain unfruitful.
One of the most suggestive and beautiful facts in the spiritual
history of men is the exhilaration which a great new thought brings
with it; the thrilling moments in history are the moments of contact
between such ideas and the minds which are open to their approach. It
is true that fresh ideas often gain acceptance slowly and against
great odds in the way of organised error and of individual inertness
and dulness; nevertheless, it is also true that certain great ideas
rapidly clarify themselves in the thought of almost every century.
They are opposed and rejected by a multitude, but they are in the air,
as we say; they seem to diffuse themselves through all fields of
thought, and they are often worked out harmoniously in different
departments by men who have no concert of action, but whose minds are
open and sensitive to these invisible currents of light and power.

The first and the most enduring result of this movement of ideas is
the enlargement of the thoughts of men about themselves and their
world. Every great new truth compels, sooner or later, a readjustment
of the whole body of organised truth as men hold it. The fresh thought
about the physical constitution of man bears its fruit ultimately in
some fresh notion of his spiritual constitution; the new fact in
geology does not spend its force until it has wrought a modification
of the view of the creative method and the age of man in the world;
the fresh conception of the method of evolution along material and
physical lines slowly reconstructs the philosophy of mental and
spiritual development. Every new thought relates itself finally to all
thought, and is like the forward step which continually changes the
horizon about the traveller.

The history of man is the story of the ideas he has entertained and
accepted, and of his struggle to incorporate these ideas into laws,
customs, institutions, and character. At the heart of every race one
finds certain ideas, not always clearly seen nor often definitely
formulated save by a few persons, but unconsciously held with
deathless tenacity and illustrated by a vast range of action and
achievement; at the heart of every great civilisation one finds a few
dominant and vital conceptions which give a certain coherence and
unity to a vast movement of life. Now, the books of life, as has
already been said, hold their place in universal literature because
they reveal and illustrate, in symbol and personality, these
fundamental ideas with supreme power and felicity. The large body of
literature in prose and verse which is put between the covers of the
Old Testament not only gives us an account of what the Hebrew race did
in the world, but of its ideas about that world, and of the character
which it formed for itself largely as the fruit of those ideas. Those
ideas, it need hardly be said, not only registered a great advance on
the ideas which preceded them, but remain in many respects the most
fundamental ideas which the race as a whole has accepted. They lifted
the men to whom they were originally revealed, or who accepted them,
to a great height of spiritual and moral vision, and a race character
was organised about them of the most powerful and persistent type. The
modern student of the Old Testament is born into a very different
atmosphere from that in which these conceptions of man and the
universe were originally formed; but though they have largely lost
their novelty, they have not lost the power of enlargement and
expansion which were in them at the beginning.

In his own history every man repeats, within certain limits, the
history of the race; and the inexhaustible educational value of race
experience lies in the fact that it so completely parallels the
history of every member of the race. Childhood has the fancies and
faiths of the earliest ages; youth has visions and dreams which form,
generation after generation, a kind of contemporary mythology;
maturity aspires after and sometimes attains the repose, the clear
intelligence, the catholic outlook of the best modern type of mind and
character. In some form every modern man travels the road over which
his predecessors have passed, but he no longer blazes his path; a
highway has been built for him. He is spared the immense toil of
formulating the ideas by which he lives, and of passing through the
searching experience which is often the only approach to the greatest
truths. If he has originative power, he forms ideas of his own, but
they are based on a massive foundation of ideas which others have
worked out for him; he passes through his own individual experience,
but he inherits the results of a multitude of experiences of which
nothing remains save certain final generalisations. Every intelligent
man is born into possession of a world of knowledge and truth which
has been explored, settled, and organised for him. To the discovery
and regulation of this world every race has worked with more or less
definiteness of aim, and the total result of the incalculable labours
and sufferings of men is the somewhat intangible but very real thing
we call civilisation.

At the heart of civilisation, and determining its form and quality, is
that group of vital ideas to which each race has contributed according
to its intelligence and power,--the measure of the greatness of a race
being determined by the value of its contribution to this organised
spiritual life of the world. This body of ideas is the highest product
of the life of men under historic conditions; it is the quintessence
of whatever was best and enduring not only in their thought, but in
their feeling, their instinct, their affections, their activities; and
the degree in which the man of to-day is able to appropriate this rich
result of the deepest life of the past is the measure of his culture.
One may be well-trained and carefully disciplined, and yet have no
share in this organised life of the race; but no one can possess real
culture who has not, according to his ability, entered into it by
making it a part of himself. It is by contact with these great ideas
that the individual mind puts itself in touch with the universal mind
and indefinitely expands and enriches itself.

