CHAPTER VIITHE CHILDREN OF PANFor I'd rather be thy childAnd pupil, in the forest wild,Than be the king of men elsewhere,And most sovereign slave of care;To have one moment of thy dawn,Than share the city's year forlorn.THOREAUThe enthusiastic nature poetry of James Thompson, called "The Seasons," came as a shock to that inbred lover of the city streets, the taverns and town activities, Doctor Samuel Johnson. In these poems, the Doctor found that natural objects which before had hardly been worthy of attention were made to appear beautiful. We must believe that after having read "Spring," "Summer," "Autumn," and "Winter," upon his infrequent excursions beyond the environs of the great metropolis he saw new beauties in the hitherto common-place landscapes, responded to the color in the fields and hedgerows, became interested in fantastic cloud effects, heard music in the streams, the waterfalls and in the songs of birds. For how many of us have arisen new sources of joy in Nature's beauteous wonderland at the instigation of poets, essayists and novelists who have seen and read with loving eyesOf this fair volume which we World do name.In an ardent conversation upon the power of certain poets a friend told me that the Anglo-Saxon world looked at Nature through Wordsworth's spectacles. He maintained that the reaction of nature upon even those who have never read a poem by this poet was influenced by his poetry; Wordsworth's interpretation of Nature had so permeated nineteenth century religion and literature that it was impossible for even the casual newspaper reader to escape it. We do not directly acknowledge our debt, but the garden clubs, the bird-study societies, the surburbanite who throughout the year will spend an hour and a half in the train, in order, on the way to the station in the early morning, to obtain the pleasures of Nature's awakening, and her retirement upon his return at twilight, and the Saturday afternoon golfer who, after holing his ball, looks beyond the course at the green whispering woods and rolling hills, expands his chest and murmurs "This is the life," are all unconsciously paying part tribute to the poet who wrote,The world is too much with us; late and soon,Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:Little we see in Nature that is ours.We need a love of nature to-day, as we have never needed it before. In the terrific complexity and speed of our external existence we crave the quiet, internal stimulus to meditation and dreams that comes from the Great Mother's intricate, manifold, yet untempestuous method of doing things. From the close hatches of the city where the noise, the smells, and the turmoil seem all man-made, we must get away to the fields and blossoming pastures to find our souls alone with ourselves and the Great God Pan. To those who answer the call of the wild, or even the call of the suburban garden, there come new strength and new conceptions of beauty, to apply to the work of the world to which we have lent our hand. The call is being answered,—man goes back to his own. We see it on every side: no one in any walk of life seems so humble or satisfied not to desire some day to own a farm; most summer resorts where there were formerly many a "flanneled fool" have now become "Adamless Edens," for our young men have answered the call of the Red Gods, and have packed their kits for the trail that leads to the tall timbers of solitude, of balsam, of camp fires and dreams.Any book or poem that gives you a keener appreciation of the crimson of the sumach, the whispers of the wild things, the glory of the sunrise or of the all-embracing broadmindness of Nature, will have done its part towards bringing literature into perfect accord with life. If my friend speaks truly in saying that Wordsworth has influenced two nations' outlook upon the world, those poems, laughed at by some for their quiet simplicity, have indeed arisen to the highest realm of literature and have become soul of our soul, mind of our mind, flesh of our flesh.There are others—Wordsworth is not alone in his glory.Henry David Thoreau, the perfect child of a cross country ramble, is my favorite. To write immortal words, it is said that a man must have an immortal passion, whether it be for beauty, or his God, his neighbor, his country, his lady, or himself. Thoreau sunk the love of all else in his passionate devotion to Nature. His Journals, kept year by year with ever a spontaneous freshness, are little else than an ecstatic love song dedicated to his mate,—the lake, the woods, the fields, the apple orchards, the winds, the colors, the birds, and all that lived and grew about his haunts near Walden. A lover sees a beauty in his lady's eye to which all the world is blind, and Thoreau senses a magic in an awakening Spring to which the senses of us lesser mortals are comparatively blunt.His sincerity of appreciation was one with his marvellous power of observation. He did not have the scientific attitude of mind as had that fascinating Frenchman, Fabre, who wrote the biographies of insects in a way that makes you tremble at the wonders that go into the making of the life of a fly. Thoreau would have scorned the aquarium and cage methods of Fabre, not because of the lack of interest in the results, but rather on account of his love of Nature, naked, wild, and free. Upon the shortest ramble he saw myriad happenings, from the unusual frost crystal upon the web of a spider to the most subtle changing with the varying temperature of a bird's note; but it is all discovered without the microscope, without thought of entomological or ornithological records. A man should be afraid to say that the woods are a dreary place in which to walk upon a winter's day—let him read a page from the Winter Journal of our author and he will find that the book of Nature is never closed for him who has an eye in focus for her mystic letterings.I say that Thoreau is my favorite and how could I deny it, since there is many a winter's day in the city when I am sick of the asphalt and the bricks, and yet unable to leave them, that I can turn to any one of his pages and be carried by his words to my favorite woods or stream, to the longed-for fields and roadways? And in other seasons when time is more prodigal, and nature so bounteous that there seems to be a glut upon the market, my senses, that might grow befogged, are given a tonic in a paragraph that makes the drowsy summer atmosphere seem pregnant with beauty and fascination. If you are cooped among the chimneys and elevated trains, Thoreau will bring you to the country—if in the country, he will multiply the pleasures of your walk, your ride, or fishing trip. He stimulates the best of life that is in you, and that is all we can ask of any literature.Nature from one point of view or another has always been one of the chief inspirations of the poets. If you examine the literature of the human race since the days when Solomon sang "And the voice of the turtle is heard through the land," you will find the various aspects of the seasons, the songs of the individual birds, the beauty and sentiment of flowers, and even the habits of the different species of fish, continually reflected in prose and verse. America has been especially blest with men we must term literary naturalists. We have spoken of Thoreau, but there are also Audubon, Wilson and our elderly contemporary, John Burroughs.Wilson and Audubon are especially famous for their magnificent colored plates of the birds of North America, but I ask all nature lovers to go to a public library and secure the prose works of these two great ornithologists. There you will find as interesting reading as will come to your hand in many a day. They were both pioneers in science, art and exploration; both children of nature, more at home in the forest than in the city; both enthusiastic, thrilled worshippers of their feathered friends whom they have so brilliantly preserved in their cherished portfolios. Because their work was accomplished one hundred years ago, before our birds were charted and when journeys of scientific exploration, even into the mountains of Pennsylvania, were made with almost the same difficulty as is now caused in the exploration of the most jungled South American river, the naïve spirit of the explorer, of the elemental pioneer, is in their every page. There is ever the surprise, the uncertainty, the joy of life and study among unknown and untrammelled things. Theirs was the joy of children who for the first time discover a blackbird's nest in the far-off meadow and their joy is communicated to us; we become children of delight, as when lying upon bur backs on the edge of a flowery field of clover we watch with fascination the darts of kingbirds dashing from the top of the nearby chestnut after the myriad insects.John Burroughs, whose essays have been a joy upon many an evening and a stimulating remembrance upon many a tramp, with a similar freshness and unworldliness carried on the tradition of the earlier men. From his fruit farm upon the Hudson he continually sends us messages to forget our tea parties, our moving pictures, our country clubs, and really to find ourselves in the discoveries of beauties and life in the growing, nesting, and flowering things about us. One of the happy thoughts that we derive from him is the knowledge that to obtain the beneficence to soul and mind we (poor suburbanites tied to the necessity of earning our daily bread in the city) need not follow the "Long Trail" to the ends of the world of the furious globe trotter, Rudyard Kipling, but must only take store of the things at hand, find the same happiness in the quiet, civilized, thoroughbred-cattled meadow as we would hope to find up against a rugged blow in the Northern Seas off the coast of which "you've lost the chart of overside." You do not have to go so far from home to know the world. Thoroughly know the garden that you cultivate, study all that happens along the hedgerow upon the way to the station, and you will be richer than he who has racketed with half blind eyes from the Yukon to Patagonia,Or East all the way into Mississippi Bay,Or West to the Golden Gate.In conjunction with the reflection of nature in books, I mentioned our scaly friends, the fish, without paying due homage to the king of all philosophic fishermen, Izaak Walton. How many devotees of the gentle art of angling have made of their own the wisdom, the beauty, the thoughtful content of the fisherman's classic, "The Compleat Angler"? A man once said to me that