Part 3 (2/2)
Now, the man of culture has pre-eminently the gift of living deeply in his own age, and at the same time of seeing it in relation to all ages. It has no illusion for him; it cannot deceive him with its pa.s.sionate acceptance or its equally pa.s.sionate rejection. He sees the crown s.h.i.+ning above the cross; he hears the long thunders of applause breaking in upon execrations which they will finally silence; he foresees the harvest in the seed that lies barely covered on the surface; and, afar off, his ear notes the final crash of that which at the moment seems to carry with it the a.s.surance of eternal duration.
Such a man secures the vitality of his time, but he escapes its limitation of vision by seeing it clearly and seeing it whole; he corrects the teaching of the time spirit by constant reference to the teaching of the Eternal Spirit imparted in the long training and the wide revelation of history. The day is beautiful and significant, or ominous and tragic, to him as it discloses its relation to the good or the evil of the years that are gone. And these vital a.s.sociations, these deep historic connections, are brought to light with peculiar clearness in literature. Beyond all other means of enfranchis.e.m.e.nt, the book liberates a man from imprisonment within the narrow limits of his own time; it makes him free of all times. He lives in all periods, under all forms of government, in all social conditions; the mind of antiquity, of mediaevalism, of the Renaissance, is as open to him as the mind of his own day, and so he is able to look upon human life in its entirety.
Chapter XVII.
Liberation from One's Place.
The instinct which drives men to travel is at bottom identical with that which fills men with pa.s.sionate desire to know what is in life.
Time and strength are often wasted in restless change from place to place; but real wandering, however aimless in mood, is always education. To know one's neighbours and to be on good terms with the community in which one lives are the beginning of sound relations to the world at large; but one never knows his village in any real sense until he knows the world. The distant hills which seem to be always calling the imaginative boy away from the familiar fields and hearth do not conspire against his peace, however much they may conspire against his comfort; they help him to the fulfilment of his destiny by suggesting to his imagination the deeper experience, the richer growth, the higher tasks which await him in the world beyond the horizon. Man is a wanderer by the law of his life; and if he never leaves his home in which he is born, he never builds a home of his own.
It is the law of life that a child should leave his father and separate himself from his inherited surroundings, in order that by self-unfolding and self-realisation he may subst.i.tute a conscious for an unconscious, a moral for an instinctive relation. The instinct of the myth-makers was sound when it led them to attach such importance to the wandering and the return; the separation effected in order that individuality and character might be realised through isolation and experience, the return voluntarily made through clear recognition of the soundness of the primitive relations, the beauty of the service of the older and wiser to the younger and the more ignorant. We are born into relations which we accept as normal and inevitable; we break away from them in order that by detachment we may see them objectively and from a distance, and that we may come to self-consciousness; we resume these relations of deliberate purpose and with clear perception of their moral significance. So the boy, grown to manhood, returns to his home from the world in which he has tested himself and seen for the first time, with clear eyes, the depth and beauty of its service in the spiritual order; so the man who has revolted from the barren and shallow dogmatic statement of a spiritual truth returns, in riper years and with a deeper insight, to the truth which is no longer matter of inherited belief but of vital need and perception.
The ripe, mature, full mind not only escapes the limitation of the time in which it finds itself; it also escapes from the limitations of the place in which it happens to be. A man of deep culture cannot be a provincial; he must be a citizen of the world. The man of provincial tastes and ideas owns the acres; the man of culture commands the landscape. He knows the world beyond the hills; he sees the great movement of life from which the village seems almost shut out; he shares those inclusive experiences which come to each age and give each age a character of its own. He is in fellows.h.i.+p and sympathy with the smaller community at his doors, but he belongs also to that greater community which is coterminous with humanity itself. He is not disloyal to his immediate surroundings when he leaves them for exploration, travel, and discovery; he is fulfilling that law of life which conditions true valuation of that into which one is born upon clear perception of that which one must acquire for himself.
