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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Books and Culture, by Hamilton Wright Mabie
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Books and Culture
+
+Author: Hamilton Wright Mabie
+
+Release Date: September 23, 2005 [EBook #16736]
+[Date last updated: October 8, 2005]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BOOKS AND CULTURE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Alicia Williams and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+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 mediæval 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 Cæsar. 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 'Phædrus.' 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
+'Phædrus' 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 zoölogy; 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. Père 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 Tourguéneff 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 Karénina" 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, Tourguéneff, 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 individual experience much of the richness
+and splendour of the experience of the race.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XV.
+
+Freshness of Feeling.
+
+
+The primary charm of art resides in the freshness of feeling which it
+reveals and conveys. An art which discloses fatigue, weariness,
+exhaustion of emotion, deadening of interest, has parted with its
+magical spell; for vitality, emotion, passionate interest in the
+experiences of life, devout acceptance of the facts of life, are the
+prime characteristics of art in those moments when its veracity and
+power are at the highest point. A great work of art may be tragic in
+the view of life which it presents, but it must show no sign of the
+succumbing of the spirit to the appalling facts with which it deals;
+even in those cases in which, as in the tragedy of "King Lear," blind
+fate seems relentlessly sovereign over human affairs, the artist must
+disclose in his attitude and method a sustained energy of spirit.
+Nothing shows so clearly a decline in creative force as a loss of
+interest on the part of the artist in the subject or material with
+which he deals.
+
+That fresh bloom which lies on the very face of poetry, and in which
+not only its obvious but its enduring charm resides, is the expression
+of a feeling for nature, for life, and for the happenings which make
+up the common lot, which keeps its earliest receptivity and
+responsiveness. When a man ceases to care deeply for things, he ceases
+to represent or interpret them with insight and power. The
+preservation of feeling is, therefore, essential in all artistic work;
+and when it is lost, the artist becomes an echo or an imitation of his
+nobler self and work. It is the beautiful quality of the true art
+instinct that it constantly sees and feels the familiar world with a
+kind of childlike directness and delight. That which has become
+commonplace to most men is as full of charm and novelty to the artist
+as if it had just been created. He sees it with fresh eyes and feels
+it with a fresh heart. To such a spirit nothing becomes stale and
+hackneyed; everything remains new, fresh, and significant. It has
+often been said that if it were not for the children the world would
+lose the faith, the enthusiasm, the delight which constantly renew its
+spirit and reinforce its courage. A world grown old in feeling would
+be an exhausted world, incapable of production along spiritual or
+artistic lines. Now, the artist is always a child in the eagerness of
+his spirit and the freshness of his feeling; he retains the magical
+power of seeing things habitually, and still seeing them freshly. Mr.
+Lowell was walking with a friend along a country road when they came
+upon a large building which bore the inscription, "Home for Incurable
+Children." "They'll take me there some day," was the half-humorous
+comment of a sensitive man, to whom life brought great sorrows, but
+who retained to the very end a youthful buoyancy, courage, and faculty
+of finding delight in common things.
+
+It is a significant fact that the greatest men and women never lose
+the qualities which are commonly associated with youth,--freshness of
+feeling, zest for work, joy in life. Goethe at eighty-four studied the
+problems of life with the same deep interest which he had felt in them
+at thirty or forty; Tennyson's imagination showed some signs of waning
+power in extreme old age, but the magic of feeling was still fresh in
+his heart; Dr. Holmes carried his blithe spirit, his gayety and
+spontaneity of wit, to the last year of his life; and Mr. Gladstone at
+eighty-six was one of the most eager and aspiring men of his time.
+Genius seems to be allied to immortal youth; and in this alliance
+resides a large part of its power. For the man of genius does not
+demonstrate his possession of that rare and elusive gift by seeing
+things which have never been seen before, but by seeing with fresh
+interest what men have seen so often that they have ceased to regard
+it. Novelty is rarely characteristic of great works of art; on the
+contrary, the facts of life which they set before us are familiar, and
+the thoughts they convey by direct statement or by dramatic
+illustration have always been haunting our minds. The secret of the
+artist resides in the unwearied vitality which brings him to such
+close quarters with life, and endows him with directness of sight and
+freshness of feeling. Daisies have starred fields in Scotland since
+men began to plough and reap, but Burns saw them as if they had sprung
+from the ground for the first time; forgotten generations have seen
+the lark rise and heard the cuckoo call in England, but to Wordsworth
+the song from the upper sky and the notes from the thicket on the hill
+were full of the music of the first morning. Shakespeare dealt with
+old stories and constantly touched upon the most familiar things; but
+with what new interest he invests both theme and illustration! One may
+spend a lifetime in a country village, surrounded by people who are
+apparently entirely uninteresting; but if one has the eye of a
+novelist for the facts of life, the power to divine character, the
+gift to catch the turn of speech, the trick of voice, the peculiarity
+of manner, what resources, discoveries, and diversion are at hand! The
+artist never has to search for material; it is always at hand. That it
+is old, trite, stale to others, is of no consequence; it is always
+fresh and significant to him.
+
+This freshness of feeling is not in any way dependent on the character
+of the materials upon which it plays; it is not an irresponsible
+temperamental quality which seeks the joyful or comic facts of life
+and ignores its sad and tragic aspects. The zest of spirit which one
+finds in Shakespeare, for instance, is not a blind optimism
+thoughtlessly escaping from the shadows into the sunshine. On the
+contrary, it is drawn by a deep instinct to study the most perplexing
+problems of character, and to drop its plummets into the blackest
+abysses of experience. Literature deals habitually with the most
+sombre side of the human lot, and finds its richest material in those
+awful happenings which invest the history of every race with such
+pathetic interest; and yet literature, in its great moments, overflows
+with vitality, zest of spirit, freshness of spirit! There is no
+contradiction in all this; for the vitality which pervades great art
+is not dependent upon external conditions; it has its source in the
+soul of the artist. It is the immortal quality in the human spirit
+playing like sunshine on the hardest and most tragic facts of
+experience. It often suggests no explanation of these facts; it is
+content to present them with relentless veracity; but even when it
+offers no solution of the tragic problem, the tireless interest which
+it feels, the force with which it illustrates and describes, the power
+of moral organisation and interpretation which it reveals, carry with
+them the conviction that the spirit of man, however baffled and
+beaten, is superior to all the accidents of fortune, and
+indestructible even within the circle of the blackest fate. As
+OEdipus, old, blind, and smitten, vanishes from our sight, we think
+of him no longer as a great figure blasted by adverse fate, but as a
+great soul smitten and scourged, and yet still invested with the
+dignity of immortality. The dramatist, even when he throws no light on
+the ultimate solution of the problem with which he is dealing, feels
+so deeply and freshly, and discloses such sustained strength, that the
+vitality with which the facts are exhibited and the question stated
+affirms its superiority over all the adversities and catastrophes of
+fortune.
+
+This freshness of feeling, which is the gift of men and women of
+genius, must be possessed in some measure by all who long to get the
+most out of life and to develop their own inner resources. To retain
+zest in work and delight in life we must keep freshness of feeling.
+Its presence lends unfailing charm to its possessor; its loss involves
+loss of the deepest personal charm. It is essential in all genuine
+culture, because it sustains that interest in events, experience, and
+opportunity upon which growth is largely conditioned; and there is no
+more effective means of preserving and developing it than intimacy
+with those who have invested all life with its charm. The great books
+are reservoirs of this vitality. When our own interest begins to die
+and the world turns gray and old in our sight, we have only to open
+Homer, Shakespeare, Browning, and the flowers bloom again and the
+skies are blue; and the experiences of life, however tragic, are
+matched by a vitality which is sovereign over them all.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVI.
+
+Liberation from One's Time.
+
+
+The law of opposites under which men live is very strikingly brought
+out in the endeavour to secure a sound and intelligent adjustment to
+one's time,--a relation intimate and vital, and at the same time
+deliberately and judicially assumed. To be detached in thought,
+feeling, or action, from the age in which one lives, is to cut the
+ties that bind the individual to society, and through which he is very
+largely nourished and educated. To live deeply and really through
+every form of expression and in every relationship is so essential to the
+complete unfolding of the personality that he who falls below the full
+measure of his capacity for experience and for expression falls below the
+full measure of his possible growth. Life is not, as some men of detached
+moods or purely critical temper have assumed, a spectacle of which the
+secret can be mastered without sharing in the movement; it is rather a
+drama, the splendour of whose expression and the depth of whose meaning
+are revealed to those alone who share in the action. To stand aside from
+the vital movement and study life in a purely critical spirit is to miss
+the deeper education which is involved in the vital process, and to
+lose the fundamental revelation which is slowly and painfully disclosed
+to those whose minds and hearts are open to receive it. No one can
+understand love who has not loved and been loved; no one can comprehend
+sorrow who has not had the companionship of sorrow. The experiment has
+been made in many forms, but no one has yet been nourished by the fruit
+of the tree of knowledge who has eaten of that fruit alone. In the art
+of living, as in all the arts which illustrate and enrich living, the
+amateur and the dilettante have no real position; they never attain
+to that mastery of knowledge or of execution which alone give reality
+to a man's life or work. Mastery in any art comes to those only who
+give themselves without reservation or stint to their task; mastery
+in the supreme art of living is within reach of those only who live
+completely in every faculty and relation.
+
+To stand in the closest and most vital relation to one's time is,
+therefore, the first condition of comprehending one's age and getting
+from it what it has to give. But while a man must be in and with his
+time in the most vital sense, he must not be wholly of it. To get the
+vital enrichment which flows from identification with one's age, and
+at the same time to get the detachment which enables one to see his
+time in true relation to all time, is one of the problems which
+requires the highest wisdom for its solution. It is easy to become
+entirely absorbed in one's age, or it is easy to detach one's self
+from it, and study it in a cold and critical temper; but to get its
+warmth and vitality and escape its narrowing and limiting influence is
+so difficult that comparatively few men succeed in striking the
+balance between two divergent tendencies.
+
+A man gets power and knowledge from his time in the degree in which he
+suffers it to enlarge and vitalise him; he loses power and knowledge
+in the degree in which he suffers it to limit his vision and confine
+his interests. The Time Spirit is the greatest of our teachers so long
+as it is the interpreter of the Eternal Spirit; it is the most
+fallible and misleading of teachers when it attempts to speak for
+itself. The visible and material things by which we are surrounded are
+of immense helpfulness so long as they symbolise invisible and
+spiritual things; they become stones of stumbling and rocks of offence
+when they are detached from the spiritual order and set apart in an
+order of their own. The age in which we live affords a concrete
+illustration of the vital processes in society and means of contact
+with that society, but it is comprehensible and educative in the exact
+degree in which we understand its relation to other times. The
+impression which the day makes upon us needs to be tested by the
+impression which we receive from the year; the judgment of a decade
+must be corrected by the judgment of the century. The present hour is
+subtly illusive; it fills the whole stage, to the exclusion of the
+past and the present; it appears to stand alone, detached from all
+that went before or is to follow; it seems to be the historic moment,
+the one reality amid fleeting shadows. As a matter of fact, it is a
+logical product of the past, bound to it by ties so elusive that we
+cannot trace them, and so numerous and tenacious that we cannot sever
+them; it is but a fragment of a whole immeasurably greater than
+itself; its character is so completely determined by the past that the
+most radical changes we can make in it are essentially superficial;
+for it is the future, not the present, which is in our hands. To get
+even a glimpse of the character and meaning of our own time, we must,
+therefore, see it in relation to all time; to master it in any sense
+we must set it in its true historical relations. That which to the
+uneducated mind seems portentous is lightly regarded by the mind which
+sees the apparently isolated event in a true historic perspective;
+while the occurrence or condition which is barely noticed by the
+untrained, seen in the same perspective, becomes tragic in its
+prophecy of change and suffering. History is full of corrections of
+the mistaken judgments of the hour; and from the hate or adoration of
+contemporaries, the wise man turns to the clear-sighted and inexorable
+judgment of posterity. In the far-seeing vision of a trained
+intelligence the hour is never detached from the day, nor the day from
+the year; and the year is always held in its place in the century.
+
+Now, the man of culture has pre-eminently the gift of living deeply in
+his own age, and at the same time of seeing it in relation to all
+ages. It has no illusion for him; it cannot deceive him with its
+passionate acceptance or its equally passionate rejection. He sees the
+crown shining above the cross; he hears the long thunders of applause
+breaking in upon execrations which they will finally silence; he
+foresees the harvest in the seed that lies barely covered on the
+surface; and, afar off, his ear notes the final crash of that which at
+the moment seems to carry with it the assurance of eternal duration.
+Such a man secures the vitality of his time, but he escapes its
+limitation of vision by seeing it clearly and seeing it whole; he
+corrects the teaching of the time spirit by constant reference to the
+teaching of the Eternal Spirit imparted in the long training and the
+wide revelation of history. The day is beautiful and significant, or
+ominous and tragic, to him as it discloses its relation to the good or
+the evil of the years that are gone. And these vital associations,
+these deep historic connections, are brought to light with peculiar
+clearness in literature. Beyond all other means of enfranchisement,
+the book liberates a man from imprisonment within the narrow limits of
+his own time; it makes him free of all times. He lives in all periods,
+under all forms of government, in all social conditions; the mind of
+antiquity, of mediævalism, of the Renaissance, is as open to him as
+the mind of his own day, and so he is able to look upon human life in
+its entirety.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVII.
+
+Liberation from One's Place.
+
+
+The instinct which drives men to travel is at bottom identical with
+that which fills men with passionate desire to know what is in life.
+Time and strength are often wasted in restless change from place to
+place; but real wandering, however aimless in mood, is always
+education. To know one's neighbours and to be on good terms with the
+community in which one lives are the beginning of sound relations to
+the world at large; but one never knows his village in any real sense
+until he knows the world. The distant hills which seem to be always
+calling the imaginative boy away from the familiar fields and hearth
+do not conspire against his peace, however much they may conspire
+against his comfort; they help him to the fulfilment of his destiny by
+suggesting to his imagination the deeper experience, the richer
+growth, the higher tasks which await him in the world beyond the
+horizon. Man is a wanderer by the law of his life; and if he never
+leaves his home in which he is born, he never builds a home of his
+own.
+
+It is the law of life that a child should leave his father and
+separate himself from his inherited surroundings, in order that by
+self-unfolding and self-realisation he may substitute a conscious for
+an unconscious, a moral for an instinctive relation. The instinct of
+the myth-makers was sound when it led them to attach such importance
+to the wandering and the return; the separation effected in order that
+individuality and character might be realised through isolation and
+experience, the return voluntarily made through clear recognition of
+the soundness of the primitive relations, the beauty of the service of
+the older and wiser to the younger and the more ignorant. We are born
+into relations which we accept as normal and inevitable; we break away
+from them in order that by detachment we may see them objectively and
+from a distance, and that we may come to self-consciousness; we resume
+these relations of deliberate purpose and with clear perception of
+their moral significance. So the boy, grown to manhood, returns to his
+home from the world in which he has tested himself and seen for the
+first time, with clear eyes, the depth and beauty of its service in
+the spiritual order; so the man who has revolted from the barren and
+shallow dogmatic statement of a spiritual truth returns, in riper
+years and with a deeper insight, to the truth which is no longer
+matter of inherited belief but of vital need and perception.
+
+The ripe, mature, full mind not only escapes the limitation of the
+time in which it finds itself; it also escapes from the limitations of
+the place in which it happens to be. A man of deep culture cannot be a
+provincial; he must be a citizen of the world. The man of provincial
+tastes and ideas owns the acres; the man of culture commands the
+landscape. He knows the world beyond the hills; he sees the great
+movement of life from which the village seems almost shut out; he
+shares those inclusive experiences which come to each age and give
+each age a character of its own. He is in fellowship and sympathy with
+the smaller community at his doors, but he belongs also to that
+greater community which is coterminous with humanity itself. He is not
+disloyal to his immediate surroundings when he leaves them for
+exploration, travel, and discovery; he is fulfilling that law of life
+which conditions true valuation of that into which one is born upon
+clear perception of that which one must acquire for himself.
+
+The wanderings of individuals and races, which form so large a part of
+the substance of history, are witnesses of that craving for deeper
+experience and wider knowledge which is one of the springs of human
+progress. The American cares for Europe not for its more skilful and
+elaborate ministration to his comfort; he is drawn towards it through
+the appeal of its rich historic life to his imagination and through
+the diversity and variety of its social and racial phenomena. And in
+like manner the European seeks the East, not simply as a matter of
+idle curiosity, but because he finds in the East conditions which are
+set in such sharp contrast with those with which he is familiar. The
+instinct for expansion which gives human history its meaning and
+interest is constantly urging the man of sensitive mind to secure by
+observation that which he cannot get by experience.
+
+To secure the most complete development one must live in one's time
+and yet live above it, and one must also live in one's home and yet
+live, at the same time, in the world. The life which is bounded in
+knowledge, interest, and activity by the invisible but real and
+limiting walls of a small community is often definite in aim,
+effective in action, and upright in intention; but it cannot be rich,
+varied, generous, and stimulating. The life, on the other hand, which
+is entirely detached from local associations and tasks is often
+interesting, liberalising, and catholic in spirit; but it cannot be
+original or productive. A sound life--balanced, poised, and
+intelligently directed--must stand strongly in both local and
+universal relations; it must have the vitality and warmth of the
+first, and the breadth and range of the second.
+
+This liberation from provincialism is not only one of the signs of
+culture, but it is also one of its finest results; it registers a high
+degree of advancement. For the man who has passed beyond the
+prejudices, misconceptions, and narrowness of provincialism has gone
+far on the road to self-education. He has made as marked an advance on
+the position of the great mass of his contemporaries as that position
+is an advance on the earlier stages of barbarism. The barbarian lives
+only in his tribe; the civilised man, in the exact degree in which he
+is civilised, lives with humanity. Books are among the richest
+resources against narrowing local influences; they are the ripest
+expositions of the world-spirit. To know the typical books of the race
+is to be in touch with those elements of thought and experience which
+are shared by men of all countries. Without a knowledge of these books
+a man never really gets at the life of localities which are foreign to
+him; never really sees those historic places about which the
+traditions of civilisation have gathered. Travel is robbed of half its
+educational value unless one carries with him a knowledge of that
+which he looks at for the first time with his own eyes. No American
+sees England unless he carries England in his memory and imagination.
+Westminster Abbey is devoid of spiritual significance to the man who
+is ignorant of the life out of which it grew, and of the history which
+is written in its architecture and its memorials. The emancipation
+from the limitations of locality is greatly aided by travel, but it is
+accomplished only by intimate knowledge of the greater books.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVIII.
+
+The Unconscious Element.
+
+
+While it is true that the greatest books betray the most intimate
+acquaintance with the time in which they are written, and disclose the
+impress of that time in thought, structure, and style, it is also true
+that such books are so essentially independent of contemporary forms
+and moods that they largely escape the vicissitudes which attend those
+forms and moods. The element of enduring interest in them outweighs
+the accidents of local speech or provincial knowledge, as the force
+and genius of Cæsar survive the armor he wore and the language he
+spoke. A great book is a possession for all time, because a writer of
+the first rank is the contemporary of every generation; he is never
+outgrown, exhausted, or even old-fashioned, although the garments he
+wore may have been laid aside long ago.
+
+In this permanent quality, unchanged by changes of taste and form,
+resides the secret of that charm which draws about the great poets men
+and women of each succeeding period, eager to listen to words which
+thrilled the world when it was young, and which have a new meaning for
+every new age. It is safe to say that Homer will speak to men as long
+as language survives, and that translation will follow translation to
+the end of time. What Robinson said of the Bible in one of the great
+moments of modern history may be said of the greater works of
+literature: more light will always stream from them. Indeed, many of
+them will not be understood until they are read in the light of long
+periods of history; for as the great books are interpretations of
+life, so life in its historic revelation is one continuous commentary
+on the greater books.
+
+This preponderance of the permanent over the accidental or temporary
+in books of this class is largely due to the unconscious element which
+plays so great a part in them: the element of universal experience, in
+which every man shares in the exact degree in which, in mind and
+heart, he approaches greatness. It is idle to attempt to separate
+arbitrarily in Shakespeare, for instance, those elements in the poet's
+work which were deliberately introduced from those which went into it
+by the unconscious action of his whole nature; but no one can study
+the plays intelligently without becoming more and more clearly aware
+of those depths of life which moved in the poet before they moved in
+his work; which enlarged, enriched, and silently reorganised his view
+of life and his power of translating life out of individual into
+universal terms. It would be impossible, for instance, to write such a
+play as "The Tempest" by sheer force of intellect; in the creation of
+such a work there is involved, beyond literary skill, calculation, and
+deep study of the relation of thought to form, a ripeness of spirit, a
+clearness of insight, a richness of imagination, which are so much
+part of the very soul of the poet that he does not separate them in
+thought, and cannot consciously balance, adjust, and employ them. They
+are quite beyond his immediate control, as they are beyond all
+attempts to imitate them.
+
+Cleverness may learn all the forms and methods, but it is powerless to
+imitate greatness; it can simulate the conscious, dexterous side of
+greatness, but it cannot simulate the unconscious, vital side. The
+moment a man like Voltaire attempts to deal with such a character as
+Joan of Arc, his spiritual and artistic limitations become painfully
+apparent; of cleverness there is no lack, but of reverence, insight,
+depth of feeling, the affinity of the great imagination for the great
+nature or deed, there is no sign. The man is entirely and hopelessly
+incapacitated for the work by virtue of certain limitations in his own
+nature of which he is obviously in entire ignorance. The conscious
+skill of Voltaire was delicate, subtle, full of vitality; but the
+unconscious side of his nature was essentially shallow, thin, largely
+undeveloped; and it is the preponderance of the unconscious over the
+conscious in a man's life which makes him great in himself and equips
+him for work of the highest quality. No man can put his skill to the
+highest use and give his knowledge the final touch of individuality
+until both are so entirely incorporated in his personality that they
+have become part of himself.
+
+This deepest and most vital of all the processes of self-education and
+self-unfolding, which is brought to such perfection in men of the
+highest creative power, is the fundamental process of culture,--the
+chief method which every man uses, consciously or unconsciously, who
+brings his nature to complete ripeness of quality and power. The
+absorption of vital experience and knowledge which went on in
+Shakespeare enlarged and clarified his vision and insight to such a
+degree that both became not only searching, but veracious in a rare
+degree; life was opened to him on many sides by the expansion first
+accomplished in himself. This is saying again what has been said so
+many times, but cannot be said too often,--that, in order to give
+one's work a touch of greatness, a man must first have a touch of
+greatness in his own nature. But greatness is not an irresponsible and
+undirected growth; it is as definitely conditioned on certain
+obediences to intellectual discipline and spiritual law as is any kind
+of lesser skill conditioned on practice and work. One of these
+conditions is the development of the power to turn conscious processes
+of observation, emotion, and skill into unconscious processes; to
+enrich the nature below the surface, so to speak; to make the soil
+productive by making it deep and rich. Men of mere skill always stop
+short of this final process of self-development, and always stop short
+of those final achievements which sum up and express all that has been
+known or felt about a subject and give it permanent form; men of
+essential greatness take this last step in that higher education which
+makes one master of the force of his personality, and give his words
+and works universal range and perennial interest.
+
+Now, this is the deepest quality in the books of life, which a student
+may not only enjoy to the full, but may also absorb and make his own.
+When Alfred de Musset, in an oft-repeated phrase, said that it takes a
+great deal of life to make a little art, he was not only affirming the
+reality of this process of passing experience through consciousness
+into the unconscious side of a man's nature, but he was also hinting
+at one of the greatest resources of pleasure and growth. For time and
+life continually enrich the man who has learned the secret of turning
+experience and observation into knowledge and power. It is a secret in
+the sense in which every vital process is a secret; but it is not a
+trick, a skill, or a method which may be communicated in a formula.
+Mrs. Ward describes a character in one of her stories as having passed
+through a great culture into a great simplicity of nature; in other
+words, culture had wrought its perfect work, and the man had passed
+through wide and intensely self-conscious activity into the repose and
+simplicity of self-unconsciousness; his knowledge had become so
+completely a part of himself that he had ceased to be conscious of it
+as a thing distinct from himself. There is no easy road to this last
+height in the long and painful process of education; and time is an
+essential element in the process, because it is a matter of growth.
+
+There are, it is true, a few men and women who seem born with this
+power of living in the heart of things and possessing them in the
+imagination without having gone through the long and painful stages of
+preparatory education; but genius is not only inexplicable, it is also
+so rare that for the immense majority of men any effort to comprehend
+it must be purely academic. It is enough to know that if we are in any
+degree to share with men and women of genius the faculty of vision,
+insight, and creative energy, we must master the conditions which
+favor the development of those supreme gifts. There is laid,
+therefore, upon the student who wishes to get the vital quality of
+literature the necessity of repeating, by deliberate and intelligent
+design, the process which in so many of the masters of the arts has
+been, apparently, accomplished instinctively. To make observation,
+study, and experience part of one's spiritual and intellectual
+capital, it is, in the first place, necessary to saturate one's self
+with that which one is studying; to possess it by constant familiarity;
+to let the imagination play upon it; to meditate upon it. And
+it is necessary, in the second place, to make this practice habitual;
+when it becomes habitual, it will become largely unconscious: one does
+it by instinct rather than by deliberation. This process is
+illustrated in every successful attempt to master any art. In the art
+of speaking, for instance, the beginner is hampered by an embarrassing
+consciousness of his hands, feet, speech; he cannot forget himself and
+surrender himself to his thought or his emotion; he dare not trust
+himself. He must, therefore, train himself through mind, voice, and
+body; he must submit to constant and long-sustained practice, thinking
+out point by point what he shall say and how he shall say it. This
+process is, at the start, partly mechanical; in the nature of things
+it must be entirely within the view and control of a vigilant
+consciousness. But as the training progresses, the element of
+self-consciousness steadily diminishes, until, in great moments, the
+true orator, become one harmonious instrument of expression,
+surrenders himself to his theme, and his personality shines clear and
+luminous through speech, articulation, and gesture. The unconscious
+nature of the man subordinates his skill wholly to its own uses. In
+like manner, in every kind of self-expression, the student who puts
+imagination, vitality, and sincerity into the work of preliminary
+education, comes at last to full command of himself, and gives
+complete expression to that which is deepest and most individual in
+him. Time, discipline, study, and thought enrich every nature which is
+receptive and responsive.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIX.
