“I am he who tauntingly compels men, women, nations, Crying, ‘Leap from your seats and contend for your lives!’” I
See Next Chapter It is good to rise early in the morning, when the world is still respectable and nobody has used it yet, and sit and look at it, try to realise it. One sees things very differently. It is a kind of yawn of all being. One feels one’s soul lying out, all relaxed, on it, and resting on real things. It stretches itself on the bare bones of the earth and knows. On a hundred silent hills it lies and suns itself. And as I lay in the morning, soul and body reaching out to the real things and resting on them, I thought I heard One Part of me, down underneath, half in the light and half in the dark, laughing softly at the Other. “What is this book of yours?” it said coldly, “with its proffered scheme of education, its millenniums and things? What do you think this theory, this heaven-spanning theory of reading of yours, really is, which you have held up objectively, almost authoritatively, to be looked at as truth? Do you think it is anything after all but a kind of pallid, unreal, water-colour exhibition, a row of blurs of faintly coloured portraits of yourself, spread on space? Do you not see how unfair it is—this spinning out of one’s own little dark, tired inside, a theory for a wide heaven and earth, this straddling with one temperament a star?” Then I made myself sit down and compose what I feared would be a strictly honest title-page for this book. Instead of: THE LOST ART OF READING A STUDY
OF
EDUCATION
BY
ETC. I wrote it: HOW TO BE MORE LIKE ME A SHY
AT
EDUCATION
BY
ETC. And when I had looked boldly (almost scientifically) at this title-page, let it mock me a little, had laughed and sighed over it, as I ought, there came a great hush from I know not where. I remembered it was the title, after all, for better or worse, in some sort or another, of every book I had craved and delighted in, in the whole world. Then suddenly I found myself before this book, praying to it, and before every struggling desiring-book of every man, of other men, where it has prayed before, and I dared to look my title in the face. I have not denied—I do not need to deny—that what I have uncovered here is merely my own soul’s glimmer—my interpretation—at this mighty, passing show of a world, and it comes to you, Oh Gentle Reader, not as I am, but as I would like to be. Out of chaos it struggles to you, and defeat—can you not see it?—and if but the benediction of what I, or you, or any man would like to be will come and rest on it, it is enough. Take it first and last, it is written in every man’s soul, be his theory whatsoever it may of this great wondering world—wave after wave of it, shuddering and glorying over him—it is written after all that he does not know that anything is, can be, or has been in this world until he possesses it, or misses possessing it himself—feels it slipping from him. It is in what a man is, has, or might have, that he must track out his promise for a world. His life is his prayer for the ages as long as he lives, and what he is, and what he is trying to be, sings and prays for him, says masses for his soul under the stars, and in the presence of all peoples, when he is dead. By this truth, I and my book with you, Gentle Reader, must stand or fall. Even now as I bend over the click of my typewriter, the years rise dim and flow over me out of the east, … generations of brothers, out of the mist of heaven and out of the dust of the earth, trooping across the world, and wondering at it, come and go, and out of all these there shall not be one, no not one, Gentle Reader, but shall be touched and loved by you, by me. In light out of shadow or in the shadow out of the light, our souls fleck them, fleck them with the invisible, blessing them and cursing them. We shall be the voices of the night and day to them, shall live a shadow of life with them, and be the sounds in their ears; did any man think that what we are, and what we are trying to be, is ours, is private, is for ourselves? Boundlessly, helplessly scattered on the world, upon the faces of our fellows, our souls mock to us or sing to us forever. So if I have opened my windows to you, say not it is because I have dared. It is because I have not dared. I have said I will protect my soul with the street. I will have my vow written on my forehead. I will throw open my window to the passer-by. Fling it in! I beg you, oh world, whatever it is, be it prayer or hope or jest. It is mine. I have vowed to live with it, to live out of it—so long as I feel your footsteps under my casement, and know that your watch is upon my days, and that you hold me to myself. I have taken for my challenge or for my comrade, I know not which, a whole world. And what shall a man give in exchange for a whole world? And my soul said “He shall not save nor keep back himself.” Who is the Fool—that I should be always taking all this trouble for him,—tiptoeing up and down the world with my little cover over my secret for him? To defy a Fool, I have said, speak your whole truth. Then God locks him out. To hide a secret, have enough of it. Hide it outdoors. Why should a man take anything less than a world to hide in? If a soul is really a soul, why should it not fall back for its reserve on its own infinity? God does. Even daisies do it. It is too big a world to be always bothering about one’s secret in it. “Who has time for it?” I have said. “Give it out. Move right on living. Get another.” The only way for a man in this twentieth century to hide his soul is by letting it reach out of sight. Not by locks, nor by stiflings, nor by mean little economizings of the heart does a man earn a world for a comrade. Let the laughers laugh. On the great still street in space where souls are,—who cares? II