the next best thing to taking a walk was to read the accounts of Walt Whitman's rambles upon Timber Creek. I answered that upon the days you could not go a-fishing, you had best read "The Compleat Angler." I hold to this! Will not the men who stand by the trout, the bass, the salmon, the weak fish, or the gallant tuna and tarpon, and the boys who put their faith in the catfish, the sucker, the eel, or the perch, fall in together and be one in believing as the Venerable Izaak believed,O the gallant fisher's life,It is the best of any!'Tis full of pleasure, void of strife,And 'tis beloved by many;Other joysAre but toys;Only thisLawful is;For our skillBreeds no ill,But content and pleasure.There is many another writer who opens the door to the traveller who wishes to enrich his enjoyment of Nature as it is to be seen along life's highway. I mention but a few who may give you new worlds for which you would not trade a mint of silver. Have you ever gone with Stevenson upon his walking trips? If not, do so, and perhaps you will agree with him that it is pleasant to have a companion upon your journeys; as Lawrence Sterne expresses it: "Let me have a companion of my way were it but to remark how the shadows lengthen as the sun declines." If you prefer to be alone, Hazlitt will tell you that no companion is necessary, as thoughts need no companions: "I want to see my vague notions float like the down of the thistle before the breeze, and not to have them entangled in the briars and thorns of controversy."Or have you read the books of the Homer of the Insects, the Frenchman I have mentioned, Fabre? There is a treat ahead of you—he wrote of the crawling, burrowing and flying things of his beloved Provence, and if there is anything in this realm more interesting than his records of observing the daily lives of the House Fly, the Praying Mantis, and many another beetle, cricket and creeper, I have yet to find it. To say that you must immediately line your room with aquariums, jars, and boxes, in which to preserve and watch the births, loves and deaths of all the spiders, whirligigs, and butterflies that come within your reach is relating the result in its mildest form that this author has had upon me. Such books introduce you to a thousandfold intensity of existence, as every great book must.Intensive agriculture is heralded as the saving factor of human progress. Let us make a plea for truly intensive living. As the crops that come from a rich, well-cultivated soil are bountiful, so is the life that is the product of a fertile mind. A poor crop is a superficial existence of discontented pleasures and shallow unhappiness; a rich crop is a life in which the heart and mind are at least attune to the joy which may be derived from the living of it,—brave when courage is needed, patient when patience is a virtue. The word "culture" is sometimes derided as a synonym for pretentious high-browism, but let us remember that the farmer respects the word "cultivate," as he knows that it is necessary if he wishes to make the harvest a season of happiness and rich reward. A man's harvest season is his every minute of existence—his bounty is the depth and pleasure of that existence. Our future life is or is not a "great perhaps," but our present life is assuredly a reality. It ishere—what are you going to do with it? If you can make every day a day of intense interest you have won the greatest battle! You have stormed the world's richest citadel! The Children of Pan, who have loved and written of Nature, charm and transport you to a world of infinite interest. They offer rich fertilizer that gives promise of a bumper crop—Open that Door into their Realm.CHAPTER VIIIMEN BEHIND BOOKSEvery word man's lips have utteredEchoes in God's Skies.ADELAIDE A. PROCTERBooks contain the accumulated store of human thought and scientific attainment—this is a treasure without which there would be no civilization—yet in addition, we may say that the most potent inheritance, that books vouchsafe, is the personalities of the great authors who have inscribed their souls within them. Personal character affects our lives as does nothing else. In the back of the mind of every one there are men and women who, we appreciate, have been the makers of our souls. Most often it is a mother or a father, sometimes a teacher of our youth, or a friend and fellow worker of whose nature we realize we have absorbed a part. Contact between human personalities is the most profound mover for good and evil. A preacher may declaim against sin for ever and a day, but you know that your great friend who scorns sin has infinitely more influence upon you. The greatest doers of good are men and women who lead others by the examples of their own lives. It is unfortunately not given to many to come into intimate personal contact with the most supreme human souls, but fortunate we are that many have extended their personalities without limit into the future, by truly encasing themselves in books that will remain as the leaven and inspiration of all ages and all peoples.I have a number of volumes upon my shelves that I choose to consider not as books, but as men. Instead of printed pages, cloth bindings, and labels, they are living personalities with whom I can pass an evening. The reading is over, and I have within me the character of a great human being. As have my Mother and Father and the old fisherman, whose knowledge of the sea and storm beaten coast fed my boyish spirit, they have become part of me. The greatest books are those that present the greatest men. It is not the artistry of telling a story or writing a poem that really counts; the sincerity and intensity with which a man, whom we may call our "guide, philosopher and friend," is revealed forms the most cherished treasure of our bookshelf. In sorrow, in dejection, in need of mental or spiritual sustenance, when the joy of living is blunted, when lazy, discouraged or annoyed, you can go to these great fellows, converse with them and return again to the world with a bird's-eye view, an enlarged vision, a quickened spirit.Have you read Walt Whitman?Thereis a glorious human being—so magnificent, so all-embracing in his love, so turbulent, so large in his personality that to know him, to feed upon him, you must become submerged in his book, his soul,—"The Leaves of Grass." Of this volume containing his poems he himself said,This is no book;Who touches this, touches a man.You do indeed touch a man! A great spirit who saw in all things God; a Democrat who saw in all men the spark of the divine; a leader who raced out to the farthest reaches of the soul and beckons and begs you to follow; a lover who embraced all, the prostitute, the poet, the lowly, the exultant, Christ himself, in a spirit of human fellowship; a physical giant who gloried in his sex and makes you consider sacred the relationship of the sexes; a nurse who brought upon himself paralysis by caring for the wounded in the Civil War; a prophet who could no more believe that the spirit of an individual man could die than that it had never been born. Perhaps you think I write extravagantly—I do not—I but attempt to present what the personality of Walt Whitman has meant to me, and to many, many others. I but ask that you go to the "Leaves of Grass," and come in contact with that man to whom so many look and say—"A great part of myself is you, Walt Whitman! My life has been renewed since first I touched your hand."Tolstoy! There is another one who believed in humanity and God,—there is another who has put a huge, rugged, loving soul within books. Probably no one has so influenced the humanitarianism of our day as did this bearded old warrior from Russia; but it was the deep human sympathy of the actual living Tolstoy that moved the world, not the arguments he deduced nor the warnings he gave. He was always a moralist,—even in his masterpiece "Anna Karenina" it is not the story he tells, but the human love which he reveals that has made the eternal monument. Afraid of nothing,—the Czar, convention, hatred, oppression,—he lived his life according to the dictates of his own conscience, the most punishing conscience that has ever been the attribute of a master soul. If you do not know him, read his short story "Master and Man." There you will find enunciated, in a manner as poignant, as powerful, as even that of the Sermon on the Mount, the doctrine of happiness found in living your life for others. Selfishness, pride, materialism, the sins that spoil the world, cannot stand in the way of the burning words of Tolstoy. Your conscience will receive a stiffening medicine, your sympathies for the sins and sufferings of your neighbors will deepen to bed rock, and your life will become proportionately more true, more happy, more Christian. Six years ago in the lowly hut near the Caucasus, when the mighty soul of Tolstoy left the body, the World missed a leader, a lover, a prophet—but his word still remains, and the doctrine as told by him of universal betterment through love and human sympathy will reach mankind whilst there are men left to read, and to communicate.We all know the poems of Robert Burns, most of us know something of his life. His life and character are revealed in his poetry. He too was a lover, but a weak rather than a rugged one. We love him for his very weakness. His heart was his strength and his undoing. He loved until his heart would break, ruthlessly and impetuously, and of his sufferings, his remorses, regrets, and forlorn hopes he sang. In this cruel world, where might so often makes right, what a benediction it is to read a poem written from the depth of a simple, sorrowing, yet deeply human heart upon the suffering that he has caused the "wee sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie" in turning up her nest with the plowshare. As with all the personalities that are "great" in the deepest sense, his was one that felt a companionship for all that lives upon the earth, and from his sympathy for the drunken, the heart-broken, and the meadow mice, and his joy in patriotism, true lovers, and beauteous roses, we derive a depth of sentiment that needs must mellow our hearts. A brave spirit in a weak body had Bobbie Burns—he drank and was unfaithful, but he felt deeply. We love him for his depth, we sympathize with him in his weaknesses. As a friend he purifies rather than stimulates our souls, but he is a true friend and a loving one.François Villon, the greatest ballad singer of all time, the tavern lover, the vagabond, the heavy-hearted sorrower, the