+
+The Teaching of Tragedy.
+
+
+No characters appeal more powerfully to the imagination than those
+impressive figures about whom the literature of tragedy
+moves,--figures associated with the greatest passions and the most
+appalling sorrows. The well-balanced man, who rises step by step
+through discipline and work to the highest place of influence and
+power, is applauded and admired; but the heart of the world goes out
+to those who, like OEdipus, are overmatched by a fate which pursues
+with relentless step, or, like Hamlet, are overweighted with tasks too
+heavy or too terrible for them. Agamemnon, OEdipus, Orestes, Hamlet,
+Lear, Père Goriot, are supreme figures in that world of the
+imagination in which the poets have endeavoured both to reflect and to
+interpret the world as men see it and act in it.
+
+The essence of tragedy is the collision between the individual will,
+impulse, or action, and society in some form of its organisation, or
+those unwritten laws of life which we call the laws of God. The tragic
+character is always a lawbreaker, but not always a criminal; he is,
+indeed, often the servant of a new idea which sets him, as in the case
+of Giordano Bruno, in opposition to an established order of knowledge;
+he is sometimes, as in the case of Socrates, a teacher of truths which
+make him a menace to lower conceptions of citizenship and narrower
+ideas of personal life; or he is, as in the case of Othello and Paolo,
+the victim of passions which overpower the will and throw the whole
+life out of relation to its moral and social environment. The interest
+with which the tragic character is always invested is due not only to
+the exceptional experience in which the tragic situation always
+culminates, but also to the self-surrender which precedes the penalty
+and the expiation.
+
+There is a fallacy at the bottom of the admiration we feel when a rich
+nature throws restraint of any kind to the winds and gives itself up
+wholly to some impulse or passion,--the fallacy of supposing that by a
+violent break with existing conditions freedom can be secured; for the
+world loves freedom, even when it is too slothful or too cowardly to
+pay the price which it exacts. That admiration arises, however, from a
+sound instinct,--the instinct which makes us love both power and
+self-sacrifice, even when the first is ill-directed and the second
+wasted. The vast majority of men are content to do their work quietly
+and in obscurity, with no disclosure of originality, freshness, or
+force; they obey law, conform to custom, respect the conventionalities
+of their age; they appear to be lacking in representative quality;
+they are, apparently, the faithful and uninteresting drudges of
+society. There are, it is true, a host of commonplace persons, in
+every generation, who perform uninteresting tasks in a mechanical
+spirit; but it must not be inferred that a man is either craven or
+cowardly because he does not break from the circle in which he finds
+himself and make a bold and picturesque rush for freedom; it may be
+that freedom is to be won for him in the silent and faithful doing of
+the work which lies next him; it is certain that the highest power and
+the noblest freedom are secured, not by the submission which fears to
+fight, but by that which accepts the discipline for the sake of the
+mastery which is conditioned upon it.
+
+There are, however, conditions which no man can control, and which are
+in their nature essentially tragic; and men and women who are involved
+in these conditions cannot elude a fate for which they are not
+responsible and from which they cannot escape. This was true of many
+of the greatest characters in classical tragedy, and it is true also
+of many of the characters in modern tragedy. The world looks with
+bated breath on a struggle of the noblest heroism, in which men and
+women, matched against overwhelming social forces, bear their part
+with sublime and unfaltering courage, and by the completeness of their
+self-surrender assert their sovereignty even in the hour when disaster
+seems to crush and destroy them. To these striking figures, isolated
+by the greatness of their fate, the heart of the world has always gone
+out as to the noblest of its children. Solitary in the possession of
+some new conception of duty or of truth, separated from the mass of
+their fellows by that lack of sympathy which springs from imperfect
+comprehension of higher aims or deeper insight, these sublime
+strugglers against ignorance, prejudice, caste, and power, become the
+heroes and martyrs of the race; they announce the advent of new
+conceptions of social order and individual rights; they incarnate the
+imperishable soul of humanity in its long and terrible endeavour to
+bring the institutions and the ideas of men into harmony with a higher
+order of life.
+
+The tragic element has, therefore, many aspects,--sometimes lawless
+and destructive, sometimes self-sacrificing and instructive; but its
+illustration in literature in any form is not only profoundly
+interesting, but profoundly instructive as well. In no other literary
+form is the stuff of which life is made wrought into such commanding
+figures; in no other form are the deeper possibilities of life brought
+into such clear view; in no other form are the fundamental laws of
+life disclosed in a light at once so searching and so beautiful in its
+revealing power. If all the histories were lost and all the ethical
+discussions forgotten, the moral quality of life and the tremendous
+significance of character would find adequate illustration in the
+great tragedies. They lay bare the very heart of man under all
+historic conditions; they make us aware of the range of his
+experiences; they uncover the depths by which he is surrounded. They
+enable us to see, in lightning flashes, the undiscovered territory
+which incloses the little island on which we live; they light up the
+mysterious background of invisible forces against which we play our
+parts and work out our destiny.
+
+To the student of literature, who strives not only to enjoy but to
+comprehend, tragedy brings all the materials for a deep and genuine
+education. Instead of a philosophical or ethical statement of
+principles, it offers living illustration of ethical law as revealed
+in the greatest deeds and the most heroic experiences; it discloses
+the secret of the age which created it,--for in no other literary form
+are the fundamental conceptions of a period so deeply involved or so
+clearly set forth. The very springs of Greek character are uncovered
+in the Greek tragedies; and the tremendous forces liberated by the
+Renaissance are nowhere else so strikingly brought to light as in that
+group of tragedies which were produced in so many countries, by so
+many men, at the close of that momentous epoch. When literature runs
+mainly to the tragic form, it may be assumed that the spiritual force
+of the race has expressed itself afresh, and that a race, or a group
+of races, has passed through one of those searching experiences which
+bring men again face to face with the facts of life; for the
+production of tragedy involves thought of such depth, insight of such
+clearness, and imaginative power of such quality and range that it is
+possible, on a great scale, only when the springs of passion and
+action have been profoundly stirred. The appearance of tragedy marks,
+therefore, those moments when men manifest, without calculation or
+restraint, all the power that is in them; and into no other literary
+form is the vital force poured so lavishly. It is the instinctive
+recognition of this unveiling of the soul of man which gives the
+tragedy such impressiveness even when it is haltingly represented on
+the stage, and which subdues the imagination to its mood when the
+solitary reader comes under its spell. The life of the race is sacred
+in those great passages which record its sufferings; and nothing makes
+us so aware of our unity with our kind in all times and under all
+circumstances as the community of suffering in which, actively or
+passively, all men share.
+
+In the tragedy the student of literature is brought into the most
+intimate relation with his race in those moments when its deepest
+experiences are laid bare; he enters into its life when that life is
+passing through its most momentous passages; he is present in those
+hidden places where it confesses its highest hopes, reveals its most
+terrible passions, suffers its most appalling punishments, and passes
+on, through anguish and sacrifice, to its new day of thought and
+achievement.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XX.
+
+The Culture Element in Fiction.
+
+
+One of the chief elements in fiction which make for culture is,
+primarily, its disclosure of the elementary types of character and
+experience. A single illustration of this quality will suggest its
+presence in all novels of the first rank and its universal interest
+and importance. The aspirations, dreams, devotions, and sacrifices of
+men are as real as their response to self-interest or their tendency
+to the conventional and the commonplace; and they are, in the long
+run, a great deal more influential. They have wider play; they are
+more compelling; and they are of the very highest significance,
+because they spring out of that which is deepest and most distinctive
+in human nature. A host of men never give these higher impulses, these
+spiritual aptitudes and possibilities, full play; but they are in all
+men, and all men recognise them and crave an expression of them.
+Nothing is truer, on the lowest and most practical plane, than the old
+declaration that men do not live by bread alone; they sometimes exist
+on bread, because nothing better is to be had at the moment; but they
+live only in the full and free play of all their activities, in the
+complete expression not only of what is most pressing in interest and
+importance at a given time, but of that which is potential and
+possible at all times.
+
+The novel of romance and adventure has had a long history, and the
+elements of which it is compounded are recognisable long before they
+took the form of fiction. Two figures appear and reappear in the
+mythology of every poetic people,--the hero and the wanderer; the man
+who achieves and the man who experiences; the man who masters life
+by superiority of soul or body, and the man who masters it by
+completeness of knowledge. It is interesting and pathetic to find how
+universally these two figures held the attention and stirred the
+hearts of primitive men; how infinitely varied are their tasks, their
+perils, and their vicissitudes. They wear so many guises, they bear so
+many names, they travel so far and compass so much experience that it
+is impossible, in any interpretation of mythology, to escape the
+conviction that they were the dominant types in the thought of the
+myth-makers. And these earliest story-makers were not idle dreamers,
+entertaining themselves by endless manufacture of imaginary incidents,
+conditions, and persons. They were, on the contrary, the observers,
+the students, the scientists of their period; their endeavour was not
+to create a fiction, but to explain the world and themselves. Their
+observation was imperfect, and they made ludicrous mistakes of fact
+because they lacked both knowledge and training; but they made free
+use of the creative faculty, and there is, consequently, a good deal
+more truth in their daring guesses than in many of those provisional
+explanations of nature and ourselves which have been based too
+exclusively on scrutiny of the obvious fact, and indifference to the
+fact, which is not less a fact because it is elusive.
+
+The myth-makers endeavoured to explain the world, but that was only
+one-half of their endeavour; they attempted also to explain
+themselves. They discovered the striking analogies between certain
+natural phenomena or processes and the phenomena and processes of
+their own nature; they discovered the tasks and wanderings of the sun,
+and they perceived the singular resemblance of these tasks and
+wanderings to the happenings of their own lives. So the hero and the
+wanderer became subjective as well as objective, and symbolised what
+was deepest and most universal in human nature and human experience,
+as well as what was most striking in the external world. When
+primitive men looked into their hearts and their experience, they
+found their deepest hopes, longings, and possibilities bound up and
+worked out in two careers,--the career of the hero and the career of
+the wanderer.
+
+These two figures became the commanding types of all the nobler
+mythologies, because they symbolised what was best, deepest, and most
+real in human nature and life. They represent the possible reach and
+the occasional achievement of the human soul; they stand for that
+which is potential as well as for that which is actual in human
+experience. Few men achieve or experience on a great scale; but these
+few are typical, and are, therefore, transcendent in interest. The
+average commonplace man fills great space in contemporary history, as
+in the history of all times, and his character and career are well
+worth the closest study and the finest art of the writer; but the
+average man, who never achieves greatly, and to whom no striking or
+dramatic experience comes, has all the possibilities of action and
+suffering in his nature, and is profoundly interested in these more
+impressive aspects of life. Truth to fact is essential to all sound
+art, but absolute veracity involves the whole truth,--the truth of the
+exceptional as well as of the average experience; the truth of the
+imagination as well as of observation.
+
+The hero and the wanderer are still, and always will be, the great
+human types; and they are, therefore, the types which will continue to
+dominate fiction; disappearing at times from the stage which they may
+have occupied too exclusively, but always reappearing in due
+season,--the hero in the novel of romance, the wanderer in the novel
+of adventure. These figures are as constant in fiction as they were in
+mythology; from the days of the earliest Greek and Oriental stories to
+these days of Stevenson and Barrie, they have never lost their hold on
+the imagination of the race. When the sense of reality was feeble,
+these figures became fantastic, and even ridiculous; but this false
+art was the product of an unregulated, not of an illegitimate,
+exercise of the imagination; and while "Don Quixote" destroyed the old
+romance of chivalry, it left the instinct which produced that romance
+untouched. As the sense of reality becomes more exacting and more
+general, the action of the imagination is more carefully regulated;
+but it is not diminished, either in volume or in potency. Men have not
+lost the power of individual action because society has become so
+highly developed, and the multiplication of the police has not
+materially reduced the tragic possibilities of life. There is more
+accurate and more extensive knowledge of environment than ever before
+in the history of the race, but temperament, impulse, and passion
+remain as powerful as they were in primitive men; and tragedy finds
+its materials in temperament, impulse, and passion, much more
+frequently than in objective conditions and circumstances.
+
+The soul of man has passed through a great education, and has
+immensely profited by it; but its elemental qualities and forces
+remain unchanged. Two things men have always craved,--to come to close
+quarters with life, and to do something positive and substantial.
+Self-expression is the prime need of human nature; it must know, act,
+and suffer by virtue of its deepest instincts. The greater and richer
+that nature, the deeper will be its need of seeing life on many sides,
+of sharing in many kinds of experience, of contending with multiform
+difficulties. To drink deeply of the cup of life, at whatever cost,
+appears to be the insatiable desire of the most richly endowed men and
+women; and with such natures the impulse is to seek, not to shun,
+experience. And that which to the elect men and women of the race is
+necessary and possible is not only comprehensible to those who cannot
+possess it: it is powerfully and permanently attractive. There is a
+spell in it which the dullest mortal does not wholly escape.[1]
+
+    1. Reprinted in part, by permission, from the "Forum."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXI.
+
+Culture through Action.
+
+
+It is an interesting fact that the four men who have been accepted as
+the greatest writers who have yet appeared, used either the epic or
+the dramatic form. It can hardly have been accidental that Homer and
+Dante gave their greatest work the epic form, and that Shakespeare and
+Goethe were in their most fortunate moments dramatists. There must
+have been some reason in the nature of things for this choice of two
+literary forms which, differing widely in other respects, have this in
+common, that they represent life in action. They are very largely
+objective; they portray events, conditions, and deeds which have
+passed beyond the stage of thought and have involved the thinker in
+the actual historical world of vital relationships and dramatic
+sequence. The lyric poet may sing, if it pleases him, like a bird in
+the recesses of a garden, far from the noise and dust of the highway
+and the clamour of men in the competitions of trade and work; but the
+epic or dramatic poet must find his theme and his inspiration in the
+stir and movement of men in social relations. He deals, not with the
+subjective, but with the objective man; with the man whose dreams are
+no longer visions of the imagination, but are becoming incorporate in
+some external order; whose passions are no longer seething within him,
+but are working themselves out in vital consequences; whose thought is
+no longer purely speculative, but has begun to give form and shape to
+laws, habits, or institutions. It is the revelation of the human
+spirit in action which we find in the epic and the drama; the inward
+life working itself out in material and social relations; the soul of
+the man becoming, so to speak, externalised.
+
+The epic, as illustrated in the "Iliad" and "Odyssey," deals with a
+main or central movement in Greek tradition; a series of events which,
+by reason of their nature and prominence, imbedded themselves in the
+memory of the Greek race. These events are described in narrative
+form, with episodes, incidents, and dialogues, which break the long
+story and relax the strain of attention from time to time, without
+interrupting the progress of the narrative. There are heroes whose
+figures stand out in the long story with great distinctness, but we
+are interested much more in what they do than in what they are; for in
+the epic, character is subordinate to action. In the dramas of
+Shakespeare, on the other hand, while action is more constantly
+employed and is thrown into bolder relief, our deepest interest
+centres in the actors; the action is no longer the matter of first
+importance; it is significant mainly because it involves men and women
+not only in the chain of external consequences, but also in the order
+of spiritual sequences. We are deeply stirred by our perception of the
+intimate connection between the possibilities which lie sleeping in
+the individual life, and the tragic events which are set in motion
+when those possibilities are realised in action. In both epic and
+drama men are seen, not in their subjective moods, but in their
+objective struggles; not in the detachment of the life of speculation
+and imagination, but in vital association and relation with society in
+its order and institutions. With many differences, both of spirit and
+form, the epic and the drama are at one in portraying men in that
+ultimate and decisive stage which determines individual character and
+gives history its direction and significance.
+
+And it is from men in action that much of the deepest truth concerning
+life and character has come; indeed, it is not until we pass out of
+the region of the speculative, the merely potential, that the word
+"character" takes on that tremendous meaning with which thousands of
+years of actual happenings have invested it. A purely ideal world--a
+world fashioned wholly apart from the realities which convey definite,
+concrete revelations of what is in us and in our world--would
+necessarily be an unmoral world. The relationships which bind men
+together and give human intercourse such depth and richness spring
+into being only when they are actually entered upon; they could never
+be understood or foreseen in a world of pure thought; nor would it be
+possible, in such a world, to realise that reaction of the deed upon
+the doer which creates character, nor that far-reaching influence of
+the deed upon society, and the sequence of events which so often
+issues in tragedy and from which history derives its immense interest
+and meaning. A world which stopped short of realisation in action
+would not only lose the fathomless dramatic interest which inheres in
+human life, but it would part with all those moral implications of the
+integrity and persistence of the individual soul, its moral quality
+and its moral responsibility, which make man something different from
+the dust which whirls about him on the highway, or the stone over
+which he stumbles. This is precisely the character of those
+speculative systems which deny the reality of action and substitute
+the idea for the deed; such a world does more than suffocate the
+individual soul; it destroys the very meaning of life by robbing it of
+moral order and meaning. The end of such a conception of the universe
+is necessarily annihilation, and its mood is necessarily despair.
+
+"How can a man come to know himself?" asked Goethe. "Never by
+thinking, but by doing." Now, this knowledge of self in the large
+sense is precisely the knowledge which ripens and clarifies us, which
+gives us sanity, repose, and power. To know what is in humanity and
+what life means to humanity, we must study humanity in its active, not
+in its passive, moods; in the hours when it is doing, not thinking.
+Sooner or later all its thinking which has any reality in it passes on
+into action. The emotion, passion, thought, impulse, which never gets
+beyond the subjective stage, dies before birth; and all those
+philosophies which urge abstinence from action would cut the plant of
+life at the root; they are, in the last analysis, pleas for suicide.
+Men really live only as they freely express themselves through
+thought, emotion, and action. They get at the deepest truth and enter
+into the deepest relationships only as they act. Inaction involves
+something more than the disease and decay of certain faculties; it
+involves the deformity of arrested development, and failure to enter
+into that larger world of truth which is open to those races alone
+which live a whole life. It is for this reason that the drama must
+always hold the first place among those forms which the art of
+literature has perfected; it is for this reason that Homer, Dante,
+Shakespeare, and Goethe, consciously or unconsciously, chose those
+forms of expression which are specially adapted to represent and
+illustrate life in action; it is for this reason, among others, that
+these writers must always play so great a part in the work of
+educating the race. Culture is, above all things, real and vital;
+knowledge may deal with abstractions and unrelated bits of fact, but
+culture must always fasten upon those things which are significant in
+a spiritual order. It has to do with the knowledge which may become
+incorporate in a man's nature, and with that knowledge especially
+which has come to humanity through action. It is this deeper knowledge
+which holds a lighted torch aloft in the deepest recesses of the soul,
+or over those abysses of possible experience which open on all sides
+about every man, which is to be found in the pages of Homer, Dante,
+Shakespeare, and Goethe, and of all those great artists who have seen
+men in those decisive and significant moments when they strike into
+the movement of history, or, through their deeds and sufferings, the
+order of life suddenly shines forth.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXII.
+
+The Interpretation of Idealism.
+
+
+Idealism has so often been associated in recent years with vagueness
+of thought, slovenly construction, and a weak sentimentalism, that it
+has been discredited, even among those who have recognised the reality
+behind it and the great place it must hold in all rich and noble
+living. It is the misfortune of what is called Idealism, that, like
+other spiritual principles, it attracts those who mistake the longings
+of unintelligent discontent for aspiration, or the changing outlines
+of vapory fancies for the firm and consistent form and shape of real
+conceptions deeply realised in the imagination. Idealism has suffered
+much at the hands of feeble practitioners who have substituted
+irrational dreams for those far-reaching visions and those penetrating
+insights which are characteristic of its true use and illustration in
+the arts. The height of the reaction so vigorously and impressively
+illustrated in a great group of modern realistic works is due largely
+to the weakness and extravagance of the idealistic movement. When
+sentiment is exchanged for its corrupting counterfeit, sentimentalism,
+and clear and definite thinking gives place to vague and elusive
+emotions and fancies, reaction is not only inevitable but wholesome;
+the instinct for sanity in men will always prevent them from becoming
+mere dreamers and star-gazers.
+
+The true Idealist has his feet firmly planted on reality, and his
+idealism discloses itself not in a disposition to dream dreams and see
+visions, but in the largeness of a vision which sees realities in the
+totality of their relations and not merely in their obvious and
+superficial relations. It is a great mistake to discern in men nothing
+more substantial than that movement of hopes and longings which is so
+often mistaken for aspiration; it is equally a mistake to discern in
+men nothing more enduring and aspiring than the animal nature; either
+report, standing by itself, would be fundamentally untrue. Man is an
+animal; but he is an animal with a soul, and the sane view of him
+takes both body and soul into account. The defect of a good deal of
+current Realism lies in its lack of veracity; it is essentially
+untrue, and it is, therefore, fundamentally unreal. The love of truth,
+the passion for the fact, the determination to follow life wherever
+life leads, are noble, artistic instincts, and have borne noble fruit;
+but what is often called Realism has suffered quite as much as
+Idealism from weak practitioners, and stands quite as much in need of
+rectification and restatement.
+
+The essence of Idealism is the application of the imagination to
+realities; it is not a play of fancy, a golden vision arbitrarily
+projected upon the clouds and treated as if it had an objective
+existence. Goethe, who had such a vigorous hold upon the realities of
+existence, and who had also an artist's horror of mere abstractions,
+touched the heart of the matter when he defined the Ideal as the
+completion of the real. In this simple but luminous statement he
+condensed the faith and practice not only of the greater artists of
+every age, but of the greater thinkers as well. In the order of life
+there can be no real break between things as they now exist and things
+as they will exist in the remotest future; the future cannot
+contradict the present, nor falsify it; for the future must be the
+realisation of the full possibilities of the present. The present is
+related to it as the seed is related to the flower and fruit in which
+its development culminates. There are vast changes of form and
+dimension between the seed and the tree hanging ripe with fruit, but
+there is no contradiction between the germ and its final unfolding.
+
+A rigid Realism, however, sees in the seed nothing but its present
+hardness, littleness, ugliness; a true and rational Idealism sees all
+these things, but it sees also not only appearances but
+potentialities; or, to recall another of Goethe's phrases, it sees the
+object whole.
+
+To see life clearly and to see it whole is not only to see distinctly
+the obvious facts of life, but to see these facts in sequence and
+order; in other words, to explain and interpret them. The power to do
+this is one of the signs of a great imagination; and, other things
+being equal, the rank of a work of art may, in the last analysis, be
+determined by the clearness and veracity with which explanation and
+interpretation are suggested. Homer is, for this reason, the foremost
+writer of the Greek race. He is wholly free from any purpose to give
+ethical instruction; he is absolutely delivered from the temptation to
+didacticism; and yet he reveals to us the secret of the temperament
+and genius of his race. And he does this because he sees in his race
+the potentialities of the seed; the vitality, beauty, fragrance, and
+growth which lie enfolded in its tiny and unpromising substance. If
+the reality of a thing is not so much its appearance as the totality
+of that which is to issue out of it, then nothing can be truly seen
+without the use of the imagination. All that the Idealist asks is that
+life shall be seen not only with his eyes but with his imagination.
+His descriptions are accurate, but they are also vital; they give us
+the thing not only as it looked standing by itself, but as it appeared
+in the complete life of which it was a part; he makes us see the
+physical side of the fact with great distinctness, but he makes us see
+its spiritual side as well. As a result, there is left in our minds by
+the intelligent reading of Homer a clear impression of the spiritual,
+political, and social aptitudes and characteristics of the Greek
+people of his age,--an impression which no exact report of mere
+appearances could have conveyed; an impression which is due to the
+constant play of the poet's imagination upon the facts with which he
+is dealing.
+
+This is true Idealism; but it is also true Realism. It is not only the
+fact, but the truth. The fact may be observed, but the truth must be
+discerned by insight,--it is not within the range of mere observation;
+and it is this insight, this discernment of realities in their
+relation to the whole order of things, which characterises true
+Idealism, and which makes all the greater writers Idealists in the
+fundamental if not in the technical sense. Tolstoi has often been
+called a Realist by those who are eager to label everything and
+everybody succinctly; but Tolstoi is one of the representative
+Idealists of his time, and his "Master and Man" is one of the most
+touching and sincere bits of true Idealism which has been given the
+world for many a day.
+
+There is nothing which needs such constant reinforcement as this
+faculty of seeing things in their totality; for we are largely at the
+mercy of the hour unless we invoke the aid of the imagination to set
+the appearances of the moment in their large relations. To the man who
+sees things as they rush like a stream before him, there is no order,
+progression, or intelligent movement in human affairs; but to the
+student who brings to the study of current events wide and deep
+knowledge of the great historic movements, these apparently unrelated
+phenomena disclose the most intimate inter-relations and connections.