Diagnosis Compelled as I am, as most of us are, to witness the unhappy spectacle, in every city of the land, of a great mass of unfortunate and mutilated persons whirled round and round in rows, in huge reading-machines, being crunched and educated, it is very hard not to rush thoughtlessly in to the rescue sometimes, even if one has nothing better than such a pitiful, helpless thing as good advice. I am afraid it does not look very wise to do it. Civilisation is such a vast, hypnotising, polarising spectacle, has the stage so fully to itself, everybody’s eyes glued on it, it is hard to get up and say what one thinks in it. One cannot find anything equally objective to say it with. One feels as if calling attention to one’s self, to the little, private, shabby theatre of one’s own mind. It is as if in a great theatre (on a back seat in it) one were to get up and stand in his chair and get the audience to turn round, and say, “Ladies and gentlemen. That is not the stage, with the foot-lights over there. This is the stage, here where I am. Now watch me twirl my thumbs.” But the great spectacle of the universal reading-machine is too much for me. Before I know it I try to get the audience to turn around.The spectacle of even a single lad, in his more impressionable and possible years, reading a book whether he has anything to do with it or not, in spite of the author and in spite of himself, when one considers how many books he might read which really belong to him, is enough to make a mere reformer or outlaw or parent-interferer of any man who is compelled to witness it. But it seems that the only way to interfere with one of these great reading-machines is to stop the machine. One would say theoretically that it would not take very much to stop it—a mere broken thread of thought would do it, if the machine had any provision for thoughts. As it is, one can only stand outside, watch it through the window, and do what all outsiders are obliged to do, shout into the din a little good advice. If this good advice were to be summed up in a principle or prepared for a text-book it would be something like this: The whole theory of our prevailing education is a kind of unanimous, colossal, “I can’t,” “You can’t”; chorus, “We all of us together can’t.” The working principle of public-school education, all the way from its biggest superintendents or overseers down to its littlest tow-heads in the primary rooms, is a huge, overbearing, overwhelming system of not expecting anything of anybody. Everything is arranged throughout with reference to not-expecting, and the more perfectly a system works without expecting, or needing to expect, the more successful it is represented to be. The public does not expect anything of the politicians. The politicians do not expect anything of the superintendents. The superintendents do not expect anything of the teachers, and the teachers do not expect anything of the pupils, and the pupils do not expect anything of themselves. That is to say, the whole educational world is upside down,—so perfectly and regularly and faultlessly upside down that it is almost hopeful. All one needs to do is to turn it accurately and carefully over at every point and it will work wonderfully. To turn it upside down, have teachers that believe something. III
Eclipse When it was decreed in the course of the nineteenth century that the educational world should pass over from the emphasis of persons to the emphasis of things, it was decreed that a generation that could not emphasise persons in its knowledge could not know persons. A generation which knows things and does not know persons naturally believes in things more than it believes in persons. Even an educator who is as forward-looking and open to human nature as President Charles F. Thwing, with all his emphasis of knowing persons and believing in persons as a basis for educational work, seems to some of us to give an essentially unbelieving and pessimistic classification of human nature for the use of teachers. “Early education,” says President Thwing, “occupies itself with description (geometry, space, arithmetic, time, science, the world of nature). Later education with comparison and relations.” If one asks, “Why not both together? Why learn facts at one time and their relations at another? Is it not the most vital possible way to learn facts to learn them in their relations?”—the answer that would be generally made reveals that most teachers are pessimists, that they have very small faith in what can be expected of the youngest pupils. The theory is that interpretative minds must not be expected of them. Some of us find it very hard to believe as little as this, in any child. Most children have such an incorrigible tendency for putting things together that they even put them together wrong rather than not put them together at all. Under existing educational conditions a child is more of a philosopher at six than he is at twenty-six. The third stage of education for which Dr. Thwing partitions off the human mind is the “stage in which a pupil becomes capable of original research, a discoverer of facts and relations” himself. In theory this means that when a man is thirty years old and all possible habits of originality have been trained out of him, he should be allowed to be original. In practice it means removing a man’s brain for thirty years and then telling him he can think. There