Read Ebook: The Lost Art of Reading by Lee Gerald Stanley

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masterpiece--a work of art which is so much alive that it cannot be taken apart, and which is eternal because its secret is eternally its own. If the time ever comes when it can be taken apart, it will be done only by a man who could have put it together, who is more alive than the masterpiece is alive. Until the masterpiece meets with a master who is more creative than its first master was, the less the motions of analysis are gone through with by those who are not masters, the better. A masterpiece cannot be analysed by the cold and negative process of being taken apart. It can only be analysed by being melted down. It can only be melted down by a man who has creative heat in him to melt it down and the daily habit of glowing with creative heat.

It is a matter of common observation that the fewer resources an artist has, the more things there are in nature and in the nature of life which he thinks are not beautiful. The making of an artist is his sense of selection. If he is an artist of the smaller type, he selects beautiful subjects--subjects with ready-made beauty in them. If he is an artist of the larger type, he can hardly miss making almost any subject beautiful, because he has so many beautiful things to put it with. He sees every subject the way it is--that is, in relation to a great many other subjects--the way God saw it, when He made it, and the way it is.

The essential difference between a small mood and a large one is that in the small one we see each thing we look on, comparatively by itself, or with reference to one or two relations to persons and events. In our larger mood we see it less analytically. We see it as it is and as it lives and as a god would see it, playing its meaning through the whole created scheme into everything else.

The soul of beauty is synthesis. In the presence of a mountain the sound of a hammer is as rich as a symphony. It is like the little word of a great man, great in its great relations. When the spirit is waked and the man within the man is listening to it, the sound of a hoof on a lonely road in the great woods is the footstep of cities to him coming through the trees, and the low, chocking sound of a cartwheel in the still and radiant valley throngs his being like an opera. All sights and echoes and thoughts and feelings revel in it. It is music for the smoke, rapt and beautiful, rising from the chimneys at his feet. A sheet of water--making heaven out of nothing--is beautiful to the dullest man, because he cannot analyse it, could not--even if he would--contrive to see it by itself. Skies come crowding on it. There is enough poetry in the mere angle of a sinking sun to flood the prose of a continent with, because the gentle earthlong shadows that follow it lay their fingers upon all life and creep together innumerable separated things.

In the meadow where our birds are there is scarcely a tree in sight to tangle the singing in. It is a meadow with miles of sunlight in it. It seems like a kind of world-melody to walk in the height of noon there--infinite grass, infinite sky, gusts of bobolinks' voices--it's as if the air that drifted down made music of itself; and the song of all the singing everywhere--the song the soul hears--comes on the slow winds.

Half the delight of a bobolink is that he is more synthetic, more of a poet, than other birds,--has a duet in his throat. He bursts from the grass and sings in bursts--plays his own obligato while he goes. One can never see him in his eager flurry, between his low heaven and his low nest, without catching the lilt of inspiration. Like the true poet, he suits the action to the word in a weary world, and does his flying and singing together. The song that he throws around him, is the very spirit of his wings--of all wings. More beauty is always the putting of more things together. They were created to be together. The spirit of art is the spirit that finds this out. Even the bobolink is cosmic, if he sings with room enough; and when the heart wakes, the song of the cricket is infinite. We hear it across stars.

The Sixth Interference: Literary Drill in College

Seeds and Blossoms

Four men stood before God at the end of The First Week, watching Him whirl His little globe. The first man said to Him, "Tell me how you did it." The second man said, "Let me have it." The third man said, "What is it for?" The fourth man said nothing, and fell down and worshipped. Having worshipped he rose to his feet and made a world himself.

Recently discovered manuscript.

These four men have been known in history as the Scientist, the Man of Affairs, the Philosopher, and the Artist. They stand for the four necessary points of view in reading books.

Most of the readers of the world are content to be partitioned off, and having been duly set down for life in one or the other of these four divisions of human nature they take sides from beginning to end with one or the other of these four men. It is the distinction of the scholar of the highest class in every period, that he declines to do this. In so far as he finds each of the four men taking sides against each other, he takes sides against each of them in behalf of all. He insists on being able to absorb knowledge, to read and write in all four ways. If he is a man of genius as well as a scholar, he insists on being able to read and write, as a rule, in all four ways at once; if his genius is of the lesser kind, in two or three ways at once. The eternal books are those that stand this four-sided test. They are written from all of these points of view. They have absorbed into themselves the four moods of creation morning. It is thus that they bring the morning back to us.

