Even if the youth of the period, as a live, human, reading being (on the principles to be laid down in the following pages), is so fortunate as to succeed in escaping the dangers and temptations of the home--even if he contrives to run the gauntlet of the grammar school and the academy--even if, in the last, longest, and hardest pull of all, he succeeds in keeping a spontaneous habit with books in spite of a college course, the story is not over. Civilisation waits for him--all-enfolding, all-instructing civilisation, and he stands face to face--book in hand--with his last chance.

 One almost wonders sometimes, why it is that the sun keeps on year after year and day after day turning the globe around and around, heating it and lighting it and keeping things growing on it, when after all, when all is said and done (crowded with wonder and with things to live with, as it is), it is a comparatively empty globe. No one seems to be using it very much, or paying very much attention to it, or getting very much out of it. There are never more than a very few men on it at a time, who can be said to be really living on it. They are engaged in getting a living and in hoping that they are going to live sometime. They are also going to read sometime.

When one thinks of the wasted sunrises and sunsets--the great free show of heaven--the door open every night--of the little groups of people straggling into it--of the swarms of people hurrying back and forth before it, jostling their getting-a-living lives up and down before it, not knowing it is there,--one wonders why it is there. Why does it not fall upon us, or its lights go suddenly out upon us? We stand in the days and the nights like stalls--suns flying over our heads, stars singing through space beneath our feet. But we do not see. Every man's head in a pocket,--boring for his living in a pocket--or being bored for his living in a pocket,--why should he see? True we are not without a philosophy for this--to look over the edge of our stalls with. "Getting a living is living," we say. We whisper it to ourselves--in our pockets. Then we try to get it. When we get it, we try to believe it--and when we get it we do not believe anything.

The man is not allowed to peep in civilisation. He is too busy in being ordered around by it to know that he would like to. It does not occur to him that he ought to be allowed time in it to know who he is, before he dies. The typical civilised man is an exhausted, spiritually hysterical man because he has no idea of what it means, or can be made to mean to a  man, to face calmly with his whole life a great book, a few minutes every day, to rest back on his ideals in it, to keep office hours with his own soul.

Whatever the remedy may be said to be, one thing is certainly true with regard to our reading habits in modern times. Men who are habitually shamefaced or absent-minded before the ideal--that is, before the actual nature of things--cannot expect to be real readers of books. They can only be what most men are nowadays, merely busy and effeminate, running-and-reading sort of men--rushing about propping up the universe. Men who cannot trust the ideal--the nature of things,--and who think they can do better, are naturally kept very busy, and as they take no time to rest back on their ideals they are naturally very tired.

 If fulness and leisure and power of living are no more with us, nothing shall save us. Walls of encyclopædias--not even walls of Bibles shall save us, nor miles of Carnegie-library. Empty and hasty and cowardly living does not get itself protected from the laws of nature by tons of paper and ink. The only way out for civilisation is through the practical men in it--men who grapple daily with ideals, who keep office hours with their souls, who keep hold of life with books, who take enough time out of hurrahing civilisation along--to live.

There seem to be but two fundamental characteristic sensibilities left alive in the typical, callously-civilised man. One of these sensibilities is the sense of motion and the other is the sense of mass. If he cannot be appealed to through one of these senses, it is of little use to appeal to him at all. In proportion as he is civilised, the civilised man can be depended on for two things. He can always be touched by a hurry of any kind, and he never fails to be moved by a crowd. If he can have hurry and crowd together, he is capable of The Lost Art of Reading, by Gerald Stanley Lee 6 almost anything. These two sensibilities, the sense of motion and the sense of mass, are all that is left of the original, lusty, tasting and seeing and feeling human being who took possession of the earth. And even in the case of comparatively rudimentary and somewhat stupid senses like these, the sense of motion, with the average civilised man, is so blunt that he needs to be rushed along at seventy miles an hour to have the feeling that he is moving, and his sense of mass is so degenerate that he needs to live with hundreds of thousands of people next door to know that he is not alone. He is seen in his most natural state,--this civilised being,--with most of his civilisation around him, in the seat of an elevated railway train, with a crowded newspaper before his eyes, and another crowded newspaper in his lap, and crowds of people reading crowded newspapers standing round him in the aisles; but he can never be said to be seen at his best, in a spectacle like this, until the spectacle moves, until it is felt rushing over the sky of the street, puffing through space; in which delectable pell-mell and carnival of hurry--hiss in front of it, shriek under it, and dust behind it--he finds, to all appearances at least, the meaning of this present world and the hope of the next. Hurry and crowd have kissed each other and his soul rests.

