The Lost Art of Reading Part 8

are pa.s.sed through a.n.a.lysis. "What the fitness is," he says, "or what the poetic or other effectiveness of suggesting that the corpse of a person who has ceased upon the midnight still has ears, only to add that it has them in vain, I cannot pretend to understand"--one of a great many other things that the Head of the Department does not pretend to understand. It is probably with the same outfit of not pretending to understand that--for the edification of the merely admiring mind--the "Ode to a Grecian Urn" was rewritten. To Keats's lines--

Oh, Attic shape! Fair att.i.tude! with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayest, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty"--that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know--

he makes various corrections, offering as a subst.i.tute-conclusion to the poet's song the following outburst:

Preaching this wisdom with thy cheerful mien: Possessing beauty thou possessest all; Pause at that goal, nor farther push thy quest.

It would not be just to the present state of academic instruction in literature to ill.u.s.trate it by such an extreme instance as this of the damage the educated mind--debauched with a.n.a.lysis--is capable of doing to the reading habit. It is probable that a large proportion of the teachers of literature in the United States, both out of their sense of John Keats and out of respect to themselves, would have publicly resented this astonis.h.i.+ng exhibit of the extreme literary-academic mind in a prominent journal, had they not suspected that its editor, having discovered a literary-academic mind that could take itself as seriously as this, had deliberately brought it out as a spectacle. It could do no harm to Keats, certainly, or to any one else, and would afford an infinite deal of amus.e.m.e.nt--the journal argued--to let a mind like this clatter down a column to oblivion. So it did. It was taken by all concerned, teachers, critics, and observers alike, as one of the more interesting literary events of the season.

Unfortunately, however, entertainments of this kind have a very serious side to them. It is one thing to smile at an individual when one knows that standing where he does he stands by himself, and another to smile at an individual when one knows that he is not standing by himself, that he is a type, that there must be a great many others like him or he would not be standing where he does at all. When a human being is seen taking his stand over his own soul in public print, summing up its emptiness there, and gloating over it, we are in the presence of a disheartening fact. It can be covered up, however, and in what, on the whole, is such a fine, true-ringing, hearty old world as this, it need not be made much of; but when we find that a mind like this has been placed at the head of a Department of Poetry in a great, representative American university, the last thing that should be done with it is to cover it up. The more people know where the a.n.a.lytical mind is to-day--where it is getting to be--and the more they think what its being there means, the better. The signs of the times, the destiny of education, and the fate of literature are all involved in a fact like this. The mere possibility of having the a.n.a.lysing-grinding mind engaged in teaching a spontaneous art in a great educational inst.i.tution would be of great significance. The fact that it is actually there and that no particular comment is excited by its being there, is significant. It betrays not only what the general, national, academic att.i.tude toward literature is, but that that att.i.tude has become habitual, that it is taken for granted.

One would be inclined to suppose, looking at the matter abstractly, that all students and teachers of literature would take it for granted that the practice of making a dispa.s.sionate criticism of a pa.s.sion would be a dangerous practice for any vital and spontaneous nature--certainly the last kind of practice that a student of the art of poetry (that is, the art of literature, in the essential sense) would wish to make himself master of. The first item in a critic's outfit for criticising a pa.s.sion is having one. The fact that this is not regarded as an axiom in our current education in books is a very significant fact. It goes with another significant fact--the a.s.sumption, in most courses of literature as at present conducted, that a little man (that is, a man incapable of a great pa.s.sion), who is not even able to read a book with a great pa.s.sion in it, can somehow teach other people to read it.

It is not necessary to deny that a.n.a.lysis occasionally plays a valuable part in bringing a pupil to a true method and knowledge of literature, but unless the a.n.a.lysis is inspired nothing can be more dangerous to a pupil under his thirtieth year, even for the shortest period of time, or more likely to move him over to the farthest confines of the creative life, or more certain, if continued long enough, to set him forever outside all power or possibility of power, either in the art of literature or in any of the other arts.