The wanderings of individuals and races, which form so large a part of the substance of history, are witnesses of that craving for deeper experience and wider knowledge which is one of the springs of human progress. The American cares for Europe not for its more skilful and elaborate ministration to his comfort; he is drawn towards it through the appeal of its rich historic life to his imagination and through the diversity and variety of its social and racial phenomena. And in like manner the European seeks the East, not simply as a matter of idle curiosity, but because he finds in the East conditions which are set in such sharp contrast with those with which he is familiar. The instinct for expansion which gives human history its meaning and interest is constantly urging the man of sensitive mind to secure by observation that which he cannot get by experience.
To secure the most complete development one must live in one's time and yet live above it, and one must also live in one's home and yet live, at the same time, in the world. The life which is bounded in knowledge, interest, and activity by the invisible but real and limiting walls of a small community is often definite in aim, effective in action, and upright in intention; but it cannot be rich, varied, generous, and stimulating. The life, on the other hand, which is entirely detached from local a.s.sociations and tasks is often interesting, liberalising, and catholic in spirit; but it cannot be original or productive. A sound life--balanced, poised, and intelligently directed--must stand strongly in both local and universal relations; it must have the vitality and warmth of the first, and the breadth and range of the second.
This liberation from provincialism is not only one of the signs of culture, but it is also one of its finest results; it registers a high degree of advancement. For the man who has pa.s.sed beyond the prejudices, misconceptions, and narrowness of provincialism has gone far on the road to self-education. He has made as marked an advance on the position of the great ma.s.s of his contemporaries as that position is an advance on the earlier stages of barbarism. The barbarian lives only in his tribe; the civilised man, in the exact degree in which he is civilised, lives with humanity. Books are among the richest resources against narrowing local influences; they are the ripest expositions of the world-spirit. To know the typical books of the race is to be in touch with those elements of thought and experience which are shared by men of all countries. Without a knowledge of these books a man never really gets at the life of localities which are foreign to him; never really sees those historic places about which the traditions of civilisation have gathered. Travel is robbed of half its educational value unless one carries with him a knowledge of that which he looks at for the first time with his own eyes. No American sees England unless he carries England in his memory and imagination.
Westminster Abbey is devoid of spiritual significance to the man who is ignorant of the life out of which it grew, and of the history which is written in its architecture and its memorials. The emanc.i.p.ation from the limitations of locality is greatly aided by travel, but it is accomplished only by intimate knowledge of the greater books.
Chapter XVIII.
The Unconscious Element.
While it is true that the greatest books betray the most intimate acquaintance with the time in which they are written, and disclose the impress of that time in thought, structure, and style, it is also true that such books are so essentially independent of contemporary forms and moods that they largely escape the vicissitudes which attend those forms and moods. The element of enduring interest in them outweighs the accidents of local speech or provincial knowledge, as the force and genius of Caesar survive the armor he wore and the language he spoke. A great book is a possession for all time, because a writer of the first rank is the contemporary of every generation; he is never outgrown, exhausted, or even old-fas.h.i.+oned, although the garments he wore may have been laid aside long ago.
In this permanent quality, unchanged by changes of taste and form, resides the secret of that charm which draws about the great poets men and women of each succeeding period, eager to listen to words which thrilled the world when it was young, and which have a new meaning for every new age. It is safe to say that Homer will speak to men as long as language survives, and that translation will follow translation to the end of time. What Robinson said of the Bible in one of the great moments of modern history may be said of the greater works of literature: more light will always stream from them. Indeed, many of them will not be understood until they are read in the light of long periods of history; for as the great books are interpretations of life, so life in its historic revelation is one continuous commentary on the greater books.