If a civilisation is founded on two senses--the sense of motion and the sense of mass,--one need not go far to find the essential traits of its literature and its daily reading habit. There are two things that such a civilisation makes sure of in all its concerns--hurry and crowd. Hence the spectacle before us--the literary rush and mobs of books.

The Mysterious Person: "There is no escaping from it. Reading-madness is a thing we all are breathing in to-day whether we will or no, and it is not only in the air, but it is worse than in the air. It is underneath the The Lost Art of Reading, by Gerald Stanley Lee 7 foundations of the things in which we live and on which we stand. It has infected the very character of the natural world, and the movement of the planets, and the whirl of the globe beneath our feet. Without its little paling of books about it, there is hardly a thing that is left in this modern world a man can go to for its own sake. Except by stepping off the globe, perhaps, now and then--practically arranging a world of one's own, and breaking with one's kind,--the life that a man must live to-day can only be described as a kind of eternal parting with himself. There is getting to be no possible way for a man to preserve his five spiritual senses--even his five physical ones--and be a member, in good and regular standing, of civilisation at the same time.

 "If civilisation and human nature are to continue to be allowed to exist together there is but one way out, apparently--an extra planet for all of us, one for a man to live on and the other for him to be civilised on."

"As long as we, who are the men and women of the world, are willing to continue our present fashion of giving up living in order to get a living, one planet will never be large enough for us. If we can only get our living in one place and have it to live with in another, the question is, To whom does this present planet belong--the people who spend their days in living into it and enjoying it, or the people who never take time to notice the planet, who do not seem to know that they are living on a planet at all?"

"We are forgetting to see. Looking is a lost art. With our poor, wistful, straining eyes, we hurry along the days that slowly, out of the rest of heaven, move their stillness across this little world. The more we hurry, the more we read. Night and noon and morning the panorama passes before our eyes. By tables, on cars, and in the street we see them--readers, readers everywhere, drinking their blindness in. Life is a blur of printed paper. We see no more the things themselves. We see about them. We lose the power to see the things themselves. We see in sentences. The linotype looks for us. We know the world in columns. The sounds of the street are muffled to us. In papers up to our ears, we whirl along our endless tracks. The faces that pass are phantoms. In our little woodcut head-line dream we go ceaseless on, turning leaves,--days and weeks and months of leaves,--wherever we go--years of leaves. Boys who never have seen the sky above them, young men who have never seen it in a face, old men who have never looked out at sea across a crowd, nor guessed the horizons there--dead men, the flicker of life in their hands, not yet beneath the roofs of graves--all turning leaves."


 I was born to read. I spent all my early years, as I remember them, with books,--peering softly about in them. My whole being was hushed and trustful and expectant at the sight of a printed page. I lived in the presence of books, with all my thoughts lying open about me; a kind of still, radiant mood of welcome seemed to lie upon them. When I looked at a shelf of books I felt the whole world flocking to me.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are. But now it is become: Twinkle, twinkle, little star, Teacher's told me what you are. Even babies won't wonder very soon. That is to say, they won't wonder out loud. Nobody does.

I have little left but the gift of being bored. That is something--but hardly a day passes without my slurring over a guilty place in conversation, without my hiding my ignorance under a bushel, where I can go later and take a look at it by myself. Then I know all about it next time and sink lower and lower. A man can do nothing alone. Of course, ignorance must be natural and not acquired in order to have the true ring and afford the most relief in the world; but every wide-awake village that has thoughtful people enough--people who are educated up to it--ought to organise an Ignoramus Club to defend the town from papers and books----.