never has been a live boy in a school as yet that would allow himself to be educated in this way if he could help it. All the daily habits of his mind resent it. It is a pessimistic, postponing way of educating him. It does not believe in him enough. It may be true of men in the bulk, men by the five thousand, that their intellectual processes happen along in this conveniently scientific fashion, at least as regards emphasis, but when it is applied to any individual mind, at any particular time, in actual education, it is found that it is not true, that it is pessimistic. God is not so monotonous and the universe is not graded as accurately as a public school, and things are much more delightfully mixed up. If a great university were to give itself whole-heartedly and pointedly to one single individual student, it would find it both convenient and pleasant and natural and necessary to let him follow these three stages all at once, in one stage with one set of things, and in another stage with another. Everyone admits that the first thing a genius does with such a convenient, three-part system, or chart for a soul, is to knock it endwise. He does it because he can. Others would if they could. He insists from his earliest days on doing all three parts, everything, one set of things after the other—description, comparison, creation, and original research sometimes all at once. He learns even words all ways at once. All of these processes are applied to each thing that a genius learns in his life, not the three parts of his life. One might as well say to a child, “Now, dear little lad, your life is going to be made up of eating, sleeping, and living. You must get your eating all done up now, these first ten years, and then you can get your sleeping done up, and then you can take a spell at living—or putting things together.” The first axiom of true pedagogics is that nothing can be taught except the outside or letter of a thing. The second axiom is that there is nothing gained in teaching a pupil the outside of a thing if he has not the inside—the spirit or relations of it. Teachers do not dare to believe this. They think it is true only of men of genius. They admit that men of genius can be educated through the inside or by calling out the spirit, by drawing out their powers of originality from the first, but they argue that with common pupils this process should not be allowed. They are not worthy of it. That is to say, the more ordinary men are and the more they need brains, the less they shall be allowed to have them. Inasmuch, then, as the inside cannot be taught and there is no object in teaching the outside, the question remains how to get the right inside at work producing the right outside. This is a purely spiritual question and brings us to the third axiom. Every human being born into the world is entitled to a special study and a special answer all to himself. If, as President Thwing very truly says, “The higher education as well as the lower is to be organised about the unit of the individual student,” what follows? The organisation must be such as to make it possible for every teacher to study and serve each individual student as a special being by himself. In other words, if this last statement of Dr. Thwing’s is to be acted on, it makes havoc with his first. It requires a somewhat new and practically revolutionary organisation in education. It will be an organisation which takes for its basic principle something like this: Viz.: The very essence of an average pupil is that he needs to be studied more, not less, than any one else in order to find his master-key, the master-passion to open his soul with. The essence of a genius is that almost any one of a dozen passions can be made the motive power of his learning. His soul is opening somewhere all the time. The less individuality a student has, the more he is like other students, the more he should be kept away from other students until what little individuality he has has been brought out. It is not only equally true of the ordinary man as well as of the man of genius that he must educate himself, but it is more true. Other people’s knowledge can be poured into and poured over a genius innocently enough. It rolls off him like water on a duck’s back. Even if it gets in, he organically protects himself. The genius of the ordinary man needs special protection made for it. As our educational institutions are arranged at present, the more commonplace our students are the more we herd them together to make them more commonplace. That is, we do not believe in them enough. We believe that they are commonplace through and through, and that nothing can be done about it. We admit, after a little intellectual struggle, that a genius (who is bound to be an individual anyway) should be treated as one, but a common boy, whose individuality can only be brought out by his being very vigorously and constantly reminded of it, and exercised in it, is dropped altogether as an individual, is put into a herd of other common boys, and his last remaining chance of being anybody is irrevocably cut off. We do not believe in him as an individual. He is a fraction of a roomful. He is a 67th or 734th of something. Some one has said that the problem of education is getting to be, How can we give, in our huge learning-machines, our exceptional students more of a chance? I state a greater problem: How can we give our common students a chance to be exceptional ones?The problem can only be solved by teachers who believe something, who believe that there is some common ground, some spiritual law of junction, between