Culture rests on ideas rather than on knowledge; its distinctive use
of knowledge is to gain material for ideas. For this reason the
"Iliad" and "Odyssey" are of more importance than Thucydides and
Curtius. For Homer was not only in a very important sense the
historian of his race; he was, above all, the expositor of its ideas.
There is involved in the very structure of the Greek epics the
fundamental conception of life as the Greeks looked at it; their view
of reverence, worship, law, obligation, subordination, personality. No
one can be said to have read these poems in any real sense until he
has made these ideas clear to himself; and these ideas carry with them
a definite enlargement of thought. When a man has gotten a clear view
of the ideas about life held by a great race, he has gone a long way
towards self-education,--so rich and illuminative are these central
conceptions around which the life of each race has been organised. To
multiply these ideas by broad contact with the books of life is to
expand one's thought so as to compass the essential thought of the
entire race. And this is precisely what the man of broad culture
accomplishes; he emancipates himself from whatever is local,
provincial, and temporal, by gaining the power of taking the race
point of view. He is liberated by ideas, not only from his own
ignorance and the limitations of his own nature, but from the partial
knowledge and the prejudices of his time; and liberation by ideas, and
expansion through ideas, constitute one of the great services of the
books of life to those who read them with an open mind.




Chapter XI.

The Logic of Free Life.


The ideas which form the substance or substratum of the greatest books
are not primarily the products of pure thought; they have a far deeper
origin, and their immense power of enlightenment and enrichment lies
in the depth of their rootage in the unconscious life of the race. If
it be true that the fundamental process of the physical universe and
of the life of man, so far as we can understand them, is not
intellectual, but vital, then it is also true that the formative ideas
by which we live, and in the clear comprehension of which the
greatness of intellectual and spiritual life for us lies, have been
borne in upon the race by living rather than by thinking. They are
felt and experienced first, and formulated later. It is clear that a
definite purpose is being wrought out through physical processes in
the world of matter; it is equally clear to most men that moral and
spiritual purposes are being worked out through the processes which
constitute the conditions of our being and acting in this world. It
has been the engrossing and fruitful study of science to discover the
processes and comprehend the ends of the physical order; it is the
highest office of art to discover and illustrate, for the most part
unconsciously, the processes and results of the spiritual order by
setting forth in concrete form the underlying and formative ideas of
races and periods.

"The thought that makes the work of art," says Mr. John La Farge in a
discussion of the art of painting of singular insight and
intelligence, "the thought which in its highest expression we call
genius, is not reflection or reflective thought. The thought which
analyses has the same deficiencies as our eyes. It can fix only one
point at a time. It is necessary for it to examine each element of
consideration, and unite it to others, to make a whole. But the
_logic of free life, which is the logic of art_, is like that
logic of one using the eye, in which we make most wonderful
combinations of momentary adaptation, by co-ordinating innumerable
memories, by rejecting those that are useless or antagonistic; and all
without being aware of it, so that those especially who most use the
eye, as, for instance, the painter or the hunter, are unaware of more
than one single, instantaneous action." This is a very happy
formulation of a fundamental principle in art; indeed, it brings
before us the essential quality of art, its illustration of thought in
the order not of a formal logic, but of the logic of free life. It is
at this point that it is differentiated from philosophy; it is from
this point that its immense spiritual significance becomes clear. In
the great books fundamental ideas are set forth not in a systematic
way, nor as the results of methodical teaching, but as they rise over
the vast territory of actual living, and are clarified by the
long-continued and many-sided experience of the race. Every book of
the first order in literature of the creative kind is a final
generalisation from a vast experience. It is, to use Mr. La Farge's
phrase, the co-ordination of innumerable memories,--memories shared by
an innumerable company of persons, and becoming, at length and after
long clarification, a kind of race memory; and this memory is so
inclusive and tenacious that it holds intact the long and varied play
of soil, sky, scenery, climate, faith, myth, suffering, action,
historic process, through which the race has passed and by which it
has been largely formed.