+The most despairing pessimism would be born in the heart of the man
+who should be fated to see to-day apart from yesterday and to-morrow;
+a rational and inspiring hope may be born in the soul of the man who
+sees the day as part of the year and the year as part of the century.
+The great writers are a refuge from the point of view of the moment,
+because they set the events of life in a fundamental order, and make
+us aware of the finer potentialities of our race. They are Idealists
+in the breadth of their vision and the nobility of the interpretation
+of events which they offer us.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXIII.
+
+The Vision of Perfection.
+
+
+These writers are also, by virtue of the faculty of discerning the
+interior relations of appearances and events, the expositors of that
+ultimate Idealism which not only discovers the possibility of the
+whole in the parts, of the perfect in the imperfect, but which
+discovers the whole, the complete and the perfect, and brings each
+before us in some noble form. The reality of the Ideal as Plato saw it
+is by no means universally accepted as a philosophical conclusion, but
+all high-minded men and women accept it as a rule of life. Idealism is
+wrought into the very fibre of the race, and is as indestructible as
+the imagination in which it has its roots. Deep in the heart of
+humanity lies the unshakable faith in its essential divinity, and in
+the reality of its highest hopes of development and attainment. The
+failure of noble schemes, the decline of enthusiasms, the fading of
+visions and dreams which seemed to have the luminous constancy of
+fixed stars, breed temporary depressions and passing moods of
+scepticism and despair; but the spiritual vitality of the race always
+reasserts itself, and faith returns after every disaster or
+disillusion.
+
+Indeed, as the race grows older and masters more and more a knowledge
+of its conditions, the impression of the essential greatness of the
+experience we call life deepens in the finer spirits. It becomes clear
+that the end towards which the hopes of the world have always moved is
+farther off than it seemed to the earlier generations; that the
+process of spiritual and social evolution is longer and more painful;
+that the universe is vaster and more wonderful than the vision of it
+which formed in the imagination of thinkers and poets; in a word, that
+the education which is being imparted to humanity by the very
+structure of the conditions under which it lives grows more severe,
+prolonged, and exacting as its methods and processes become more
+clear. The broadening of the field of observation has steadily
+deepened the impression of the magnitude and majesty of the physical
+order by which men are surrounded; and the fuller knowledge of what is
+in human experience has steadily deepened the impression of the almost
+tragic greatness of the lot of men. The disappointments of the race
+have been largely due to its inadequate conception of its own
+possibilities; its disillusions have been like the fading of the
+mirage which simulates against the near horizon that which lies long
+leagues away. These disappointments and disillusions, as Browning saw
+clearly, are essential parts of an education which leads the race step
+by step from smaller to larger ideas, from nearer and easier to more
+remote and difficult attainments.
+
+The disappointment which comes with the completion of every piece of
+work well and wisely done does not arise from the futility of the
+work, as the pessimists tell us, but from its inadequacy to express
+entirely the thought and force of the man who has striven to express
+himself completely in a material which, however masterfully used, can
+never give its ultimate form to a spiritual conception. It is not an
+evidence of failure, but a prophecy of greater achievement. A world in
+which the work was as great as the worker, the piece of art as the
+artist, would be a finished world in more senses than one; a world in
+which all work is inadequate to contain the energy of the worker, all
+art insufficient to express the soul of the artist, is necessarily a
+prophetic world, bearing witness to the presence of a creative force
+in workers and artists immeasurably beyond the capacity of any
+perishable material to receive or to preserve.
+
+A rational Idealism is, therefore, not only indestructible in a race
+which does not violate the laws of life, but is instilled into the
+higher order of minds by the order of life as revealed by science,
+history, and the arts. And this idealistic tendency is not only the
+poetic temper; it is the hope and safeguard of society. The real
+perils of the race are not material; they are always spiritual; and no
+peril could be greater than the loss of faith and hope in the
+possibility of attaining the best things. If men are ever bereft of
+their instinctive or rational conviction that they have the power
+ultimately to bring institutions of all kinds into harmony with their
+higher conceptions, they will sink into the lethargy of despair or the
+slough of sensualism. The belief in the reality of the Ideal in
+personal and social life is not only the joy and inspiration of the
+poet and thinker; it is also the salvation of the race. It is
+imperishable, because it is the product of the play of the imagination
+on the realities of life; and until the imagination perishes, the
+vision of the ultimate perfection will form and reform in the heart of
+every generation. It is the inspiration of every art, the end of every
+noble occupation, the secret hope of every fine character.
+
+Idealism in this sense, not as the product of an easy and ignorant
+optimism turning away from the facts of life, but as the product of a
+large and spiritual dealing with those facts, is the very soul, not
+only of noble living, but of those noble expressions of life which the
+greater writers have given us. They disclose wide diversity of gifts,
+but they have this in common,--that, in discovering to us the
+spiritual order of the facts of life, they disclose also those ideal
+figures which the race accepts as embodiments of its secrets, hopes,
+and aims. It is a significant fact that, in portraying the Greek of
+his time, Homer has given us also the ideal Greek and the Greek
+ideals. His insight went to the soul of the persons he described, and
+he struck into that spiritual order in which the ideal is not only a
+reality, but, in a sense, the only reality.
+
+Cervantes, in the very act of destroying a false Idealism,
+conventionally conceived and treated, made one of the most beautiful
+revelations of a true Idealism which the world has yet received.
+Shakespeare's presentation of the facts of life is, on the whole, the
+most comprehensive and impressive which has yet been made; in the
+disclosure of tragic elements it is unsurpassed; and yet what a host of
+ideal figures move through the plays and invest them with a light
+beyond the glow of art! In the Forest of Arden and on Prospero's
+Island there live, beyond the touch of time and the vicissitudes of
+fate, those gracious and beautiful spirits in whom the race sees its
+noblest hopes come true, its instinctive faith in itself justified.
+These spirits are not airy nothings, woven of the unsubstantial
+gossamer of which dreams are made; they are born of a deep insight
+into the possibilities of the soul, and a rational faith in their
+reality. Prospero is as real as Trinculo, and Rosalind as true as
+Cressida. These ideal persons are not necessarily fortunate in their
+surroundings or happy in their lot; they are simply perfect in their
+development of a type. They are not abnormal beings, rising above
+normal conditions; they are normal beings, rising above abnormal
+conditions. They stand for wholeness amid fragments, for perfection
+amid imperfection; but the very imperfection and fragmentariness by
+which they are surrounded predicts their coming and affirms their
+reality.
+
+In the rounded and developed nature there must be a deep vein of the
+Idealism which grows out of the vision of things in their large
+relations--out of a view of men ample enough to discern not only what
+they are at this stage of development, but what they may become when
+development has been completed. Nothing is more essential than the
+courage, the joy, and the insight which grow out of such an Idealism,
+and no spiritual possession is more easily lost. The spiritual
+depression of a reactionary period, the routine of work, the immersion
+in the stream of events, the decline of moral energy, conspire to
+blight this noble use of the imagination, and to chill the faith which
+makes creative living and working possible. The familiar companionship
+of the great Idealists is one of the greatest resources against the
+paralysis of this faith and the decay of this faculty.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXIV.
+
+Retrospect.
+
+
+The books of four great writers have been used almost exclusively by
+way of illustration throughout this discussion of the relation of
+books to culture. This limited selection may have seemed at times too
+narrow and rigid; it may have conveyed an impression of insensibility
+to the vast range and the great variety of literary forms and
+products, and of indifference to contemporary writing. It needs to be
+said, therefore, that the constant reference to Homer, Dante,
+Shakespeare, and Goethe has been made for the sake of clearness and
+force of illustration, and not, in any sense, as applying an exclusive
+principle of selection. The books of life are to be found in every
+language, and are the product of almost every age; and no one attains
+genuine culture who does not, through them, make himself familiar with
+the life of each successive generation. To be ignorant of the thought
+and art of one's time involves a narrowness of intelligence which is
+inconsistent with the maturity of taste and ripeness of nature which
+have been emphasised in these chapters as the highest and finest
+fruits of culture. The more generous a man's culture becomes, the more
+catholic becomes his taste and the keener his insight. The man of
+highest intelligence will be the first to recognise the fresh touch,
+the new point of view, the broader thought. He will bring to the books
+of his own time not only a trained instinct for sound work, but a deep
+sympathy with the latest effort of the human spirit to express itself
+in new forms. So deep and real will be his feeling for life that he
+will be eager to understand and possess every fresh manifestation of
+that life. However novel and unconventional the new form may be, it
+will not make its appeal to him in vain.
+
+It remains true, however, that literature is a universal art,
+expressive and interpretative of the spirit of humanity, and that no
+man can make full acquaintance with that spirit who fails to make
+companionship with its greatest masters and interpreters. The appeal
+of contemporary books is so constant and urgent that it stands in
+small need of emphasis; but the claims of the rich and splendid
+literature of the past are often slighted or ignored. The supreme
+masters of an art ought to be the objects of constant study and
+thought; there is more of life, truth, and beauty in them than in
+their fellow-artists of narrower range of experience and artistic
+achievement. For this reason these greatest interpreters of the human
+spirit are in no sense exclusively of the past; they are of the
+present and the future. To know them is not only to know the
+particular periods in which they wrote, but to know our own period in
+the deepest sense. No man can better prepare himself to enter into the
+formative life of his time than by thoroughly familiarising himself
+with the greatest books of the past; for in these are revealed, not
+the secrets of past forms of life, but the secrets of that spirit
+whose historic life is one unbroken revelation of its nature and
+destiny. It is, therefore, no disparagement of the great company of
+writers who have been the secretaries of the race in all ages to
+fasten attention upon the claims of the four men of genius whom the
+world has accepted as the supreme masters of the art of literature,
+and to point out again the immense importance of their works in the
+educational life of the individual and of society.
+
+It cannot be said too often that literature is the product of the
+continuous spiritual activity of the race; that it cannot be
+arbitrarily divided into periods save for mere convenience of
+arrangement; and that it is impossible to understand and value its
+latest products unless one is able to find their place and discern
+their value in the order of a spiritual development. To secure an
+adequate impression of this highest expression of the human spirit one
+must keep in view the work of the past quite as definitely as the work
+of the present; in such a broad survey there is a constant deliverance
+from the rashness of contemporary judgments, and from that narrowness
+of feeling which limits one's vital contact with the life of the race
+to the products of a single brief period.
+
+In any attempt to indicate the fundamental significance of the art of
+literature in the educational development of the individual and of
+society there must also be a certain repetition of idea and of
+illustration. This limitation, if it be a limitation, is inherent in
+the very nature of the undertaking. Literature is, for purposes of
+comment and exposition, practically inexhaustible; its themes are as
+varied and as numerous as the objects upon which the mind can fasten
+and about which the imagination can play. But while its forms and
+products are almost without number, this magnificent growth has, in
+the last analysis, a single root, and in these brief chapters the
+endeavour has been made, very inadequately, to bring the mind to this
+deep and hidden unity of life and art. Information, instruction,
+delight, flow in a thousand rivulets from as many books, but there is
+a spring of life which feeds all these separate streams. From that
+unseen source flows the vitality which has given power and freshness
+to a host of noble works; from that source vitality also flows into
+every mind open to its incoming. A rich intellectual life is
+characterised not so much by profusion of ideas as by the application
+of a few formative ideas to life; not so much by multiplicity of
+detached thoughts as by the habit of thinking. The genius of Carlyle
+is evidenced not by prodigal growth of ideas, but by an impressive
+interpretation of life through the application to all its phenomena of
+a few ideas of great depth and range. And this is true of all the
+great writers who have given us fresh views of life from some central
+and commanding height rather than a succession of glimpses or outlooks
+from a great number of points. The closer the approach to the central
+force behind any course of development, the fewer in number are the
+elements involved. The rootage of literature in the spiritual nature
+and experience of the race is the fundamental fact not only in the
+history of this rich and splendid art, but in its relation to culture.
+From this rootage flows the vitality which imparts immortality to its
+noblest products, and which supplies an educational element unrivalled
+in its enriching and enlarging quality.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Books and Culture, by Hamilton Wright Mabie
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Books and Culture, by Hamilton Wright Mabie.
+</title>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Books and Culture, by Hamilton Wright Mabie
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Books and Culture
+
+Author: Hamilton Wright Mabie
+
+Release Date: September 23, 2005 [EBook #16736]
+[Date last updated: October 8, 2005]
+
+Language: English
+
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+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BOOKS AND CULTURE ***
+
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+Produced by Alicia Williams and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
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+
+</pre>
+
+<h1>
+BOOKS AND CULTURE
+</h1>
+<p>
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+<h4>
+By
+</h4>
+<h2>
+HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE
+</h2>
+<p class="ctr">
+<img src="images/001.jpg" alt="Decoration" width="50" height="50">
+</p>
+<h4>
+NEW YORK: PUBLISHED BY
+<br>
+DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
+</h4>
+<h4>
+MDCCCCVII
+</h4>
+<h4>
+<i>
+Copyright, 1896</i>,
+</h4>
+<h4>
+<span class="sc">
+By Dodd, Mead and Company</span>,
+<br>
+<i>
+All rights reserved</i>.
+</h4>
+<h4>
+University Press:
+<br>
+<span class="sc">
+John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A.
+</span>
+</h4>
+<p>
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+<h4>
+To
+</h4>
+<h3>
+EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
+</h3>
+<hr class="med">
+<p>
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+<h3>
+CONTENTS
+</h3>
+<ul class="nameofchapter">
+<li>
+CHAPTER<span class="ralign">PAGE
+</span>
+</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="TOC">
+<li>
+MATERIAL AND METHOD<span class="ralign"><a href="#7">7
+</a>
+</span>
+</li>
+<li>
+TIME AND PLACE<span class="ralign"><a href="#20">20
+</a>
+</span>
+</li>
+<li>
+MEDITATION AND IMAGINATION<span class="ralign"><a href="#34">34
+</a>
+</span>
+</li>
+<li>
+THE FIRST DELIGHT<span class="ralign"><a href="#51">51
+</a>
+</span>
+</li>
+<li>
+THE FEELING FOR LITERATURE<span class="ralign"><a href="#63">63
+</a>
+</span>
+</li>
+<li>
+THE BOOKS OF LIFE<span class="ralign"><a href="#74">74
+</a>
+</span>
+</li>
+<li>
+FROM THE BOOK TO THE READER<span class="ralign"><a href="#85">85
+</a>
+</span>
+</li>
+<li>
+BY WAY OF ILLUSTRATION<span class="ralign"><a href="#95">95
+</a>
+</span>
+</li>
+<li>
+PERSONALITY<span class="ralign"><a href="#109">109
+</a>
+</span>
+</li>
+<li>
+LIBERATION THROUGH IDEAS<span class="ralign"><a href="#121">121
+</a>
+</span>
+</li>
+<li>
+THE LOGIC OF FREE LIFE<span class="ralign"><a href="#132">132
+</a>
+</span>
+</li>
+<li>
+THE IMAGINATION<span class="ralign"><a href="#143">143
+</a>
+</span>
+</li>
+<li>
+BREADTH OF LIFE<span class="ralign"><a href="#154">154
+</a>
+</span>
+</li>
+<li>
+RACIAL EXPERIENCE<span class="ralign"><a href="#165">165
+</a>
+</span>
+</li>
+<li>
+FRESHNESS OF FEELING<span class="ralign"><a href="#174">174
+</a>
+</span>
+</li>
+<li>
+LIBERATION FROM ONE'S TIME<span class="ralign"><a href="#185">185
+</a>
+</span>
+</li>
+<li>
+LIBERATION FROM ONE'S PLACE<span class="ralign"><a href="#195">195
+</a>
+</span>
+</li>
+<li>
+THE UNCONSCIOUS ELEMENT<span class="ralign"><a href="#204">204
+</a>
+</span>
+</li>
+<li>
+THE TEACHING OF TRAGEDY<span class="ralign"><a href="#217">217
+</a>
+</span>
+</li>
+<li>
+THE CULTURE ELEMENT IN FICTION<span class="ralign"><a href="#229">229
+</a>
+</span>
+</li>
+<li>
+CULTURE THROUGH ACTION<span class="ralign"><a href="#239">239
+</a>
+</span>
+</li>
+<li>
+THE INTERPRETATION OF IDEALISM<span class="ralign"><a href="#250">250
+</a>
+</span>
+</li>
+<li>
+THE VISION OF PERFECTION<span class="ralign"><a href="#260">260
+</a>
+</span>
+</li>
+<li>
+RETROSPECT<span class="ralign"><a href="#271">271
+</a>
+</span>
+</li>
+</ul>
+<hr class="long">
+<p class="chapter">
+<a name="7">
+Chapter I.
+</a>
+</p>
+<p class="chaptertitle">
+Material and Method.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 medi&#230;val frame-work upon
+which Dante constructed the &#34;Divine Comedy&#34; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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, &#34;Shall I take account of
+them?&#34; but &#34;How shall I get the most and the best out of them
+for my enrichment and guidance?&#34;
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+The word love in this connection is significant of a very definite
+attitude toward books,&mdash;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,&mdash;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&mdash;the man who penetrates the secret of a work of
+art&mdash;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 &#34;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.&#34;
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+That goal, in Goethe's thought, was the complete development of the
+individual life through thought, feeling, and action,&mdash;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 &#34;culture,&#34; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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,&mdash;the greatest
+service that can be rendered us&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+<p class="chapter">
+<a name="20">
+Chapter II.
+</a>
+</p>
+<p class="chaptertitle">
+Time and Place.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &#34;short cuts.&#34; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+It is not wealth of time, but what Mr. Gladstone has aptly called
+&#34;thrift of time,&#34; 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. &#34;The thrift of time,&#34; says the English
+statesman, &#34;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.&#34;
+And Matthew Arnold has put the same truth into words which touch the
+subject in hand still more closely: &#34;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.&#34; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &#34;take time by the forelock&#34; 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,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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. &#34;Shall I tell you the
+secret of the true scholar?&#34; says Emerson. &#34;It is this: every
+man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of
+him.&#34;
+</p>
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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,&mdash;not only the book, but the repose.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &#34;Tempest&#34; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+<p class="chapter">
+<a name="34">
+</a>
+Chapter III.
+</p>
+<p class="chaptertitle">
+Meditation and Imagination.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+&#34;Chronicles&#34; 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 C&#230;sar. 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &#34;Divine Comedy,&#34; 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. &#34;Still studying Dante?&#34; said the intruder into the
+workshop of as true a man of culture as we have known on this
+continent. &#34;Yes,&#34; was the prompt reply; &#34;always studying
+Dante.&#34;
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &#34;The Tempest,&#34; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &#34;The Tempest;&#34; 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 &#34;Epithalamium&#34; 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 &#34;Spectator&#34; and
+turned them into verse; &#34;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.&#34; 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 &#34;My Last Duchess,&#34; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+<p class="chapter">
+<a name="51">
+Chapter IV.
+</a>
+</p>
+<p class="chaptertitle">
+The First Delight.
+</p>
+<p>
+&#34;We were reading Plato's Apology in the Sixth Form,&#34; says Mr.
+Symonds in his account of his school life at Harrow. &#34;I bought
+Cary's crib, and took it with me to London on an <i>exeat</i>
+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 'Ph&#230;drus.' 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 'Ph&#230;drus' 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.&#34; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;not the mere
+structure&mdash;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,&mdash;they are most
+delicate and characteristic disclosures of its life. In like manner he
+who would master &#34;As You Like It&#34; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &#34;As You Like It&#34; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+<p class="chapter">
+<a name="63">
+Chapter V.
+</a>
+</p>
+<p class="chaptertitle">
+The Feeling for Literature.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 zoölogy; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+&#34;Yes,&#34; answered the poet in substance, &#34;I carefully
+observed all those rules and was entirely unconscious of them!&#34;
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+<p class="chapter">
+<a name="74">
+Chapter VI.
+</a>
+</p>
+<p class="chaptertitle">
+The Books of Life.
+</p>
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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,&mdash;the books of life.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &#34;Iliad&#34; and
+&#34;Odyssey,&#34; the &#34;Divine Comedy,&#34; the plays of
+Shakespeare, and &#34;Faust&#34; have set new movements in motion and
+have enriched and enlarged the lives of races.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+<p class="chapter">
+<a name="85">
+Chapter VII.
+</a>
+</p>
+<p class="chaptertitle">
+From the Book to the Reader.
+</p>
+<p>
+The study which has found its material and its reward in Dante's
+&#34;Divine Comedy&#34; or in Goethe's &#34;Faust&#34; 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 &#34;Faust&#34; and
+the &#34;Divine Comedy&#34; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &#34;a
+life beyond life.&#34;
+</p>
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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 &#34;Divine Comedy&#34; and &#34;Faust&#34; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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 &#34;Master and Man,&#34; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+<p class="chapter">
+<a name="95">
+Chapter VIII.
+</a>
+</p>
+<p class="chaptertitle">
+By Way of Illustration.
+</p>
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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:&mdash;
+</p>
+<p class="quote">
+&#34;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 
+<i>Kourotrophos</i>, 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.&#34;
+</p>
+<p>
+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:&mdash;
+</p>
+<p class="quote">
+&#34;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.&#34;
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+<p class="chapter">
+<a name="109">
+Chapter IX.
+</a>
+</p>
+<p class="chaptertitle">
+Personality.
+</p>
+<p>
+&#34;It is undeniable,&#34; says Matthew Arnold, &#34;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.&#34; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;which is the heavy penalty of the artistic
+temperament&mdash;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 &#34;Divine
+Comedy&#34; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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 &#34;Faust&#34; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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 &#34;Dialogues,&#34; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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,&mdash;these things are as much and as great a part of the
+&#34;Dialogues&#34; 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 &#34;Dialogues&#34; with his
+heart as well as with his mind comes into personal relations with the
+richest mind of antiquity.
+</p>
+<p>
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+<p class="chapter">
+<a name="121">
+Chapter X.
+</a>
+</p>
+<p class="chaptertitle">
+Liberation through Ideas.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+Culture rests on ideas rather than on knowledge; its distinctive use
+of knowledge is to gain material for ideas. For this reason the
+&#34;Iliad&#34; and &#34;Odyssey&#34; 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,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+<p class="chapter">
+<a name="132">
+Chapter XI.
+</a>
+</p>
+<p class="chaptertitle">
+The Logic of Free Life.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+&#34;The thought that makes the work of art,&#34; says Mr. John La
+Farge in a discussion of the art of painting of singular insight and
+intelligence, &#34;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
+<i>logic of free life, which is the logic of art</i>, 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.&#34; 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,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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,&mdash;not things in isolation and detachment. Mr. La Farge will
+pardon further quotation; he admirably states this great truth when he
+says that &#34;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.&#34; 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.
+&#34;In any museum,&#34; says Mr. La Farge, &#34;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.&#34;
+</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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 &#34;logic of free life.&#34;
+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 <i>by</i> the remnant, as Matthew Arnold
+held; it is saved
+<i>
+through
+</i>
+the remnant. The elect of the race, its prophets, teachers,
+artists,&mdash;and every great artist is also a prophet and
+teacher,&mdash;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 &#34;Iliad&#34; and the &#34;Odyssey&#34; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+<p class="chapter">
+<a name="143">
+Chapter XII.
+</a>
+</p>
+<p class="chaptertitle">
+The Imagination.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Lady of Shalott, sitting in her tower, looked into her magic
+mirror and saw the whole world go by,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+&#34;Iliad&#34; and the &#34;Odyssey&#34; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+<p class="chapter">
+<a name="154">
+Chapter XIII.
+</a>
+</p>
+<p class="chaptertitle">
+Breadth of Life.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+Society is full of provincialism in art, politics, religion, and
+economics; and the essence of this provincialism is always the
+same,&mdash;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,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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. P&#232;re 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+<p class="chapter">
+<a name="165">
+Chapter XIV.
+</a>
+</p>
+<p class="chaptertitle">
+Racial Experience.
+</p>
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+No man can read &#34;In Memoriam&#34; or &#34;The Ring and the
+Book&#34; 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 Tourgu&#233;neff 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 &#34;Anna Kar&#233;nina&#34; 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,
+Tourgu&#233;neff, 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 individual experience much of the richness and
+splendour of the experience of the race.
+</p>
+<p>
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+<p class="chapter">
+<a name="174">
+Chapter XV.
+</a>
+</p>
+<p class="chaptertitle">
+Freshness of Feeling.
+</p>
+<p>
+The primary charm of art resides in the freshness of feeling which it
+reveals and conveys. An art which discloses fatigue, weariness,
+exhaustion of emotion, deadening of interest, has parted with its
+magical spell; for vitality, emotion, passionate interest in the
+experiences of life, devout acceptance of the facts of life, are the
+prime characteristics of art in those moments when its veracity and
+power are at the highest point. A great work of art may be tragic in
+the view of life which it presents, but it must show no sign of the
+succumbing of the spirit to the appalling facts with which it deals;
+even in those cases in which, as in the tragedy of &#34;King
+Lear,&#34; blind fate seems relentlessly sovereign over human affairs,
+the artist must disclose in his attitude and method a sustained energy
+of spirit. Nothing shows so clearly a decline in creative force as a
+loss of interest on the part of the artist in the subject or material
+with which he deals.