the man of genius, the natural or free man, and the cramped, i.e., artificial, ordinary one. It would be hard to name any more important proposition for current education to act on than this, that the natural man in this world is the man of genius. The Church has had to learn that religion does not consist in being unnatural. The schools are next to learn that the man of genius is not unnatural. He is what nature intended every man to be, at the point where his genius lies. The way out in education, the only believing, virile, man’s way out, would seem to be to begin with the man of genius as a principle and work out the application of the principle to more ordinary men—men of slowed-down genius. We are going to use the same methods—faster or slower—for both. A child’s greater genius lies in his having a more lively sense of relation with more things than other children. Teachers are going to believe that if the right thing can be done about it, this sense of a live relation to knowledge can be uncovered in every human soul, that there is a certain sense in which every man is his own genius. “By education,” said Helvetius, “you can make bears dance, but never create a man of genius.” The first thing for a teacher who believes this to do, is not to teach. IV
Apocalypse There is a spirit in this book, struggling down underneath it, which neither I nor any other man shall ever express. It needs a nation to express it, a nation fearless to know itself, a great, joyous, trustful, expectant nation. The centuries break away. I almost see it now, lifting itself in its plains and hills and fields and cities, in its smoke and cloud-land, as on some huge altar, to supreme destiny, a nation freed before heaven by the mighty, daily, childlike joy of its own life. I see it as a nation full of personalities, full of self-contained, normally self-centred, self-delighted, self-poised men—men of genius, men who balance off with a world, men who are capable of being at will magnificently self-conscious or unconscious, self-possessed and self-forgetful—balanced men, comrades and equals of a world, neither its slaves nor its masters. I have said I will not have a faith that I have to get to with a trap-door. I have said that inspiration is for everybody. I have had inspiration myself and I will not clang down a door above my soul and believe that God has given to me or to any one else what only a few can have. I do not want anything, I will not have anything that any one cannot have. If there is one thing rather than another that inspiration is for, it is that when I have it I know that any man can have it. It is necessary to my selfishness that he shall have it. If a great wonder of a world like this is given to a man, and he is told to live on it and it is not furnished with men to live with, with men that go with it, what is it all for? If one could have one’s choice in being damned there would be no way that would be quite so quick and effective as having inspirations that were so little inspired as to make one suppose they were merely for one’s self or for a few others. The only way to save one’s soul or to keep a corner for God in it is to believe that He is a kind of God who has put inspiration in every man. All that has to be done with it, is to get him to stop smothering it. Inspiration, instead of being an act of going to work in a minute, living a few hundred years at once, an act of making up and creating a new and wonderful soul for one’s self, consists in the act of lifting off the lid from the one one has. The mere fact that the man exists who has had both experiences, not having inspiration and having it, gives a basis for knowledge of what inspiration is. A man who has never had anything except inspiration cannot tell us what it is, and a man who has never had it cannot tell us what it is; but a man who has had both of these experiences (which is the case with most of us) constitutes a cross-section of the subject, a symbol of hope for every one. All who have had not-inspirations and inspirations both know that the origin and control and habit of inspiration, are all of such a character as to suggest that it is the common property of all men. All that is necessary is to have true educators or promoters, men who furnish the conditions in which the common property can be got at. The only difference between men of genius—men of genius who know it—and other men—men of genius who don’t know it—is that the men of genius who know it have discovered themselves, have such a headlong habit of self-joy in them, have tasted their self-joys so deeply, that they are bound to get at them whether the conditions are favourable or not. The great fact about the ordinary man’s genius, which the educational world has next to reckon with, is that there are not so many places to uncover it. The ordinary man at first, or until he gets the appetite started, is more particular about the conditions. It is because a man of genius is more thorough with the genius he has, more spiritual and wilful with it than other men, that he grows great. A man’s genius is always at bottom religious, at the point where it is genius, a worshipping toward something, a worshipping toward something until he gets it, a supreme covetousness for God, for being a God. It is a faith in him, a sense of identity and sharing with what seems to be above and outside, a sense of his own latent infinity. I have said that all that real teaching is for, is to say to a man, in countless ways, a countless “You can.” And I have said that all real learning is for is to say “I can.” When we have enough great “I can’s,” there will be a great society or nation, a glorious “We can” rising to heaven. This is the ideal that hovers over all real teaching and makes it deathless,—fertile for ever. If the world could be stopped short for ten years in its dull, sullen round of not believing in itself, if it could be allowed to have, all of it, all over, even for three days, the great solemn joy of letting itself go, it would not be caught falling back very soon, I think, into its stupor of cowardice. It would not be the same world for three hundred years. All that it is going to require to get all people to feel that they are inspired is some one who is strong enough to lift a few people off of themselves—get the idea started. Every man is so busy nowadays keeping himself, as he thinks, properly smothered, that he has not the slightest idea of what is really inside him, or of what the thing that is really inside him would do with him, if he would give it a chance. Any man who has had the experience of not having inspiration and the experience of having it both knows that it is the sense of striking down through, of having the lid of one’s smaller consciousness lifted off. In the long run his inspiration can be had or not as he wills. He knows that it is the supreme reasonableness in him, the primeval, underlying naturalness in him, rising to its rights. What he feels when he is inspired is that the larger laws, the laws above the other laws, have taken hold of him. He knows that the one law of inspiration is that a man shall have the freedom of himself. Most problems and worries are based on defective, uninvoked functions. Some organ, vision, taste, or feeling or instinct is not allowed its vent, its chance to qualify. Something needs lifting away. The common experience of sleeping things off, or walking or working them off, is the daily symbol of inspiration. More often than not a worry or trouble is moved entirely out of one’s path by the simplest possible device, an intelligent or instinctive change of conditions. The fundamental heresy of modern education is that it does not believe this—does not believe in making deliberate arrangements for the originality of the average man. It does not see that the extraordinary man is simply the ordinary man keyed-up, writ large or moving more rapidly. What the average man is now, the great men were once. When we begin to understand that a man of genius is not supernatural, that he is simply more natural than the rest of us, that all the things that are true for him are true for us, except that they are true more slowly, the educational world will be a new world. The very essence of the creative power of a man of genius over other men, is that he believes in them more than they do. He writes, paints, or sings as if all other men were men of genius, and he keeps on doing it until they are. All modern human nature is annexed genius. The whole world is a great gallery of things, that men of genius have seen, until they make other men see them too, and prove that other men can see them. What one man sees with travail or by being born again, whole generations see at last without trying, and when they are born the first time. The great cosmic process is going on in the human spirit. Ages flow down from the stars upon it. No one man shall guess, now or ever, what a man is, what a man shall be. But it is to be noticed that when the world gets its greatest man—the One who guesses most, generations are born and die to know Him, all with awe and gentleness in their hearts. One after the other as they wheel up to the Great Sun to live,—they call Him the Son of God because He thought everybody was. The main difference between a great man and a little one is a matter of time. If the little man could keep his organs going, could keep on experiencing, acting, and reacting on things for four thousand years, he would have no difficulty in being as great as some men are in their threescore and ten. All genius is inherited time and space. The imagination, which is the psychological substitute for time and space, is a fundamental element in all great power, because, being able to reach results without pacing off the processes, it makes it possible for a man to crowd more experience in, and be great in a shorter time. The idea of educating the little man in the same way as the great man, from the inside, or by drawing out his originality, meets with many objections. It is objected that inasmuch as no little men could be made into great men in the time allotted, there would be no object in trying to do it, and no result to show for it in the world, except row after row of spoiled little men, drearily waiting to die. The answer to this is the simple assertion that if a quart-cup is full it is the utmost a quart-cup can expect. A hogshead can do no more. So far as the man himself is concerned, if he has five sound, real senses in him, all of them acting and reacting on real things, if he is alive, i.e., sincere through and through, he is educated. True education must always consist, not in how much a man has, but in the way he feels about what he has. The kingdom of heaven is on the inside of his five senses. V