The most important question in regard to books that our schools and institutions of learning are obliged to face at present is, "How shall we produce conditions that will enable the ordinary man to keep the proportions that belong to a man, to absorb knowledge, to do his reading and writing in all four ways at once?" In other words, How shall we enable him to be a natural man, a man of genius as far as he goes?

A masterpiece is a book that can only be read by a man who is a master in some degree of the things the book is master of. The man who has mastered things the most is the man who can make those things. The man who makes things is the artist. He has bowed down and worshipped and he has arisen and stood before God and created before Him, and the spirit of the Creator is in him. To take the artist's point of view, is to take the point of view that absorbs and sums up the others. The supremacy and comprehensiveness of this point of view is a matter of fact rather than argument. The artist is the man who makes the things that Science and Practical Affairs and Philosophy are merely about. The artist of the higher order is more scientific than the scientist, more practical than the man of affairs, and more philosophic than the philosopher, because he combines what these men do about things, and what these men say about things, into the things themselves, and makes the things live.

To combine these four moods at once in one's attitude toward an idea is to take the artist's--that is, the creative--point of view toward it. The only fundamental outfit a man can have for reading books in all four ways at once is his ability to take the point of view of the man who made the book in all four ways at once, and feel the way he felt when he made it.

The organs that appreciate literature are the organs that made it. True reading is latent writing. The more one feels like writing a book when he reads it the more alive his reading is and the more alive the book is.

The measure of culture is its originating and reproductive capacity, the amount of seed and blossom there is in it, the amount it can afford to throw away, and secure divine results. Unless the culture in books we are taking such national pains to acquire in the present generation can be said to have this pollen quality in it, unless it is contagious, can be summed up in its pollen and transmitted, unless it is nothing more or less than life itself made catching, unless, like all else that is allowed to have rights in nature, it has powers also, has an almost infinite power of self-multiplication, self-perpetuation, the more cultured we are the more emasculated we are. The vegetables of the earth and the flowers of the field--the very codfish of the sea become our superiors. What is more to the point, in the minds and interests of all living human beings, their culture crowds ours out.

Nature may be somewhat coarse and simple-minded and na?ve, but reproduction is her main point and she never misses it. Her prejudice against dead things is immutable. If a man objects to this prejudice against dead things, his only way of making himself count is to die. Nature uses such men over again, makes them into something more worth while, something terribly or beautifully alive,--and goes on her way.

If this principle--namely, that the reproductive power of culture is the measure of its value--were as fully introduced and recognised in the world of books as it is in the world of commerce and in the natural world, it would revolutionise from top to bottom, and from entrance examination to diploma, the entire course of study, policy, and spirit of most of our educational institutions. Allowing for exceptions in every faculty--memorable to all of us who have been college students,--it would require a new corps of teachers.

Entrance examinations for pupils and teachers alike would determine two points. First, what does this person know about things? Second, what is the condition of his organs--what can he do with them? If the privilege of being a pupil in the standard college were conditioned strictly upon the second of these questions--the condition of his organs--as well as upon the first, fifty out of a hundred pupils, as prepared at present, would fall short of admission. If the same test were applied for admission to the faculty, ninety out of a hundred teachers would fall short of admission. Having had analytic, self-destructive, learned habits for a longer time than their pupils, the condition of their organs is more hopeless.

The man who has the greatest joy in a symphony is:

First, the man who composes it.

Second, the conductor.

Third, the performers.

Fourth, those who might be composers of such music themselves.

Fifth, those in the audience who have been performers.

Sixth, those who are going to be.

Seventh, those who are composers of such music for other instruments.

Eighth, those who are composers of music in other arts--literature, painting, sculpture, and architecture.

Ninth, those who are performers of music on other instruments.

Tenth, those who are performers of music in other arts.

Eleventh, those who are creators of music with their own lives.

Twelfth, those who perform and interpret in their own lives the music they hear in other lives.

Thirteenth, those who create anything whatever and who love perfection in it.

Fourteenth, "The Public."

Fifteenth, the Professional Critic--almost inevitably at the fifteenth remove from the heart of things because he is the least creative, unless he is a man of genius, or has pluck and talent enough to work his way through the other fourteen moods and sum them up before he ventures to criticise.

The principles that have been employed in putting life into literature must be employed on drawing life out of it. These principles are the creative principles--principles of joy. All influences in education, family training, and a man's life that tend to overawe, crowd out, and make impossible his own private, personal, daily habit of creative joy are the enemies of books.