I have always kept on hoping that I would be allowed, in spite of being somewhat mixed up with civilisation, to be a normal man sometime. It has always seemed to me that the normal man--the highly organised man in all ages, is the man who takes the universe primarily as a spectacle. This is his main use for it. The object of his life is to get a good look at it before he dies--to be the kind of man who can get a good look at it. How any one can go through a whole life--sixty or seventy years of it--with a splendour like this arching over him morning, noon, and night, flying beneath his feet, blooming out at him on every side, and not spend nearly all his time (after the bare necessaries of life) in taking it in, listening and tasting and looking in it, is one of the seven wonders of the world. I never look out of my factory window in civilisation, see a sunset or shore of the universe,--am reminded again that there is a universe--but I wonder at myself and wonder at It. I try to put civilisation and the universe together. I cannot do it. It's as if we were afraid to be caught looking at it--most of us--spending the time to look at it, or as if we were ashamed before the universe itself--running furiously to and fro in it, lest it should look at us.

But we do not want knowledge in our civilisation to fit people as their clothes fit them. We do not even want their clothes to fit them. The people themselves do not want it. Our modern life is an elaborate and organised endeavour, on the part of almost every person in it, to escape from being fitted, either in knowledge or in anything else. The first symptom of civilisation--of the fact that a man is becoming civilised--is that he wishes to appear to belong where he does not. It is looked upon as the spirit of the age. He wishes to be learned, that no one may find out how little he knows. He wishes to be religious, that no one may see how wicked he is. He wishes to be respectable, that no one may know that he does not respect himself. The result mocks at us from every corner in life. Society is a struggle to get into the wrong clothes. Culture is a struggle to learn the things that belong to some one else.

In the meantime, as long as the industry of being well informed is the main ideal of living in the world, as long as every man's life, chasing the shadow of some other man's life, goes hurrying by, grasping at ignorance, there is nothing we can do--most of us--as educators, but to rescue a youth now and then from the rush and wait for results, both good and evil, to work themselves out. Those of us who respect every man's life, and delight in it and in the dignity of the things that belong to it, would like to do many things. We should be particularly glad to join hands in the "practical" things that are being hurried into the hurry around us. But they do not seem to us practical. The only practical thing we know of that can be done with a man who does not respect himself, is to get him to. It is true, no doubt, that we cannot respect another man's life for him, but we are profoundly convinced that we cannot do anything more practical for such a man's life than respecting it until he respects it himself, and we are convinced also that until he does respect it himself, respecting it for him is the only thing that any one else can do--the beginning and end of all action for him and of all knowledge.

When these principles are brought home to educators--when they are practised in some degree by the people, instead of merely, as they have always been before, by the leaders of the people, the world of knowledge shall be a new world. All knowledge shall be human, incarnate, expressive, artistic. Whole systems of knowledge shall come to us by seeing one another's faces on the street.

Trusting a boy to the weather in a library may have its momentary embarrassments, but it is immeasurably the shortest and most natural way to bring him into a vital connection with books. The first condition of a vital connection with books is that he shall make the connection for himself. The relation will be vital in proportion as he makes it himself.

There are times, it must be confessed, when Christ's command, that every man shall love his neighbour as himself, seems inconsiderate. There are some of us who cannot help feeling, when we see a man coming along toward us proposing to love us a little while the way he loves himself, that our permission might have been asked. If there is one inconvenience rather than another in our modern Christian society, it is the general unprotected sense one has in it, the number of people there are about in it (let loose by Sunday-school teachers and others) who are allowed to go around loving other people the way they love themselves. A codicil or at least an explanatory footnote to the Golden Rule, in the general interest of neighbours, would be widely appreciated. How shall a man dare to love his neighbour as himself, until he loves himself, has a self that he really loves, a self he can really love, and loves it? There is no more sad or constant spectacle that this modern world has to face than the spectacle of the man who has overlooked himself, bustling about in it, trying to give honour to other people,--the man who has never been able to help himself, hurrying anxious to and fro as if he could help some one else.