lighted-hearted laugher, the bosom companion of thieves, cut-throats, chattering grisettes, old courtesans, rioters, and brawlers of the narrow streets, Cathedral shadows, Seine banks of mediæval Paris, was another of those great-hearted human lovers who had the gift of telling his heart secrets in words of wondrous beauty. By twentieth century standards Villon's actions, thieveries, and suspected murder, would have been neither moral nor proper, but by the standard of all ages, in all true hearts, his feelings towards the people among whom he moved will stand the test of the most austere morality. He loved all men and women for the best that was in them, he did not scorn them for the worst. He was unselfish and true to his friends, and more than that we cannot desire. Where there is hypocrisy there is vice; where there is selfishness there is lack of Christianity and humanity; our tavern poet, François Villon, had neither of these, and if you want a friend who will make you see the good in the bad, the beautiful in the ugly, go to your bookshelf and become acquainted with the fervid soul of this ancient ballad singer.When you are too contented, when your mind feels squidgy with good living, or sultry from the summer heat, go to another man,—George Gordon, Lord Byron. They say that Byron (with Scott) is nowadays out of fashion. "They" are mistaken. The author of Childe Harold and Don Juan will never be truly out of fashion, so long as there is a flare in youthful hearts, a discontent in ambitious minds. He is the poet of a great revolt, a kicker at the traces, and then again he is the singer of the bleeding heart, of lost causes; he hurries you across the seas upon his speeding bark; he tops the crags of human loneliness and leaves you desolate. His songs are of the rollicking wine of life with its excitements, its depressions, its sentiments of hatred, beauty, joy. For youth he is the poet of liberty, of intense individualism; for age the poet of thwarted desires, for everyone he has a chestnut burr to put beneath dull content; his mockery is for stupidity, dryness, stagnation. Get under the crust of his effusive egotism and you will meet a sombre, lonely, sensitive individual, who needs you as a friend and who will be to you a hypodermic stimulative.How different a one from this poet is his contemporary, the essayist, Charles Lamb. The essays we love the best are those that reveal the point of view, the little personalities of the writer, and no man of letters ever had a more magnetic personality, or knew better how to preserve himself in little literary gems, than did the author of "The Essays of Elia." Lamb spent his days in the South Sea Counting House transferring figures from one great ledger to another. But his evenings with his books, his family and his friends! Ah!—there was a companion! A booklover whose enthusiasm, for musty duodecimos has become a classic allusion, a punster whose puns are sometimes good and sometimes bad, but always original, a relisher of good conversation, a man of many petty weaknesses, a lover of good food, with a taste for old wine, and with an infinite appreciation of the fads and foibles of himself and others, he seems to have been altogether the most lovable individual with whom it would be possible to scrape up an acquaintance. Read but one hundred pages of his essays and he becomes your chuckling, appreciative, inimitable companion. Every old book shop, every roast pig, every glass of rich wine, every threadbare clerk stooping over his ledger—these and many such will take on fresh and romantic aspects for the friend of Elia.Thomas Carlyle was an historian and philosopher who wrote his name over every page of his work. His was the voice and the soul of the Old Testament prophets, who railed at men from the depths of their bitter yet anxious hearts. The Preacher of the Nineteenth Century, when he spoke the world listened! Have you read "Sartor Resartus"? Among his works this is even the most personal. It is rough and jagged in style, turbulent and confused in arrangement, but behind it all, or rather under it all, is revealed the spiritual message to his age. The message is Carlyle's own personality: his bravery, his sincerity, his fine hatred of muddle-headed thinking, of credulity, of cant; his love and admiration for the fundamental greatnesses of human nature, his belief in an omnipotent God. He wished men to believe, and the thunder he bellowed in his endeavor still resounds. His soul was a battery of twelve-inch guns directed against the forces of ignorance and hypocrisy. It is to the reading of "Sartor Resartus" that many men point as the turning stake in their spiritual lives. It was not in the book that they found their spiritual bulwarks, but in the soul of the great Scotchman with whom they came in contact.There is our own Emerson, whose admiration for Carlyle was probably only outdone by Carlyle's admiration for him! "Self Realization," "The American Scholar," "Friendship," "Politics"—how many of his essays have become part and parcel of America's loftiest thought and action. The metallic acuteness of his personality was not of the kind with which you can become familiar, but its very aloofness holds our respect and devotion. The austerity of George Washington in public life can only be compared with the cold distance at which this philosopher holds us, and yet upon their pedestals we recognize them as men from whom the best in American character has derived nourishment. In every sentence of his every essay, we feel the soul at peace, the intellect enthroned, the power of will predominant.A man without friends is a man without life, and I have but told you of some of my boon companions. Never to have shared in the fellowship of the great spirits who are preserved for us in books is to cut one's self off from the most rewarding of human relationships. The chums of our boyhood, our companions at college, too often drift away to distant parts, or diverge from us in pursuits other than our own; although remembrances of our times together are sacred and of sweet recalling, too often they are of the past and renewal forever impossible. The friends of our books, however, are forever with us, they cannot die, they cannot depart, they remain fresh and vigorous, hearty sojourners upon our road, forever willing to lend a hand over the rocks and bumpy places. Without disparaging those with whom I sit before the fire, and chat, and smoke, I must confess that I value equally with them the friends of eternal character that exist there in the book-case. They lighten the path of life; they are ready for converse when my spirit calls.Go to the greatest books for your most enduring friends, but upon having formed their friendship do not leave them in the study, but carry them within your spirit to your business and the marts of men, and in holding their confidences burning in your heart you will find yourself a more thorough human being.CHAPTER IXKEEPING UP WITH LIFEReading is the key which admits us to the whole world of thought and fancy and imagination, to the company of saint and sage, of the wisest and wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moments. It enables us to see with the keenest eyes, to hear with the finest ears, and to listen to the sweetest voices of all time.JAMES RUSSELL LOWELLIf in the minds of some readers this little book has helped to break down the futile distinctions and to show the real relation between the man who reads and the one who enjoys life, between the thinker and the man of action, it has done all that the author dared hope. Let us look upon our library not as an end in itself, but as a means to an end. It is a mistaken ambition to read as many books as possible within a year, or to attempt religiously to read the complete works of a number of authors. The man who buries himself in his library and exists only in the books therein is an unsocial, stagnant creature; but the one who reads as a means of attaining to a more productive life among his fellow men is the one who has gained the true riches of literature.The world is a world for workers, not idlers. We live in America in the twentieth century, and we are of but little use to the general machinery if our minds are forever sojourning with the mediæval knights or gossiping in the by-ways of London with Charles Lamb and his contemporaries. Literature for you and me who live, and toil, and hope to obtain joy in the doing of it, must be vivifying nourishment to apply to our living and toiling. Great books and all true education provide this nourishment or else they would not be worth the price of a comic supplement.Poetry, fiction, philosophy and history are not alone for old maids and retired business men who desire comforting, amusing solace to while away the hours until the race is run, nor alone for college professors and writers whose business it is to read, abstract, and judge,—they are truly, have been, and always will be for the minds of men and women who need and use the spirit of them in their work, their play, their sorrows, and their joys.When Francis Bacon wrote "Reading maketh a full man," he did not mean "full" to imply a great accumulation of facts and dry-as-dust learning. Bacon was a philosopher, scientist, essayist, of the first order in each, and yet a leading statesman in his age. His mind was "full" in that he had probably as had no other man in England absorbed all the literature and science of all the centuries that had preceded him; his was the fulness of the reservoir from which could be drawn an endless stream of resource with which to undertake new political enterprises, of strength to maintain his position and of philosophy in the face of losing it. He was a literary man in that he knew the literature of the world, a man of letters—he wrote masterpieces, a man of action—he virtually ruled Great Britain. This is the threefold thread of life that we may all have as our ambition,—the connoisseur, the creative artist, the productive worker.After having considered the bearing the reading of books has upon life, let us consider the bearing that living has upon reading and writing. Elbert Hubbard carried out this thought in his little book upon William Morris, the English poet. Morris, as you may know, was a weaver, a blacksmith, a wood-carver, a painter, a dyer, a printer, a furniture manufacturer, a musician, and withal a great poet. Hubbard said: "William Morris thought literature should be the product of the ripened mind." We have looked at Bacon as one