This preponderance of the permanent over the accidental or temporary in books of this cla.s.s is largely due to the unconscious element which plays so great a part in them: the element of universal experience, in which every man shares in the exact degree in which, in mind and heart, he approaches greatness. It is idle to attempt to separate arbitrarily in Shakespeare, for instance, those elements in the poet's work which were deliberately introduced from those which went into it by the unconscious action of his whole nature; but no one can study the plays intelligently without becoming more and more clearly aware of those depths of life which moved in the poet before they moved in his work; which enlarged, enriched, and silently reorganised his view of life and his power of translating life out of individual into universal terms. It would be impossible, for instance, to write such a play as ”The Tempest” by sheer force of intellect; in the creation of such a work there is involved, beyond literary skill, calculation, and deep study of the relation of thought to form, a ripeness of spirit, a clearness of insight, a richness of imagination, which are so much part of the very soul of the poet that he does not separate them in thought, and cannot consciously balance, adjust, and employ them. They are quite beyond his immediate control, as they are beyond all attempts to imitate them.
Cleverness may learn all the forms and methods, but it is powerless to imitate greatness; it can simulate the conscious, dexterous side of greatness, but it cannot simulate the unconscious, vital side. The moment a man like Voltaire attempts to deal with such a character as Joan of Arc, his spiritual and artistic limitations become painfully apparent; of cleverness there is no lack, but of reverence, insight, depth of feeling, the affinity of the great imagination for the great nature or deed, there is no sign. The man is entirely and hopelessly incapacitated for the work by virtue of certain limitations in his own nature of which he is obviously in entire ignorance. The conscious skill of Voltaire was delicate, subtle, full of vitality; but the unconscious side of his nature was essentially shallow, thin, largely undeveloped; and it is the preponderance of the unconscious over the conscious in a man's life which makes him great in himself and equips him for work of the highest quality. No man can put his skill to the highest use and give his knowledge the final touch of individuality until both are so entirely incorporated in his personality that they have become part of himself.
This deepest and most vital of all the processes of self-education and self-unfolding, which is brought to such perfection in men of the highest creative power, is the fundamental process of culture,--the chief method which every man uses, consciously or unconsciously, who brings his nature to complete ripeness of quality and power. The absorption of vital experience and knowledge which went on in Shakespeare enlarged and clarified his vision and insight to such a degree that both became not only searching, but veracious in a rare degree; life was opened to him on many sides by the expansion first accomplished in himself. This is saying again what has been said so many times, but cannot be said too often,--that, in order to give one's work a touch of greatness, a man must first have a touch of greatness in his own nature. But greatness is not an irresponsible and undirected growth; it is as definitely conditioned on certain obediences to intellectual discipline and spiritual law as is any kind of lesser skill conditioned on practice and work. One of these conditions is the development of the power to turn conscious processes of observation, emotion, and skill into unconscious processes; to enrich the nature below the surface, so to speak; to make the soil productive by making it deep and rich. Men of mere skill always stop short of this final process of self-development, and always stop short of those final achievements which sum up and express all that has been known or felt about a subject and give it permanent form; men of essential greatness take this last step in that higher education which makes one master of the force of his personality, and give his words and works universal range and perennial interest.
Now, this is the deepest quality in the books of life, which a student may not only enjoy to the full, but may also absorb and make his own.
When Alfred de Musset, in an oft-repeated phrase, said that it takes a great deal of life to make a little art, he was not only affirming the reality of this process of pa.s.sing experience through consciousness into the unconscious side of a man's nature, but he was also hinting at one of the greatest resources of pleasure and growth. For time and life continually enrich the man who has learned the secret of turning experience and observation into knowledge and power. It is a secret in the sense in which every vital process is a secret; but it is not a trick, a skill, or a method which may be communicated in a formula.
Mrs. Ward describes a character in one of her stories as having pa.s.sed through a great culture into a great simplicity of nature; in other words, culture had wrought its perfect work, and the man had pa.s.sed through wide and intensely self-conscious activity into the repose and simplicity of self-unconsciousness; his knowledge had become so completely a part of himself that he had ceased to be conscious of it as a thing distinct from himself. There is no easy road to this last height in the long and painful process of education; and time is an essential element in the process, because it is a matter of growth.
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