+</p>
+<p>
+That fresh bloom which lies on the very face of poetry, and in which
+not only its obvious but its enduring charm resides, is the expression
+of a feeling for nature, for life, and for the happenings which make
+up the common lot, which keeps its earliest receptivity and
+responsiveness. When a man ceases to care deeply for things, he ceases
+to represent or interpret them with insight and power. The
+preservation of feeling is, therefore, essential in all artistic work;
+and when it is lost, the artist becomes an echo or an imitation of his
+nobler self and work. It is the beautiful quality of the true art
+instinct that it constantly sees and feels the familiar world with a
+kind of childlike directness and delight. That which has become
+commonplace to most men is as full of charm and novelty to the artist
+as if it had just been created. He sees it with fresh eyes and feels
+it with a fresh heart. To such a spirit nothing becomes stale and
+hackneyed; everything remains new, fresh, and significant. It has
+often been said that if it were not for the children the world would
+lose the faith, the enthusiasm, the delight which constantly renew its
+spirit and reinforce its courage. A world grown old in feeling would
+be an exhausted world, incapable of production along spiritual or
+artistic lines. Now, the artist is always a child in the eagerness of
+his spirit and the freshness of his feeling; he retains the magical
+power of seeing things habitually, and still seeing them freshly. Mr.
+Lowell was walking with a friend along a country road when they came
+upon a large building which bore the inscription, &#34;Home for
+Incurable Children.&#34; &#34;They'll take me there some day,&#34; was
+the half-humorous comment of a sensitive man, to whom life brought
+great sorrows, but who retained to the very end a youthful buoyancy,
+courage, and faculty of finding delight in common things.
+</p>
+<p>
+It is a significant fact that the greatest men and women never lose
+the qualities which are commonly associated with
+youth,&mdash;freshness of feeling, zest for work, joy in life. Goethe
+at eighty-four studied the problems of life with the same deep
+interest which he had felt in them at thirty or forty; Tennyson's
+imagination showed some signs of waning power in extreme old age, but
+the magic of feeling was still fresh in his heart; Dr. Holmes carried
+his blithe spirit, his gayety and spontaneity of wit, to the last year
+of his life; and Mr. Gladstone at eighty-six was one of the most eager
+and aspiring men of his time. Genius seems to be allied to immortal
+youth; and in this alliance resides a large part of its power. For the
+man of genius does not demonstrate his possession of that rare and
+elusive gift by seeing things which have never been seen before, but
+by seeing with fresh interest what men have seen so often that they
+have ceased to regard it. Novelty is rarely characteristic of great
+works of art; on the contrary, the facts of life which they set before
+us are familiar, and the thoughts they convey by direct statement or
+by dramatic illustration have always been haunting our minds. The
+secret of the artist resides in the unwearied vitality which brings
+him to such close quarters with life, and endows him with directness
+of sight and freshness of feeling. Daisies have starred fields in
+Scotland since men began to plough and reap, but Burns saw them as if
+they had sprung from the ground for the first time; forgotten
+generations have seen the lark rise and heard the cuckoo call in
+England, but to Wordsworth the song from the upper sky and the notes
+from the thicket on the hill were full of the music of the first
+morning. Shakespeare dealt with old stories and constantly touched
+upon the most familiar things; but with what new interest he invests
+both theme and illustration! One may spend a lifetime in a country
+village, surrounded by people who are apparently entirely
+uninteresting; but if one has the eye of a novelist for the facts of
+life, the power to divine character, the gift to catch the turn of
+speech, the trick of voice, the peculiarity of manner, what resources,
+discoveries, and diversion are at hand! The artist never has to search
+for material; it is always at hand. That it is old, trite, stale to
+others, is of no consequence; it is always fresh and significant to
+him.
+</p>
+<p>
+This freshness of feeling is not in any way dependent on the character
+of the materials upon which it plays; it is not an irresponsible
+temperamental quality which seeks the joyful or comic facts of life
+and ignores its sad and tragic aspects. The zest of spirit which one
+finds in Shakespeare, for instance, is not a blind optimism
+thoughtlessly escaping from the shadows into the sunshine. On the
+contrary, it is drawn by a deep instinct to study the most perplexing
+problems of character, and to drop its plummets into the blackest
+abysses of experience. Literature deals habitually with the most
+sombre side of the human lot, and finds its richest material in those
+awful happenings which invest the history of every race with such
+pathetic interest; and yet literature, in its great moments, overflows
+with vitality, zest of spirit, freshness of spirit! There is no
+contradiction in all this; for the vitality which pervades great art
+is not dependent upon external conditions; it has its source in the
+soul of the artist. It is the immortal quality in the human spirit
+playing like sunshine on the hardest and most tragic facts of
+experience. It often suggests no explanation of these facts; it is
+content to present them with relentless veracity; but even when it
+offers no solution of the tragic problem, the tireless interest which
+it feels, the force with which it illustrates and describes, the power
+of moral organisation and interpretation which it reveals, carry with
+them the conviction that the spirit of man, however baffled and
+beaten, is superior to all the accidents of fortune, and
+indestructible even within the circle of the blackest fate. As
+&#338;dipus, old, blind, and smitten, vanishes from our sight, we
+think of him no longer as a great figure blasted by adverse fate, but
+as a great soul smitten and scourged, and yet still invested with the
+dignity of immortality. The dramatist, even when he throws no light on
+the ultimate solution of the problem with which he is dealing, feels
+so deeply and freshly, and discloses such sustained strength, that the
+vitality with which the facts are exhibited and the question stated
+affirms its superiority over all the adversities and catastrophes of
+fortune.
+</p>
+<p>
+This freshness of feeling, which is the gift of men and women of
+genius, must be possessed in some measure by all who long to get the
+most out of life and to develop their own inner resources. To retain
+zest in work and delight in life we must keep freshness of feeling.
+Its presence lends unfailing charm to its possessor; its loss involves
+loss of the deepest personal charm. It is essential in all genuine
+culture, because it sustains that interest in events, experience, and
+opportunity upon which growth is largely conditioned; and there is no
+more effective means of preserving and developing it than intimacy
+with those who have invested all life with its charm. The great books
+are reservoirs of this vitality. When our own interest begins to die
+and the world turns gray and old in our sight, we have only to open
+Homer, Shakespeare, Browning, and the flowers bloom again and the
+skies are blue; and the experiences of life, however tragic, are
+matched by a vitality which is sovereign over them all.
+</p>
+<p>
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+<p class="chapter">
+<a name="185">
+Chapter XVI.
+</a>
+</p>
+<p class="chaptertitle">
+Liberation from One's Time.
+</p>
+<p>
+The law of opposites under which men live is very strikingly brought
+out in the endeavour to secure a sound and intelligent adjustment to
+one's time,--a relation intimate and vital, and at the same time
+deliberately and judicially assumed. To be detached in thought,
+feeling, or action, from the age in which one lives, is to cut the
+ties that bind the individual to society, and through which he is very
+largely nourished and educated. To live deeply and really through
+every form of expression and in every relationship is so essential to the
+complete unfolding of the personality that he who falls below the full
+measure of his capacity for experience and for expression falls below the
+full measure of his possible growth. Life is not, as some men of detached
+moods or purely critical temper have assumed, a spectacle of which the
+secret can be mastered without sharing in the movement; it is rather a
+drama, the splendour of whose expression and the depth of whose meaning
+are revealed to those alone who share in the action. To stand aside from
+the vital movement and study life in a purely critical spirit is to miss
+the deeper education which is involved in the vital process, and to
+lose the fundamental revelation which is slowly and painfully disclosed
+to those whose minds and hearts are open to receive it. No one can
+understand love who has not loved and been loved; no one can comprehend
+sorrow who has not had the companionship of sorrow. The experiment has
+been made in many forms, but no one has yet been nourished by the fruit
+of the tree of knowledge who has eaten of that fruit alone. In the art
+of living, as in all the arts which illustrate and enrich living, the
+amateur and the dilettante have no real position; they never attain
+to that mastery of knowledge or of execution which alone give reality
+to a man's life or work. Mastery in any art comes to those only who
+give themselves without reservation or stint to their task; mastery
+in the supreme art of living is within reach of those only who live
+completely in every faculty and relation.
+</p>
+<p>
+To stand in the closest and most vital relation to one's time is,
+therefore, the first condition of comprehending one's age and getting
+from it what it has to give. But while a man must be in and with his
+time in the most vital sense, he must not be wholly of it. To get the
+vital enrichment which flows from identification with one's age, and
+at the same time to get the detachment which enables one to see his
+time in true relation to all time, is one of the problems which
+requires the highest wisdom for its solution. It is easy to become
+entirely absorbed in one's age, or it is easy to detach one's self
+from it, and study it in a cold and critical temper; but to get its
+warmth and vitality and escape its narrowing and limiting influence is
+so difficult that comparatively few men succeed in striking the
+balance between two divergent tendencies.
+</p>
+<p>
+A man gets power and knowledge from his time in the degree in which he
+suffers it to enlarge and vitalise him; he loses power and knowledge
+in the degree in which he suffers it to limit his vision and confine
+his interests. The Time Spirit is the greatest of our teachers so long
+as it is the interpreter of the Eternal Spirit; it is the most
+fallible and misleading of teachers when it attempts to speak for
+itself. The visible and material things by which we are surrounded are
+of immense helpfulness so long as they symbolise invisible and
+spiritual things; they become stones of stumbling and rocks of offence
+when they are detached from the spiritual order and set apart in an
+order of their own. The age in which we live affords a concrete
+illustration of the vital processes in society and means of contact
+with that society, but it is comprehensible and educative in the exact
+degree in which we understand its relation to other times. The
+impression which the day makes upon us needs to be tested by the
+impression which we receive from the year; the judgment of a decade
+must be corrected by the judgment of the century. The present hour is
+subtly illusive; it fills the whole stage, to the exclusion of the
+past and the present; it appears to stand alone, detached from all
+that went before or is to follow; it seems to be the historic moment,
+the one reality amid fleeting shadows. As a matter of fact, it is a
+logical product of the past, bound to it by ties so elusive that we
+cannot trace them, and so numerous and tenacious that we cannot sever
+them; it is but a fragment of a whole immeasurably greater than
+itself; its character is so completely determined by the past that the
+most radical changes we can make in it are essentially superficial;
+for it is the future, not the present, which is in our hands. To get
+even a glimpse of the character and meaning of our own time, we must,
+therefore, see it in relation to all time; to master it in any sense
+we must set it in its true historical relations. That which to the
+uneducated mind seems portentous is lightly regarded by the mind which
+sees the apparently isolated event in a true historic perspective;
+while the occurrence or condition which is barely noticed by the
+untrained, seen in the same perspective, becomes tragic in its
+prophecy of change and suffering. History is full of corrections of
+the mistaken judgments of the hour; and from the hate or adoration of
+contemporaries, the wise man turns to the clear-sighted and inexorable
+judgment of posterity. In the far-seeing vision of a trained
+intelligence the hour is never detached from the day, nor the day from
+the year; and the year is always held in its place in the century.
+</p>
+<p>
+Now, the man of culture has pre-eminently the gift of living deeply in
+his own age, and at the same time of seeing it in relation to all
+ages. It has no illusion for him; it cannot deceive him with its
+passionate acceptance or its equally passionate rejection. He sees the
+crown shining above the cross; he hears the long thunders of applause
+breaking in upon execrations which they will finally silence; he
+foresees the harvest in the seed that lies barely covered on the
+surface; and, afar off, his ear notes the final crash of that which at
+the moment seems to carry with it the assurance of eternal duration.
+Such a man secures the vitality of his time, but he escapes its
+limitation of vision by seeing it clearly and seeing it whole; he
+corrects the teaching of the time spirit by constant reference to the
+teaching of the Eternal Spirit imparted in the long training and the
+wide revelation of history. The day is beautiful and significant, or
+ominous and tragic, to him as it discloses its relation to the good or
+the evil of the years that are gone. And these vital associations,
+these deep historic connections, are brought to light with peculiar
+clearness in literature. Beyond all other means of enfranchisement,
+the book liberates a man from imprisonment within the narrow limits of
+his own time; it makes him free of all times. He lives in all periods,
+under all forms of government, in all social conditions; the mind of
+antiquity, of mediævalism, of the Renaissance, is as open to him as
+the mind of his own day, and so he is able to look upon human life in
+its entirety.
+</p>
+<p>
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+<p class="chapter">
+<a name="195">
+Chapter XVII.
+</a>
+</p>
+<p class="chaptertitle">
+Liberation from One's Place.
+</p>
+<p>
+The instinct which drives men to travel is at bottom identical with
+that which fills men with passionate desire to know what is in life.
+Time and strength are often wasted in restless change from place to
+place; but real wandering, however aimless in mood, is always
+education. To know one's neighbours and to be on good terms with the
+community in which one lives are the beginning of sound relations to
+the world at large; but one never knows his village in any real sense
+until he knows the world. The distant hills which seem to be always
+calling the imaginative boy away from the familiar fields and hearth
+do not conspire against his peace, however much they may conspire
+against his comfort; they help him to the fulfilment of his destiny by
+suggesting to his imagination the deeper experience, the richer
+growth, the higher tasks which await him in the world beyond the
+horizon. Man is a wanderer by the law of his life; and if he never
+leaves his home in which he is born, he never builds a home of his
+own.
+</p>
+<p>
+It is the law of life that a child should leave his father and
+separate himself from his inherited surroundings, in order that by
+self-unfolding and self-realisation he may substitute a conscious for
+an unconscious, a moral for an instinctive relation. The instinct of
+the myth-makers was sound when it led them to attach such importance
+to the wandering and the return; the separation effected in order that
+individuality and character might be realised through isolation and
+experience, the return voluntarily made through clear recognition of
+the soundness of the primitive relations, the beauty of the service of
+the older and wiser to the younger and the more ignorant. We are born
+into relations which we accept as normal and inevitable; we break away
+from them in order that by detachment we may see them objectively and
+from a distance, and that we may come to self-consciousness; we resume
+these relations of deliberate purpose and with clear perception of
+their moral significance. So the boy, grown to manhood, returns to his
+home from the world in which he has tested himself and seen for the
+first time, with clear eyes, the depth and beauty of its service in
+the spiritual order; so the man who has revolted from the barren and
+shallow dogmatic statement of a spiritual truth returns, in riper
+years and with a deeper insight, to the truth which is no longer
+matter of inherited belief but of vital need and perception.
+</p>
+<p>
+The ripe, mature, full mind not only escapes the limitation of the
+time in which it finds itself; it also escapes from the limitations of
+the place in which it happens to be. A man of deep culture cannot be a
+provincial; he must be a citizen of the world. The man of provincial
+tastes and ideas owns the acres; the man of culture commands the
+landscape. He knows the world beyond the hills; he sees the great
+movement of life from which the village seems almost shut out; he
+shares those inclusive experiences which come to each age and give
+each age a character of its own. He is in fellowship and sympathy with
+the smaller community at his doors, but he belongs also to that
+greater community which is coterminous with humanity itself. He is not
+disloyal to his immediate surroundings when he leaves them for
+exploration, travel, and discovery; he is fulfilling that law of life
+which conditions true valuation of that into which one is born upon
+clear perception of that which one must acquire for himself.
+</p>
+<p>
+The wanderings of individuals and races, which form so large a part of
+the substance of history, are witnesses of that craving for deeper
+experience and wider knowledge which is one of the springs of human
+progress. The American cares for Europe not for its more skilful and
+elaborate ministration to his comfort; he is drawn towards it through
+the appeal of its rich historic life to his imagination and through
+the diversity and variety of its social and racial phenomena. And in
+like manner the European seeks the East, not simply as a matter of
+idle curiosity, but because he finds in the East conditions which are
+set in such sharp contrast with those with which he is familiar. The
+instinct for expansion which gives human history its meaning and
+interest is constantly urging the man of sensitive mind to secure by
+observation that which he cannot get by experience.
+</p>
+<p>
+To secure the most complete development one must live in one's time
+and yet live above it, and one must also live in one's home and yet
+live, at the same time, in the world. The life which is bounded in
+knowledge, interest, and activity by the invisible but real and
+limiting walls of a small community is often definite in aim,
+effective in action, and upright in intention; but it cannot be rich,
+varied, generous, and stimulating. The life, on the other hand, which
+is entirely detached from local associations and tasks is often
+interesting, liberalising, and catholic in spirit; but it cannot be
+original or productive. A sound life&mdash;balanced, poised, and
+intelligently directed&mdash;must stand strongly in both local and
+universal relations; it must have the vitality and warmth of the
+first, and the breadth and range of the second.
+</p>
+<p>
+This liberation from provincialism is not only one of the signs of
+culture, but it is also one of its finest results; it registers a high
+degree of advancement. For the man who has passed beyond the
+prejudices, misconceptions, and narrowness of provincialism has gone
+far on the road to self-education. He has made as marked an advance on
+the position of the great mass of his contemporaries as that position
+is an advance on the earlier stages of barbarism. The barbarian lives
+only in his tribe; the civilised man, in the exact degree in which he
+is civilised, lives with humanity. Books are among the richest
+resources against narrowing local influences; they are the ripest
+expositions of the world-spirit. To know the typical books of the race
+is to be in touch with those elements of thought and experience which
+are shared by men of all countries. Without a knowledge of these books
+a man never really gets at the life of localities which are foreign to
+him; never really sees those historic places about which the
+traditions of civilisation have gathered. Travel is robbed of half its
+educational value unless one carries with him a knowledge of that
+which he looks at for the first time with his own eyes. No American
+sees England unless he carries England in his memory and imagination.
+Westminster Abbey is devoid of spiritual significance to the man who
+is ignorant of the life out of which it grew, and of the history which
+is written in its architecture and its memorials. The emancipation
+from the limitations of locality is greatly aided by travel, but it is
+accomplished only by intimate knowledge of the greater books.
+</p>
+<p>
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+<p class="chapter">
+<a name="204">
+Chapter XVIII.
+</a>
+</p>
+<p class="chaptertitle">
+The Unconscious Element.
+</p>
+<p>
+While it is true that the greatest books betray the most intimate
+acquaintance with the time in which they are written, and disclose the
+impress of that time in thought, structure, and style, it is also true
+that such books are so essentially independent of contemporary forms
+and moods that they largely escape the vicissitudes which attend those
+forms and moods. The element of enduring interest in them outweighs
+the accidents of local speech or provincial knowledge, as the force
+and genius of C&#230;sar survive the armor he wore and the language he
+spoke. A great book is a possession for all time, because a writer of
+the first rank is the contemporary of every generation; he is never
+outgrown, exhausted, or even old-fashioned, although the garments he
+wore may have been laid aside long ago.
+</p>
+<p>
+In this permanent quality, unchanged by changes of taste and form,
+resides the secret of that charm which draws about the great poets men
+and women of each succeeding period, eager to listen to words which
+thrilled the world when it was young, and which have a new meaning for
+every new age. It is safe to say that Homer will speak to men as long
+as language survives, and that translation will follow translation to
+the end of time. What Robinson said of the Bible in one of the great
+moments of modern history may be said of the greater works of
+literature: more light will always stream from them. Indeed, many of
+them will not be understood until they are read in the light of long
+periods of history; for as the great books are interpretations of
+life, so life in its historic revelation is one continuous commentary
+on the greater books.
+</p>
+<p>
+This preponderance of the permanent over the accidental or temporary
+in books of this class is largely due to the unconscious element which
+plays so great a part in them: the element of universal experience, in
+which every man shares in the exact degree in which, in mind and
+heart, he approaches greatness. It is idle to attempt to separate
+arbitrarily in Shakespeare, for instance, those elements in the poet's
+work which were deliberately introduced from those which went into it
+by the unconscious action of his whole nature; but no one can study
+the plays intelligently without becoming more and more clearly aware
+of those depths of life which moved in the poet before they moved in
+his work; which enlarged, enriched, and silently reorganised his view
+of life and his power of translating life out of individual into
+universal terms. It would be impossible, for instance, to write such a
+play as &#34;The Tempest&#34; by sheer force of intellect; in the
+creation of such a work there is involved, beyond literary skill,
+calculation, and deep study of the relation of thought to form, a
+ripeness of spirit, a clearness of insight, a richness of imagination,
+which are so much part of the very soul of the poet that he does not
+separate them in thought, and cannot consciously balance, adjust, and
+employ them. They are quite beyond his immediate control, as they are
+beyond all attempts to imitate them.
+</p>
+<p>
+Cleverness may learn all the forms and methods, but it is powerless to
+imitate greatness; it can simulate the conscious, dexterous side of
+greatness, but it cannot simulate the unconscious, vital side. The
+moment a man like Voltaire attempts to deal with such a character as
+Joan of Arc, his spiritual and artistic limitations become painfully
+apparent; of cleverness there is no lack, but of reverence, insight,
+depth of feeling, the affinity of the great imagination for the great
+nature or deed, there is no sign. The man is entirely and hopelessly
+incapacitated for the work by virtue of certain limitations in his own
+nature of which he is obviously in entire ignorance. The conscious
+skill of Voltaire was delicate, subtle, full of vitality; but the
+unconscious side of his nature was essentially shallow, thin, largely
+undeveloped; and it is the preponderance of the unconscious over the
+conscious in a man's life which makes him great in himself and equips
+him for work of the highest quality. No man can put his skill to the
+highest use and give his knowledge the final touch of individuality
+until both are so entirely incorporated in his personality that they
+have become part of himself.
+</p>
+<p>
+This deepest and most vital of all the processes of self-education and
+self-unfolding, which is brought to such perfection in men of the
+highest creative power, is the fundamental process of
+culture,&mdash;the chief method which every man uses, consciously or
+unconsciously, who brings his nature to complete ripeness of quality
+and power. The absorption of vital experience and knowledge which went
+on in Shakespeare enlarged and clarified his vision and insight to
+such a degree that both became not only searching, but veracious in a
+rare degree; life was opened to him on many sides by the expansion
+first accomplished in himself. This is saying again what has been said
+so many times, but cannot be said too often,&mdash;that, in order to
+give one's work a touch of greatness, a man must first have a touch of
+greatness in his own nature. But greatness is not an irresponsible and
+undirected growth; it is as definitely conditioned on certain
+obediences to intellectual discipline and spiritual law as is any kind
+of lesser skill conditioned on practice and work. One of these
+conditions is the development of the power to turn conscious processes
+of observation, emotion, and skill into unconscious processes; to
+enrich the nature below the surface, so to speak; to make the soil
+productive by making it deep and rich. Men of mere skill always stop
+short of this final process of self-development, and always stop short
+of those final achievements which sum up and express all that has been
+known or felt about a subject and give it permanent form; men of
+essential greatness take this last step in that higher education which
+makes one master of the force of his personality, and give his words
+and works universal range and perennial interest.
+</p>
+<p>
+Now, this is the deepest quality in the books of life, which a student
+may not only enjoy to the full, but may also absorb and make his own.
+When Alfred de Musset, in an oft-repeated phrase, said that it takes a
+great deal of life to make a little art, he was not only affirming the
+reality of this process of passing experience through consciousness
+into the unconscious side of a man's nature, but he was also hinting
+at one of the greatest resources of pleasure and growth. For time and
+life continually enrich the man who has learned the secret of turning
+experience and observation into knowledge and power. It is a secret in
+the sense in which every vital process is a secret; but it is not a
+trick, a skill, or a method which may be communicated in a formula.
+Mrs. Ward describes a character in one of her stories as having passed
+through a great culture into a great simplicity of nature; in other
+words, culture had wrought its perfect work, and the man had passed
+through wide and intensely self-conscious activity into the repose and
+simplicity of self-unconsciousness; his knowledge had become so
+completely a part of himself that he had ceased to be conscious of it
+as a thing distinct from himself. There is no easy road to this last
+height in the long and painful process of education; and time is an
+essential element in the process, because it is a matter of growth.
+</p>
+<p>
+There are, it is true, a few men and women who seem born with this
+power of living in the heart of things and possessing them in the
+imagination without having gone through the long and painful stages of
+preparatory education; but genius is not only inexplicable, it is also
+so rare that for the immense majority of men any effort to comprehend
+it must be purely academic. It is enough to know that if we are in any
+degree to share with men and women of genius the faculty of vision,
+insight, and creative energy, we must master the conditions which
+favor the development of those supreme gifts. There is laid,
+therefore, upon the student who wishes to get the vital quality of
+literature the necessity of repeating, by deliberate and intelligent
+design, the process which in so many of the masters of the arts has
+been, apparently, accomplished instinctively. To make observation,
+study, and experience part of one's spiritual and intellectual
+capital, it is, in the first place, necessary to saturate one's self
+with that which one is studying; to possess it by constant familiarity;
+to let the imagination play upon it; to meditate upon it. And
+it is necessary, in the second place, to make this practice habitual;
+when it becomes habitual, it will become largely unconscious: one does
+it by instinct rather than by deliberation. This process is
+illustrated in every successful attempt to master any art. In the art
+of speaking, for instance, the beginner is hampered by an embarrassing
+consciousness of his hands, feet, speech; he cannot forget himself and
+surrender himself to his thought or his emotion; he dare not trust
+himself. He must, therefore, train himself through mind, voice, and
+body; he must submit to constant and long-sustained practice, thinking
+out point by point what he shall say and how he shall say it. This
+process is, at the start, partly mechanical; in the nature of things
+it must be entirely within the view and control of a vigilant
+consciousness. But as the training progresses, the element of
+self-consciousness steadily diminishes, until, in great moments, the
+true orator, become one harmonious instrument of expression,
+surrenders himself to his theme, and his personality shines clear and
+luminous through speech, articulation, and gesture. The unconscious
+nature of the man subordinates his skill wholly to its own uses. In
+like manner, in every kind of self-expression, the student who puts
+imagination, vitality, and sincerity into the work of preliminary
+education, comes at last to full command of himself, and gives
+complete expression to that which is deepest and most individual in
+him. Time, discipline, study, and thought enrich every nature which is
+receptive and responsive.