The ideas which underlie the great books bring with them, therefore,
when we really receive them into our minds, the entire background of
the life out of which they took their rise. We are not only permitted
to refresh ourselves at the inexhaustible spring, but, as we drink,
the entire sweep of landscape, to the remotest mountains in whose
heart its sources are hidden, encompasses us like a vast living world.
It is, in other words, the totality of things which great art gives
us,--not things in isolation and detachment. Mr. La Farge will pardon
further quotation; he admirably states this great truth when he says
that "in a work of art, executed through the body, and appealing to
the mind through the senses, the entire make-up of its creator
addresses the entire constitution of the man for whom it is meant."
One may go further, and say of the greatest books that the whole race
speaks through them to the whole man who puts himself in a receptive
mood towards them. This totality of influences, conditions, and
history which goes to the making of books of this order receives
dramatic unity, artistic sequence, and integral order and coherence
from the personality of the writer. He gathers into himself the
spiritual results of the experience of his people or his age, and
through his genius for expression the vast general background of his
personal life, which, as in the case of Homer, for instance, has
entirely faded from view, rises once more in clear vision before us.
"In any museum," says Mr. La Farge, "we can see certain great
differences in things; which are so evident, so much on the surface,
as almost to be our first impressions. They are the marks of the
places where the works of art were born. Climate; intensity of heat
and light; the nature of the earth; whether there was much or little
water in proportion to land; plants, animals, surrounding beings, have
helped to make these differences, as well as manners, laws, religions,
and national ideals. If you recall the more general physical
impression of a gallery of Flemish paintings and of a gallery of
Italian masters, you will have carried off in yourself two distinct
impressions received during their lives by the men of these two races.
The fact that they used their eyes more or less is only a small factor
in this enormous aggregation of influences received by them and
transmitted to us."

From this point of view the inexhaustible significance of a great work
of art becomes clear, both as regards its definite revelation of
racial and individual truth, and as regards its educational or culture
quality and value. Ideas are presented not in isolation and
detachment, but in their totality of origin and relationship; they are
not abstractions, general propositions, philosophical generalisations;
they are living truths--truths, that is, which have become clear by
long experience, and to which men stand, or have stood, in personal
relations. They are ideas, in other words, which stand together, not
in the order of formal logic, but of the "logic of free life." They
are not torn out of their normal relations; they bring all their
relationships with them. We are offered a plant in the soil, not a
flower cut from its stem. Every man is rooted to the soil, touches
through his senses the physical, and through his mind and heart the
spiritual, order of his time; all these influences are focussed in
him, and according to his capacity he gathers them into his
experience, formulates and expresses them. The greater and more
productive the man, the wider his contact with and absorption of the
life of his time. For the artist stands nearest, not farthest from his
contemporaries. He is not, however, a mere medium in their hands, not
a mere secretary or recorder of their ideas and feelings. He is
separated from them in the clearness of his vision of the significance
of their activities, the ends towards which they are moving, the ideas
which they are working out; but, in the exact degree of his greatness,
he is one with them in sympathy, experience, and comprehension. They
live for him, and he lives with them; they work out ideas in the logic
of free life, and he clarifies, interprets, and illustrates those
ideas. The world is not saved _by_ the remnant, as Matthew Arnold
held; it is saved _through_ the remnant. The elect of the race,
its prophets, teachers, artists,--and every great artist is also a
prophet and teacher,--are its leaders, not its masters; its
interpreters, not its creators. The race is dumb without its artists;
but the artists would be impossible without the sustaining fellowship
of the race. In the making of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" the Greek
race was in full partnership with Homer. The ideas which form the
summits of human achievement are sustained by immense masses of earth;
the higher they rise the vaster their bases. The richer and wider the
race life, the freer and deeper the play of that vital logic which
produces the formative ideas.




Chapter XII.

The Imagination.