whose literary output must have been the product of a mind that had manfully grappled with worldly affairs, and here is a further list that the Roycrofter gives us: "Shakespeare was a theatre manager, Milton a secretary, Bobbie Burns a farmer, Lamb a bookkeeper, Wordsworth a Government employee, Emerson a lecturer, Hawthorne a custom-house inspector, and Whitman a clerk."The professional man of letters, except in rather rare instances, is by no means the man who erects the most enduring literary monuments. Literature must come from elemental life to have the true relationship to the affairs of men. We could increase Elbert Hubbard's list to an almost indefinite length—the author of the Gettysburg address had the weight of a nation upon his shoulders, Thoreau was more interested in observing the changing seasons than he was in writing books, Tolstoy was a soldier, an economist and farmer, Balzac an unsuccessful publisher, Bunyan a preacher, Pepys a high government official, Oliver Wendell Holmes a doctor, and countless novelists and poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries hard-working, hard-driven newspaper men.Leisure does not make great literature,—all that is effective must come from interior or exterior experiences, and acute observations. The most effectual reading is that which is done in the light of personal experience, with one's eye upon unliterary activity. There is an endless chain, of which the links are the subject, the artist, the reader and his life as reflected by the author's treatment. To live in a world of books and to have as their profession the spinning of other volumes is the life of too many of our writers. On the other side of the shield, we of course see readers whose lives are entirely absorbed in the volumes they read without an outlet to the practical activities of existence. How tiresome it is to have a bustling man or woman tell us that they have not the time or that they are not literary enough to read great books. They of course, being good Americans, have plenty of time to go through stacks of worthless novels, and absorb a half dozen continuous serial stories in our monthly magazines. I say it is tiresome, and it is foolish, as with a moment's thought we can realize that books are essentially for the man or woman who is most deeply immersed in life.Break down the barrier between literature and life?—there is none! I have a certain friend who has more to do within the twenty-four hours of the day than has anyone else I know. Politics, municipal corporations, railroads—these are apparently his life—absorbed in men and affairs. And yet if I run across a book that especially appeals to me, I go to him and ask his ideas upon it. He has probably read it and with his greater experience in the actual turmoil of living than I have had, he can enlighten me with a dozen new points of view upon the book under consideration. He interprets it in the light of his experience, as the author had written in the light of his.It was said that during President Wilson's first winter in the White House, society in Washington was much exercised as to how he passed his evenings. It later developed that those evenings in which he was not absorbed in official business were spent in reading poetry, preferably Wordsworth, to his family. Washington stood amazed! Perhaps there is no truth in this story, but the ingredients are certainly there, which, if brought into conjunction, would make a true yarn. The active helmsman of the ship of state, with innumerable matters weighing upon him, seeking wisdom and spiritual fibre from a great poet; Washington society, without much to do, yet frightfully busy, amazed at his wasting or dreamily passing his hours of possible recreation!Many another great public man has well appreciated that books are not for the closet but for life. Theodore Roosevelt is the apostle of strenuosity, statesman, ranchman, hunter, and yet a writer upon a wide range of subjects and an omnivorous reader. The plays of Shakespeare were the school books and college education of our rail splitter, Abraham Lincoln. A great English liberal, Charles James Fox, would charm the House of Commons for hours with his oratory, go to Brooks' and lose a fortune at cards, and then home to his bed to read the Plays of Euripides,—probably to absorb wisdom and courage for his thinking and gaming upon the following evening. Of the men and women to whom books mean life, we could go on with our list indefinitely, not only through the ranks of kings and queens, soldiers and statesmen, financiers and merchants, but sea captains, mechanics, farmers, clerks, and coal miners. In every walk of life we find the true philosophers, the true adepts in the art of living, seeking sustenance from the printed page.Go into a public library, and study the faces of those who are reading there—ambition, inspiration, delight will be expressed by those who have foundthe open door, the way to riches and plenty. Observe the homes of your acquaintances! Cicero said that books are the soul of a room, and we may expand this epigram in saying that the use of books in a family brings all the members into a communion with each other, creating an atmosphere far removed from that of the home in which books are infrequent sojourners.Oh no, it is not the professed gentleman of literature with the pedantic knowledge and bookish phraseology, but the men and women who seek explanation of and relief from sorrow, stimulus to higher attainment, pleasure that mellows activity, to whom the authors are truly the path of life. Those whom you see on the elevated trains reading Shakespeare, the ranchman with his pocket edition of Dickens, the country doctor who hates to buy an automobile as when driving his old buggy he could read his Boswell upon his round of visits,—they are the ones to whom the poet can truly say,You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean;But I will be health to you nevertheless,And filter and fibre your blood.You need never be afraid of becoming intellectual. To be sure it is somewhat the fashion in America to think that a man who reads Meredith should be a college professor or the editor of a book review—but this is only a fashion and held to by the most stupid. It is smart to laugh at good books and "culture," but it is the same sort of smartness at which all Europe has been sensibly sneering for a century. Reading should not be a profession; those that make it such invariably become world weary, book weary, at sea in an ocean in which life is necessarily a more vital thing than they are able to swallow. Do not give your life over to your library, but make of it an electric battery with which to vivify life. It can be done, and is done by the great and the little, the sorrowful and the joyful, the leading warriors in the battle for civilized progress.Call upon the supreme minds of past ages to support you in the strife of this and they will prove stalwart, faithful legions. Read as is your need and inclination; not as a duty, not as a feat, but as an acknowledgment that you are glad to win the best and most helpful of friends. Aristotle said that all men desire knowledge. If knowledge means deeper human sympathy, a more profound enlightenment, a richer, happier, more productive life, let each one of us admit that the attainment of knowledge is in truth our endeavor. Let us try the experiment of finding this knowledge in the volumes of the deepest, the most intensive livers.Make the book you read to-day play a part in the world of to-morrow, and you will rise above the reader in the closet who carps and criticizes, thus cutting himself off from the work of men. You will disprove all statements about the lack of practicability of education, the other-worldiness of books.* * * * *There was a boy who wandered out along an unknown highway into a far country. The way seemed sombre, foreign and meaningless. His questions were unanswered, his desires unsatisfied; there seemed no by-paths into which he could turn in the hope of finding a solace or a reason for his journey.A never-ending vista without rhyme or reason lay before him of flat, uninteresting solitudes, only broken by dark pits or rugged obstructions which he had either to circle about or climb over or under. They always annoyed and provoked him, as there seemed no set plan for meeting such difficulties, no apparent purpose in wandering on. He knew, however, that there was no turning back, he had to stagger, and stumble, and plod forward, ever forward.It was the way of life, and it was a meaningless road, a disappointing journey undertaken with great expectations.After a deal of suffering, impatience and profound discouragement, he came upon a great Palace standing in his way. It was the first that he had ever seen, and he wondered at it.With hesitancy he determined to walk about it and to follow the beaten road, uninteresting but familiar, which he felt must stretch beyond. He spied, however, a small door at the side of the great barred gate and he determined to enter and to see what could be found within. The panel yielded to his timorous push, and he found himself in a mighty hall where there were wondrous things!Many another wanderer had already arrived, and many others were to follow,—there was a happiness, a purpose, a vitality in life that had been sadly lacking upon the road of his journeying. Wisdom, riches, the answers to his questions, the reasons for his arduous pilgrimage lay before him. He grasped them and was content.* * * * * * * *J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY'SIMPORTANT NEW BOOKSBetty at Fort BlizzardBy MOLLY ELLIOT SEAWELL. Four illustrations in color and decorations by Edmund Frederick. $1.50 net.This is a straightaway army love story, with the scene laid at a post in the far Northwest. It is a sequel to the famous "Betty's Virginia Christmas" so popular a few years ago. It is realistic and yet as light as Betty's laugh,—presented in a delightfully dainty gift book style, it makes a charming Christmas present.Behold the Woman!By T. 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CHAPTER VII
THE CHILDREN OF PAN
For I'd rather be thy childAnd pupil, in the forest wild,Than be the king of men elsewhere,And most sovereign slave of care;To have one moment of thy dawn,Than share the city's year forlorn.THOREAU
For I'd rather be thy child
And pupil, in the forest wild,
Than be the king of men elsewhere,
And most sovereign slave of care;
To have one moment of thy dawn,
Than share the city's year forlorn.