+</p>
+<p>
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+<p class="chapter">
+<a name="217">
+Chapter XIX.
+</a>
+</p>
+<p class="chaptertitle">
+The Teaching of Tragedy.
+</p>
+<p>
+No characters appeal more powerfully to the imagination than those
+impressive figures about whom the literature of tragedy
+moves,&mdash;figures associated with the greatest passions and the
+most appalling sorrows. The well-balanced man, who rises step by step
+through discipline and work to the highest place of influence and
+power, is applauded and admired; but the heart of the world goes out
+to those who, like &#338;dipus, are overmatched by a fate which
+pursues with relentless step, or, like Hamlet, are overweighted with
+tasks too heavy or too terrible for them. Agamemnon, &#338;dipus,
+Orestes, Hamlet, Lear, P&#232;re Goriot, are supreme figures in that
+world of the imagination in which the poets have endeavoured both to
+reflect and to interpret the world as men see it and act in it.
+</p>
+<p>
+The essence of tragedy is the collision between the individual will,
+impulse, or action, and society in some form of its organisation, or
+those unwritten laws of life which we call the laws of God. The tragic
+character is always a lawbreaker, but not always a criminal; he is,
+indeed, often the servant of a new idea which sets him, as in the case
+of Giordano Bruno, in opposition to an established order of knowledge;
+he is sometimes, as in the case of Socrates, a teacher of truths which
+make him a menace to lower conceptions of citizenship and narrower
+ideas of personal life; or he is, as in the case of Othello and Paolo,
+the victim of passions which overpower the will and throw the whole
+life out of relation to its moral and social environment. The interest
+with which the tragic character is always invested is due not only to
+the exceptional experience in which the tragic situation always
+culminates, but also to the self-surrender which precedes the penalty
+and the expiation.
+</p>
+<p>
+There is a fallacy at the bottom of the admiration we feel when a rich
+nature throws restraint of any kind to the winds and gives itself up
+wholly to some impulse or passion,&mdash;the fallacy of supposing that
+by a violent break with existing conditions freedom can be secured;
+for the world loves freedom, even when it is too slothful or too
+cowardly to pay the price which it exacts. That admiration arises,
+however, from a sound instinct,&mdash;the instinct which makes us love
+both power and self-sacrifice, even when the first is ill-directed and
+the second wasted. The vast majority of men are content to do their
+work quietly and in obscurity, with no disclosure of originality,
+freshness, or force; they obey law, conform to custom, respect the
+conventionalities of their age; they appear to be lacking in
+representative quality; they are, apparently, the faithful and
+uninteresting drudges of society. There are, it is true, a host of
+commonplace persons, in every generation, who perform uninteresting
+tasks in a mechanical spirit; but it must not be inferred that a man
+is either craven or cowardly because he does not break from the circle
+in which he finds himself and make a bold and picturesque rush for
+freedom; it may be that freedom is to be won for him in the silent and
+faithful doing of the work which lies next him; it is certain that the
+highest power and the noblest freedom are secured, not by the
+submission which fears to fight, but by that which accepts the
+discipline for the sake of the mastery which is conditioned upon it.
+</p>
+<p>
+There are, however, conditions which no man can control, and which are
+in their nature essentially tragic; and men and women who are involved
+in these conditions cannot elude a fate for which they are not
+responsible and from which they cannot escape. This was true of many
+of the greatest characters in classical tragedy, and it is true also
+of many of the characters in modern tragedy. The world looks with
+bated breath on a struggle of the noblest heroism, in which men and
+women, matched against overwhelming social forces, bear their part
+with sublime and unfaltering courage, and by the completeness of their
+self-surrender assert their sovereignty even in the hour when disaster
+seems to crush and destroy them. To these striking figures, isolated
+by the greatness of their fate, the heart of the world has always gone
+out as to the noblest of its children. Solitary in the possession of
+some new conception of duty or of truth, separated from the mass of
+their fellows by that lack of sympathy which springs from imperfect
+comprehension of higher aims or deeper insight, these sublime
+strugglers against ignorance, prejudice, caste, and power, become the
+heroes and martyrs of the race; they announce the advent of new
+conceptions of social order and individual rights; they incarnate the
+imperishable soul of humanity in its long and terrible endeavour to
+bring the institutions and the ideas of men into harmony with a higher
+order of life.
+</p>
+<p>
+The tragic element has, therefore, many aspects,&mdash;sometimes
+lawless and destructive, sometimes self-sacrificing and instructive;
+but its illustration in literature in any form is not only profoundly
+interesting, but profoundly instructive as well. In no other literary
+form is the stuff of which life is made wrought into such commanding
+figures; in no other form are the deeper possibilities of life brought
+into such clear view; in no other form are the fundamental laws of
+life disclosed in a light at once so searching and so beautiful in its
+revealing power. If all the histories were lost and all the ethical
+discussions forgotten, the moral quality of life and the tremendous
+significance of character would find adequate illustration in the
+great tragedies. They lay bare the very heart of man under all
+historic conditions; they make us aware of the range of his
+experiences; they uncover the depths by which he is surrounded. They
+enable us to see, in lightning flashes, the undiscovered territory
+which incloses the little island on which we live; they light up the
+mysterious background of invisible forces against which we play our
+parts and work out our destiny.
+</p>
+<p>
+To the student of literature, who strives not only to enjoy but to
+comprehend, tragedy brings all the materials for a deep and genuine
+education. Instead of a philosophical or ethical statement of
+principles, it offers living illustration of ethical law as revealed
+in the greatest deeds and the most heroic experiences; it discloses
+the secret of the age which created it,&mdash;for in no other literary
+form are the fundamental conceptions of a period so deeply involved or
+so clearly set forth. The very springs of Greek character are
+uncovered in the Greek tragedies; and the tremendous forces liberated
+by the Renaissance are nowhere else so strikingly brought to light as
+in that group of tragedies which were produced in so many countries,
+by so many men, at the close of that momentous epoch. When literature
+runs mainly to the tragic form, it may be assumed that the spiritual
+force of the race has expressed itself afresh, and that a race, or a
+group of races, has passed through one of those searching experiences
+which bring men again face to face with the facts of life; for the
+production of tragedy involves thought of such depth, insight of such
+clearness, and imaginative power of such quality and range that it is
+possible, on a great scale, only when the springs of passion and
+action have been profoundly stirred. The appearance of tragedy marks,
+therefore, those moments when men manifest, without calculation or
+restraint, all the power that is in them; and into no other literary
+form is the vital force poured so lavishly. It is the instinctive
+recognition of this unveiling of the soul of man which gives the
+tragedy such impressiveness even when it is haltingly represented on
+the stage, and which subdues the imagination to its mood when the
+solitary reader comes under its spell. The life of the race is sacred
+in those great passages which record its sufferings; and nothing makes
+us so aware of our unity with our kind in all times and under all
+circumstances as the community of suffering in which, actively or
+passively, all men share.
+</p>
+<p>
+In the tragedy the student of literature is brought into the most
+intimate relation with his race in those moments when its deepest
+experiences are laid bare; he enters into its life when that life is
+passing through its most momentous passages; he is present in those
+hidden places where it confesses its highest hopes, reveals its most
+terrible passions, suffers its most appalling punishments, and passes
+on, through anguish and sacrifice, to its new day of thought and
+achievement.
+</p>
+<p>
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+<p class="chapter">
+<a name="229">
+Chapter XX.
+</a>
+</p>
+<p class="chaptertitle">
+The Culture Element in Fiction.
+</p>
+<p>
+One of the chief elements in fiction which make for culture is,
+primarily, its disclosure of the elementary types of character and
+experience. A single illustration of this quality will suggest its
+presence in all novels of the first rank and its universal interest
+and importance. The aspirations, dreams, devotions, and sacrifices of
+men are as real as their response to self-interest or their tendency
+to the conventional and the commonplace; and they are, in the long
+run, a great deal more influential. They have wider play; they are
+more compelling; and they are of the very highest significance,
+because they spring out of that which is deepest and most distinctive
+in human nature. A host of men never give these higher impulses, these
+spiritual aptitudes and possibilities, full play; but they are in all
+men, and all men recognise them and crave an expression of them.
+Nothing is truer, on the lowest and most practical plane, than the old
+declaration that men do not live by bread alone; they sometimes exist
+on bread, because nothing better is to be had at the moment; but they
+live only in the full and free play of all their activities, in the
+complete expression not only of what is most pressing in interest and
+importance at a given time, but of that which is potential and
+possible at all times.
+</p>
+<p>
+The novel of romance and adventure has had a long history, and the
+elements of which it is compounded are recognisable long before they
+took the form of fiction. Two figures appear and reappear in the
+mythology of every poetic people,&mdash;the hero and the wanderer; the
+man who achieves and the man who experiences; the man who masters life
+by superiority of soul or body, and the man who masters it by
+completeness of knowledge. It is interesting and pathetic to find how
+universally these two figures held the attention and stirred the
+hearts of primitive men; how infinitely varied are their tasks, their
+perils, and their vicissitudes. They wear so many guises, they bear so
+many names, they travel so far and compass so much experience that it
+is impossible, in any interpretation of mythology, to escape the
+conviction that they were the dominant types in the thought of the
+myth-makers. And these earliest story-makers were not idle dreamers,
+entertaining themselves by endless manufacture of imaginary incidents,
+conditions, and persons. They were, on the contrary, the observers,
+the students, the scientists of their period; their endeavour was not
+to create a fiction, but to explain the world and themselves. Their
+observation was imperfect, and they made ludicrous mistakes of fact
+because they lacked both knowledge and training; but they made free
+use of the creative faculty, and there is, consequently, a good deal
+more truth in their daring guesses than in many of those provisional
+explanations of nature and ourselves which have been based too
+exclusively on scrutiny of the obvious fact, and indifference to the
+fact, which is not less a fact because it is elusive.
+</p>
+<p>
+The myth-makers endeavoured to explain the world, but that was only
+one-half of their endeavour; they attempted also to explain
+themselves. They discovered the striking analogies between certain
+natural phenomena or processes and the phenomena and processes of
+their own nature; they discovered the tasks and wanderings of the sun,
+and they perceived the singular resemblance of these tasks and
+wanderings to the happenings of their own lives. So the hero and the
+wanderer became subjective as well as objective, and symbolised what
+was deepest and most universal in human nature and human experience,
+as well as what was most striking in the external world. When
+primitive men looked into their hearts and their experience, they
+found their deepest hopes, longings, and possibilities bound up and
+worked out in two careers,&mdash;the career of the hero and the career
+of the wanderer.
+</p>
+<p>
+These two figures became the commanding types of all the nobler
+mythologies, because they symbolised what was best, deepest, and most
+real in human nature and life. They represent the possible reach and
+the occasional achievement of the human soul; they stand for that
+which is potential as well as for that which is actual in human
+experience. Few men achieve or experience on a great scale; but these
+few are typical, and are, therefore, transcendent in interest. The
+average commonplace man fills great space in contemporary history, as
+in the history of all times, and his character and career are well
+worth the closest study and the finest art of the writer; but the
+average man, who never achieves greatly, and to whom no striking or
+dramatic experience comes, has all the possibilities of action and
+suffering in his nature, and is profoundly interested in these more
+impressive aspects of life. Truth to fact is essential to all sound
+art, but absolute veracity involves the whole truth,&mdash;the truth
+of the exceptional as well as of the average experience; the truth of
+the imagination as well as of observation.
+</p>
+<p>
+The hero and the wanderer are still, and always will be, the great
+human types; and they are, therefore, the types which will continue to
+dominate fiction; disappearing at times from the stage which they may
+have occupied too exclusively, but always reappearing in due
+season,&mdash;the hero in the novel of romance, the wanderer in the
+novel of adventure. These figures are as constant in fiction as they
+were in mythology; from the days of the earliest Greek and Oriental
+stories to these days of Stevenson and Barrie, they have never lost
+their hold on the imagination of the race. When the sense of reality
+was feeble, these figures became fantastic, and even ridiculous; but
+this false art was the product of an unregulated, not of an
+illegitimate, exercise of the imagination; and while &#34;Don
+Quixote&#34; destroyed the old romance of chivalry, it left the
+instinct which produced that romance untouched. As the sense of
+reality becomes more exacting and more general, the action of the
+imagination is more carefully regulated; but it is not diminished,
+either in volume or in potency. Men have not lost the power of
+individual action because society has become so highly developed, and
+the multiplication of the police has not materially reduced the tragic
+possibilities of life. There is more accurate and more extensive
+knowledge of environment than ever before in the history of the race,
+but temperament, impulse, and passion remain as powerful as they were
+in primitive men; and tragedy finds its materials in temperament,
+impulse, and passion, much more frequently than in objective
+conditions and circumstances.
+</p>
+<p>
+The soul of man has passed through a great education, and has
+immensely profited by it; but its elemental qualities and forces
+remain unchanged. Two things men have always craved,&mdash;to come to
+close quarters with life, and to do something positive and
+substantial. Self-expression is the prime need of human nature; it
+must know, act, and suffer by virtue of its deepest instincts. The
+greater and richer that nature, the deeper will be its need of seeing
+life on many sides, of sharing in many kinds of experience, of
+contending with multiform difficulties. To drink deeply of the cup of
+life, at whatever cost, appears to be the insatiable desire of the
+most richly endowed men and women; and with such natures the impulse
+is to seek, not to shun, experience. And that which to the elect men
+and women of the race is necessary and possible is not only
+comprehensible to those who cannot possess it: it is powerfully and
+permanently attractive. There is a spell in it which the dullest
+mortal does not wholly escape.<sup>[1]
+</sup>
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+<sup>
+[1]</sup>&nbsp;Reprinted in part, by permission, from the &#34;Forum.&#34;
+</p>
+<p>
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+<p class="chapter">
+<a name="239">
+Chapter XXI.
+</a>
+</p>
+<p class="chaptertitle">
+Culture through Action.
+</p>
+<p>
+It is an interesting fact that the four men who have been accepted as
+the greatest writers who have yet appeared, used either the epic or
+the dramatic form. It can hardly have been accidental that Homer and
+Dante gave their greatest work the epic form, and that Shakespeare and
+Goethe were in their most fortunate moments dramatists. There must
+have been some reason in the nature of things for this choice of two
+literary forms which, differing widely in other respects, have this in
+common, that they represent life in action. They are very largely
+objective; they portray events, conditions, and deeds which have
+passed beyond the stage of thought and have involved the thinker in
+the actual historical world of vital relationships and dramatic
+sequence. The lyric poet may sing, if it pleases him, like a bird in
+the recesses of a garden, far from the noise and dust of the highway
+and the clamour of men in the competitions of trade and work; but the
+epic or dramatic poet must find his theme and his inspiration in the
+stir and movement of men in social relations. He deals, not with the
+subjective, but with the objective man; with the man whose dreams are
+no longer visions of the imagination, but are becoming incorporate in
+some external order; whose passions are no longer seething within him,
+but are working themselves out in vital consequences; whose thought is
+no longer purely speculative, but has begun to give form and shape to
+laws, habits, or institutions. It is the revelation of the human
+spirit in action which we find in the epic and the drama; the inward
+life working itself out in material and social relations; the soul of
+the man becoming, so to speak, externalised.
+</p>
+<p>
+The epic, as illustrated in the &#34;Iliad&#34; and &#34;Odyssey,&#34;
+deals with a main or central movement in Greek tradition; a series of
+events which, by reason of their nature and prominence, imbedded
+themselves in the memory of the Greek race. These events are described
+in narrative form, with episodes, incidents, and dialogues, which
+break the long story and relax the strain of attention from time to
+time, without interrupting the progress of the narrative. There are
+heroes whose figures stand out in the long story with great
+distinctness, but we are interested much more in what they do than in
+what they are; for in the epic, character is subordinate to action. In
+the dramas of Shakespeare, on the other hand, while action is more
+constantly employed and is thrown into bolder relief, our deepest
+interest centres in the actors; the action is no longer the matter of
+first importance; it is significant mainly because it involves men and
+women not only in the chain of external consequences, but also in the
+order of spiritual sequences. We are deeply stirred by our perception
+of the intimate connection between the possibilities which lie
+sleeping in the individual life, and the tragic events which are set
+in motion when those possibilities are realised in action. In both
+epic and drama men are seen, not in their subjective moods, but in
+their objective struggles; not in the detachment of the life of
+speculation and imagination, but in vital association and relation
+with society in its order and institutions. With many differences,
+both of spirit and form, the epic and the drama are at one in
+portraying men in that ultimate and decisive stage which determines
+individual character and gives history its direction and significance.
+</p>
+<p>
+And it is from men in action that much of the deepest truth concerning
+life and character has come; indeed, it is not until we pass out of
+the region of the speculative, the merely potential, that the word
+&#34;character&#34; takes on that tremendous meaning with which
+thousands of years of actual happenings have invested it. A purely
+ideal world&mdash;a world fashioned wholly apart from the realities
+which convey definite, concrete revelations of what is in us and in
+our world&mdash;would necessarily be an unmoral world. The
+relationships which bind men together and give human intercourse such
+depth and richness spring into being only when they are actually
+entered upon; they could never be understood or foreseen in a world of
+pure thought; nor would it be possible, in such a world, to realise
+that reaction of the deed upon the doer which creates character, nor
+that far-reaching influence of the deed upon society, and the sequence
+of events which so often issues in tragedy and from which history
+derives its immense interest and meaning. A world which stopped short
+of realisation in action would not only lose the fathomless dramatic
+interest which inheres in human life, but it would part with all those
+moral implications of the integrity and persistence of the individual
+soul, its moral quality and its moral responsibility, which make man
+something different from the dust which whirls about him on the
+highway, or the stone over which he stumbles. This is precisely the
+character of those speculative systems which deny the reality of
+action and substitute the idea for the deed; such a world does more
+than suffocate the individual soul; it destroys the very meaning of
+life by robbing it of moral order and meaning. The end of such a
+conception of the universe is necessarily annihilation, and its mood
+is necessarily despair.
+</p>
+<p>
+&#34;How can a man come to know himself?&#34; asked Goethe. &#34;Never
+by thinking, but by doing.&#34; Now, this knowledge of self in the
+large sense is precisely the knowledge which ripens and clarifies us,
+which gives us sanity, repose, and power. To know what is in humanity
+and what life means to humanity, we must study humanity in its active,
+not in its passive, moods; in the hours when it is doing, not
+thinking. Sooner or later all its thinking which has any reality in it
+passes on into action. The emotion, passion, thought, impulse, which
+never gets beyond the subjective stage, dies before birth; and all
+those philosophies which urge abstinence from action would cut the
+plant of life at the root; they are, in the last analysis, pleas for
+suicide. Men really live only as they freely express themselves
+through thought, emotion, and action. They get at the deepest truth
+and enter into the deepest relationships only as they act. Inaction
+involves something more than the disease and decay of certain
+faculties; it involves the deformity of arrested development, and
+failure to enter into that larger world of truth which is open to
+those races alone which live a whole life. It is for this reason that
+the drama must always hold the first place among those forms which the
+art of literature has perfected; it is for this reason that Homer,
+Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, consciously or unconsciously, chose
+those forms of expression which are specially adapted to represent and
+illustrate life in action; it is for this reason, among others, that
+these writers must always play so great a part in the work of
+educating the race. Culture is, above all things, real and vital;
+knowledge may deal with abstractions and unrelated bits of fact, but
+culture must always fasten upon those things which are significant in
+a spiritual order. It has to do with the knowledge which may become
+incorporate in a man's nature, and with that knowledge especially
+which has come to humanity through action. It is this deeper knowledge
+which holds a lighted torch aloft in the deepest recesses of the soul,
+or over those abysses of possible experience which open on all sides
+about every man, which is to be found in the pages of Homer, Dante,
+Shakespeare, and Goethe, and of all those great artists who have seen
+men in those decisive and significant moments when they strike into
+the movement of history, or, through their deeds and sufferings, the
+order of life suddenly shines forth.
+</p>
+<p>
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+<p class="chapter">
+<a name="250">
+Chapter XXII.
+</a>
+</p>
+<p class="chaptertitle">
+The Interpretation of Idealism.
+</p>
+<p>
+Idealism has so often been associated in recent years with vagueness
+of thought, slovenly construction, and a weak sentimentalism, that it
+has been discredited, even among those who have recognised the reality
+behind it and the great place it must hold in all rich and noble
+living. It is the misfortune of what is called Idealism, that, like
+other spiritual principles, it attracts those who mistake the longings
+of unintelligent discontent for aspiration, or the changing outlines
+of vapory fancies for the firm and consistent form and shape of real
+conceptions deeply realised in the imagination. Idealism has suffered
+much at the hands of feeble practitioners who have substituted
+irrational dreams for those far-reaching visions and those penetrating
+insights which are characteristic of its true use and illustration in
+the arts. The height of the reaction so vigorously and impressively
+illustrated in a great group of modern realistic works is due largely
+to the weakness and extravagance of the idealistic movement. When
+sentiment is exchanged for its corrupting counterfeit, sentimentalism,
+and clear and definite thinking gives place to vague and elusive
+emotions and fancies, reaction is not only inevitable but wholesome;
+the instinct for sanity in men will always prevent them from becoming
+mere dreamers and star-gazers.
+</p>
+<p>
+The true Idealist has his feet firmly planted on reality, and his
+idealism discloses itself not in a disposition to dream dreams and see
+visions, but in the largeness of a vision which sees realities in the
+totality of their relations and not merely in their obvious and
+superficial relations. It is a great mistake to discern in men nothing
+more substantial than that movement of hopes and longings which is so
+often mistaken for aspiration; it is equally a mistake to discern in
+men nothing more enduring and aspiring than the animal nature; either
+report, standing by itself, would be fundamentally untrue. Man is an
+animal; but he is an animal with a soul, and the sane view of him
+takes both body and soul into account. The defect of a good deal of
+current Realism lies in its lack of veracity; it is essentially
+untrue, and it is, therefore, fundamentally unreal. The love of truth,
+the passion for the fact, the determination to follow life wherever
+life leads, are noble, artistic instincts, and have borne noble fruit;
+but what is often called Realism has suffered quite as much as
+Idealism from weak practitioners, and stands quite as much in need of
+rectification and restatement.
+</p>
+<p>
+The essence of Idealism is the application of the imagination to
+realities; it is not a play of fancy, a golden vision arbitrarily
+projected upon the clouds and treated as if it had an objective
+existence. Goethe, who had such a vigorous hold upon the realities of
+existence, and who had also an artist's horror of mere abstractions,
+touched the heart of the matter when he defined the Ideal as the
+completion of the real. In this simple but luminous statement he
+condensed the faith and practice not only of the greater artists of
+every age, but of the greater thinkers as well. In the order of life
+there can be no real break between things as they now exist and things
+as they will exist in the remotest future; the future cannot
+contradict the present, nor falsify it; for the future must be the
+realisation of the full possibilities of the present. The present is
+related to it as the seed is related to the flower and fruit in which
+its development culminates. There are vast changes of form and
+dimension between the seed and the tree hanging ripe with fruit, but
+there is no contradiction between the germ and its final unfolding.
+</p>
+<p>
+A rigid Realism, however, sees in the seed nothing but its present
+hardness, littleness, ugliness; a true and rational Idealism sees all
+these things, but it sees also not only appearances but
+potentialities; or, to recall another of Goethe's phrases, it sees the
+object whole.
+</p>
+<p>
+To see life clearly and to see it whole is not only to see distinctly
+the obvious facts of life, but to see these facts in sequence and
+order; in other words, to explain and interpret them. The power to do
+this is one of the signs of a great imagination; and, other things
+being equal, the rank of a work of art may, in the last analysis, be
+determined by the clearness and veracity with which explanation and
+interpretation are suggested. Homer is, for this reason, the foremost
+writer of the Greek race. He is wholly free from any purpose to give
+ethical instruction; he is absolutely delivered from the temptation to
+didacticism; and yet he reveals to us the secret of the temperament
+and genius of his race. And he does this because he sees in his race
+the potentialities of the seed; the vitality, beauty, fragrance, and
+growth which lie enfolded in its tiny and unpromising substance. If
+the reality of a thing is not so much its appearance as the totality
+of that which is to issue out of it, then nothing can be truly seen
+without the use of the imagination. All that the Idealist asks is that
+life shall be seen not only with his eyes but with his imagination.
+His descriptions are accurate, but they are also vital; they give us
+the thing not only as it looked standing by itself, but as it appeared
+in the complete life of which it was a part; he makes us see the
+physical side of the fact with great distinctness, but he makes us see
+its spiritual side as well. As a result, there is left in our minds by
+the intelligent reading of Homer a clear impression of the spiritual,
+political, and social aptitudes and characteristics of the Greek
+people of his age,&mdash;an impression which no exact report of mere
+appearances could have conveyed; an impression which is due to the
+constant play of the poet's imagination upon the facts with which he
+is dealing.