The Lady of Shalott, sitting in her tower, looked into her magic
mirror and saw the whole world go by,--monk, maiden, priest, knight,
lady, and king. In the mirror of the imagination not only the world of
to-day but the entire movement of human life moves before the eye as
the throngs of living men move on the streets. For the imagination is
the real magician, of whose marvels all simulated magic is but a
clumsy and mechanical imitation. It is the real power, of which all
material powers are very inadequate symbols. Rarely taken into account
by teachers, largely ignored by educational systems and philosophies,
it is the divinest of all the powers which men are able to put forth,
because it is the creative power. It uses thought, but, in a way, it
is greater than thought, because it builds out of thought that which
thought alone is powerless to construct. It is, indeed, the essential
element in great constructive thinking; for while we may have thoughts
untouched by the imagination, one cannot think along high constructive
lines without its constant aid. Isolated thoughts come unattended by
it, but the thinking which issues in organised systems, in
comprehensive interpretations of things and events, in those noble
generalisations which have the splendour of the discovery of new
worlds in them, in those concrete embodiments of idea which we call
works of art, is conditioned on the use of the imagination. Plato's
Dialogues were fashioned by it as truly as Homer's poems; Hegel's
philosophy was created by it as definitely as Shakespeare's plays,
and Newton and Kepler used it as freely as Dante or Rembrandt.

Upon the use of this supreme faculty we depend not only for creative
power, but for education in the highest sense of the word; for culture
is the highest result of education, and the final test of education is
its power to produce culture. Goethe was in the habit of saying that
sympathy is essential to all true criticism; for no man can discern
the heart of a movement, of a work of art, or of a race who does not
put himself into heart relations with that which he is trying to
understand. We never really possess an idea, a bit of knowledge, or a
fact of experience until we get below the mind of it into the heart of
it. Now, sympathy in this sense is the imagination touched with
feeling; it is the imagination bringing thought and emotion into vital
relation. In the process of culture, therefore, the imagination plays
a great part; for culture, it cannot too often be said, is knowledge,
observation, and experience incorporate into personality and become
part of the very nature of the individual. The man of culture is
pre-eminently a man of imagination; lacking this quality, he may
become learned by force of industry, or a scholar by virtue of a
trained intelligence, but the ripeness, the balance, the peculiar
richness of fibre which characterise the man of culture will be denied
him. The man of culture, it is true, is not always a man of creative
power; but he is never devoid of that kind of creative quality which
transforms everything he receives into something personal and
individual. And the more deeply one studies the work of the great
artists, the more distinctly does he see the immense place which
culture in the vital, as contrasted with the academic, sense held in
their lives, and the great part it played in their productive
activity. Dante, Goethe, Tennyson, Browning, Lowell, were men
possessed in rare degree of culture of both kinds; but Shakespeare and
Burns were equally men of culture. They shared in the possession of
this faculty of making all they saw and knew a part of themselves.
Between culture of this quality and the creative power there is
something more than complete unity; there is almost identity, for they
seem to be two forms of activity of the same power rather than
distinct faculties. Culture enables us to receive the world into
ourselves, not in the reflection of a magic mirror, but in the depths
of a living soul; to receive that world in such a way that we possess
it; it ceases to be outside us and becomes part of our very nature.
The creative power enables us to refashion that world and to put it
forth again out of ourselves, as it was originally put forth out of
the life of the divine artist. The creative process is, therefore, a
double process, and culture and genius stand in indissoluble union.

The development of the imagination, upon the power of which both
absorption of knowledge and creative capacity depend, is, therefore, a
matter of supreme importance. To this necessity educators will some
day open their eyes, and educational systems will some day conform;
meantime, it must be done mainly by individual work. Knowledge,
discipline, and technical training of the best sort are accessible on
every hand; but the development of the faculty which unites all these
in the highest form of activity must be secured mainly by personal
effort. The richest and most accessible material for this highest
education is furnished by art; and the form of art within reach of
every civilised man, at all times, in all places, is the book. To
these masterpieces, which have been called the books of life, all men
may turn with the assurance that as the supreme achievements of the
imagination they have the power of awakening, stimulating, and
enriching it in the highest degree. For the genuine reader, who sees
in a book what the writer has put there, repeats in a way the process
through which the maker of the book passed. The man who reads the
"Iliad" and the "Odyssey" with his heart as well as his intelligence
must measurably enter into the life which these poems describe and
interpret; he must identify himself for the time with the race whose
soul and historic character are revealed in epic form as in a great
mirror; he must see life from the Greek point of view, and feel life
as the Greek felt it. He must, in a word, go through the process by
which the poems were made, as well as feel, comprehend, and enjoy
their final perfection. In like manner the open-hearted and
open-minded reader of the Book of Job cannot rest content with that
noble poem in the form which it now possesses; the imaginative impulse
which even the casual reading of the poem liberates in him sends him
behind the finished product to the life of which it was the immortal
fruit; he enters into the groping thought of an age which has perished
out of all other remembrance; he deals with a problem which is as old
as man from the standpoint of men who have left no other record of
themselves. In proportion to the depth of his feeling and the vitality
of his imagination he must saturate himself with the rich life of
thought, conviction, and emotion, of struggle and aspiration, out of
which the greatest of the poems of nature took its rise. He must, in a
word, receive into himself the living material upon which the unknown
poet worked. In such a process the imagination is evoked in full and
free play; it insensibly reconstructs a life gone out of knowledge;
selects, harmonises, unifies, and in a measure creates. It illuminates
and unifies knowledge, divines the wide relations of thought, and
discerns its place in organic connection with the world which gave it
birth.