The first objection to the a.n.a.lysis of one of Shakespeare's plays as ordinarily practised in courses of literature is that it is of doubtful value to nine hundred and ninety-nine pupils in a thousand--if they do it. The second is, that they cannot do it. The a.n.a.lysing of one of Shakespeare's plays requires more of a commonplace pupil than Shakespeare required of himself. The apology that is given for the a.n.a.lysing method is, that the process of a.n.a.lysing a work of Shakespeare's will show the pupil how Shakespeare did it, and that by seeing how Shakespeare did it he will see how to do it himself.

In the first place, a.n.a.lysis will not show how Shakespeare did it, and in the second place, if it does, it will show that he did not do it by a.n.a.lysis. In the third place,--to say nothing of not doing it by a.n.a.lysis,--if he had a.n.a.lysed it before he did it, he could not have a.n.a.lysed it afterward in the literal and modern sense. In the fourth place, even if Shakespeare were able to do his work by a.n.a.lysing it before he did it, it does not follow that undergraduate students can.

A man of genius, with all his onset of natural pa.s.sion, his natural power of letting himself go, could doubtless do more a.n.a.lysing, both before and after his work, than any one else without being damaged by it. What shall be said of the folly of trying to teach men of talent, and the mere pupils of men of talent, by a.n.a.lysis--by a method, that is, which, even if it succeeds in doing what it tries to do, can only, at the very best, reveal to the pupil the roots of his instincts before they have come up? And why is it that our courses of literature may be seen a.s.suming to-day on every hand, almost without exception, that by teaching men to a.n.a.lyse their own inspirations--the inspirations they have--and teaching them to a.n.a.lyse the inspirations of other men--inspirations they can never have--we are somehow teaching them "English literature"?

It seems to have been overlooked while we are all a.n.a.lytically falling at Shakespeare's feet, that Shakespeare did not become Shakespeare by a.n.a.lytically falling at any one's feet--not even at his own--and that the most important difference between being a Shakespeare and being an a.n.a.lyser of Shakespeare is that with the man Shakespeare no submitting of himself to the a.n.a.lysis-gymnast would ever have been possible, and with the students of Shakespeare (as students go and if they are caught young enough) the habit of a.n.a.lysis is not only a possibility but a sleek, industrious, and complacent certainty.

After a little furtive looking backward perhaps, and a few tremblings and doubts, they shall all be seen, almost to a man, offering their souls to Moloch, as though the not having a soul and not missing it were the one final and consummate triumph that literary culture could bring.

Flocks of them can be seen with the s.h.i.+ning in their faces year after year, term after term, almost anywhere on the civilised globe, doing this very thing--doing it under the impression that they are learning something, and not until the s.h.i.+ning in their faces is gone will they be under the impression that they have learned it (whatever it is) and that they are educated.

The fact that the a.n.a.lytic mind is establis.h.i.+ng itself, in a greater or less degree, as the sentinel in college life of the entire creative literature of the world is a fact with many meanings in it. It means not only that there are a great many more minds like it in literature, but that a great many other minds--nearly all college-educated minds--are being made like it. It means that unless the danger is promptly faced and acted upon the next generation of American citizens can neither expect to be able to produce literature of its own nor to appreciate or enjoy literature that has been produced. It means that another eighteenth century is coming to the world; and, as the a.n.a.lysis is deeper than before and more deadly-clever with the deeper things than before, it is going to be the longest eighteenth century the world has ever seen--generations with machines for hands and feet, machines for minds, machines outside their minds to enjoy the machines inside their minds with. Every man with his information-machine to be cultured with, his religious machine to be good with, and his private a.n.a.lysis Machine to be beautiful with, shall take his place in the world--shall add his soul to the Machine we make a world with. For every man that is born on the earth one more joy shall be crowded out of it--one more a.n.a.lysis of joy shall take its place, go round and round under the stars--dew, dawn, and darkness--until it stops. How a sunrise is made and why a cloud is artistic and how pines should be composed in a landscape, all men shall know. We shall criticise the technique of thunderstorms. "And what is a sunset after all?" The reflection of a large body on rarefied air.