 All that seems to be left to him in a universe is a kind of keeping up appearances in it--a looking as if he lived--a hurrying, dishonest trying to forget. He dare not sit down and think. He spends his strength in racing with himself to get away from himself, and those greatest days of all in human life--the days when men grow old, world-gentle, and still and deep before their God, are the days he dreads the most.

This criticism, as a part of an estimate of Thomas Carlyle, is not only a criticism on itself and an autobiography besides, but it sums up, in a more or less characteristic fashion perhaps, what might be called the ultra-academic attitude in reading. The ultra-academic attitude may be defined as the attitude of sitting down and being told things, and of expecting all other persons to sit down and be told things, and of judging all authors, principles, men, and methods accordingly.

Faith is not an act of the imagination--to the man who knows it. It is infinite fact, the infinite crowding of facts, the drawing of the man-self upward and outward, where he is surrounded with the infinite man-self. Perhaps a man can make himself not believe. He can not make himself believe. He can only believe by letting himself go, by trusting the force of gravity and the law of space around him. Faith is the universe flowing silently, implacably, through his soul. He has given himself up to it. In the tiniest, noisiest noon his spirit is flooded with the stars. He is let out to the boundaries of heaven and the night-sky bears him up in the heat of the day.

 In the presence of a great work of art--a work of inspiration or faith, there is no such thing as appreciation, without letting one's self go.

People who always know what time it is, who always know exactly where they are, and exactly how they look, have it not in their power to read a great book. The book that comes to the reader as a great book is always one that shares with him the infinite and the eternal in himself.

 The orator and the listener, the writer and the reader, in proportion as they become alive to one another, come into the same spirit--the spirit of mutual listening and utterance. At the very best, and in the most inspired mood, the reader reads as if he were a reader and writer both, and the writer writes as if he were a writer and reader both.

. It means that another eighteenth century is coming to the world; and, as the analysis 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 Analysis 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 analysis of joy shall take its place, go round and round under the stars--dew, dawn, and darkness--until it stops.

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

 A sheet of water--making heaven out of nothing--is beautiful to the dullest man, because he cannot analyse it, could not--even if he would--contrive to see it by itself. Skies come crowding on it. There is enough poetry in the mere angle of a sinking sun to flood the prose of a continent with, because the gentle earthlong shadows that follow it lay their fingers upon all life and creep together innumerable separated things.

Four men stood before God 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 worshipped. Having worshipped he rose to his feet and made a world himself. [2] Recently discovered manuscript. These four men have been known in history as the Scientist, the Man of Affairs, the Philosopher, and the Artist. They stand for the four necessary points of view in reading books.

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

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

There is no such thing possible as being a literary authority, a cultured or scholarly man, unless the permeating of the sense-perceptions with spiritual suggestion is a daily and unconscious habit of life. "Every man his own poet" is the underlying assumption of every genuine work of art, and a work of art cannot be taught to a pupil in any other way than by making this same pupil a poet, by getting him to discover himself. Continued and unfaltering disaster is all that can be expected of all methods of literary training that do not recognise this.

 The man of genius is the man who literally gives himself. He makes every man a man of genius for the time being. He exchanges souls with us and for one brief moment we are great, we are beautiful, we are immortal. We are visited with our possible selves. Literature is the transfiguring of the senses in which men are dwelling every day and of the thoughts of the mind in which they are living every day. It is the commingling of one's life in one vast network of sensibility, communion, and eternal comradeship with all the joy and sorrow, taste, odor, and sound, passion of men and love of women and worship of God, that ever has been on the earth, since the watching of the first night above the earth, or since the look of the first morning on it, when it was loved for the first time by a human life.