The material upon which this great power is nourished is specifically
furnished by the works which it has created. As the eye is trained to
discover the line of beauty by companionship with the works in which
it is revealed with the greatest clearness and power, so is the
imagination developed by intimacy with the books which disclose its
depth, its reality, and its method. The reader of Shakespeare cannot
follow the leadings of his masterly imagination without feeling a
liberation of his own faculty of seeing things as parts of a vast
order of life. He does not gain the poet's creative power, but he is
enlarged and enriched to the point where his own imagination plays
directly on the material about it; he receives it into himself, and in
the exact measure in which he learns the secret of absorbing what he
sees, feels, and knows, becomes master and interpreter of the world of
his time, and restorer of the world of other times and men. For the
imagination, playing upon fact and experience, divines their meaning
and puts us in possession of the truth and life that are in them. To
possess this magical power is to live the whole of life and to enter
into the heritage of history.




Chapter XIII.

Breadth of Life.


One of the prime characteristics of the man of culture is freedom from
provincialism, complete deliverance from rigidity of temper,
narrowness of interest, uncertainty of taste, and general unripeness.
The villager, or pagan in the old sense, is always a provincial; his
horizon is narrow, his outlook upon the world restricted, his
knowledge of life limited. He may know a few things thoroughly; he
cannot know them in true relation to one another or to the larger
order of which they are part. He may know a few persons intimately; he
cannot know the representative persons of his time or of his race. The
essence of provincialism is the substitution of a part for the whole;
the acceptance of the local experience, knowledge, and standards as
possessing the authority of the universal experience, knowledge, and
standards. The local experience is entirely true in its own sphere; it
becomes misleading when it is accepted as the experience of all time
and all men. It is this mistake which breeds that narrowness and
uncertainty of taste and opinion from which culture furnishes the only
escape. A small community, isolated from other communities by the
accidents of position, often comes to believe that its way of doing
things is the way of the world; a small body of religious people,
devoutly attentive to their own observances, often reach the
conclusion that these observances are the practice of that catholic
church which includes the pious-minded of all creeds and rituals; a
group of radical reformers, by passionate advocacy of a single reform,
come to believe that there have been no reformers before them, and
that none will be needed after them; a band of fresh and audacious
young practitioners of any of the arts, by dint of insistence upon a
certain manner, rapidly generate the conviction that art has no other
manner.

Society is full of provincialism in art, politics, religion, and
economics; and the essence of this provincialism is always the
same,--the substitution of a part for the whole. Larger knowledge of
the world and of history would make it perfectly clear that there has
always been not only a wide latitude, but great variation, in ritual
and worship; that the political story of all the progressive nations
has been one long agitation for reforms, and that no reform can ever
be final; that reform must succeed reform until the end of
time,--reforms being in their nature neither more nor less than those
readjustments to new conditions which are involved in all social
development. A wider survey of experience would make it clear that art
has many manners, and that no manner is supreme and none final.

A long experience gives a man poise, balance, and steadiness; he has
seen many things come and go, and he is neither paralysed by
depression when society goes wrong, nor irrationally elated when it
goes right. He is perfectly aware that his party is only a means to an
end, and not a piece of indestructible and infallible machinery; that
the creed he accepts has passed through many changes of
interpretation, and will pass through more; that the social order for
which he contends, if secured, will be only another stage in the
unbroken development of the organised life of men in the world. And
culture is, at bottom, only an enlarged and clarified experience,--an
experience so comprehensive that it puts its possessor in touch with
all times and men, and gives him the opportunity of comparing his own
knowledge of things, his faith and his practice, with the knowledge,
faith, and practice of all the generations. This opportunity brings,
to one who knows how to use it, deliverance from the ignorance or
half-knowledge of provincialism, from the crudity of its half-trained
tastes, and from the blind passion of its rash and groundless faith in
its own infallibility.