THOREAU
THOREAU
The enthusiastic nature poetry of James Thompson, called "The Seasons," came as a shock to that inbred lover of the city streets, the taverns and town activities, Doctor Samuel Johnson. In these poems, the Doctor found that natural objects which before had hardly been worthy of attention were made to appear beautiful. We must believe that after having read "Spring," "Summer," "Autumn," and "Winter," upon his infrequent excursions beyond the environs of the great metropolis he saw new beauties in the hitherto common-place landscapes, responded to the color in the fields and hedgerows, became interested in fantastic cloud effects, heard music in the streams, the waterfalls and in the songs of birds. For how many of us have arisen new sources of joy in Nature's beauteous wonderland at the instigation of poets, essayists and novelists who have seen and read with loving eyes
Of this fair volume which we World do name.
Of this fair volume which we World do name.
Of this fair volume which we World do name.
In an ardent conversation upon the power of certain poets a friend told me that the Anglo-Saxon world looked at Nature through Wordsworth's spectacles. He maintained that the reaction of nature upon even those who have never read a poem by this poet was influenced by his poetry; Wordsworth's interpretation of Nature had so permeated nineteenth century religion and literature that it was impossible for even the casual newspaper reader to escape it. We do not directly acknowledge our debt, but the garden clubs, the bird-study societies, the surburbanite who throughout the year will spend an hour and a half in the train, in order, on the way to the station in the early morning, to obtain the pleasures of Nature's awakening, and her retirement upon his return at twilight, and the Saturday afternoon golfer who, after holing his ball, looks beyond the course at the green whispering woods and rolling hills, expands his chest and murmurs "This is the life," are all unconsciously paying part tribute to the poet who wrote,
The world is too much with us; late and soon,Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:Little we see in Nature that is ours.
The world is too much with us; late and soon,Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:Little we see in Nature that is ours.
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours.
We need a love of nature to-day, as we have never needed it before. In the terrific complexity and speed of our external existence we crave the quiet, internal stimulus to meditation and dreams that comes from the Great Mother's intricate, manifold, yet untempestuous method of doing things. From the close hatches of the city where the noise, the smells, and the turmoil seem all man-made, we must get away to the fields and blossoming pastures to find our souls alone with ourselves and the Great God Pan. To those who answer the call of the wild, or even the call of the suburban garden, there come new strength and new conceptions of beauty, to apply to the work of the world to which we have lent our hand. The call is being answered,—man goes back to his own. We see it on every side: no one in any walk of life seems so humble or satisfied not to desire some day to own a farm; most summer resorts where there were formerly many a "flanneled fool" have now become "Adamless Edens," for our young men have answered the call of the Red Gods, and have packed their kits for the trail that leads to the tall timbers of solitude, of balsam, of camp fires and dreams.
Any book or poem that gives you a keener appreciation of the crimson of the sumach, the whispers of the wild things, the glory of the sunrise or of the all-embracing broadmindness of Nature, will have done its part towards bringing literature into perfect accord with life. If my friend speaks truly in saying that Wordsworth has influenced two nations' outlook upon the world, those poems, laughed at by some for their quiet simplicity, have indeed arisen to the highest realm of literature and have become soul of our soul, mind of our mind, flesh of our flesh.
There are others—Wordsworth is not alone in his glory.
Henry David Thoreau, the perfect child of a cross country ramble, is my favorite. To write immortal words, it is said that a man must have an immortal passion, whether it be for beauty, or his God, his neighbor, his country, his lady, or himself. Thoreau sunk the love of all else in his passionate devotion to Nature. His Journals, kept year by year with ever a spontaneous freshness, are little else than an ecstatic love song dedicated to his mate,—the lake, the woods, the fields, the apple orchards, the winds, the colors, the birds, and all that lived and grew about his haunts near Walden. A lover sees a beauty in his lady's eye to which all the world is blind, and Thoreau senses a magic in an awakening Spring to which the senses of us lesser mortals are comparatively blunt.
His sincerity of appreciation was one with his marvellous power of observation. He did not have the scientific attitude of mind as had that fascinating Frenchman, Fabre, who wrote the biographies of insects in a way that makes you tremble at the wonders that go into the making of the life of a fly. Thoreau would have scorned the aquarium and cage methods of Fabre, not because of the lack of interest in the results, but rather on account of his love of Nature, naked, wild, and free. Upon the shortest ramble he saw myriad happenings, from the unusual frost crystal upon the web of a spider to the most subtle changing with the varying temperature of a bird's note; but it is all discovered without the microscope, without thought of entomological or ornithological records. A man should be afraid to say that the woods are a dreary place in which to walk upon a winter's day—let him read a page from the Winter Journal of our author and he will find that the book of Nature is never closed for him who has an eye in focus for her mystic letterings.
I say that Thoreau is my favorite and how could I deny it, since there is many a winter's day in the city when I am sick of the asphalt and the bricks, and yet unable to leave them, that I can turn to any one of his pages and be carried by his words to my favorite woods or stream, to the longed-for fields and roadways? And in other seasons when time is more prodigal, and nature so bounteous that there seems to be a glut upon the market, my senses, that might grow befogged, are given a tonic in a paragraph that makes the drowsy summer atmosphere seem pregnant with beauty and fascination. If you are cooped among the chimneys and elevated trains, Thoreau will bring you to the country—if in the country, he will multiply the pleasures of your walk, your ride, or fishing trip. He stimulates the best of life that is in you, and that is all we can ask of any literature.
Nature from one point of view or another has always been one of the chief inspirations of the poets. If you examine the literature of the human race since the days when Solomon sang "And the voice of the turtle is heard through the land," you will find the various aspects of the seasons, the songs of the individual birds, the beauty and sentiment of flowers, and even the habits of the different species of fish, continually reflected in prose and verse. America has been especially blest with men we must term literary naturalists. We have spoken of Thoreau, but there are also Audubon, Wilson and our elderly contemporary, John Burroughs.
Wilson and Audubon are especially famous for their magnificent colored plates of the birds of North America, but I ask all nature lovers to go to a public library and secure the prose works of these two great ornithologists. There you will find as interesting reading as will come to your hand in many a day. They were both pioneers in science, art and exploration; both children of nature, more at home in the forest than in the city; both enthusiastic, thrilled worshippers of their feathered friends whom they have so brilliantly preserved in their cherished portfolios. Because their work was accomplished one hundred years ago, before our birds were charted and when journeys of scientific exploration, even into the mountains of Pennsylvania, were made with almost the same difficulty as is now caused in the exploration of the most jungled South American river, the naïve spirit of the explorer, of the elemental pioneer, is in their every page. There is ever the surprise, the uncertainty, the joy of life and study among unknown and untrammelled things. Theirs was the joy of children who for the first time discover a blackbird's nest in the far-off meadow and their joy is communicated to us; we become children of delight, as when lying upon bur backs on the edge of a flowery field of clover we watch with fascination the darts of kingbirds dashing from the top of the nearby chestnut after the myriad insects.
John Burroughs, whose essays have been a joy upon many an evening and a stimulating remembrance upon many a tramp, with a similar freshness and unworldliness carried on the tradition of the earlier men. From his fruit farm upon the Hudson he continually sends us messages to forget our tea parties, our moving pictures, our country clubs, and really to find ourselves in the discoveries of beauties and life in the growing, nesting, and flowering things about us. One of the happy thoughts that we derive from him is the knowledge that to obtain the beneficence to soul and mind we (poor suburbanites tied to the necessity of earning our daily bread in the city) need not follow the "Long Trail" to the ends of the world of the furious globe trotter, Rudyard Kipling, but must only take store of the things at hand, find the same happiness in the quiet, civilized, thoroughbred-cattled meadow as we would hope to find up against a rugged blow in the Northern Seas off the coast of which "you've lost the chart of overside." You do not have to go so far from home to know the world. Thoroughly know the garden that you cultivate, study all that happens along the hedgerow upon the way to the station, and you will be richer than he who has racketed with half blind eyes from the Yukon to Patagonia,
Or East all the way into Mississippi Bay,Or West to the Golden Gate.
Or East all the way into Mississippi Bay,Or West to the Golden Gate.
Or East all the way into Mississippi Bay,
Or West to the Golden Gate.