+</p>
+<p>
+This is true Idealism; but it is also true Realism. It is not only the
+fact, but the truth. The fact may be observed, but the truth must be
+discerned by insight,&mdash;it is not within the range of mere
+observation; and it is this insight, this discernment of realities in
+their relation to the whole order of things, which characterises true
+Idealism, and which makes all the greater writers Idealists in the
+fundamental if not in the technical sense. Tolstoi has often been
+called a Realist by those who are eager to label everything and
+everybody succinctly; but Tolstoi is one of the representative
+Idealists of his time, and his &#34;Master and Man&#34; is one of the
+most touching and sincere bits of true Idealism which has been given
+the world for many a day.
+</p>
+<p>
+There is nothing which needs such constant reinforcement as this
+faculty of seeing things in their totality; for we are largely at the
+mercy of the hour unless we invoke the aid of the imagination to set
+the appearances of the moment in their large relations. To the man who
+sees things as they rush like a stream before him, there is no order,
+progression, or intelligent movement in human affairs; but to the
+student who brings to the study of current events wide and deep
+knowledge of the great historic movements, these apparently unrelated
+phenomena disclose the most intimate inter-relations and connections.
+The most despairing pessimism would be born in the heart of the man
+who should be fated to see to-day apart from yesterday and to-morrow;
+a rational and inspiring hope may be born in the soul of the man who
+sees the day as part of the year and the year as part of the century.
+The great writers are a refuge from the point of view of the moment,
+because they set the events of life in a fundamental order, and make
+us aware of the finer potentialities of our race. They are Idealists
+in the breadth of their vision and the nobility of the interpretation
+of events which they offer us.
+</p>
+<p>
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+<p class="chapter">
+<a name="260">
+Chapter XXIII.
+</a>
+</p>
+<p class="chaptertitle">
+The Vision of Perfection.
+</p>
+<p>
+These writers are also, by virtue of the faculty of discerning the
+interior relations of appearances and events, the expositors of that
+ultimate Idealism which not only discovers the possibility of the
+whole in the parts, of the perfect in the imperfect, but which
+discovers the whole, the complete and the perfect, and brings each
+before us in some noble form. The reality of the Ideal as Plato saw it
+is by no means universally accepted as a philosophical conclusion, but
+all high-minded men and women accept it as a rule of life. Idealism is
+wrought into the very fibre of the race, and is as indestructible as
+the imagination in which it has its roots. Deep in the heart of
+humanity lies the unshakable faith in its essential divinity, and in
+the reality of its highest hopes of development and attainment. The
+failure of noble schemes, the decline of enthusiasms, the fading of
+visions and dreams which seemed to have the luminous constancy of
+fixed stars, breed temporary depressions and passing moods of
+scepticism and despair; but the spiritual vitality of the race always
+reasserts itself, and faith returns after every disaster or
+disillusion.
+</p>
+<p>
+Indeed, as the race grows older and masters more and more a knowledge
+of its conditions, the impression of the essential greatness of the
+experience we call life deepens in the finer spirits. It becomes clear
+that the end towards which the hopes of the world have always moved is
+farther off than it seemed to the earlier generations; that the
+process of spiritual and social evolution is longer and more painful;
+that the universe is vaster and more wonderful than the vision of it
+which formed in the imagination of thinkers and poets; in a word, that
+the education which is being imparted to humanity by the very
+structure of the conditions under which it lives grows more severe,
+prolonged, and exacting as its methods and processes become more
+clear. The broadening of the field of observation has steadily
+deepened the impression of the magnitude and majesty of the physical
+order by which men are surrounded; and the fuller knowledge of what is
+in human experience has steadily deepened the impression of the almost
+tragic greatness of the lot of men. The disappointments of the race
+have been largely due to its inadequate conception of its own
+possibilities; its disillusions have been like the fading of the
+mirage which simulates against the near horizon that which lies long
+leagues away. These disappointments and disillusions, as Browning saw
+clearly, are essential parts of an education which leads the race step
+by step from smaller to larger ideas, from nearer and easier to more
+remote and difficult attainments.
+</p>
+<p>
+The disappointment which comes with the completion of every piece of
+work well and wisely done does not arise from the futility of the
+work, as the pessimists tell us, but from its inadequacy to express
+entirely the thought and force of the man who has striven to express
+himself completely in a material which, however masterfully used, can
+never give its ultimate form to a spiritual conception. It is not an
+evidence of failure, but a prophecy of greater achievement. A world in
+which the work was as great as the worker, the piece of art as the
+artist, would be a finished world in more senses than one; a world in
+which all work is inadequate to contain the energy of the worker, all
+art insufficient to express the soul of the artist, is necessarily a
+prophetic world, bearing witness to the presence of a creative force
+in workers and artists immeasurably beyond the capacity of any
+perishable material to receive or to preserve.
+</p>
+<p>
+A rational Idealism is, therefore, not only indestructible in a race
+which does not violate the laws of life, but is instilled into the
+higher order of minds by the order of life as revealed by science,
+history, and the arts. And this idealistic tendency is not only the
+poetic temper; it is the hope and safeguard of society. The real
+perils of the race are not material; they are always spiritual; and no
+peril could be greater than the loss of faith and hope in the
+possibility of attaining the best things. If men are ever bereft of
+their instinctive or rational conviction that they have the power
+ultimately to bring institutions of all kinds into harmony with their
+higher conceptions, they will sink into the lethargy of despair or the
+slough of sensualism. The belief in the reality of the Ideal in
+personal and social life is not only the joy and inspiration of the
+poet and thinker; it is also the salvation of the race. It is
+imperishable, because it is the product of the play of the imagination
+on the realities of life; and until the imagination perishes, the
+vision of the ultimate perfection will form and reform in the heart of
+every generation. It is the inspiration of every art, the end of every
+noble occupation, the secret hope of every fine character.
+</p>
+<p>
+Idealism in this sense, not as the product of an easy and ignorant
+optimism turning away from the facts of life, but as the product of a
+large and spiritual dealing with those facts, is the very soul, not
+only of noble living, but of those noble expressions of life which the
+greater writers have given us. They disclose wide diversity of gifts,
+but they have this in common,&mdash;that, in discovering to us the
+spiritual order of the facts of life, they disclose also those ideal
+figures which the race accepts as embodiments of its secrets, hopes,
+and aims. It is a significant fact that, in portraying the Greek of
+his time, Homer has given us also the ideal Greek and the Greek
+ideals. His insight went to the soul of the persons he described, and
+he struck into that spiritual order in which the ideal is not only a
+reality, but, in a sense, the only reality.
+</p>
+<p>
+Cervantes, in the very act of destroying a false Idealism,
+conventionally conceived and treated, made one of the most beautiful
+revelations of a true Idealism which the world has yet received.
+Shakespeare's presentation of the facts of life is, on the whole, the
+most comprehensive and impressive which has yet been made; in the
+disclosure of tragic elements it is unsurpassed; and yet what a host of
+ideal figures move through the plays and invest them with a light
+beyond the glow of art! In the Forest of Arden and on Prospero's
+Island there live, beyond the touch of time and the vicissitudes of
+fate, those gracious and beautiful spirits in whom the race sees its
+noblest hopes come true, its instinctive faith in itself justified.
+These spirits are not airy nothings, woven of the unsubstantial
+gossamer of which dreams are made; they are born of a deep insight
+into the possibilities of the soul, and a rational faith in their
+reality. Prospero is as real as Trinculo, and Rosalind as true as
+Cressida. These ideal persons are not necessarily fortunate in their
+surroundings or happy in their lot; they are simply perfect in their
+development of a type. They are not abnormal beings, rising above
+normal conditions; they are normal beings, rising above abnormal
+conditions. They stand for wholeness amid fragments, for perfection
+amid imperfection; but the very imperfection and fragmentariness by
+which they are surrounded predicts their coming and affirms their
+reality.
+</p>
+<p>
+In the rounded and developed nature there must be a deep vein of the
+Idealism which grows out of the vision of things in their large
+relations&mdash;out of a view of men ample enough to discern not only
+what they are at this stage of development, but what they may become
+when development has been completed. Nothing is more essential than
+the courage, the joy, and the insight which grow out of such an
+Idealism, and no spiritual possession is more easily lost. The
+spiritual depression of a reactionary period, the routine of work, the
+immersion in the stream of events, the decline of moral energy,
+conspire to blight this noble use of the imagination, and to chill the
+faith which makes creative living and working possible. The familiar
+companionship of the great Idealists is one of the greatest resources
+against the paralysis of this faith and the decay of this faculty.
+</p>
+<p>
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+<p class="chapter">
+<a name="271">
+Chapter XXIV.
+</a>
+</p>
+<p class="chaptertitle">
+Retrospect.
+</p>
+<p>
+The books of four great writers have been used almost exclusively by
+way of illustration throughout this discussion of the relation of
+books to culture. This limited selection may have seemed at times too
+narrow and rigid; it may have conveyed an impression of insensibility
+to the vast range and the great variety of literary forms and
+products, and of indifference to contemporary writing. It needs to be
+said, therefore, that the constant reference to Homer, Dante,
+Shakespeare, and Goethe has been made for the sake of clearness and
+force of illustration, and not, in any sense, as applying an exclusive
+principle of selection. The books of life are to be found in every
+language, and are the product of almost every age; and no one attains
+genuine culture who does not, through them, make himself familiar with
+the life of each successive generation. To be ignorant of the thought
+and art of one's time involves a narrowness of intelligence which is
+inconsistent with the maturity of taste and ripeness of nature which
+have been emphasised in these chapters as the highest and finest
+fruits of culture. The more generous a man's culture becomes, the more
+catholic becomes his taste and the keener his insight. The man of
+highest intelligence will be the first to recognise the fresh touch,
+the new point of view, the broader thought. He will bring to the books
+of his own time not only a trained instinct for sound work, but a deep
+sympathy with the latest effort of the human spirit to express itself
+in new forms. So deep and real will be his feeling for life that he
+will be eager to understand and possess every fresh manifestation of
+that life. However novel and unconventional the new form may be, it
+will not make its appeal to him in vain.
+</p>
+<p>
+It remains true, however, that literature is a universal art,
+expressive and interpretative of the spirit of humanity, and that no
+man can make full acquaintance with that spirit who fails to make
+companionship with its greatest masters and interpreters. The appeal
+of contemporary books is so constant and urgent that it stands in
+small need of emphasis; but the claims of the rich and splendid
+literature of the past are often slighted or ignored. The supreme
+masters of an art ought to be the objects of constant study and
+thought; there is more of life, truth, and beauty in them than in
+their fellow-artists of narrower range of experience and artistic
+achievement. For this reason these greatest interpreters of the human
+spirit are in no sense exclusively of the past; they are of the
+present and the future. To know them is not only to know the
+particular periods in which they wrote, but to know our own period in
+the deepest sense. No man can better prepare himself to enter into the
+formative life of his time than by thoroughly familiarising himself
+with the greatest books of the past; for in these are revealed, not
+the secrets of past forms of life, but the secrets of that spirit
+whose historic life is one unbroken revelation of its nature and
+destiny. It is, therefore, no disparagement of the great company of
+writers who have been the secretaries of the race in all ages to
+fasten attention upon the claims of the four men of genius whom the
+world has accepted as the supreme masters of the art of literature,
+and to point out again the immense importance of their works in the
+educational life of the individual and of society.
+</p>
+<p>
+It cannot be said too often that literature is the product of the
+continuous spiritual activity of the race; that it cannot be
+arbitrarily divided into periods save for mere convenience of
+arrangement; and that it is impossible to understand and value its
+latest products unless one is able to find their place and discern
+their value in the order of a spiritual development. To secure an
+adequate impression of this highest expression of the human spirit one
+must keep in view the work of the past quite as definitely as the work
+of the present; in such a broad survey there is a constant deliverance
+from the rashness of contemporary judgments, and from that narrowness
+of feeling which limits one's vital contact with the life of the race
+to the products of a single brief period.
+</p>
+<p>
+In any attempt to indicate the fundamental significance of the art of
+literature in the educational development of the individual and of
+society there must also be a certain repetition of idea and of
+illustration. This limitation, if it be a limitation, is inherent in
+the very nature of the undertaking. Literature is, for purposes of
+comment and exposition, practically inexhaustible; its themes are as
+varied and as numerous as the objects upon which the mind can fasten
+and about which the imagination can play. But while its forms and
+products are almost without number, this magnificent growth has, in
+the last analysis, a single root, and in these brief chapters the
+endeavour has been made, very inadequately, to bring the mind to this
+deep and hidden unity of life and art. Information, instruction,
+delight, flow in a thousand rivulets from as many books, but there is
+a spring of life which feeds all these separate streams. From that
+unseen source flows the vitality which has given power and freshness
+to a host of noble works; from that source vitality also flows into
+every mind open to its incoming. A rich intellectual life is
+characterised not so much by profusion of ideas as by the application
+of a few formative ideas to life; not so much by multiplicity of
+detached thoughts as by the habit of thinking. The genius of Carlyle
+is evidenced not by prodigal growth of ideas, but by an impressive
+interpretation of life through the application to all its phenomena of
+a few ideas of great depth and range. And this is true of all the
+great writers who have given us fresh views of life from some central
+and commanding height rather than a succession of glimpses or outlooks
+from a great number of points. The closer the approach to the central
+force behind any course of development, the fewer in number are the
+elements involved. The rootage of literature in the spiritual nature
+and experience of the race is the fundamental fact not only in the
+history of this rich and splendid art, but in its relation to culture.
+From this rootage flows the vitality which imparts immortality to its
+noblest products, and which supplies an educational element unrivalled
+in its enriching and enlarging quality.
+</p>
+<p>
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Books and Culture, by Hamilton Wright Mabie
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Books and Culture, by Hamilton Wright Mabie
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Books and Culture
+
+Author: Hamilton Wright Mabie
+
+Release Date: September 23, 2005 [EBook #16736]
+[Date last updated: October 8, 2005]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BOOKS AND CULTURE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Alicia Williams and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+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 individual experience much of the richness
+and splendour of the experience of the race.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XV.
+
+Freshness of Feeling.
+
+
+The primary charm of art resides in the freshness of feeling which it
+reveals and conveys. An art which discloses fatigue, weariness,
+exhaustion of emotion, deadening of interest, has parted with its
+magical spell; for vitality, emotion, passionate interest in the
+experiences of life, devout acceptance of the facts of life, are the
+prime characteristics of art in those moments when its veracity and
+power are at the highest point. A great work of art may be tragic in
+the view of life which it presents, but it must show no sign of the
+succumbing of the spirit to the appalling facts with which it deals;
+even in those cases in which, as in the tragedy of "King Lear," blind
+fate seems relentlessly sovereign over human affairs, the artist must
+disclose in his attitude and method a sustained energy of spirit.
+Nothing shows so clearly a decline in creative force as a loss of
+interest on the part of the artist in the subject or material with
+which he deals.
+
+That fresh bloom which lies on the very face of poetry, and in which
+not only its obvious but its enduring charm resides, is the expression
+of a feeling for nature, for life, and for the happenings which make
+up the common lot, which keeps its earliest receptivity and
+responsiveness. When a man ceases to care deeply for things, he ceases
+to represent or interpret them with insight and power. The
+preservation of feeling is, therefore, essential in all artistic work;
+and when it is lost, the artist becomes an echo or an imitation of his
+nobler self and work. It is the beautiful quality of the true art
+instinct that it constantly sees and feels the familiar world with a
+kind of childlike directness and delight. That which has become
+commonplace to most men is as full of charm and novelty to the artist
+as if it had just been created. He sees it with fresh eyes and feels
+it with a fresh heart. To such a spirit nothing becomes stale and
+hackneyed; everything remains new, fresh, and significant. It has
+often been said that if it were not for the children the world would
+lose the faith, the enthusiasm, the delight which constantly renew its
+spirit and reinforce its courage. A world grown old in feeling would
+be an exhausted world, incapable of production along spiritual or
+artistic lines. Now, the artist is always a child in the eagerness of
+his spirit and the freshness of his feeling; he retains the magical
+power of seeing things habitually, and still seeing them freshly. Mr.
+Lowell was walking with a friend along a country road when they came
+upon a large building which bore the inscription, "Home for Incurable
+Children." "They'll take me there some day," was the half-humorous
+comment of a sensitive man, to whom life brought great sorrows, but
+who retained to the very end a youthful buoyancy, courage, and faculty
+of finding delight in common things.
+
+It is a significant fact that the greatest men and women never lose
+the qualities which are commonly associated with youth,--freshness of
+feeling, zest for work, joy in life. Goethe at eighty-four studied the
+problems of life with the same deep interest which he had felt in them
+at thirty or forty; Tennyson's imagination showed some signs of waning
+power in extreme old age, but the magic of feeling was still fresh in
+his heart; Dr. Holmes carried his blithe spirit, his gayety and
+spontaneity of wit, to the last year of his life; and Mr. Gladstone at
+eighty-six was one of the most eager and aspiring men of his time.
+Genius seems to be allied to immortal youth; and in this alliance
+resides a large part of its power. For the man of genius does not
+demonstrate his possession of that rare and elusive gift by seeing
+things which have never been seen before, but by seeing with fresh
+interest what men have seen so often that they have ceased to regard
+it. Novelty is rarely characteristic of great works of art; on the
+contrary, the facts of life which they set before us are familiar, and
+the thoughts they convey by direct statement or by dramatic
+illustration have always been haunting our minds. The secret of the
+artist resides in the unwearied vitality which brings him to such
+close quarters with life, and endows him with directness of sight and
+freshness of feeling. Daisies have starred fields in Scotland since
+men began to plough and reap, but Burns saw them as if they had sprung
+from the ground for the first time; forgotten generations have seen
+the lark rise and heard the cuckoo call in England, but to Wordsworth
+the song from the upper sky and the notes from the thicket on the hill
+were full of the music of the first morning. Shakespeare dealt with
+old stories and constantly touched upon the most familiar things; but
+with what new interest he invests both theme and illustration! One may
+spend a lifetime in a country village, surrounded by people who are
+apparently entirely uninteresting; but if one has the eye of a
+novelist for the facts of life, the power to divine character, the
+gift to catch the turn of speech, the trick of voice, the peculiarity
+of manner, what resources, discoveries, and diversion are at hand! The
+artist never has to search for material; it is always at hand. That it
+is old, trite, stale to others, is of no consequence; it is always
+fresh and significant to him.
+
+This freshness of feeling is not in any way dependent on the character
+of the materials upon which it plays; it is not an irresponsible
+temperamental quality which seeks the joyful or comic facts of life
+and ignores its sad and tragic aspects. The zest of spirit which one
+finds in Shakespeare, for instance, is not a blind optimism
+thoughtlessly escaping from the shadows into the sunshine. On the
+contrary, it is drawn by a deep instinct to study the most perplexing
+problems of character, and to drop its plummets into the blackest
+abysses of experience. Literature deals habitually with the most
+sombre side of the human lot, and finds its richest material in those
+awful happenings which invest the history of every race with such
+pathetic interest; and yet literature, in its great moments, overflows
+with vitality, zest of spirit, freshness of spirit! There is no
+contradiction in all this; for the vitality which pervades great art
+is not dependent upon external conditions; it has its source in the
+soul of the artist. It is the immortal quality in the human spirit
+playing like sunshine on the hardest and most tragic facts of
+experience. It often suggests no explanation of these facts; it is
+content to present them with relentless veracity; but even when it
+offers no solution of the tragic problem, the tireless interest which
+it feels, the force with which it illustrates and describes, the power
+of moral organisation and interpretation which it reveals, carry with
+them the conviction that the spirit of man, however baffled and
+beaten, is superior to all the accidents of fortune, and
+indestructible even within the circle of the blackest fate. As
+OEdipus, old, blind, and smitten, vanishes from our sight, we think
+of him no longer as a great figure blasted by adverse fate, but as a
+great soul smitten and scourged, and yet still invested with the
+dignity of immortality. The dramatist, even when he throws no light on
+the ultimate solution of the problem with which he is dealing, feels
+so deeply and freshly, and discloses such sustained strength, that the
+vitality with which the facts are exhibited and the question stated
+affirms its superiority over all the adversities and catastrophes of
+fortune.
+
+This freshness of feeling, which is the gift of men and women of
+genius, must be possessed in some measure by all who long to get the
+most out of life and to develop their own inner resources. To retain
+zest in work and delight in life we must keep freshness of feeling.
+Its presence lends unfailing charm to its possessor; its loss involves
+loss of the deepest personal charm. It is essential in all genuine
+culture, because it sustains that interest in events, experience, and
+opportunity upon which growth is largely conditioned; and there is no
+more effective means of preserving and developing it than intimacy
+with those who have invested all life with its charm. The great books
+are reservoirs of this vitality. When our own interest begins to die
+and the world turns gray and old in our sight, we have only to open
+Homer, Shakespeare, Browning, and the flowers bloom again and the
+skies are blue; and the experiences of life, however tragic, are
+matched by a vitality which is sovereign over them all.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVI.
+
+Liberation from One's Time.
+
+
+The law of opposites under which men live is very strikingly brought
+out in the endeavour to secure a sound and intelligent adjustment to
+one's time,--a relation intimate and vital, and at the same time
+deliberately and judicially assumed. To be detached in thought,
+feeling, or action, from the age in which one lives, is to cut the
+ties that bind the individual to society, and through which he is very
+largely nourished and educated. To live deeply and really through
+every form of expression and in every relationship is so essential to the
+complete unfolding of the personality that he who falls below the full
+measure of his capacity for experience and for expression falls below the
+full measure of his possible growth. Life is not, as some men of detached
+moods or purely critical temper have assumed, a spectacle of which the
+secret can be mastered without sharing in the movement; it is rather a
+drama, the splendour of whose expression and the depth of whose meaning
+are revealed to those alone who share in the action. To stand aside from
+the vital movement and study life in a purely critical spirit is to miss
+the deeper education which is involved in the vital process, and to
+lose the fundamental revelation which is slowly and painfully disclosed
+to those whose minds and hearts are open to receive it. No one can
+understand love who has not loved and been loved; no one can comprehend
+sorrow who has not had the companionship of sorrow. The experiment has
+been made in many forms, but no one has yet been nourished by the fruit
+of the tree of knowledge who has eaten of that fruit alone. In the art
+of living, as in all the arts which illustrate and enrich living, the
+amateur and the dilettante have no real position; they never attain
+to that mastery of knowledge or of execution which alone give reality
+to a man's life or work. Mastery in any art comes to those only who
+give themselves without reservation or stint to their task; mastery
+in the supreme art of living is within reach of those only who live
+completely in every faculty and relation.
+
+To stand in the closest and most vital relation to one's time is,
+therefore, the first condition of comprehending one's age and getting
+from it what it has to give. But while a man must be in and with his
+time in the most vital sense, he must not be wholly of it. To get the
+vital enrichment which flows from identification with one's age, and
+at the same time to get the detachment which enables one to see his
+time in true relation to all time, is one of the problems which
+requires the highest wisdom for its solution. It is easy to become
+entirely absorbed in one's age, or it is easy to detach one's self
+from it, and study it in a cold and critical temper; but to get its
+warmth and vitality and escape its narrowing and limiting influence is
+so difficult that comparatively few men succeed in striking the
+balance between two divergent tendencies.
+
+A man gets power and knowledge from his time in the degree in which he
+suffers it to enlarge and vitalise him; he loses power and knowledge
+in the degree in which he suffers it to limit his vision and confine
+his interests. The Time Spirit is the greatest of our teachers so long
+as it is the interpreter of the Eternal Spirit; it is the most
+fallible and misleading of teachers when it attempts to speak for
+itself. The visible and material things by which we are surrounded are
+of immense helpfulness so long as they symbolise invisible and
+spiritual things; they become stones of stumbling and rocks of offence
+when they are detached from the spiritual order and set apart in an
+order of their own. The age in which we live affords a concrete
+illustration of the vital processes in society and means of contact
+with that society, but it is comprehensible and educative in the exact
+degree in which we understand its relation to other times. The
+impression which the day makes upon us needs to be tested by the
+impression which we receive from the year; the judgment of a decade
+must be corrected by the judgment of the century. The present hour is
+subtly illusive; it fills the whole stage, to the exclusion of the
+past and the present; it appears to stand alone, detached from all
+that went before or is to follow; it seems to be the historic moment,
+the one reality amid fleeting shadows. As a matter of fact, it is a
+logical product of the past, bound to it by ties so elusive that we
+cannot trace them, and so numerous and tenacious that we cannot sever
+them; it is but a fragment of a whole immeasurably greater than
+itself; its character is so completely determined by the past that the
+most radical changes we can make in it are essentially superficial;
+for it is the future, not the present, which is in our hands. To get
+even a glimpse of the character and meaning of our own time, we must,
+therefore, see it in relation to all time; to master it in any sense
+we must set it in its true historical relations. That which to the
+uneducated mind seems portentous is lightly regarded by the mind which
+sees the apparently isolated event in a true historic perspective;
+while the occurrence or condition which is barely noticed by the
+untrained, seen in the same perspective, becomes tragic in its
+prophecy of change and suffering. History is full of corrections of
+the mistaken judgments of the hour; and from the hate or adoration of
+contemporaries, the wise man turns to the clear-sighted and inexorable
+judgment of posterity. In the far-seeing vision of a trained
+intelligence the hour is never detached from the day, nor the day from
+the year; and the year is always held in its place in the century.