Through a.n.a.lysed heaven and over a.n.a.lysed fields it trails its joylessness around the earth.

Time was, when the setting of the sun was the playing of two worlds upon a human being's life on the edge of the little day, the blending of sense and spirit for him, earth and heaven, out in the still west. His whole being went forth to it. He watched with it and prayed and sang with it. In its presence his soul walked down to the stars. Out of the joy of his life, the finite sorrow and the struggle of his life, he gazed upon it. It was the portrait of his infinite self. Every setting sun that came to him was a compact with Eternal Joy. The Night itself--his figure faint before it in the flicker of the east--whispered to him: "Thou also--hills and heavens around thee, hills and heavens within thee--oh, Child of Time--Thou also art G.o.d!"

"Ah me! How I could love! My soul doth melt," cries Keats:

Ye deaf and senseless minutes of the day, And thou old forest, hold ye this for true, There is no lightning, no authentic dew But in the eye of love; there's not a sound, Melodious howsoever, can confound The heavens and the earth to such a death As doth the voice of love; there's not a breath Will mingle kindly with the meadow air, Till it has panted round, and stolen a share Of pa.s.sion from the heart.

John Keats and William Shakespeare wrote masterpieces because they had pa.s.sions, spiritual experiences, and the daily habit of inspiration. In so far as these masterpieces are being truthfully taught, they are taught by teachers who themselves know the pa.s.sion of creation. They teach John Keats and William Shakespeare by rousing the same pa.s.sions and experiences in the pupil that Keats and Shakespeare had, and by daily appealing to them.

II

a.n.a.lysis a.n.a.lysed

There are a great many men in the world to-day, faithfully doing their stint in it (they are commonly known as men of talent), who would have been men of genius if they had dared. Education has made cowards of us all, and the habit of examining the roots of one's instincts, before they come up, is an incurable habit.

The essential principle in a true work of art is always the poem or the song that is hidden in it. A work of art by a man of talent is generally ranked by the fact that it is the work of a man who a.n.a.lyses a song before he sings it. He puts down the words of the song first--writes it, that is--in prose. Then he lumbers it over into poetry. Then he looks around for some music for it. Then he practises at singing it, and then he sings it. The man of genius, on the other hand, whether he be a great one or a very little one, is known by the fact that he has a song sent to him. He sings it. He has a habit of humming it over afterwards. His humming it over afterwards is his a.n.a.lysis. It is the only possible inspired a.n.a.lysis.

The difference between these two types of men is so great that anything that the smaller of them has to say about the spirit or the processes of the other is of little value. When one of them tries to teach the work of the other, which is what almost always occurs,--the man of talent being the typical professor of works of genius,--the result is fatal. A singer who is so little capable of singing that he can give a prose a.n.a.lysis of his own song while it is coming to him and before he sings it, can hardly be expected to extemporise an inspired a.n.a.lysis of another man's song after reading it. If a man cannot apply inspired a.n.a.lysis to a little common pa.s.sion in a song he has of his own, he is placed in a hopeless position when he tries to give an inspired a.n.a.lysis of a pa.s.sion that only another man could have and that only a great man would forget himself long enough to have.

An inspired a.n.a.lysis may be defined as the kind of a.n.a.lysis that the real poet in his creatively critical mood is able to give to his work--a low-singing or humming a.n.a.lysis in which all the elements of the song are active and all the faculties and all the senses work on the subject at once. The proportions and relations of a living thing are all kept perfect in an inspired a.n.a.lysis, and the song is made perfect at last, not by being taken apart, but by being made to pa.s.s its delight more deeply and more slowly through the singer's utmost self to its fulfilment.