In conjunction with the reflection of nature in books, I mentioned our scaly friends, the fish, without paying due homage to the king of all philosophic fishermen, Izaak Walton. How many devotees of the gentle art of angling have made of their own the wisdom, the beauty, the thoughtful content of the fisherman's classic, "The Compleat Angler"? A man once said to me that the next best thing to taking a walk was to read the accounts of Walt Whitman's rambles upon Timber Creek. I answered that upon the days you could not go a-fishing, you had best read "The Compleat Angler." I hold to this! Will not the men who stand by the trout, the bass, the salmon, the weak fish, or the gallant tuna and tarpon, and the boys who put their faith in the catfish, the sucker, the eel, or the perch, fall in together and be one in believing as the Venerable Izaak believed,
O the gallant fisher's life,It is the best of any!'Tis full of pleasure, void of strife,And 'tis beloved by many;Other joysAre but toys;Only thisLawful is;For our skillBreeds no ill,But content and pleasure.
O the gallant fisher's life,It is the best of any!'Tis full of pleasure, void of strife,And 'tis beloved by many;Other joysAre but toys;Only thisLawful is;For our skillBreeds no ill,But content and pleasure.
O the gallant fisher's life,
It is the best of any!
'Tis full of pleasure, void of strife,
And 'tis beloved by many;
Other joys
Are but toys;
Only this
Lawful is;
For our skill
Breeds no ill,
But content and pleasure.
There is many another writer who opens the door to the traveller who wishes to enrich his enjoyment of Nature as it is to be seen along life's highway. I mention but a few who may give you new worlds for which you would not trade a mint of silver. Have you ever gone with Stevenson upon his walking trips? If not, do so, and perhaps you will agree with him that it is pleasant to have a companion upon your journeys; as Lawrence Sterne expresses it: "Let me have a companion of my way were it but to remark how the shadows lengthen as the sun declines." If you prefer to be alone, Hazlitt will tell you that no companion is necessary, as thoughts need no companions: "I want to see my vague notions float like the down of the thistle before the breeze, and not to have them entangled in the briars and thorns of controversy."
Or have you read the books of the Homer of the Insects, the Frenchman I have mentioned, Fabre? There is a treat ahead of you—he wrote of the crawling, burrowing and flying things of his beloved Provence, and if there is anything in this realm more interesting than his records of observing the daily lives of the House Fly, the Praying Mantis, and many another beetle, cricket and creeper, I have yet to find it. To say that you must immediately line your room with aquariums, jars, and boxes, in which to preserve and watch the births, loves and deaths of all the spiders, whirligigs, and butterflies that come within your reach is relating the result in its mildest form that this author has had upon me. Such books introduce you to a thousandfold intensity of existence, as every great book must.
Intensive agriculture is heralded as the saving factor of human progress. Let us make a plea for truly intensive living. As the crops that come from a rich, well-cultivated soil are bountiful, so is the life that is the product of a fertile mind. A poor crop is a superficial existence of discontented pleasures and shallow unhappiness; a rich crop is a life in which the heart and mind are at least attune to the joy which may be derived from the living of it,—brave when courage is needed, patient when patience is a virtue. The word "culture" is sometimes derided as a synonym for pretentious high-browism, but let us remember that the farmer respects the word "cultivate," as he knows that it is necessary if he wishes to make the harvest a season of happiness and rich reward. A man's harvest season is his every minute of existence—his bounty is the depth and pleasure of that existence. Our future life is or is not a "great perhaps," but our present life is assuredly a reality. It ishere—what are you going to do with it? If you can make every day a day of intense interest you have won the greatest battle! You have stormed the world's richest citadel! The Children of Pan, who have loved and written of Nature, charm and transport you to a world of infinite interest. They offer rich fertilizer that gives promise of a bumper crop—Open that Door into their Realm.
CHAPTER VIII
MEN BEHIND BOOKS
Every word man's lips have utteredEchoes in God's Skies.ADELAIDE A. PROCTER
Every word man's lips have uttered
Echoes in God's Skies.
ADELAIDE A. PROCTER
ADELAIDE A. PROCTER
Books contain the accumulated store of human thought and scientific attainment—this is a treasure without which there would be no civilization—yet in addition, we may say that the most potent inheritance, that books vouchsafe, is the personalities of the great authors who have inscribed their souls within them. Personal character affects our lives as does nothing else. In the back of the mind of every one there are men and women who, we appreciate, have been the makers of our souls. Most often it is a mother or a father, sometimes a teacher of our youth, or a friend and fellow worker of whose nature we realize we have absorbed a part. Contact between human personalities is the most profound mover for good and evil. A preacher may declaim against sin for ever and a day, but you know that your great friend who scorns sin has infinitely more influence upon you. The greatest doers of good are men and women who lead others by the examples of their own lives. It is unfortunately not given to many to come into intimate personal contact with the most supreme human souls, but fortunate we are that many have extended their personalities without limit into the future, by truly encasing themselves in books that will remain as the leaven and inspiration of all ages and all peoples.
I have a number of volumes upon my shelves that I choose to consider not as books, but as men. Instead of printed pages, cloth bindings, and labels, they are living personalities with whom I can pass an evening. The reading is over, and I have within me the character of a great human being. As have my Mother and Father and the old fisherman, whose knowledge of the sea and storm beaten coast fed my boyish spirit, they have become part of me. The greatest books are those that present the greatest men. It is not the artistry of telling a story or writing a poem that really counts; the sincerity and intensity with which a man, whom we may call our "guide, philosopher and friend," is revealed forms the most cherished treasure of our bookshelf. In sorrow, in dejection, in need of mental or spiritual sustenance, when the joy of living is blunted, when lazy, discouraged or annoyed, you can go to these great fellows, converse with them and return again to the world with a bird's-eye view, an enlarged vision, a quickened spirit.
Have you read Walt Whitman?Thereis a glorious human being—so magnificent, so all-embracing in his love, so turbulent, so large in his personality that to know him, to feed upon him, you must become submerged in his book, his soul,—"The Leaves of Grass." Of this volume containing his poems he himself said,
This is no book;Who touches this, touches a man.
This is no book;Who touches this, touches a man.
This is no book;
Who touches this, touches a man.
You do indeed touch a man! A great spirit who saw in all things God; a Democrat who saw in all men the spark of the divine; a leader who raced out to the farthest reaches of the soul and beckons and begs you to follow; a lover who embraced all, the prostitute, the poet, the lowly, the exultant, Christ himself, in a spirit of human fellowship; a physical giant who gloried in his sex and makes you consider sacred the relationship of the sexes; a nurse who brought upon himself paralysis by caring for the wounded in the Civil War; a prophet who could no more believe that the spirit of an individual man could die than that it had never been born. Perhaps you think I write extravagantly—I do not—I but attempt to present what the personality of Walt Whitman has meant to me, and to many, many others. I but ask that you go to the "Leaves of Grass," and come in contact with that man to whom so many look and say—"A great part of myself is you, Walt Whitman! My life has been renewed since first I touched your hand."
Tolstoy! There is another one who believed in humanity and God,—there is another who has put a huge, rugged, loving soul within books. Probably no one has so influenced the humanitarianism of our day as did this bearded old warrior from Russia; but it was the deep human sympathy of the actual living Tolstoy that moved the world, not the arguments he deduced nor the warnings he gave. He was always a moralist,—even in his masterpiece "Anna Karenina" it is not the story he tells, but the human love which he reveals that has made the eternal monument. Afraid of nothing,—the Czar, convention, hatred, oppression,—he lived his life according to the dictates of his own conscience, the most punishing conscience that has ever been the attribute of a master soul. If you do not know him, read his short story "Master and Man." There you will find enunciated, in a manner as poignant, as powerful, as even that of the Sermon on the Mount, the doctrine of happiness found in living your life for others. Selfishness, pride, materialism, the sins that spoil the world, cannot stand in the way of the burning words of Tolstoy. Your conscience will receive a stiffening medicine, your sympathies for the sins and sufferings of your neighbors will deepen to bed rock, and your life will become proportionately more true, more happy, more Christian. Six years ago in the lowly hut near the Caucasus, when the mighty soul of Tolstoy left the body, the World missed a leader, a lover, a prophet—but his word still remains, and the doctrine as told by him of universal betterment through love and human sympathy will reach mankind whilst there are men left to read, and to communicate.