+
+Now, the man of culture has pre-eminently the gift of living deeply in
+his own age, and at the same time of seeing it in relation to all
+ages. It has no illusion for him; it cannot deceive him with its
+passionate acceptance or its equally passionate rejection. He sees the
+crown shining above the cross; he hears the long thunders of applause
+breaking in upon execrations which they will finally silence; he
+foresees the harvest in the seed that lies barely covered on the
+surface; and, afar off, his ear notes the final crash of that which at
+the moment seems to carry with it the assurance of eternal duration.
+Such a man secures the vitality of his time, but he escapes its
+limitation of vision by seeing it clearly and seeing it whole; he
+corrects the teaching of the time spirit by constant reference to the
+teaching of the Eternal Spirit imparted in the long training and the
+wide revelation of history. The day is beautiful and significant, or
+ominous and tragic, to him as it discloses its relation to the good or
+the evil of the years that are gone. And these vital associations,
+these deep historic connections, are brought to light with peculiar
+clearness in literature. Beyond all other means of enfranchisement,
+the book liberates a man from imprisonment within the narrow limits of
+his own time; it makes him free of all times. He lives in all periods,
+under all forms of government, in all social conditions; the mind of
+antiquity, of mediaevalism, of the Renaissance, is as open to him as
+the mind of his own day, and so he is able to look upon human life in
+its entirety.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVII.
+
+Liberation from One's Place.
+
+
+The instinct which drives men to travel is at bottom identical with
+that which fills men with passionate desire to know what is in life.
+Time and strength are often wasted in restless change from place to
+place; but real wandering, however aimless in mood, is always
+education. To know one's neighbours and to be on good terms with the
+community in which one lives are the beginning of sound relations to
+the world at large; but one never knows his village in any real sense
+until he knows the world. The distant hills which seem to be always
+calling the imaginative boy away from the familiar fields and hearth
+do not conspire against his peace, however much they may conspire
+against his comfort; they help him to the fulfilment of his destiny by
+suggesting to his imagination the deeper experience, the richer
+growth, the higher tasks which await him in the world beyond the
+horizon. Man is a wanderer by the law of his life; and if he never
+leaves his home in which he is born, he never builds a home of his
+own.
+
+It is the law of life that a child should leave his father and
+separate himself from his inherited surroundings, in order that by
+self-unfolding and self-realisation he may substitute a conscious for
+an unconscious, a moral for an instinctive relation. The instinct of
+the myth-makers was sound when it led them to attach such importance
+to the wandering and the return; the separation effected in order that
+individuality and character might be realised through isolation and
+experience, the return voluntarily made through clear recognition of
+the soundness of the primitive relations, the beauty of the service of
+the older and wiser to the younger and the more ignorant. We are born
+into relations which we accept as normal and inevitable; we break away
+from them in order that by detachment we may see them objectively and
+from a distance, and that we may come to self-consciousness; we resume
+these relations of deliberate purpose and with clear perception of
+their moral significance. So the boy, grown to manhood, returns to his
+home from the world in which he has tested himself and seen for the
+first time, with clear eyes, the depth and beauty of its service in
+the spiritual order; so the man who has revolted from the barren and
+shallow dogmatic statement of a spiritual truth returns, in riper
+years and with a deeper insight, to the truth which is no longer
+matter of inherited belief but of vital need and perception.
+
+The ripe, mature, full mind not only escapes the limitation of the
+time in which it finds itself; it also escapes from the limitations of
+the place in which it happens to be. A man of deep culture cannot be a
+provincial; he must be a citizen of the world. The man of provincial
+tastes and ideas owns the acres; the man of culture commands the
+landscape. He knows the world beyond the hills; he sees the great
+movement of life from which the village seems almost shut out; he
+shares those inclusive experiences which come to each age and give
+each age a character of its own. He is in fellowship and sympathy with
+the smaller community at his doors, but he belongs also to that
+greater community which is coterminous with humanity itself. He is not
+disloyal to his immediate surroundings when he leaves them for
+exploration, travel, and discovery; he is fulfilling that law of life
+which conditions true valuation of that into which one is born upon
+clear perception of that which one must acquire for himself.
+
+The wanderings of individuals and races, which form so large a part of
+the substance of history, are witnesses of that craving for deeper
+experience and wider knowledge which is one of the springs of human
+progress. The American cares for Europe not for its more skilful and
+elaborate ministration to his comfort; he is drawn towards it through
+the appeal of its rich historic life to his imagination and through
+the diversity and variety of its social and racial phenomena. And in
+like manner the European seeks the East, not simply as a matter of
+idle curiosity, but because he finds in the East conditions which are
+set in such sharp contrast with those with which he is familiar. The
+instinct for expansion which gives human history its meaning and
+interest is constantly urging the man of sensitive mind to secure by
+observation that which he cannot get by experience.
+
+To secure the most complete development one must live in one's time
+and yet live above it, and one must also live in one's home and yet
+live, at the same time, in the world. The life which is bounded in
+knowledge, interest, and activity by the invisible but real and
+limiting walls of a small community is often definite in aim,
+effective in action, and upright in intention; but it cannot be rich,
+varied, generous, and stimulating. The life, on the other hand, which
+is entirely detached from local associations and tasks is often
+interesting, liberalising, and catholic in spirit; but it cannot be
+original or productive. A sound life--balanced, poised, and
+intelligently directed--must stand strongly in both local and
+universal relations; it must have the vitality and warmth of the
+first, and the breadth and range of the second.
+
+This liberation from provincialism is not only one of the signs of
+culture, but it is also one of its finest results; it registers a high
+degree of advancement. For the man who has passed beyond the
+prejudices, misconceptions, and narrowness of provincialism has gone
+far on the road to self-education. He has made as marked an advance on
+the position of the great mass of his contemporaries as that position
+is an advance on the earlier stages of barbarism. The barbarian lives
+only in his tribe; the civilised man, in the exact degree in which he
+is civilised, lives with humanity. Books are among the richest
+resources against narrowing local influences; they are the ripest
+expositions of the world-spirit. To know the typical books of the race
+is to be in touch with those elements of thought and experience which
+are shared by men of all countries. Without a knowledge of these books
+a man never really gets at the life of localities which are foreign to
+him; never really sees those historic places about which the
+traditions of civilisation have gathered. Travel is robbed of half its
+educational value unless one carries with him a knowledge of that
+which he looks at for the first time with his own eyes. No American
+sees England unless he carries England in his memory and imagination.
+Westminster Abbey is devoid of spiritual significance to the man who
+is ignorant of the life out of which it grew, and of the history which
+is written in its architecture and its memorials. The emancipation
+from the limitations of locality is greatly aided by travel, but it is
+accomplished only by intimate knowledge of the greater books.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVIII.
+
+The Unconscious Element.
+
+
+While it is true that the greatest books betray the most intimate
+acquaintance with the time in which they are written, and disclose the
+impress of that time in thought, structure, and style, it is also true
+that such books are so essentially independent of contemporary forms
+and moods that they largely escape the vicissitudes which attend those
+forms and moods. The element of enduring interest in them outweighs
+the accidents of local speech or provincial knowledge, as the force
+and genius of Caesar survive the armor he wore and the language he
+spoke. A great book is a possession for all time, because a writer of
+the first rank is the contemporary of every generation; he is never
+outgrown, exhausted, or even old-fashioned, although the garments he
+wore may have been laid aside long ago.
+
+In this permanent quality, unchanged by changes of taste and form,
+resides the secret of that charm which draws about the great poets men
+and women of each succeeding period, eager to listen to words which
+thrilled the world when it was young, and which have a new meaning for
+every new age. It is safe to say that Homer will speak to men as long
+as language survives, and that translation will follow translation to
+the end of time. What Robinson said of the Bible in one of the great
+moments of modern history may be said of the greater works of
+literature: more light will always stream from them. Indeed, many of
+them will not be understood until they are read in the light of long
+periods of history; for as the great books are interpretations of
+life, so life in its historic revelation is one continuous commentary
+on the greater books.
+
+This preponderance of the permanent over the accidental or temporary
+in books of this class is largely due to the unconscious element which
+plays so great a part in them: the element of universal experience, in
+which every man shares in the exact degree in which, in mind and
+heart, he approaches greatness. It is idle to attempt to separate
+arbitrarily in Shakespeare, for instance, those elements in the poet's
+work which were deliberately introduced from those which went into it
+by the unconscious action of his whole nature; but no one can study
+the plays intelligently without becoming more and more clearly aware
+of those depths of life which moved in the poet before they moved in
+his work; which enlarged, enriched, and silently reorganised his view
+of life and his power of translating life out of individual into
+universal terms. It would be impossible, for instance, to write such a
+play as "The Tempest" by sheer force of intellect; in the creation of
+such a work there is involved, beyond literary skill, calculation, and
+deep study of the relation of thought to form, a ripeness of spirit, a
+clearness of insight, a richness of imagination, which are so much
+part of the very soul of the poet that he does not separate them in
+thought, and cannot consciously balance, adjust, and employ them. They
+are quite beyond his immediate control, as they are beyond all
+attempts to imitate them.
+
+Cleverness may learn all the forms and methods, but it is powerless to
+imitate greatness; it can simulate the conscious, dexterous side of
+greatness, but it cannot simulate the unconscious, vital side. The
+moment a man like Voltaire attempts to deal with such a character as
+Joan of Arc, his spiritual and artistic limitations become painfully
+apparent; of cleverness there is no lack, but of reverence, insight,
+depth of feeling, the affinity of the great imagination for the great
+nature or deed, there is no sign. The man is entirely and hopelessly
+incapacitated for the work by virtue of certain limitations in his own
+nature of which he is obviously in entire ignorance. The conscious
+skill of Voltaire was delicate, subtle, full of vitality; but the
+unconscious side of his nature was essentially shallow, thin, largely
+undeveloped; and it is the preponderance of the unconscious over the
+conscious in a man's life which makes him great in himself and equips
+him for work of the highest quality. No man can put his skill to the
+highest use and give his knowledge the final touch of individuality
+until both are so entirely incorporated in his personality that they
+have become part of himself.
+
+This deepest and most vital of all the processes of self-education and
+self-unfolding, which is brought to such perfection in men of the
+highest creative power, is the fundamental process of culture,--the
+chief method which every man uses, consciously or unconsciously, who
+brings his nature to complete ripeness of quality and power. The
+absorption of vital experience and knowledge which went on in
+Shakespeare enlarged and clarified his vision and insight to such a
+degree that both became not only searching, but veracious in a rare
+degree; life was opened to him on many sides by the expansion first
+accomplished in himself. This is saying again what has been said so
+many times, but cannot be said too often,--that, in order to give
+one's work a touch of greatness, a man must first have a touch of
+greatness in his own nature. But greatness is not an irresponsible and
+undirected growth; it is as definitely conditioned on certain
+obediences to intellectual discipline and spiritual law as is any kind
+of lesser skill conditioned on practice and work. One of these
+conditions is the development of the power to turn conscious processes
+of observation, emotion, and skill into unconscious processes; to
+enrich the nature below the surface, so to speak; to make the soil
+productive by making it deep and rich. Men of mere skill always stop
+short of this final process of self-development, and always stop short
+of those final achievements which sum up and express all that has been
+known or felt about a subject and give it permanent form; men of
+essential greatness take this last step in that higher education which
+makes one master of the force of his personality, and give his words
+and works universal range and perennial interest.
+
+Now, this is the deepest quality in the books of life, which a student
+may not only enjoy to the full, but may also absorb and make his own.
+When Alfred de Musset, in an oft-repeated phrase, said that it takes a
+great deal of life to make a little art, he was not only affirming the
+reality of this process of passing experience through consciousness
+into the unconscious side of a man's nature, but he was also hinting
+at one of the greatest resources of pleasure and growth. For time and
+life continually enrich the man who has learned the secret of turning
+experience and observation into knowledge and power. It is a secret in
+the sense in which every vital process is a secret; but it is not a
+trick, a skill, or a method which may be communicated in a formula.
+Mrs. Ward describes a character in one of her stories as having passed
+through a great culture into a great simplicity of nature; in other
+words, culture had wrought its perfect work, and the man had passed
+through wide and intensely self-conscious activity into the repose and
+simplicity of self-unconsciousness; his knowledge had become so
+completely a part of himself that he had ceased to be conscious of it
+as a thing distinct from himself. There is no easy road to this last
+height in the long and painful process of education; and time is an
+essential element in the process, because it is a matter of growth.
+
+There are, it is true, a few men and women who seem born with this
+power of living in the heart of things and possessing them in the
+imagination without having gone through the long and painful stages of
+preparatory education; but genius is not only inexplicable, it is also
+so rare that for the immense majority of men any effort to comprehend
+it must be purely academic. It is enough to know that if we are in any
+degree to share with men and women of genius the faculty of vision,
+insight, and creative energy, we must master the conditions which
+favor the development of those supreme gifts. There is laid,
+therefore, upon the student who wishes to get the vital quality of
+literature the necessity of repeating, by deliberate and intelligent
+design, the process which in so many of the masters of the arts has
+been, apparently, accomplished instinctively. To make observation,
+study, and experience part of one's spiritual and intellectual
+capital, it is, in the first place, necessary to saturate one's self
+with that which one is studying; to possess it by constant familiarity;
+to let the imagination play upon it; to meditate upon it. And
+it is necessary, in the second place, to make this practice habitual;
+when it becomes habitual, it will become largely unconscious: one does
+it by instinct rather than by deliberation. This process is
+illustrated in every successful attempt to master any art. In the art
+of speaking, for instance, the beginner is hampered by an embarrassing
+consciousness of his hands, feet, speech; he cannot forget himself and
+surrender himself to his thought or his emotion; he dare not trust
+himself. He must, therefore, train himself through mind, voice, and
+body; he must submit to constant and long-sustained practice, thinking
+out point by point what he shall say and how he shall say it. This
+process is, at the start, partly mechanical; in the nature of things
+it must be entirely within the view and control of a vigilant
+consciousness. But as the training progresses, the element of
+self-consciousness steadily diminishes, until, in great moments, the
+true orator, become one harmonious instrument of expression,
+surrenders himself to his theme, and his personality shines clear and
+luminous through speech, articulation, and gesture. The unconscious
+nature of the man subordinates his skill wholly to its own uses. In
+like manner, in every kind of self-expression, the student who puts
+imagination, vitality, and sincerity into the work of preliminary
+education, comes at last to full command of himself, and gives
+complete expression to that which is deepest and most individual in
+him. Time, discipline, study, and thought enrich every nature which is
+receptive and responsive.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIX.
+
+The Teaching of Tragedy.
+
+
+No characters appeal more powerfully to the imagination than those
+impressive figures about whom the literature of tragedy
+moves,--figures associated with the greatest passions and the most
+appalling sorrows. The well-balanced man, who rises step by step
+through discipline and work to the highest place of influence and
+power, is applauded and admired; but the heart of the world goes out
+to those who, like OEdipus, are overmatched by a fate which pursues
+with relentless step, or, like Hamlet, are overweighted with tasks too
+heavy or too terrible for them. Agamemnon, OEdipus, Orestes, Hamlet,
+Lear, Pere Goriot, are supreme figures in that world of the
+imagination in which the poets have endeavoured both to reflect and to
+interpret the world as men see it and act in it.
+
+The essence of tragedy is the collision between the individual will,
+impulse, or action, and society in some form of its organisation, or
+those unwritten laws of life which we call the laws of God. The tragic
+character is always a lawbreaker, but not always a criminal; he is,
+indeed, often the servant of a new idea which sets him, as in the case
+of Giordano Bruno, in opposition to an established order of knowledge;
+he is sometimes, as in the case of Socrates, a teacher of truths which
+make him a menace to lower conceptions of citizenship and narrower
+ideas of personal life; or he is, as in the case of Othello and Paolo,
+the victim of passions which overpower the will and throw the whole
+life out of relation to its moral and social environment. The interest
+with which the tragic character is always invested is due not only to
+the exceptional experience in which the tragic situation always
+culminates, but also to the self-surrender which precedes the penalty
+and the expiation.
+
+There is a fallacy at the bottom of the admiration we feel when a rich
+nature throws restraint of any kind to the winds and gives itself up
+wholly to some impulse or passion,--the fallacy of supposing that by a
+violent break with existing conditions freedom can be secured; for the
+world loves freedom, even when it is too slothful or too cowardly to
+pay the price which it exacts. That admiration arises, however, from a
+sound instinct,--the instinct which makes us love both power and
+self-sacrifice, even when the first is ill-directed and the second
+wasted. The vast majority of men are content to do their work quietly
+and in obscurity, with no disclosure of originality, freshness, or
+force; they obey law, conform to custom, respect the conventionalities
+of their age; they appear to be lacking in representative quality;
+they are, apparently, the faithful and uninteresting drudges of
+society. There are, it is true, a host of commonplace persons, in
+every generation, who perform uninteresting tasks in a mechanical
+spirit; but it must not be inferred that a man is either craven or
+cowardly because he does not break from the circle in which he finds
+himself and make a bold and picturesque rush for freedom; it may be
+that freedom is to be won for him in the silent and faithful doing of
+the work which lies next him; it is certain that the highest power and
+the noblest freedom are secured, not by the submission which fears to
+fight, but by that which accepts the discipline for the sake of the
+mastery which is conditioned upon it.
+
+There are, however, conditions which no man can control, and which are
+in their nature essentially tragic; and men and women who are involved
+in these conditions cannot elude a fate for which they are not
+responsible and from which they cannot escape. This was true of many
+of the greatest characters in classical tragedy, and it is true also
+of many of the characters in modern tragedy. The world looks with
+bated breath on a struggle of the noblest heroism, in which men and
+women, matched against overwhelming social forces, bear their part
+with sublime and unfaltering courage, and by the completeness of their
+self-surrender assert their sovereignty even in the hour when disaster
+seems to crush and destroy them. To these striking figures, isolated
+by the greatness of their fate, the heart of the world has always gone
+out as to the noblest of its children. Solitary in the possession of
+some new conception of duty or of truth, separated from the mass of
+their fellows by that lack of sympathy which springs from imperfect
+comprehension of higher aims or deeper insight, these sublime
+strugglers against ignorance, prejudice, caste, and power, become the
+heroes and martyrs of the race; they announce the advent of new
+conceptions of social order and individual rights; they incarnate the
+imperishable soul of humanity in its long and terrible endeavour to
+bring the institutions and the ideas of men into harmony with a higher
+order of life.
+
+The tragic element has, therefore, many aspects,--sometimes lawless
+and destructive, sometimes self-sacrificing and instructive; but its
+illustration in literature in any form is not only profoundly
+interesting, but profoundly instructive as well. In no other literary
+form is the stuff of which life is made wrought into such commanding
+figures; in no other form are the deeper possibilities of life brought
+into such clear view; in no other form are the fundamental laws of
+life disclosed in a light at once so searching and so beautiful in its
+revealing power. If all the histories were lost and all the ethical
+discussions forgotten, the moral quality of life and the tremendous
+significance of character would find adequate illustration in the
+great tragedies. They lay bare the very heart of man under all
+historic conditions; they make us aware of the range of his
+experiences; they uncover the depths by which he is surrounded. They
+enable us to see, in lightning flashes, the undiscovered territory
+which incloses the little island on which we live; they light up the
+mysterious background of invisible forces against which we play our
+parts and work out our destiny.
+
+To the student of literature, who strives not only to enjoy but to
+comprehend, tragedy brings all the materials for a deep and genuine
+education. Instead of a philosophical or ethical statement of
+principles, it offers living illustration of ethical law as revealed
+in the greatest deeds and the most heroic experiences; it discloses
+the secret of the age which created it,--for in no other literary form
+are the fundamental conceptions of a period so deeply involved or so
+clearly set forth. The very springs of Greek character are uncovered
+in the Greek tragedies; and the tremendous forces liberated by the
+Renaissance are nowhere else so strikingly brought to light as in that
+group of tragedies which were produced in so many countries, by so
+many men, at the close of that momentous epoch. When literature runs
+mainly to the tragic form, it may be assumed that the spiritual force
+of the race has expressed itself afresh, and that a race, or a group
+of races, has passed through one of those searching experiences which
+bring men again face to face with the facts of life; for the
+production of tragedy involves thought of such depth, insight of such
+clearness, and imaginative power of such quality and range that it is
+possible, on a great scale, only when the springs of passion and
+action have been profoundly stirred. The appearance of tragedy marks,
+therefore, those moments when men manifest, without calculation or
+restraint, all the power that is in them; and into no other literary
+form is the vital force poured so lavishly. It is the instinctive
+recognition of this unveiling of the soul of man which gives the
+tragedy such impressiveness even when it is haltingly represented on
+the stage, and which subdues the imagination to its mood when the
+solitary reader comes under its spell. The life of the race is sacred
+in those great passages which record its sufferings; and nothing makes
+us so aware of our unity with our kind in all times and under all
+circumstances as the community of suffering in which, actively or
+passively, all men share.
+
+In the tragedy the student of literature is brought into the most
+intimate relation with his race in those moments when its deepest
+experiences are laid bare; he enters into its life when that life is
+passing through its most momentous passages; he is present in those
+hidden places where it confesses its highest hopes, reveals its most
+terrible passions, suffers its most appalling punishments, and passes
+on, through anguish and sacrifice, to its new day of thought and
+achievement.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XX.
+
+The Culture Element in Fiction.
+
+
+One of the chief elements in fiction which make for culture is,
+primarily, its disclosure of the elementary types of character and
+experience. A single illustration of this quality will suggest its
+presence in all novels of the first rank and its universal interest
+and importance. The aspirations, dreams, devotions, and sacrifices of
+men are as real as their response to self-interest or their tendency
+to the conventional and the commonplace; and they are, in the long
+run, a great deal more influential. They have wider play; they are
+more compelling; and they are of the very highest significance,
+because they spring out of that which is deepest and most distinctive
+in human nature. A host of men never give these higher impulses, these
+spiritual aptitudes and possibilities, full play; but they are in all
+men, and all men recognise them and crave an expression of them.
+Nothing is truer, on the lowest and most practical plane, than the old
+declaration that men do not live by bread alone; they sometimes exist
+on bread, because nothing better is to be had at the moment; but they
+live only in the full and free play of all their activities, in the
+complete expression not only of what is most pressing in interest and
+importance at a given time, but of that which is potential and
+possible at all times.
+
+The novel of romance and adventure has had a long history, and the
+elements of which it is compounded are recognisable long before they
+took the form of fiction. Two figures appear and reappear in the
+mythology of every poetic people,--the hero and the wanderer; the man
+who achieves and the man who experiences; the man who masters life
+by superiority of soul or body, and the man who masters it by
+completeness of knowledge. It is interesting and pathetic to find how
+universally these two figures held the attention and stirred the
+hearts of primitive men; how infinitely varied are their tasks, their
+perils, and their vicissitudes. They wear so many guises, they bear so
+many names, they travel so far and compass so much experience that it
+is impossible, in any interpretation of mythology, to escape the
+conviction that they were the dominant types in the thought of the
+myth-makers. And these earliest story-makers were not idle dreamers,
+entertaining themselves by endless manufacture of imaginary incidents,
+conditions, and persons. They were, on the contrary, the observers,
+the students, the scientists of their period; their endeavour was not
+to create a fiction, but to explain the world and themselves. Their
+observation was imperfect, and they made ludicrous mistakes of fact
+because they lacked both knowledge and training; but they made free
+use of the creative faculty, and there is, consequently, a good deal
+more truth in their daring guesses than in many of those provisional
+explanations of nature and ourselves which have been based too
+exclusively on scrutiny of the obvious fact, and indifference to the
+fact, which is not less a fact because it is elusive.
+
+The myth-makers endeavoured to explain the world, but that was only
+one-half of their endeavour; they attempted also to explain
+themselves. They discovered the striking analogies between certain
+natural phenomena or processes and the phenomena and processes of
+their own nature; they discovered the tasks and wanderings of the sun,
+and they perceived the singular resemblance of these tasks and
+wanderings to the happenings of their own lives. So the hero and the
+wanderer became subjective as well as objective, and symbolised what
+was deepest and most universal in human nature and human experience,
+as well as what was most striking in the external world. When
+primitive men looked into their hearts and their experience, they
+found their deepest hopes, longings, and possibilities bound up and
+worked out in two careers,--the career of the hero and the career of
+the wanderer.
+
+These two figures became the commanding types of all the nobler
+mythologies, because they symbolised what was best, deepest, and most
+real in human nature and life. They represent the possible reach and
+the occasional achievement of the human soul; they stand for that
+which is potential as well as for that which is actual in human
+experience. Few men achieve or experience on a great scale; but these
+few are typical, and are, therefore, transcendent in interest. The
+average commonplace man fills great space in contemporary history, as
+in the history of all times, and his character and career are well
+worth the closest study and the finest art of the writer; but the
+average man, who never achieves greatly, and to whom no striking or
+dramatic experience comes, has all the possibilities of action and
+suffering in his nature, and is profoundly interested in these more
+impressive aspects of life. Truth to fact is essential to all sound
+art, but absolute veracity involves the whole truth,--the truth of the
+exceptional as well as of the average experience; the truth of the
+imagination as well as of observation.