Private Road: Dangerous

The impotence of the study of literature as practised in the schools and colleges of the present day turns largely on the fact that the principle of creative joy--of knowing through creative joy--is overlooked. The field of vision is the book and not the world. In the average course in literature the field is not even the book. It is still farther from the creative point of view. It is the book about the book.

It is written generally in the laborious unreadable, well-read style--the book about the book. You are as one thrust into the shadow of the endless aisles of Other Books--not that they are referred to baldly, or vulgarly, or in the text. It is worse than this . But you are surrounded helplessly. Invisible lexicons are on every page. Grammars and rhetorics, piled up in paragraphs and between the lines thrust at you everywhere. Hardly a chapter that does not convey its sense of struggling faithfulness, of infinite forlorn and empty plodding--and all for something a man might have known anyway. "I have toted a thousand books," each chapter seems to say. "This one paragraph has had to have forty-seven books carried to it." Not once, except in loopholes in his reading which come now and then, does the face of the man's soul peep forth. One does not expect to meet any one in the book about the book--not one's self, not even the man who writes it, nor the man who writes the book that the book is about. One is confronted with a mob.

Two things are apt to be true of students who study the great masters in courses employing the book about the book. Even if the books about the book are what they ought to be, the pupils of such courses find that studying the master, instead of the things he mastered, they lose all power over the things he mastered; they lose, consequently, not only the power of creating masterpieces out of these things themselves, but the power of enjoying those that have been created by others, of having the daily experiences that make such joy possible. They are out of range of experience. They are barricaded against life. Inasmuch as the creators of literature, without a single exception, have been more interested in life than in books, and have written books to help other people to be more interested in life than in books, this is the gravest possible defect. To be more interested in life than in books is the first essential for creating a book or for understanding one.

The typical course of study now offered in literature carries on its process of paralysis in various ways:

First. It undermines the imagination by giving it paper things instead of real ones to work on.

Sixth. The teacher of literature so-called, having succeeded in destroying the personality of the pupil, puts himself in front of the personality of the author.

Seventh. A teacher who destroys personality in a pupil is the wrong personality to put in front of an author. If he were the right one, if he had the spirit of the author, his being in front, now and then at least, would be interpretation and inspiration. Not having the spirit of the author, he is intimidated by him, or has all he can do not to be. A classic cannot reveal itself to a groveller or to a critic. It is a book that was written standing up and it can only be studied and taught by those who stand up without knowing it. The decorous and beautiful despising of one's self that the study of the classics has come to be as conducted under unclassic teachers, is a fact that speaks for itself.

Eighth. Even if the personality of the teacher of literature is so fortunate as not to be the wrong one, there is not enough of it. There is hardly a course of literature that can be found in a college catalogue at the present time that does not base itself on the dictum that a great book can somehow--by some mysterious process--be taught by a small person. The axiom that necessarily undermines all such courses is obvious enough. A great book cannot be taught except by a teacher who is literally living in a great spirit, the spirit the great book lived in before it became a book,--a teacher who has the great book in him--not over him,--who, if he took time for it, might be capable of writing, in some sense at least, a great book himself. When the teacher is a teacher of this kind, teaches the spirit of what he teaches--that is, teaches the inside,--a classic can be taught.

Otherwise the best course in literature that can be devised is the one that gives the masterpieces the most opportunity to teach themselves. The object of a course in literature is best served in proportion as the course is arranged and all associated studies are arranged in such a way as to secure sensitive and contagious conditions for the pupil's mind in the presence of the great masters, such conditions as give the pupil time, freedom, space, and atmosphere--the things out of which a masterpiece is written and with which alone it can be taught, or can teach itself.

All that comes between a masterpiece and its thus teaching itself, spreads ruin both ways. The masterpiece is partitioned off from the pupil, guarded to be kept aloof from him--outside of him. The pupil is locked up from himself--his possible self.

Not too much stress could possibly be laid upon intimacy with the great books or on the constant habit of living on them. They are the movable Olympus. All who create camp out between the heavens and the earth on them and breathe and live and climb upon them. From their mighty sides they look down on human life. But classics can only be taught by classics. The creative paralysis of pupils who have drudged most deeply in classical training--English or otherwise--is a fact that no observer of college life can overlook. The guilt for this state of affairs must be laid at the door of the classics or at the door of the teachers. Either the classics are not worth teaching or they are not being taught properly.

In either case the best way out of the difficulty would seem to be for teachers to let the classics teach themselves, to furnish the students with the atmosphere, the conditions, the points of view in life, which will give the classics a chance to teach themselves.

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