 If entrance examinations in joy were required at our representative colleges very few of the pupils who are prepared for college in the ordinary way would be admitted. What is more serious than this, the honour-pupils in the colleges themselves at commencement time--those who have submitted most fully to the college requirements--would take a lower stand in a final examination in joy, whether of sense or spirit, than any others in the class. Their education has not consisted in the acquiring of a state of being, a condition of organs, a capacity of tasting life, of creating and sharing the joys and meanings in it. Their learning has largely consisted in the fact that they have learned at last to let their joys go. They have become the most satisfactory of scholars, not because of their power of knowing, but because of their willingness to be powerless in knowing. When they have been drilled to know without joy, have become the day-labourers of learning, they are given diplomas for cheerlessness, and are sent forth into the world as teachers of the young. Almost any morning, in almost any town or city beneath the sun, you can see them.

When, for whatever reason, of whatever importance, men and women choose to be so close together, that it is not fitting they should have freedom, and when they choose to have so little room to live in that development is not fitting lest it should inconvenience others, the penalty follows. When grass-blades are crowded between walls and fences, the more they can be made to look alike the more pleasing they are, and when an acre of ground finds itself covered with a thousand people, or a teacher of culture finds himself mobbed with pupils, the law of nature is the same. Whenever crowding of any kind takes place, whether it be in grass, ideas, or human nature, the most pleasing as well as the most convenient and natural way of producing a beautiful effect is with the Lawn Mower. The dead level is the logic of crowded conditions. The city grades down its hills for the convenience of reducing its sewer problem. It makes its streets into blocks for the convenience of knowing where every home is, and how far it is, by a glance at a page, and, in order that the human beings in it (one set of innumerable nobodies hurrying to another set of innumerable nobodies) may never be made to turn out perchance for an elm on a sidewalk, it cuts down centuries of trees, and then, out of its modern improvements, its map of life, its woods in rows, its wheels on tracks, and its souls in pigeonholes--out of its huge Checker-board under the days and nights--it lifts its eyes to the smoke in heaven, at last, and thanks God it is civilised!

The intense study of human experience in a college course may be fairly said to involve three things that must be daily made possible to the pupil in college life. Everything that is given him to do, and everything that happens to him in college, should cultivate these three things in the pupil: (1) Personality--an intense first person singular, as a centre for having experience; (2) Imagination--the natural organ in the human soul for realising what an experience is and for combining and condensing it; (3) The habit of having time and room, for re-experiencing an experience at will in the imagination, until the experience becomes so powerful and vivid, so fully realises itself in the mind, that the owner of the mind is an artist with his mind. When he puts the experience of his mind down it becomes more real to other men on paper than their own experiences are to them in their own lives.

In the meantime the Manufacture of the Cultured Mind is going ruthlessly on, and thousands of young men and women who, left alone with the masters of literature, might be engaged in accumulating and multiplying inspiration, are engaged in analysing--dividing what inspiration they have; and, in the one natural, creative period of their lives, their time is entirely spent in learning how inspired work was done, or how it might have been done, or how it should have been done; in absorbing everything about it except its spirit--the power that did it--the power that makes being told how to do it uncalled for, the power that asks and answers its "Hows?" for itself. The serene powerlessness of it all, without courage or passion or conviction, without self-discovery in it, or self-forgetfulness or beauty in it, or for one moment the great contagion of the great, is one of the saddest sights in this modern day.

It is the first importance of a true book that a man can select his neighbours with it,--can overcome space, riches, poverty, and time with it,--and the grave, and break bread with the dead. A book is a portable miracle. It makes a man's native place all over for him, for a dollar and a quarter; and many a man in this somewhat hard and despairing world has been furnished with a new heaven and a new earth for twenty-five cents.

A library, on the whole, is the purest and most perfect form of power that exists, because it is a lever on the nature of things. If a man is born with the wrong neighbours it brings the right ones flocking to him. It is the universe to order. It makes the world like a globe in a child's hands. He turns up the part where he chooses to live--now one way and now another, that he may delight in it and live in it. If he is a poet it is the meaning of life to him that he can keep on turning it until he has delighted and tasted and lived in all of it.