Provincialism is the soil in which philistinism grows most rapidly and
widely. For as the essence of provincialism is the substitution of a
part for the whole, so the essence of philistinism is the conviction
that what one possesses is the best of its kind, that the kind is the
highest, and that one has all he needs of it. A true philistine is not
only convinced that he holds the only true and consistent position,
but he is also entirely satisfied with himself. He is infallible and
he is sufficient unto himself. In politics he is a blind partisan, in
theology an arrogant dogmatist, in art an ignorant propagandist. What
he accepts, believes, or has, is not only the best of its kind, but
nothing better can ever supersede it.

To this spirit the spirit of culture is antipodal; between the two
there is inextinguishable antagonism. They can never compromise or
agree upon a truce, any more than day and night can consent to dwell
together. To destroy philistinism root and branch, to eradicate the
ignorance which makes it possible for a man to believe that he
possesses all things in their final forms, to empty a man of the
stupidity and vulgarity of self-satisfaction, and to invigorate the
immortal dissatisfaction of the soul with its present attainments, are
the ends which culture is always seeking to accomplish. The keen lance
of Matthew Arnold, flashing now in one part of the field and now in
another, pierced many of the fallacies of provincialism and
philistinism, and mortally wounded more than one Goliath of ignorance
and conceit; but the work must be done anew in every generation and in
every individual. All men are conceived in the sin of ignorance and
born in the iniquity of half-knowledge; and every man needs to be
saved by wider knowledge and clearer vision. It is a matter of
comparative indifference where one is born; it is a matter of supreme
importance how one educates one's self. There is as genuine a
provincialism in Paris as in the remotest frontier town; it is better
dressed and better mannered, but it is not less narrow and vulgar.
There is as much vulgarity in the arrogance of a czar as in that of an
African chief; as much absurdity in the self-satisfaction of the man
who believes that the habit and speech of the boulevard are the
ultimate habit and speech of the race, as in that of the man who
accepts the manners of the mining camp as the finalities of human
intercourse. Culture is not an accident of birth, although
surroundings retard or advance it; it is always a matter of individual
education.

This education finds no richer material than that which is contained
in literature; for the characteristic of literature, as of all the
arts, is its universality of interest, its elevation of taste, its
disclosure of ideas, its constant appeal to the highest in the reader
by its revelation of the highest in the writer. Many of the noblest
works of literature are intensely local in colour, atmosphere,
material, and allusion; but in every case that which is of universal
interest is touched, evoked, and expressed. The artist makes the
figure he paints stand out with the greatest distinctness by the
accuracy of the details introduced and by the skill with which they
are handled; but the very definiteness of the figure gives force and
clearness to the revelation of the universal trait or characteristic
which is made through it. Pere Goriot has the ineffaceable stamp of
Paris upon him, but he is for that very reason the more completely
disclosed as a typical individuality. Literature abounds in
illustrations of this true and artistic adjustment of the local to the
universal, this disclosure of the common humanity in which all men
share through the highly elaborated individuality; and this
characteristic indicates one of the deepest sources of its educational
power. So searching is this power that it is safe to say that no one
can know thoroughly the great books of the world and remain a
provincial or a philistine; the very air of these works is fatal to
narrow views, to low standards, and to self-satisfaction.




Chapter XIV.

Racial Experience.


There is a general agreement among men that experience is the most
effective and successful of teachers; that for many men no other form
of education is possible; and that those who enjoy the fullest
educational opportunities miss the deeper processes of training if
they fail of that wide contact with the happenings of life which we
call experience. To touch the world at many points; to come into
relations with many kinds of men; to think, to feel, and to act on a
generous scale,--these are prime opportunities for growth. For it is
not only true, as Browning said so often and in so many kinds of speech,
that a man's greatest good fortune is to have the opportunity of
giving out freely and powerfully all the force that is in him, but it
is also true that almost equal good fortune attends the man who has
the opportunity of receiving truth and instruction through a wide and
rich experience.