Every Man his Own Genius I do not mean by the man of genius in this connection the great man of genius, who takes hold of his ancestors to live, rakes centuries into his life, burns up the phosphorus of ten generations in fifty years, and with giant masterpieces takes leave of the world at last, bringing his family to a full stop in a blaze of glory, and a spindling child or so. I am merely contending for the principle that the extraordinary or inspired man is the normal man (at the point where he is inspired) and that the ordinary or uninspired boy can be made like him, must be educated like him, led out through his self-delight to truth, that, if anything, the ordinary or uninspired boy needs to be educated like a genius more than a genius does. I know of a country house which reminds me of the kind of mind I would like to have. In the first place, it is a house that grew. It could not possibly have been thought of all at once. In the second place, it grew itself. Half inspiration and half common-sense, with its mistakes and its delights all in it, gloriously, frankly, it blundered into being, seven generations tumbled on its floors, filled it with laughter and love and tears. One felt that every life that had come to it had written itself on its walls, that the old house had broken out in a new place for it, full of new little joys everywhere, and jogs and bays and afterthoughts and forethoughts, old roofs and young ones chumming together, and old chimneys (three to start with and four new ones that came when they got ready). Everything about it touched the heart and said something. I have never managed to see it yet, whether in sunlight, cloud-light, or starlight, or the light of its own lamps, but that it stood and spoke. It is a house that has genius. The genius of the earth and the sky around it are all in it, of motherhood, of old age, and of little children. It grew out of a spirit, a loving, eager, putting-together, a making of relations between things that were apart,—the portrait of a family. It is a very beautiful, eloquent house, and hundreds of nights on the white road have I passed it by, in my lonely walk, and stopped and listened to it, standing there in its lights, like a kind of low singing in the trees, and when I have come home, later, on the white road, and the lights were all put out, I still feel it speaking there, faint against heaven, with all its sleep, its young and old sleep, its memories and hopes of birth and death, lifting itself in the night, a prayer of generations. Many people do not care for it very much. They would wonder that I should like a mind like it. It is a wandering-around kind of a house, has thirty outside doors. If one doesn’t like it, it is easy to get out (which is just what I like in a mind). Stairways almost anywhere, only one or two places in the whole building where there is not a piazza, and every inch of piazza has steps down to the grass and there are no walks. A great central fireplace, big as a room, little groups of rooms that keep coming on one like surprises, and little groups of houses around outside that have sprung up out of the ground themselves. A flower garden that thought of itself and looks as if it took care of itself (but doesn’t). Everything exuberant and hospitable and free on every side and full of play,—a high stillness and seriousness over all. I cannot quite say what it is, but most country houses look to me as if they had forgotten they were really outdoors, in a great, wide, free, happy place, where winds and suns run things, where not even God says nay, and everything lives by its inner law, in the presence of the others, exults in its own joy and plays with God. Most country homes forget this. They look like little isles of glare and showing off, and human joylessness, dotting the earth. People’s minds in the houses are like the houses: they reek with propriety. That is, they are all abnormal, foreign to the spirit, to the passion of self-delight, of life, of genius. Most of them are fairly hostile to genius or look at it with a lorgnette. I like to think that if the principles and habits of freedom that result in genius were to be gauged and adjusted toward bringing out the genius of ordinary men, they would result in the following: Recipe to make a great man (or a live small one): Let him be made like a great work of art. In general, follow the rule in Genesis i. 1. Chaos. 2. Enough Chaos; that is, enough kinds of Chaos. Pouring all the several parts of Chaos upon the other parts of Chaos. 3. Watch to see what emerges and what it is in the Chaos that most belongs to all the rest, what is the Unifying Principle. 4. Fertilise the Chaos. Let it be impregnated with desire, will, purpose, personality. 5. When the Unifying Principle is discovered, refrain from trying to force everything to attach itself to it. Let things attach themselves in their way as they are sure to do in due time and grow upon it. Let the mind be trusted. Let it not be always ordered around, thrust into, or meddled with. The making of a man, like the making of a work of art, consists in giving the nature of things a chance, keeping them open to the sun and air and the springs of thought. The first person who ever said to man, “You press the button and I will do the rest,” was God. The emphasis of art in our modern education, of the knack or science or how of things, is to be followed next by the emphasis of the art that conceals art, genius, the norm and climax of human ability. Any finishing-school girl can out-sonnet Keats. The study of appearances, the passion for the outside has run its course. The next thing in education is going to be honesty, fearless naturalness, upheaval, the freedom of self, self-expectancy, all-expectancy, and the passion for possessing real things. The personalities, persons with genius, persons with free-working, uncramped minds, are all there, ready and waiting, both in teachers and pupils, all growing sub rosa, and the main thing that is left to do is to lift the great roof of machinery off and let them come up. The days are already upon us when education shall be taken out of the hands of anÆmic, abstracted men—men who go into everything theory-end first. There is already a new atmosphere in the educated world. The thing that shall be taught shall be the love of swinging out, of swinging up to the light and the air. Let every man live, the world says next, a little less with his outside, with his mere brain or logic-stitching machine. Let him swear by his instincts more, and live with his medulla oblongata. VI