+
+The hero and the wanderer are still, and always will be, the great
+human types; and they are, therefore, the types which will continue to
+dominate fiction; disappearing at times from the stage which they may
+have occupied too exclusively, but always reappearing in due
+season,--the hero in the novel of romance, the wanderer in the novel
+of adventure. These figures are as constant in fiction as they were in
+mythology; from the days of the earliest Greek and Oriental stories to
+these days of Stevenson and Barrie, they have never lost their hold on
+the imagination of the race. When the sense of reality was feeble,
+these figures became fantastic, and even ridiculous; but this false
+art was the product of an unregulated, not of an illegitimate,
+exercise of the imagination; and while "Don Quixote" destroyed the old
+romance of chivalry, it left the instinct which produced that romance
+untouched. As the sense of reality becomes more exacting and more
+general, the action of the imagination is more carefully regulated;
+but it is not diminished, either in volume or in potency. Men have not
+lost the power of individual action because society has become so
+highly developed, and the multiplication of the police has not
+materially reduced the tragic possibilities of life. There is more
+accurate and more extensive knowledge of environment than ever before
+in the history of the race, but temperament, impulse, and passion
+remain as powerful as they were in primitive men; and tragedy finds
+its materials in temperament, impulse, and passion, much more
+frequently than in objective conditions and circumstances.
+
+The soul of man has passed through a great education, and has
+immensely profited by it; but its elemental qualities and forces
+remain unchanged. Two things men have always craved,--to come to close
+quarters with life, and to do something positive and substantial.
+Self-expression is the prime need of human nature; it must know, act,
+and suffer by virtue of its deepest instincts. The greater and richer
+that nature, the deeper will be its need of seeing life on many sides,
+of sharing in many kinds of experience, of contending with multiform
+difficulties. To drink deeply of the cup of life, at whatever cost,
+appears to be the insatiable desire of the most richly endowed men and
+women; and with such natures the impulse is to seek, not to shun,
+experience. And that which to the elect men and women of the race is
+necessary and possible is not only comprehensible to those who cannot
+possess it: it is powerfully and permanently attractive. There is a
+spell in it which the dullest mortal does not wholly escape.[1]
+
+    1. Reprinted in part, by permission, from the "Forum."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXI.
+
+Culture through Action.
+
+
+It is an interesting fact that the four men who have been accepted as
+the greatest writers who have yet appeared, used either the epic or
+the dramatic form. It can hardly have been accidental that Homer and
+Dante gave their greatest work the epic form, and that Shakespeare and
+Goethe were in their most fortunate moments dramatists. There must
+have been some reason in the nature of things for this choice of two
+literary forms which, differing widely in other respects, have this in
+common, that they represent life in action. They are very largely
+objective; they portray events, conditions, and deeds which have
+passed beyond the stage of thought and have involved the thinker in
+the actual historical world of vital relationships and dramatic
+sequence. The lyric poet may sing, if it pleases him, like a bird in
+the recesses of a garden, far from the noise and dust of the highway
+and the clamour of men in the competitions of trade and work; but the
+epic or dramatic poet must find his theme and his inspiration in the
+stir and movement of men in social relations. He deals, not with the
+subjective, but with the objective man; with the man whose dreams are
+no longer visions of the imagination, but are becoming incorporate in
+some external order; whose passions are no longer seething within him,
+but are working themselves out in vital consequences; whose thought is
+no longer purely speculative, but has begun to give form and shape to
+laws, habits, or institutions. It is the revelation of the human
+spirit in action which we find in the epic and the drama; the inward
+life working itself out in material and social relations; the soul of
+the man becoming, so to speak, externalised.
+
+The epic, as illustrated in the "Iliad" and "Odyssey," deals with a
+main or central movement in Greek tradition; a series of events which,
+by reason of their nature and prominence, imbedded themselves in the
+memory of the Greek race. These events are described in narrative
+form, with episodes, incidents, and dialogues, which break the long
+story and relax the strain of attention from time to time, without
+interrupting the progress of the narrative. There are heroes whose
+figures stand out in the long story with great distinctness, but we
+are interested much more in what they do than in what they are; for in
+the epic, character is subordinate to action. In the dramas of
+Shakespeare, on the other hand, while action is more constantly
+employed and is thrown into bolder relief, our deepest interest
+centres in the actors; the action is no longer the matter of first
+importance; it is significant mainly because it involves men and women
+not only in the chain of external consequences, but also in the order
+of spiritual sequences. We are deeply stirred by our perception of the
+intimate connection between the possibilities which lie sleeping in
+the individual life, and the tragic events which are set in motion
+when those possibilities are realised in action. In both epic and
+drama men are seen, not in their subjective moods, but in their
+objective struggles; not in the detachment of the life of speculation
+and imagination, but in vital association and relation with society in
+its order and institutions. With many differences, both of spirit and
+form, the epic and the drama are at one in portraying men in that
+ultimate and decisive stage which determines individual character and
+gives history its direction and significance.
+
+And it is from men in action that much of the deepest truth concerning
+life and character has come; indeed, it is not until we pass out of
+the region of the speculative, the merely potential, that the word
+"character" takes on that tremendous meaning with which thousands of
+years of actual happenings have invested it. A purely ideal world--a
+world fashioned wholly apart from the realities which convey definite,
+concrete revelations of what is in us and in our world--would
+necessarily be an unmoral world. The relationships which bind men
+together and give human intercourse such depth and richness spring
+into being only when they are actually entered upon; they could never
+be understood or foreseen in a world of pure thought; nor would it be
+possible, in such a world, to realise that reaction of the deed upon
+the doer which creates character, nor that far-reaching influence of
+the deed upon society, and the sequence of events which so often
+issues in tragedy and from which history derives its immense interest
+and meaning. A world which stopped short of realisation in action
+would not only lose the fathomless dramatic interest which inheres in
+human life, but it would part with all those moral implications of the
+integrity and persistence of the individual soul, its moral quality
+and its moral responsibility, which make man something different from
+the dust which whirls about him on the highway, or the stone over
+which he stumbles. This is precisely the character of those
+speculative systems which deny the reality of action and substitute
+the idea for the deed; such a world does more than suffocate the
+individual soul; it destroys the very meaning of life by robbing it of
+moral order and meaning. The end of such a conception of the universe
+is necessarily annihilation, and its mood is necessarily despair.
+
+"How can a man come to know himself?" asked Goethe. "Never by
+thinking, but by doing." Now, this knowledge of self in the large
+sense is precisely the knowledge which ripens and clarifies us, which
+gives us sanity, repose, and power. To know what is in humanity and
+what life means to humanity, we must study humanity in its active, not
+in its passive, moods; in the hours when it is doing, not thinking.
+Sooner or later all its thinking which has any reality in it passes on
+into action. The emotion, passion, thought, impulse, which never gets
+beyond the subjective stage, dies before birth; and all those
+philosophies which urge abstinence from action would cut the plant of
+life at the root; they are, in the last analysis, pleas for suicide.
+Men really live only as they freely express themselves through
+thought, emotion, and action. They get at the deepest truth and enter
+into the deepest relationships only as they act. Inaction involves
+something more than the disease and decay of certain faculties; it
+involves the deformity of arrested development, and failure to enter
+into that larger world of truth which is open to those races alone
+which live a whole life. It is for this reason that the drama must
+always hold the first place among those forms which the art of
+literature has perfected; it is for this reason that Homer, Dante,
+Shakespeare, and Goethe, consciously or unconsciously, chose those
+forms of expression which are specially adapted to represent and
+illustrate life in action; it is for this reason, among others, that
+these writers must always play so great a part in the work of
+educating the race. Culture is, above all things, real and vital;
+knowledge may deal with abstractions and unrelated bits of fact, but
+culture must always fasten upon those things which are significant in
+a spiritual order. It has to do with the knowledge which may become
+incorporate in a man's nature, and with that knowledge especially
+which has come to humanity through action. It is this deeper knowledge
+which holds a lighted torch aloft in the deepest recesses of the soul,
+or over those abysses of possible experience which open on all sides
+about every man, which is to be found in the pages of Homer, Dante,
+Shakespeare, and Goethe, and of all those great artists who have seen
+men in those decisive and significant moments when they strike into
+the movement of history, or, through their deeds and sufferings, the
+order of life suddenly shines forth.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXII.
+
+The Interpretation of Idealism.
+
+
+Idealism has so often been associated in recent years with vagueness
+of thought, slovenly construction, and a weak sentimentalism, that it
+has been discredited, even among those who have recognised the reality
+behind it and the great place it must hold in all rich and noble
+living. It is the misfortune of what is called Idealism, that, like
+other spiritual principles, it attracts those who mistake the longings
+of unintelligent discontent for aspiration, or the changing outlines
+of vapory fancies for the firm and consistent form and shape of real
+conceptions deeply realised in the imagination. Idealism has suffered
+much at the hands of feeble practitioners who have substituted
+irrational dreams for those far-reaching visions and those penetrating
+insights which are characteristic of its true use and illustration in
+the arts. The height of the reaction so vigorously and impressively
+illustrated in a great group of modern realistic works is due largely
+to the weakness and extravagance of the idealistic movement. When
+sentiment is exchanged for its corrupting counterfeit, sentimentalism,
+and clear and definite thinking gives place to vague and elusive
+emotions and fancies, reaction is not only inevitable but wholesome;
+the instinct for sanity in men will always prevent them from becoming
+mere dreamers and star-gazers.
+
+The true Idealist has his feet firmly planted on reality, and his
+idealism discloses itself not in a disposition to dream dreams and see
+visions, but in the largeness of a vision which sees realities in the
+totality of their relations and not merely in their obvious and
+superficial relations. It is a great mistake to discern in men nothing
+more substantial than that movement of hopes and longings which is so
+often mistaken for aspiration; it is equally a mistake to discern in
+men nothing more enduring and aspiring than the animal nature; either
+report, standing by itself, would be fundamentally untrue. Man is an
+animal; but he is an animal with a soul, and the sane view of him
+takes both body and soul into account. The defect of a good deal of
+current Realism lies in its lack of veracity; it is essentially
+untrue, and it is, therefore, fundamentally unreal. The love of truth,
+the passion for the fact, the determination to follow life wherever
+life leads, are noble, artistic instincts, and have borne noble fruit;
+but what is often called Realism has suffered quite as much as
+Idealism from weak practitioners, and stands quite as much in need of
+rectification and restatement.
+
+The essence of Idealism is the application of the imagination to
+realities; it is not a play of fancy, a golden vision arbitrarily
+projected upon the clouds and treated as if it had an objective
+existence. Goethe, who had such a vigorous hold upon the realities of
+existence, and who had also an artist's horror of mere abstractions,
+touched the heart of the matter when he defined the Ideal as the
+completion of the real. In this simple but luminous statement he
+condensed the faith and practice not only of the greater artists of
+every age, but of the greater thinkers as well. In the order of life
+there can be no real break between things as they now exist and things
+as they will exist in the remotest future; the future cannot
+contradict the present, nor falsify it; for the future must be the
+realisation of the full possibilities of the present. The present is
+related to it as the seed is related to the flower and fruit in which
+its development culminates. There are vast changes of form and
+dimension between the seed and the tree hanging ripe with fruit, but
+there is no contradiction between the germ and its final unfolding.
+
+A rigid Realism, however, sees in the seed nothing but its present
+hardness, littleness, ugliness; a true and rational Idealism sees all
+these things, but it sees also not only appearances but
+potentialities; or, to recall another of Goethe's phrases, it sees the
+object whole.
+
+To see life clearly and to see it whole is not only to see distinctly
+the obvious facts of life, but to see these facts in sequence and
+order; in other words, to explain and interpret them. The power to do
+this is one of the signs of a great imagination; and, other things
+being equal, the rank of a work of art may, in the last analysis, be
+determined by the clearness and veracity with which explanation and
+interpretation are suggested. Homer is, for this reason, the foremost
+writer of the Greek race. He is wholly free from any purpose to give
+ethical instruction; he is absolutely delivered from the temptation to
+didacticism; and yet he reveals to us the secret of the temperament
+and genius of his race. And he does this because he sees in his race
+the potentialities of the seed; the vitality, beauty, fragrance, and
+growth which lie enfolded in its tiny and unpromising substance. If
+the reality of a thing is not so much its appearance as the totality
+of that which is to issue out of it, then nothing can be truly seen
+without the use of the imagination. All that the Idealist asks is that
+life shall be seen not only with his eyes but with his imagination.
+His descriptions are accurate, but they are also vital; they give us
+the thing not only as it looked standing by itself, but as it appeared
+in the complete life of which it was a part; he makes us see the
+physical side of the fact with great distinctness, but he makes us see
+its spiritual side as well. As a result, there is left in our minds by
+the intelligent reading of Homer a clear impression of the spiritual,
+political, and social aptitudes and characteristics of the Greek
+people of his age,--an impression which no exact report of mere
+appearances could have conveyed; an impression which is due to the
+constant play of the poet's imagination upon the facts with which he
+is dealing.
+
+This is true Idealism; but it is also true Realism. It is not only the
+fact, but the truth. The fact may be observed, but the truth must be
+discerned by insight,--it is not within the range of mere observation;
+and it is this insight, this discernment of realities in their
+relation to the whole order of things, which characterises true
+Idealism, and which makes all the greater writers Idealists in the
+fundamental if not in the technical sense. Tolstoi has often been
+called a Realist by those who are eager to label everything and
+everybody succinctly; but Tolstoi is one of the representative
+Idealists of his time, and his "Master and Man" is one of the most
+touching and sincere bits of true Idealism which has been given the
+world for many a day.
+
+There is nothing which needs such constant reinforcement as this
+faculty of seeing things in their totality; for we are largely at the
+mercy of the hour unless we invoke the aid of the imagination to set
+the appearances of the moment in their large relations. To the man who
+sees things as they rush like a stream before him, there is no order,
+progression, or intelligent movement in human affairs; but to the
+student who brings to the study of current events wide and deep
+knowledge of the great historic movements, these apparently unrelated
+phenomena disclose the most intimate inter-relations and connections.
+The most despairing pessimism would be born in the heart of the man
+who should be fated to see to-day apart from yesterday and to-morrow;
+a rational and inspiring hope may be born in the soul of the man who
+sees the day as part of the year and the year as part of the century.
+The great writers are a refuge from the point of view of the moment,
+because they set the events of life in a fundamental order, and make
+us aware of the finer potentialities of our race. They are Idealists
+in the breadth of their vision and the nobility of the interpretation
+of events which they offer us.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXIII.
+
+The Vision of Perfection.
+
+
+These writers are also, by virtue of the faculty of discerning the
+interior relations of appearances and events, the expositors of that
+ultimate Idealism which not only discovers the possibility of the
+whole in the parts, of the perfect in the imperfect, but which
+discovers the whole, the complete and the perfect, and brings each
+before us in some noble form. The reality of the Ideal as Plato saw it
+is by no means universally accepted as a philosophical conclusion, but
+all high-minded men and women accept it as a rule of life. Idealism is
+wrought into the very fibre of the race, and is as indestructible as
+the imagination in which it has its roots. Deep in the heart of
+humanity lies the unshakable faith in its essential divinity, and in
+the reality of its highest hopes of development and attainment. The
+failure of noble schemes, the decline of enthusiasms, the fading of
+visions and dreams which seemed to have the luminous constancy of
+fixed stars, breed temporary depressions and passing moods of
+scepticism and despair; but the spiritual vitality of the race always
+reasserts itself, and faith returns after every disaster or
+disillusion.
+
+Indeed, as the race grows older and masters more and more a knowledge
+of its conditions, the impression of the essential greatness of the
+experience we call life deepens in the finer spirits. It becomes clear
+that the end towards which the hopes of the world have always moved is
+farther off than it seemed to the earlier generations; that the
+process of spiritual and social evolution is longer and more painful;
+that the universe is vaster and more wonderful than the vision of it
+which formed in the imagination of thinkers and poets; in a word, that
+the education which is being imparted to humanity by the very
+structure of the conditions under which it lives grows more severe,
+prolonged, and exacting as its methods and processes become more
+clear. The broadening of the field of observation has steadily
+deepened the impression of the magnitude and majesty of the physical
+order by which men are surrounded; and the fuller knowledge of what is
+in human experience has steadily deepened the impression of the almost
+tragic greatness of the lot of men. The disappointments of the race
+have been largely due to its inadequate conception of its own
+possibilities; its disillusions have been like the fading of the
+mirage which simulates against the near horizon that which lies long
+leagues away. These disappointments and disillusions, as Browning saw
+clearly, are essential parts of an education which leads the race step
+by step from smaller to larger ideas, from nearer and easier to more
+remote and difficult attainments.
+
+The disappointment which comes with the completion of every piece of
+work well and wisely done does not arise from the futility of the
+work, as the pessimists tell us, but from its inadequacy to express
+entirely the thought and force of the man who has striven to express
+himself completely in a material which, however masterfully used, can
+never give its ultimate form to a spiritual conception. It is not an
+evidence of failure, but a prophecy of greater achievement. A world in
+which the work was as great as the worker, the piece of art as the
+artist, would be a finished world in more senses than one; a world in
+which all work is inadequate to contain the energy of the worker, all
+art insufficient to express the soul of the artist, is necessarily a
+prophetic world, bearing witness to the presence of a creative force
+in workers and artists immeasurably beyond the capacity of any
+perishable material to receive or to preserve.
+
+A rational Idealism is, therefore, not only indestructible in a race
+which does not violate the laws of life, but is instilled into the
+higher order of minds by the order of life as revealed by science,
+history, and the arts. And this idealistic tendency is not only the
+poetic temper; it is the hope and safeguard of society. The real
+perils of the race are not material; they are always spiritual; and no
+peril could be greater than the loss of faith and hope in the
+possibility of attaining the best things. If men are ever bereft of
+their instinctive or rational conviction that they have the power
+ultimately to bring institutions of all kinds into harmony with their
+higher conceptions, they will sink into the lethargy of despair or the
+slough of sensualism. The belief in the reality of the Ideal in
+personal and social life is not only the joy and inspiration of the
+poet and thinker; it is also the salvation of the race. It is
+imperishable, because it is the product of the play of the imagination
+on the realities of life; and until the imagination perishes, the
+vision of the ultimate perfection will form and reform in the heart of
+every generation. It is the inspiration of every art, the end of every
+noble occupation, the secret hope of every fine character.
+
+Idealism in this sense, not as the product of an easy and ignorant
+optimism turning away from the facts of life, but as the product of a
+large and spiritual dealing with those facts, is the very soul, not
+only of noble living, but of those noble expressions of life which the
+greater writers have given us. They disclose wide diversity of gifts,
+but they have this in common,--that, in discovering to us the
+spiritual order of the facts of life, they disclose also those ideal
+figures which the race accepts as embodiments of its secrets, hopes,
+and aims. It is a significant fact that, in portraying the Greek of
+his time, Homer has given us also the ideal Greek and the Greek
+ideals. His insight went to the soul of the persons he described, and
+he struck into that spiritual order in which the ideal is not only a
+reality, but, in a sense, the only reality.
+
+Cervantes, in the very act of destroying a false Idealism,
+conventionally conceived and treated, made one of the most beautiful
+revelations of a true Idealism which the world has yet received.
+Shakespeare's presentation of the facts of life is, on the whole, the
+most comprehensive and impressive which has yet been made; in the
+disclosure of tragic elements it is unsurpassed; and yet what a host of
+ideal figures move through the plays and invest them with a light
+beyond the glow of art! In the Forest of Arden and on Prospero's
+Island there live, beyond the touch of time and the vicissitudes of
+fate, those gracious and beautiful spirits in whom the race sees its
+noblest hopes come true, its instinctive faith in itself justified.
+These spirits are not airy nothings, woven of the unsubstantial
+gossamer of which dreams are made; they are born of a deep insight
+into the possibilities of the soul, and a rational faith in their
+reality. Prospero is as real as Trinculo, and Rosalind as true as
+Cressida. These ideal persons are not necessarily fortunate in their
+surroundings or happy in their lot; they are simply perfect in their
+development of a type. They are not abnormal beings, rising above
+normal conditions; they are normal beings, rising above abnormal
+conditions. They stand for wholeness amid fragments, for perfection
+amid imperfection; but the very imperfection and fragmentariness by
+which they are surrounded predicts their coming and affirms their
+reality.
+
+In the rounded and developed nature there must be a deep vein of the
+Idealism which grows out of the vision of things in their large
+relations--out of a view of men ample enough to discern not only what
+they are at this stage of development, but what they may become when
+development has been completed. Nothing is more essential than the
+courage, the joy, and the insight which grow out of such an Idealism,
+and no spiritual possession is more easily lost. The spiritual
+depression of a reactionary period, the routine of work, the immersion
+in the stream of events, the decline of moral energy, conspire to
+blight this noble use of the imagination, and to chill the faith which
+makes creative living and working possible. The familiar companionship
+of the great Idealists is one of the greatest resources against the
+paralysis of this faith and the decay of this faculty.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXIV.
+
+Retrospect.
+
+
+The books of four great writers have been used almost exclusively by
+way of illustration throughout this discussion of the relation of
+books to culture. This limited selection may have seemed at times too
+narrow and rigid; it may have conveyed an impression of insensibility
+to the vast range and the great variety of literary forms and
+products, and of indifference to contemporary writing. It needs to be
+said, therefore, that the constant reference to Homer, Dante,
+Shakespeare, and Goethe has been made for the sake of clearness and
+force of illustration, and not, in any sense, as applying an exclusive
+principle of selection. The books of life are to be found in every
+language, and are the product of almost every age; and no one attains
+genuine culture who does not, through them, make himself familiar with
+the life of each successive generation. To be ignorant of the thought
+and art of one's time involves a narrowness of intelligence which is
+inconsistent with the maturity of taste and ripeness of nature which
+have been emphasised in these chapters as the highest and finest
+fruits of culture. The more generous a man's culture becomes, the more
+catholic becomes his taste and the keener his insight. The man of
+highest intelligence will be the first to recognise the fresh touch,
+the new point of view, the broader thought. He will bring to the books
+of his own time not only a trained instinct for sound work, but a deep
+sympathy with the latest effort of the human spirit to express itself
+in new forms. So deep and real will be his feeling for life that he
+will be eager to understand and possess every fresh manifestation of
+that life. However novel and unconventional the new form may be, it
+will not make its appeal to him in vain.
+
+It remains true, however, that literature is a universal art,
+expressive and interpretative of the spirit of humanity, and that no
+man can make full acquaintance with that spirit who fails to make
+companionship with its greatest masters and interpreters. The appeal
+of contemporary books is so constant and urgent that it stands in
+small need of emphasis; but the claims of the rich and splendid
+literature of the past are often slighted or ignored. The supreme
+masters of an art ought to be the objects of constant study and
+thought; there is more of life, truth, and beauty in them than in
+their fellow-artists of narrower range of experience and artistic
+achievement. For this reason these greatest interpreters of the human
+spirit are in no sense exclusively of the past; they are of the
+present and the future. To know them is not only to know the
+particular periods in which they wrote, but to know our own period in
+the deepest sense. No man can better prepare himself to enter into the
+formative life of his time than by thoroughly familiarising himself
+with the greatest books of the past; for in these are revealed, not
+the secrets of past forms of life, but the secrets of that spirit
+whose historic life is one unbroken revelation of its nature and
+destiny. It is, therefore, no disparagement of the great company of
+writers who have been the secretaries of the race in all ages to
+fasten attention upon the claims of the four men of genius whom the
+world has accepted as the supreme masters of the art of literature,
+and to point out again the immense importance of their works in the
+educational life of the individual and of society.
+
+It cannot be said too often that literature is the product of the
+continuous spiritual activity of the race; that it cannot be
+arbitrarily divided into periods save for mere convenience of
+arrangement; and that it is impossible to understand and value its
+latest products unless one is able to find their place and discern
+their value in the order of a spiritual development. To secure an
+adequate impression of this highest expression of the human spirit one
+must keep in view the work of the past quite as definitely as the work
+of the present; in such a broad survey there is a constant deliverance
+from the rashness of contemporary judgments, and from that narrowness
+of feeling which limits one's vital contact with the life of the race
+to the products of a single brief period.
+
+In any attempt to indicate the fundamental significance of the art of
+literature in the educational development of the individual and of
+society there must also be a certain repetition of idea and of
+illustration. This limitation, if it be a limitation, is inherent in
+the very nature of the undertaking. Literature is, for purposes of
+comment and exposition, practically inexhaustible; its themes are as
+varied and as numerous as the objects upon which the mind can fasten
+and about which the imagination can play. But while its forms and
+products are almost without number, this magnificent growth has, in
+the last analysis, a single root, and in these brief chapters the
+endeavour has been made, very inadequately, to bring the mind to this
+deep and hidden unity of life and art. Information, instruction,
+delight, flow in a thousand rivulets from as many books, but there is
+a spring of life which feeds all these separate streams. From that
+unseen source flows the vitality which has given power and freshness
+to a host of noble works; from that source vitality also flows into
+every mind open to its incoming. A rich intellectual life is
+characterised not so much by profusion of ideas as by the application
+of a few formative ideas to life; not so much by multiplicity of
+detached thoughts as by the habit of thinking. The genius of Carlyle
+is evidenced not by prodigal growth of ideas, but by an impressive
+interpretation of life through the application to all its phenomena of
+a few ideas of great depth and range. And this is true of all the
+great writers who have given us fresh views of life from some central
+and commanding height rather than a succession of glimpses or outlooks
+from a great number of points. The closer the approach to the central
+force behind any course of development, the fewer in number are the
+elements involved. The rootage of literature in the spiritual nature
+and experience of the race is the fundamental fact not only in the
+history of this rich and splendid art, but in its relation to culture.
+From this rootage flows the vitality which imparts immortality to its
+noblest products, and which supplies an educational element unrivalled
+in its enriching and enlarging quality.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Books and Culture, by Hamilton Wright Mabie
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