But individual experience, however inclusive and deep, is necessarily
limited, and the life of the greatest man would be confined within
narrow boundaries if he were shut within the circle of his own
individual contact with things and persons. If Shakespeare had written
of those things only of which he had personal knowledge, of those
experiences in which he had personally shared, his contribution to
literature would be deeply interesting, but it would not possess that
quality of universality which makes it the property of the race. In
Shakespeare there was not only knowledge of man, but knowledge of men
as well. His greatness rests not only on his own commanding
personality, but on his magical power of laying other personalities
under tribute for the enlargement of his view of things and the
enrichment of his portraiture of humanity. A man learns much from his
own contacts with his time and his race, but one of the most important
gains he makes is the development of the faculty of appropriating the
results of the contacts of other men with other times and races; and
one of the finer qualities of rich experience is the quickening of the
imagination to divine that which is hidden in the experience of other
races and ages.

The man of culture must not only live deeply and intelligently in his
own experience, rationalising and utilising it as he passes through
it; he must also break away from its limitations and escape its
tendency to substitute a part of life, distinctly seen, for the whole
of life, vaguely discerned. The great writer, for instance, must first
make his own nature rich in its development and powerful in harmony of
aim and force, and he must also make this nature sensitive,
sympathetic, and clairvoyant in its relations with the natures of
other men. To become self-centred, and yet to be able to pass entirely
out of one's self into the thoughts, emotions, impulses, and
sufferings of others, involves a harmonising of opposing tendencies
which is difficult of attainment.

It is precisely this poise which men of the highest productive power
secure; for it is this nice adjustment of the individual discovery of
truth to the general discovery of truth which gives a man of
imaginative faculty range, power, and sanity of view. To see, feel,
think, and act strongly and intelligently in our own individual world
gives us first-hand relations to that world, and first-hand knowledge
of it; to pass beyond the limits of this small sphere, which we touch
with our own hands, into the larger spheres which other men touch, not
only widens our knowledge but vastly increases our power. It is like
exchanging the power of a small stream for the general power which
plays through Nature. One of the measures of greatness is furnished by
this ability to pass through individual into national or racial
experience; for a man's spiritual dimensions, as revealed through any
form of art, are determined by his power of discerning essential
qualities and experiences in the greatest number of people. The four
writers who hold the highest places in literature justify their claims
by their universality; that is to say, by the range of their knowledge
of life as that knowledge lies revealed in the experience of the race.

It is the fortune of a very small group of men in any age to possess
the power of divining, by the gift of genius, the world which lies,
nebulous and shadowy, in the lives of men about them, or in the lives
of men of other times; in the nature of things, the clairvoyant vision
of poets like Tennyson, Browning, and Hugo, of novelists like
Thackeray, Balzac, and Tolstoi, is not at the command of all men; and
yet all men may share in it and be enlarged by it. This is one of the
most important services which literature renders to its lover: it
makes him a companion of the most interesting personalities in their
most significant moments; it enables him to break the bars of
individual experience and escape into the wider and richer life of the
race. Within the compass of a very small room, on a very few shelves,
the real story of man in this world may be collected in the books of
life in which it is written; and the solitary reader, whose personal
contacts with men and events are few and lacking in distinction and
interest, may enter, through his books, into the most thrilling life
of the race in some of its most significant moments.

No man can read "In Memoriam" or "The Ring and the Book" without
passing beyond the boundaries of his individual experience into
experiences which broaden and quicken his own spirit; and no one can
become familiar with the novels of Tourgueneff or Tolstoi without
touching life at new points and passing through emotions which would
never have been stirred in him by the happenings of his own life. Such
a story as "Anna Karenina" leaves no reader of imagination or heart
entirely unchanged; its elemental moral and artistic force strikes
into every receptive mind and leaves there a knowledge of life not
possessed before. The work of the Russian novelists has been, indeed,
a new reading in the book of experience; it has made a notable
addition to the sum total of humanity's knowledge of itself. In the
pages of Gogol, Dostoievski, Tourgueneff, and Tolstoi, the majority of
readers have found a world absolutely new to them; and in reading
those pages, so penetrated with the dramatic spirit, they have come
into the possession of a knowledge of life not formal and didactic,
but deep, vital, and racial in its range and significance. To possess
the knowledge of an experience at once so remote and so rich in
disclosure of character, so charged with tragic interest, is to push
back the horizons of our own experience, to secure a real contribution
to our own enrichment and development. Whoever carries that process
far enough brings into his individ