An Inclined Plane “This is a very pleasant and profitable ideal you have printed in this book, but teachers and pupils and institutions being what they are, it is not practical and nothing can be done about it,” it is objected. RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED 1. There is nothing so practical as an ideal, for if through his personality and imagination a man can be made to see an ideal, the ideal does itself; that is, it takes hold of him and inspires him to do it and to find means for doing it. This is what has been aimed at in this book. 2. The first and most practical thing to do with an ideal is to believe it. 3. The next most practical thing is to act as if one believed it. This makes other people believe it. To act as if one believed an ideal is to be literal with it, to assume that it can be made real, that something—some next thing—can be done with it. 4. It is only people who believe an ideal who can make it practical. Educators who think that an ideal is true and who do not think it is practical do not think it is true, do not really know it. The process of knowing an ideal, of realising it with the mind, is the process of knowing that it can be made real. This is what makes it an ideal, that it is capable of becoming real, and if a man does not realise an ideal, cannot make it real in his mind, it is not accurate for him to say that it is not practical. It is accurate for him to say that it is not practical to him. The ideal presented in this book is not presented as practical except to teachers who believe it. 5. Every man has been given in this world, if he is allowed to get at them, two powers to make a man out of. These powers are Vision and Action. (1) Seeing, and (2) Being or Doing what one sees. What a man sees with, is quite generally called his imagination. What he does with what he sees, is called his character or personality. If it is true, as has been maintained in the whole trend of this book, that the most important means of education are imagination and personality, the power of seeing things and the power of living as if one saw them, imagination and personality must be accepted as the forces to teach with, and the things that must be taught. The persons who have imagination and personality in modern life must do the teaching. 6. Parents and others who believe in imagination and personality as the supreme energies of human knowledge and the means of education, and who have children they wish taught in this way, are going to make connections with such teachers and call on them to do it. 7. Inasmuch as the best way to make an ideal that rests on persons practical is to find the persons, the next thing for persons who believe in an ideal to do is to find each other out. All persons, particularly teachers and parents, in their various communities and in the nation, who believe that the ideal is practical in education should be social with their ideal, group themselves together, make themselves known and felt. 8. Some of us are going to act through the schools we have. We are going to make room in our present over-managed, morbidly organised institutions, with ordered-around teachers, for teachers who cannot be ordered around, who are accustomed to use their imaginations and personalities to teach with, instead of superintendents. We are going to have superintendents who will desire such teachers. The reason that our over-organised and over-superintended schools and colleges cannot get the teachers they want, to carry out their ideals, is a natural one enough. The moment ideal teachers are secured it is found that they have ideals of their own and that they will not teach without them. When vital and free teachers are attracted to the schools and allowed fair conditions there, they will soon crowd others out. The moment we arrange to give good teachers a chance good teachers will be had. 9. Others will find it best to act in another way. Instead of reforming schools from the inside, they are going to attack the problem from the outside, start new schools which shall stand for live principles and outlive the others. As good teachers can arrange better conditions for themselves to teach in their own schools, wherever practicable this would seem to be the better way. They are going to organise colleges of their own. They are going to organise unorganised colleges (for such they would be called at first), assemblings of inspired teachers, men grouping men about them each after his kind. Every one can begin somewhere. Teachers who are outside can begin outside and teachers who are within can begin within. Certainly if every teacher who believes something will believe deeply, will free himself, let himself out with his belief, act on it, the day is not long hence when the great host of ordered-around teachers with their ordered-around pupils will be a memory. Copying and appearing to know will cease. Self-delight and genius will again be the habit of the minds of men and the days of our present poor, pale, fuddling, unbelieving, Simon-says-thumbs-up education will be numbered.