 If we are to shut ourselves up with one law, either the law of environment or the law of heredity, it is obvious that the best a logical man could do, would be to be ashamed of a universe like this and creep out of it as soon as he could. The great glory of a great book is, that it will not let itself be limited to the law of environment in dealing with a man. It deals directly with the man himself. It appeals to the law of heredity. It reaches down into the infinite depth of his life. If a man has started a life with parents he had better not have (for all practical purposes), it furnishes him with better ones. It picks and chooses in behalf of his life out of his very grandfathers, for him. It not only supplies him with a new set of neighbours as often as he wants them. It sees that he is born again every morning on the wide earth and that he has a new set of parents to be born to.

Neither environment nor heredity--taken by itself--can give a man a determined spirit, but it is everything to know that, given a few books and the determined spirit both, a man can have any environment he wants for living his life, and his own assorted ancestors for living it. It is only by means of books that a man can keep from living a partitioned-off life in the world--can keep toned up to the divine sense of possibility in it. We hear great men every day, across space and time, halloaing to one another in books, and across all things, as we feel and read, is the call of our possible selves. Even the impossible has been achieved, books tell us, in history, again and again. It has been achieved by several men. This may not prove very much, but if it does not prove anything else, it proves that the possible, at least, is the privilege of the rest of us. It has its greeting for every man. The sense of the possible crowds around him, and not merely in his books nor merely in his life, but in the place where his life and books meet--in his soul. However or wherever a man may be placed, it is the great book that reminds him Who he is. It reminds him who his Neighbour is. It is his charter of possibility. Having seen, he acts on what he sees, and reads himself out and reads himself in accordingly.

 "The way a man feels in a library (if any one can get him to tell it) lets out more about a man than anything else in the world."

The question that concerns me is, What shall a man do, how shall he act, when he finds himself in the hush of a great library,--opens the door upon it, stands and waits in the midst of it, with his poor outstretched soul all by himself before IT,--and feels the books pulling on him? I always feel as if it were a sort of infinite crossroads. The last thing I want to know in a library is exactly what I want there. I am tired of knowing what I want. I am always knowing what I want. I can know what I want almost anywhere. If there is a place left on God's earth where a modern man can go and go regularly and not know what he wants awhile, in Heaven's The Lost Art of Reading, by Gerald Stanley Lee 78 name why not let him? I am as fond as the next man, I think, of knowing what I am about, but when I find myself ushered into a great library I do not know what I am about any sooner than I can help. I shall know soon enough--God forgive me!

 The weak point in our modern education seems to be that it has broken altogether with the spirit or the imagination. Playing upon the spirit or the imagination of a man is the one method possible to employ in educating him in everything except his specialty. It is the one method possible to employ in making even a powerful specialist of him; in relating his specialty to other specialties; that is, in making either him or his specialty worth while.

I admit that I am in an unreasonable state of mind.[3] I think a great many people are. At least I hope so. There is no excuse for not being a little unreasonable. Sometimes it almost seems, when one looks at the condition of most college boys' minds, as if our colleges were becoming the moral and spiritual and intellectual dead-centres of modern life.

Avoiding experience is one of the great creative arts of life. We shall have enough before we die. It is forced upon us. We cannot even select it, most of it. But, in so far as we can select it,--in one's reading, for instance,--it behooves a man to avoid experience. He at least wants to avoid experience enough to have time to stop and think about the experience he has; to be sure he is getting as much out of his experience as it is worth.

I'd rather be alone with myself, I think, than with anybody. It's a deal better than being lonely the way we all are nowadays--with such a lot of other people crowding round, that one has to be lonely with, and books and newspapers and things besides. One has to be lonely so much in civilisation, there are so many things and persons that insist on one's coming over and being lonely with them, that being lonely in a perfectly plain way, all by one's self--the very thought of it seems to me, comparatively speaking, a relief.

Originality may be said to depend upon a balance of two things, the power of being interested in other people's minds and the power of being more interested in one's own.

