Hamilton Wright Mabie - Books and Culture
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Hamilton Wright Mabie >> Books and Culture
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8 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."
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