We all know the poems of Robert Burns, most of us know something of his life. His life and character are revealed in his poetry. He too was a lover, but a weak rather than a rugged one. We love him for his very weakness. His heart was his strength and his undoing. He loved until his heart would break, ruthlessly and impetuously, and of his sufferings, his remorses, regrets, and forlorn hopes he sang. In this cruel world, where might so often makes right, what a benediction it is to read a poem written from the depth of a simple, sorrowing, yet deeply human heart upon the suffering that he has caused the "wee sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie" in turning up her nest with the plowshare. As with all the personalities that are "great" in the deepest sense, his was one that felt a companionship for all that lives upon the earth, and from his sympathy for the drunken, the heart-broken, and the meadow mice, and his joy in patriotism, true lovers, and beauteous roses, we derive a depth of sentiment that needs must mellow our hearts. A brave spirit in a weak body had Bobbie Burns—he drank and was unfaithful, but he felt deeply. We love him for his depth, we sympathize with him in his weaknesses. As a friend he purifies rather than stimulates our souls, but he is a true friend and a loving one.
François Villon, the greatest ballad singer of all time, the tavern lover, the vagabond, the heavy-hearted sorrower, the lighted-hearted laugher, the bosom companion of thieves, cut-throats, chattering grisettes, old courtesans, rioters, and brawlers of the narrow streets, Cathedral shadows, Seine banks of mediæval Paris, was another of those great-hearted human lovers who had the gift of telling his heart secrets in words of wondrous beauty. By twentieth century standards Villon's actions, thieveries, and suspected murder, would have been neither moral nor proper, but by the standard of all ages, in all true hearts, his feelings towards the people among whom he moved will stand the test of the most austere morality. He loved all men and women for the best that was in them, he did not scorn them for the worst. He was unselfish and true to his friends, and more than that we cannot desire. Where there is hypocrisy there is vice; where there is selfishness there is lack of Christianity and humanity; our tavern poet, François Villon, had neither of these, and if you want a friend who will make you see the good in the bad, the beautiful in the ugly, go to your bookshelf and become acquainted with the fervid soul of this ancient ballad singer.
When you are too contented, when your mind feels squidgy with good living, or sultry from the summer heat, go to another man,—George Gordon, Lord Byron. They say that Byron (with Scott) is nowadays out of fashion. "They" are mistaken. The author of Childe Harold and Don Juan will never be truly out of fashion, so long as there is a flare in youthful hearts, a discontent in ambitious minds. He is the poet of a great revolt, a kicker at the traces, and then again he is the singer of the bleeding heart, of lost causes; he hurries you across the seas upon his speeding bark; he tops the crags of human loneliness and leaves you desolate. His songs are of the rollicking wine of life with its excitements, its depressions, its sentiments of hatred, beauty, joy. For youth he is the poet of liberty, of intense individualism; for age the poet of thwarted desires, for everyone he has a chestnut burr to put beneath dull content; his mockery is for stupidity, dryness, stagnation. Get under the crust of his effusive egotism and you will meet a sombre, lonely, sensitive individual, who needs you as a friend and who will be to you a hypodermic stimulative.
How different a one from this poet is his contemporary, the essayist, Charles Lamb. The essays we love the best are those that reveal the point of view, the little personalities of the writer, and no man of letters ever had a more magnetic personality, or knew better how to preserve himself in little literary gems, than did the author of "The Essays of Elia." Lamb spent his days in the South Sea Counting House transferring figures from one great ledger to another. But his evenings with his books, his family and his friends! Ah!—there was a companion! A booklover whose enthusiasm, for musty duodecimos has become a classic allusion, a punster whose puns are sometimes good and sometimes bad, but always original, a relisher of good conversation, a man of many petty weaknesses, a lover of good food, with a taste for old wine, and with an infinite appreciation of the fads and foibles of himself and others, he seems to have been altogether the most lovable individual with whom it would be possible to scrape up an acquaintance. Read but one hundred pages of his essays and he becomes your chuckling, appreciative, inimitable companion. Every old book shop, every roast pig, every glass of rich wine, every threadbare clerk stooping over his ledger—these and many such will take on fresh and romantic aspects for the friend of Elia.
Thomas Carlyle was an historian and philosopher who wrote his name over every page of his work. His was the voice and the soul of the Old Testament prophets, who railed at men from the depths of their bitter yet anxious hearts. The Preacher of the Nineteenth Century, when he spoke the world listened! Have you read "Sartor Resartus"? Among his works this is even the most personal. It is rough and jagged in style, turbulent and confused in arrangement, but behind it all, or rather under it all, is revealed the spiritual message to his age. The message is Carlyle's own personality: his bravery, his sincerity, his fine hatred of muddle-headed thinking, of credulity, of cant; his love and admiration for the fundamental greatnesses of human nature, his belief in an omnipotent God. He wished men to believe, and the thunder he bellowed in his endeavor still resounds. His soul was a battery of twelve-inch guns directed against the forces of ignorance and hypocrisy. It is to the reading of "Sartor Resartus" that many men point as the turning stake in their spiritual lives. It was not in the book that they found their spiritual bulwarks, but in the soul of the great Scotchman with whom they came in contact.
There is our own Emerson, whose admiration for Carlyle was probably only outdone by Carlyle's admiration for him! "Self Realization," "The American Scholar," "Friendship," "Politics"—how many of his essays have become part and parcel of America's loftiest thought and action. The metallic acuteness of his personality was not of the kind with which you can become familiar, but its very aloofness holds our respect and devotion. The austerity of George Washington in public life can only be compared with the cold distance at which this philosopher holds us, and yet upon their pedestals we recognize them as men from whom the best in American character has derived nourishment. In every sentence of his every essay, we feel the soul at peace, the intellect enthroned, the power of will predominant.
A man without friends is a man without life, and I have but told you of some of my boon companions. Never to have shared in the fellowship of the great spirits who are preserved for us in books is to cut one's self off from the most rewarding of human relationships. The chums of our boyhood, our companions at college, too often drift away to distant parts, or diverge from us in pursuits other than our own; although remembrances of our times together are sacred and of sweet recalling, too often they are of the past and renewal forever impossible. The friends of our books, however, are forever with us, they cannot die, they cannot depart, they remain fresh and vigorous, hearty sojourners upon our road, forever willing to lend a hand over the rocks and bumpy places. Without disparaging those with whom I sit before the fire, and chat, and smoke, I must confess that I value equally with them the friends of eternal character that exist there in the book-case. They lighten the path of life; they are ready for converse when my spirit calls.
Go to the greatest books for your most enduring friends, but upon having formed their friendship do not leave them in the study, but carry them within your spirit to your business and the marts of men, and in holding their confidences burning in your heart you will find yourself a more thorough human being.
CHAPTER IX
KEEPING UP WITH LIFE
Reading is the key which admits us to the whole world of thought and fancy and imagination, to the company of saint and sage, of the wisest and wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moments. It enables us to see with the keenest eyes, to hear with the finest ears, and to listen to the sweetest voices of all time.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
If in the minds of some readers this little book has helped to break down the futile distinctions and to show the real relation between the man who reads and the one who enjoys life, between the thinker and the man of action, it has done all that the author dared hope. Let us look upon our library not as an end in itself, but as a means to an end. It is a mistaken ambition to read as many books as possible within a year, or to attempt religiously to read the complete works of a number of authors. The man who buries himself in his library and exists only in the books therein is an unsocial, stagnant creature; but the one who reads as a means of attaining to a more productive life among his fellow men is the one who has gained the true riches of literature.
The world is a world for workers, not idlers. We live in America in the twentieth century, and we are of but little use to the general machinery if our minds are forever sojourning with the mediæval knights or gossiping in the by-ways of London with Charles Lamb and his contemporaries. Literature for you and me who live, and toil, and hope to obtain joy in the doing of it, must be vivifying nourishment to apply to our living and toiling. Great books and all true education provide this nourishment or else they would not be worth the price of a comic supplement.
Poetry, fiction, philosophy and history are not alone for old maids and retired business men who desire comforting, amusing solace to while away the hours until the race is run, nor alone for college professors and writers whose business it is to read, abstract, and judge,—they are truly, have been, and always will be for the minds of men and women who need and use the spirit of them in their work, their play, their sorrows, and their joys.