Sometimes it seems as if this globe, this huge cyclorama of nations whirling in sunlight through stars, were a mere empty, mumbled repetition, a going round and round of the same stupendous stupidities and the same heroisms in human life. One is always feeling as if everything, arts, architecture, cables, colleges, nations, had all almost literally happened before, in the ages dark to us, gone the same round of beginning, struggling, and ending. Then the globe was wiped clean and began again.One of the great advantages in emphasising individuals,—the main idea of this book,—in picking out particular men as forces, centres of energy in society, as the basis for one’s programme for human nature, is the sense it gives that things really can begin again—begin anywhere—where a man is. One single human being, deeply believed in, glows up a world, casts a kind of speculative value, a divine wager over all the rest. I confess that most men I have seen seem to me phantasmagorically walking the earth, their lives haunting them, hanging intangibly about them—indefinitely postponed. But one does not need, in order to have a true joyous working-theory of life, to believe verbatim, every moment, in the mass of men—as men. One needs to believe in them very much—as possible men—larvÆ of great men, and if, in the meantime, one can have (what is quite practicable) one sample to a square mile of what the mass of men in that mile might be, or are going to be, one comes to a considerable degree of enthusiasm, a working and sharing enthusiasm for all the rest. VII
Allons I thought when I began to make my little visit in civilisation—this book—that perhaps I ought to have a motto to visit a civilisation with. So the motto I selected (a good one for all reformers, viewers of institutions and things) was, “Do not shoot the organist. He is doing the best he can.” I fear I have not lived up to it. I am an optimist. I cannot believe he is doing the best he can. Before I know it, I get to hoping and scolding. I do not even believe he is enjoying it. Most of the people in civilisation are not enjoying it. They are like people one sees on tally-hos. They are not really enjoying what they are doing. They enjoy thinking that other people think they are enjoying it. The great characteristic enthusiasm of modern society, of civilisation, the fad of showing off, of exhibiting a life instead of living it, very largely comes, it is not too much to say, from the lack of normal egoism, of self-joy in civilised human beings. It has come over us like a kind of moral anÆmia. People cannot get interested enough in anything to be interested in it by themselves. Hence no great art—merely the art which is a trick or knack of appearance. We lack great art because we do not believe in great living. The emphasis which would seem to be most to the point in civilisation is that people must enjoy something, something of their very own, even if it is only their sins, if they can do no better, and they are their own. It would be a beginning. They could work out from that. They would get the idea. Some one has said that people repent of their sins because they didn’t enjoy them as much as they expected to. Well, then, let them enjoy their repentance. The great point is, in this world, that men must get hold of reality somewhere, somehow, get the feel, the bare feel of living before they try dying. Most of us seem to think we ought to do them both up together. It is to be admitted that people might not do really better things for their own joy, than for other people’s, but they would do them better. It is not the object of this book to reform people. Reformers are sinners enjoying their own sins, who try to keep other people from enjoying theirs. The object of this book is to inspire people to enjoy anything, to find a principle that underlies right and wrong both. Let people enjoy their sins, we say, if they really know how to enjoy. The more they get the idea of enjoying anything, the more vitally and sincerely they will run their course—turn around and enjoy something truer and more lasting. What we all feel, what every man feels is, that he has a personal need of daring and happy people around him, people that are selfish enough to be alive and worth while, people that have the habit and conviction of joy, whose joys whether they are wrong or right are real joys to them, not shadows or shows of joys, joys that melt away when no one is looking. The main difficulty in the present juncture of the world in writing on the Lost Art of Reading is that all the other arts are lost, the great self-delights. As they have all been lost together, it has been necessary to go after them together, to seek some way of securing conditions for the artist, the enjoyer and prophet of human life, in our modern time. At the bottom of all great art, it is necessary to believe, there has been great, believing, free, beautiful living. This is not saying that inconsistency, contradiction, and insincerity have not played their part, but it is the benediction, the great Amen of the world, to say this,—that if there has been great constructive work there has been great radiant, unconquerable, constructive living behind it. There is but one way to recover the lost art of reading. It is to recover the lost art of living. The day we begin to take the liberty of living our own lives there will be artists and seers everywhere. We will all be artists and seers, and great arts, great books, and great readers of books will flock to us.
Well, here we are, Gentle Reader. We are rounding the corner of the last paragraph. Time stretches out before us. On the great highroad we stand together in the dawn—I with my little book in hand, you, perhaps, with yours. The white road reaches away before us, behind us. There are cross-roads. There are parallels, too. Sometimes when there falls a clearness on the air, they are nearer than I thought. I hear crowds trudging on them in the dark, singing faintly. I hear them cheering in the dark. But this is my way, right here. See the hill there? That is my next one. The sun in a minute. You are going my way, comrade?… You are not going my way? So be it. God be with you. The top o’ the morning to you. I pass on. |
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