 A man who really reads a book and reads it well, reads it for moral muscle, spiritual skill, for far-sightedness, for catholicity--above all for a kind of limberness and suppleness, a swift sure strength through his whole being. He faces the world with a new face when he has truly read a true book, and as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, he rejoices as a strong man to run a race.

 The indications are that the more a man spends, makes himself able to spend, a large part of his time, as Whitman did, in standing still and looking around and loving things, the more practical he is. Even if a man's life were to serve as a mere guide-board to the universe, it would supply to all who know him the main thing the universe seems to be without. But a man who, like Walt Whitman, is more than a guide-board to the universe, who deliberately takes time to live in the whole of it, who becomes a part of the universe to all who live always, who makes the universe human to us--companionable,--such a man may not be able to fix a latch on a kitchen door, but I can only say for one that if there is a man who can lift a universe bodily, and set it down in my front yard where I can feel it helping me do my work all day and guarding my sleep at night, that man is practical. Who can say he does not "come to anything"? To have heard it rumoured that such a man has lived, can live, is a result--the most practical result of all to most of the workers of the world. A bare fact about such a man is a gospel. Why work for nothing (that is, with no result) in a universe where you can play for nothing--and by playing earn everything?

It is like that when Something is lifted and one sees faces. Faces are worlds to me. However hard I try, I cannot get a man, somehow, any smaller than a world. He is a world to himself, and God helping me, when I deal with him, he shall be a world to me. The dignity of a world rests upon him. His face is a sum-total of the universe.

It is not unnatural to claim, therefore, that the most immediate and important short-cut in knowledge that the comprehensive or educated man can take comes to him through his human and personal relations. There is no better way of getting at the spirits of facts, of tracing out valuable and practical laws or generalisations, than the habit of trying things on to people in one's mind.

 It is a great waste of time to read a book alone. One needs room for rows of one's friends in a book. One book read through the eyes of ten people has more reading matter in it than ten books read in a common, lazy, lonesome fashion. One likes to do it, not only because one finds one's self enjoying a book ten times over, getting ten people's worth out of it, but because it makes a kind of sitting-room of one's mind, puts a fire-place in it, and one watches the ten people enjoying one another.

  No one knows anybody nowadays. He merely knows everybody. He falls before The Reception Room. A reception room is a place where we set people up in rows like pickets on a fence to know them. Then like the small boy with a stick, one tap per picket, we run along knowing people. No one comes in touch with any one. It is getting so that there is hardly any possible way left in our modern life for knowing people except by marrying them. One cannot even be sure of that, when one thinks how married people are being driven about by books and by other people. Society is a crowd of crowds mutually destroying each other and literature is a crowd of books all shutting each other up, and the law seems to be either selection or annihilation, whether in reading or living. The only way to love everybody in this world seems to be to pick out a few in it, delegates of everybody, and use these few to read with, and to love and understand the world with, and to keep close to it, all one's days.

 The shortest way for an immortal soul to read a book is to know and absorb enough other immortal souls, and get them to help. Any system of education which like our present prevailing one is so vulgar, so unpsychological, as to overlook the soul as the organ and method of knowledge, which fails to see that the knowledge of human souls is itself the method of acquiring all other knowledge and of combining and utilising it, makes narrow and trivial and impotent scholars as a matter of course.

 To know a few men, to turn them into one's books, to turn them into one another, into one's self, to study history with their hearts, to know all men that live with them, to put them all together and guess at God with them--it seems to me that knowledge that is as convenient and penetrating, as easily turned on and off, as much like a light as this, is well worth having. It would be like taking away a whole world, if it were taken away from me--the little row of people I do my reading with. And some of them are supposed to be dead--hundreds of years.

 When one considers that it is a literal, scientific, demonstrable fact that there is not a single evil that can be named in modern life, social, religious, political, or industrial, which is not based on the narrowness and blindness of classes of men toward one another, it is very hard to sit by and watch the modern college almost everywhere, with its silent, deadly Thing-emphasis upon it, educating every man it can reach, into not knowing other men, into not knowing even himself.