When Francis Bacon wrote "Reading maketh a full man," he did not mean "full" to imply a great accumulation of facts and dry-as-dust learning. Bacon was a philosopher, scientist, essayist, of the first order in each, and yet a leading statesman in his age. His mind was "full" in that he had probably as had no other man in England absorbed all the literature and science of all the centuries that had preceded him; his was the fulness of the reservoir from which could be drawn an endless stream of resource with which to undertake new political enterprises, of strength to maintain his position and of philosophy in the face of losing it. He was a literary man in that he knew the literature of the world, a man of letters—he wrote masterpieces, a man of action—he virtually ruled Great Britain. This is the threefold thread of life that we may all have as our ambition,—the connoisseur, the creative artist, the productive worker.
After having considered the bearing the reading of books has upon life, let us consider the bearing that living has upon reading and writing. Elbert Hubbard carried out this thought in his little book upon William Morris, the English poet. Morris, as you may know, was a weaver, a blacksmith, a wood-carver, a painter, a dyer, a printer, a furniture manufacturer, a musician, and withal a great poet. Hubbard said: "William Morris thought literature should be the product of the ripened mind." We have looked at Bacon as one whose literary output must have been the product of a mind that had manfully grappled with worldly affairs, and here is a further list that the Roycrofter gives us: "Shakespeare was a theatre manager, Milton a secretary, Bobbie Burns a farmer, Lamb a bookkeeper, Wordsworth a Government employee, Emerson a lecturer, Hawthorne a custom-house inspector, and Whitman a clerk."
The professional man of letters, except in rather rare instances, is by no means the man who erects the most enduring literary monuments. Literature must come from elemental life to have the true relationship to the affairs of men. We could increase Elbert Hubbard's list to an almost indefinite length—the author of the Gettysburg address had the weight of a nation upon his shoulders, Thoreau was more interested in observing the changing seasons than he was in writing books, Tolstoy was a soldier, an economist and farmer, Balzac an unsuccessful publisher, Bunyan a preacher, Pepys a high government official, Oliver Wendell Holmes a doctor, and countless novelists and poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries hard-working, hard-driven newspaper men.
Leisure does not make great literature,—all that is effective must come from interior or exterior experiences, and acute observations. The most effectual reading is that which is done in the light of personal experience, with one's eye upon unliterary activity. There is an endless chain, of which the links are the subject, the artist, the reader and his life as reflected by the author's treatment. To live in a world of books and to have as their profession the spinning of other volumes is the life of too many of our writers. On the other side of the shield, we of course see readers whose lives are entirely absorbed in the volumes they read without an outlet to the practical activities of existence. How tiresome it is to have a bustling man or woman tell us that they have not the time or that they are not literary enough to read great books. They of course, being good Americans, have plenty of time to go through stacks of worthless novels, and absorb a half dozen continuous serial stories in our monthly magazines. I say it is tiresome, and it is foolish, as with a moment's thought we can realize that books are essentially for the man or woman who is most deeply immersed in life.
Break down the barrier between literature and life?—there is none! I have a certain friend who has more to do within the twenty-four hours of the day than has anyone else I know. Politics, municipal corporations, railroads—these are apparently his life—absorbed in men and affairs. And yet if I run across a book that especially appeals to me, I go to him and ask his ideas upon it. He has probably read it and with his greater experience in the actual turmoil of living than I have had, he can enlighten me with a dozen new points of view upon the book under consideration. He interprets it in the light of his experience, as the author had written in the light of his.
It was said that during President Wilson's first winter in the White House, society in Washington was much exercised as to how he passed his evenings. It later developed that those evenings in which he was not absorbed in official business were spent in reading poetry, preferably Wordsworth, to his family. Washington stood amazed! Perhaps there is no truth in this story, but the ingredients are certainly there, which, if brought into conjunction, would make a true yarn. The active helmsman of the ship of state, with innumerable matters weighing upon him, seeking wisdom and spiritual fibre from a great poet; Washington society, without much to do, yet frightfully busy, amazed at his wasting or dreamily passing his hours of possible recreation!
Many another great public man has well appreciated that books are not for the closet but for life. Theodore Roosevelt is the apostle of strenuosity, statesman, ranchman, hunter, and yet a writer upon a wide range of subjects and an omnivorous reader. The plays of Shakespeare were the school books and college education of our rail splitter, Abraham Lincoln. A great English liberal, Charles James Fox, would charm the House of Commons for hours with his oratory, go to Brooks' and lose a fortune at cards, and then home to his bed to read the Plays of Euripides,—probably to absorb wisdom and courage for his thinking and gaming upon the following evening. Of the men and women to whom books mean life, we could go on with our list indefinitely, not only through the ranks of kings and queens, soldiers and statesmen, financiers and merchants, but sea captains, mechanics, farmers, clerks, and coal miners. In every walk of life we find the true philosophers, the true adepts in the art of living, seeking sustenance from the printed page.
Go into a public library, and study the faces of those who are reading there—ambition, inspiration, delight will be expressed by those who have foundthe open door, the way to riches and plenty. Observe the homes of your acquaintances! Cicero said that books are the soul of a room, and we may expand this epigram in saying that the use of books in a family brings all the members into a communion with each other, creating an atmosphere far removed from that of the home in which books are infrequent sojourners.
Oh no, it is not the professed gentleman of literature with the pedantic knowledge and bookish phraseology, but the men and women who seek explanation of and relief from sorrow, stimulus to higher attainment, pleasure that mellows activity, to whom the authors are truly the path of life. Those whom you see on the elevated trains reading Shakespeare, the ranchman with his pocket edition of Dickens, the country doctor who hates to buy an automobile as when driving his old buggy he could read his Boswell upon his round of visits,—they are the ones to whom the poet can truly say,
You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean;But I will be health to you nevertheless,And filter and fibre your blood.
You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean;But I will be health to you nevertheless,And filter and fibre your blood.
You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean;
But I will be health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
And filter and fibre your blood.
You need never be afraid of becoming intellectual. To be sure it is somewhat the fashion in America to think that a man who reads Meredith should be a college professor or the editor of a book review—but this is only a fashion and held to by the most stupid. It is smart to laugh at good books and "culture," but it is the same sort of smartness at which all Europe has been sensibly sneering for a century. Reading should not be a profession; those that make it such invariably become world weary, book weary, at sea in an ocean in which life is necessarily a more vital thing than they are able to swallow. Do not give your life over to your library, but make of it an electric battery with which to vivify life. It can be done, and is done by the great and the little, the sorrowful and the joyful, the leading warriors in the battle for civilized progress.
Call upon the supreme minds of past ages to support you in the strife of this and they will prove stalwart, faithful legions. Read as is your need and inclination; not as a duty, not as a feat, but as an acknowledgment that you are glad to win the best and most helpful of friends. Aristotle said that all men desire knowledge. If knowledge means deeper human sympathy, a more profound enlightenment, a richer, happier, more productive life, let each one of us admit that the attainment of knowledge is in truth our endeavor. Let us try the experiment of finding this knowledge in the volumes of the deepest, the most intensive livers.
Make the book you read to-day play a part in the world of to-morrow, and you will rise above the reader in the closet who carps and criticizes, thus cutting himself off from the work of men. You will disprove all statements about the lack of practicability of education, the other-worldiness of books.
* * * * *
There was a boy who wandered out along an unknown highway into a far country. The way seemed sombre, foreign and meaningless. His questions were unanswered, his desires unsatisfied; there seemed no by-paths into which he could turn in the hope of finding a solace or a reason for his journey.
A never-ending vista without rhyme or reason lay before him of flat, uninteresting solitudes, only broken by dark pits or rugged obstructions which he had either to circle about or climb over or under. They always annoyed and provoked him, as there seemed no set plan for meeting such difficulties, no apparent purpose in wandering on. He knew, however, that there was no turning back, he had to stagger, and stumble, and plod forward, ever forward.
It was the way of life, and it was a meaningless road, a disappointing journey undertaken with great expectations.
After a deal of suffering, impatience and profound discouragement, he came upon a great Palace standing in his way. It was the first that he had ever seen, and he wondered at it.
With hesitancy he determined to walk about it and to follow the beaten road, uninteresting but familiar, which he felt must stretch beyond. He spied, however, a small door at the side of the great barred gate and he determined to enter and to see what could be found within. The panel yielded to his timorous push, and he found himself in a mighty hall where there were wondrous things!
Many another wanderer had already arrived, and many others were to follow,—there was a happiness, a purpose, a vitality in life that had been sadly lacking upon the road of his journeying. Wisdom, riches, the answers to his questions, the reasons for his arduous pilgrimage lay before him. He grasped them and was content.
* * * * * * * *
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