What is ordinarily taught as a.n.a.lysis is very different from this. It consists in the deliberate and triumphant separation of the faculties from one another and from the thing they have produced--the dull, bare, pitiless process of pa.s.sing a living and beautiful thing before one vacant, staring faculty at a time. This faculty, being left in the stupor of being all by itself, sits in complacent judgment upon a work of art, the very essence of the life and beauty of which is its appealing to all of the faculties and senses at once, in their true proportion, glowing them together into a unit--namely, several things made into one thing, that is--several things occupying the same time and the same place, that is--synthesis. An inspired a.n.a.lysis is the rehearsal of a synthesis. An a.n.a.lysis is not inspired unless it comes as a flash of light and a burst of music and a breath of fragrance all in one. Such an a.n.a.lysis cannot be secured with painstaking and slowness, unless the painstaking and slowness are the rehearsal of a synthesis, and all the elements in it are laboured on and delighted in at once. It must be a low-singing or humming a.n.a.lysis.

The expert student or teacher of poetry who makes "a dispa.s.sionate criticism" of a pa.s.sion, who makes it his special boast that he is able to apply his intellect severely by itself to a great poem, boasts of the devastation of the highest power a human being can attain. The commonest man that lives, whatever his powers may be, if they are powers that act together, can look down on a man whose powers cannot, as a mutilated being. While it cannot be denied that a being who has been thus especially mutilated is often possessed of a certain literary ability, he belongs to the acrobats of literature rather than to literature itself. The contortionist who separates himself from his hands and feet for the delectation of audiences, the circus performer who makes a battering-ram of his head and who glories in being shot out of a cannon into s.p.a.ce and amazement, goes through his motions with essentially the same pride in his strength, and sustains the same relation to the strength of the real man of the world.

Whatever a course of literary criticism may be, or its value may be, to the pupils who take it, it consists, more often than not, on the part of pupil and teacher both, in the dislocating of one faculty from all the others, and the bearing it down hard on a work of art, as if what it was made of, or how it was made, could only be seen by scratching it.

It is to be expected now and then, in the hurry of the outside world, that a newspaper critic will be found writing a cerebellum criticism of a work of the imagination; but the student of literature, in the comparative quiet and leisure of the college atmosphere, who works in the same separated spirit, who estimates a work by dislocating his faculties on it, is infinitely more blameworthy; and the college teacher who teaches a work of genius by causing it to file before one of his faculties at a time, when all of them would not be enough,--who does this in the presence of young persons and trains them to do it themselves,--is a public menace. The attempt to master a masterpiece, as it were, by reading it first with the sense of sight, and then with the sense of smell, and with all the senses in turn, keeping them carefully guarded from their habit of sensing things together, is not only a self-destructive but a hopeless attempt. A great mind, even if it would attempt to master anything in this way, would find it hopeless, and the attempt to learn a great work of art--a great whole--by applying the small parts of a small mind to it, one after the other, is more hopeless still. It can be put down as a general principle that a human being who is so little alive that he finds his main pleasure in life in taking himself apart, can find little of value for others in a masterpiece--a work of art which is so much alive that it cannot be taken apart, and which is eternal because its secret is eternally its own. If the time ever comes when it can be taken apart, it will be done only by a man who could have put it together, who is more alive than the masterpiece is alive. Until the masterpiece meets with a master who is more creative than its first master was, the less the motions of a.n.a.lysis are gone through with by those who are not masters, the better. A masterpiece cannot be a.n.a.lysed by the cold and negative process of being taken apart. It can only be a.n.a.lysed 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 G.o.d 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 a.n.a.lytically. We see it as it is and as it lives and as a G.o.d 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 a.n.a.lyse 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 gra.s.s, 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 gra.s.s 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

I

Seeds and Blossoms

Four men stood before G.o.d at the end of The First Week, watching Him whirl His little globe.[2] 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 wors.h.i.+pped. Having wors.h.i.+pped he rose to his feet and made a world himself.

[2] Recently discovered ma.n.u.script.

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 part.i.tioned 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 cla.s.s 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 inst.i.tutions 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 wors.h.i.+pped and he has arisen and stood before G.o.d 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 att.i.tude 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 coa.r.s.e and simple-minded and nave, 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.