The test of civilisation is what it produces--its man, if only because he produces all else. If we have all made up our minds to allow the specialist to set the pace for us, either to be specialists ourselves or vulgarly to compete with specialists, for the right of living, or getting a living, there is going to be a crash sometime. Then a sense of emptiness after the crash which will call us to our senses. The specialist's view of the world logically narrows itself down to a race of nonentities for nothings. And even if a thing is a thing, it is a nothing to a nonentity. And if it is the one business of the specialist to obtain results, and we are all browbeaten into being specialists, but one result is going to be possible. It is obvious that the man who is willing to sacrifice the most is going to have the most success in the race, crowd out and humiliate or annihilate the others. If this is to be the world, it is only men who are ready to die for nothing in order to create nothing who will be able to secure enough of nothing to rule it. One wonders how long ruling such a world will be worth while, a world which has accepted as the order of the day success by suicide, the spending of manhood on things which only by being men we can enjoy--the method of forging boilers and getting deaf to buy violins, of having elevated railways for dead men, wireless telegraphs for clods, gigantic printing-presses for men who have forgotten how to read.

 The modern reader is a skimmer, a starer at pictures, like a child, while he reads, never thinking a whole thought, a lover of peeks and paragraphs, as a matter of course. Except in his money-making, or perhaps in the upper levels of science, the typical modern man is all paragraphs, not only in the way he reads, but in the way he lives and thinks. Outside of his specialty he is not interested in anything more than one paragraph's worth. He is as helpless as a bit of protoplasm before the sight of a great many very different things being honestly put together. Putting things together tires him. He has no imagination, because he has the daily habit of contentedly seeing a great many things which he never puts together. He is neither artistic nor original nor far-sighted nor powerful, because he has a paragraph way of thinking, a scrap-bag of a soul, because he cannot concentrate separate things, cannot put things together. He has no personality because he cannot put himself together.

It is not necessary to deny, in the present emphasis of Things, that we are making and inspiring all Things except ourselves in a way that would make the Things glad. The trouble is that Things are getting too glad. They are turning around and making us. Nearly every man in college is being made over, mind and body, into a sort of machine. When the college has finished him, and put him on the market, and one wonders what he is for, one learns he is to do some very little part, of some very little thing, and nothing else.

 Whether it is true or not that the universe is most swiftly known, most naturally enjoyed as related to one Creator or Person, as the self-expression of one Being who loved all these things enough to gather them together, it is generally admitted that the natural man seems to have been created to enjoy a universe as related to himself. His most natural and powerful way of enjoying it is to enjoy it in its relation to persons. A Person may not have created it, but it seems for the time being at least, and so far as persons are concerned, to have been created for persons. To know the persons and the things together, and particularly the things in relation to the persons, is the swiftest and simplest way of knowing the things. Persons are the nervous system of all knowledge. So far as man is concerned all truth is a sub-topic under his own soul, and the universe is the tool of his own life. Reading for different topics in it gives him a superficial knowledge of the men who write about them. Reading to know the men gives him a superficial knowledge, in the technical sense, of the things they write about. Let him stand up and take his choice like a man between being superficial in the letter and superficial in the spirit. Outside of his specialty, however, being superficial in the letter will lead him to the most knowledge. Man is the greatest topic. All other knowledge is a sub-topic under a Man, and the stars themselves are as footnotes to the thoughts of his heart.

All knowledge, I have said in my heart, instead of being a kind of vast overseer-and-slave system for a man to lock himself up in, and throw away his key in, becomes free, fluent, daring, and glorious the moment it is conceived through persons and for persons and with persons. Knowledge is not knowledge until it is conceived in relation to persons; that is, in relation to all the facts. Persons are facts also and on the whole the main facts, the facts which for seventy years, at least, or until the planet is too cooled off, all other facts are for.

Under existing educational conditions a child is more of a philosopher at six than he is at twenty-six.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 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 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.

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 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.

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.

 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.

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.

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.