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CHAPTER III - BOOKS WHICH HAVE INFLUENCED ME (14)
THE Editor (15) has somewhat insidiously laid a trap for his
correspondents, the question put appearing at first so
innocent, truly cutting so deep. It is not, indeed, until
after some reconnaissance and review that the writer awakes
to find himself engaged upon something in the nature of
autobiography, or, perhaps worse, upon a chapter in the life
of that little, beautiful brother whom we once all had, and
whom we have all lost and mourned, the man we ought to have
been, the man we hoped to be. But when word has been passed
(even to an editor), it should, if possible, be kept; and if
sometimes I am wise and say too little, and sometimes weak
and say too much, the blame must lie at the door of the
person who entrapped me.
The most influential books, and the truest in their
influence, are works of fiction. They do not pin the reader
to a dogma, which he must afterwards discover to be inexact;
they do not teach him a lesson, which he must afterwards
unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the
lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they
constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us
the web of experience, not as we can see it for ourselves,
but with a singular change - that monstrous, consuming EGO of
ours being, for the nonce, struck out. To be so, they must
be reasonably true to the human comedy; and any work that is
so serves the turn of instruction. But the course of our
education is answered best by those poems and romances where
we breathe a magnanimous atmosphere of thought and meet
generous and pious characters. Shakespeare has served me
best. Few living friends have had upon me an influence so
strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. The last character,
already well beloved in the reading, I had the good fortune
to see, I must think, in an impressionable hour, played by
Mrs. Scott Siddons. Nothing has ever more moved, more
delighted, more refreshed me; nor has the influence quite
passed away. Kent's brief speech over the dying Lear had a
great effect upon my mind, and was the burthen of my
reflections for long, so profoundly, so touchingly generous
did it appear in sense, so overpowering in expression.
Perhaps my dearest and best friend outside of Shakespeare is
D'Artagnan - the elderly D'Artagnan of the VICOMTE DE
BRAGELONNE. I know not a more human soul, nor, in his way, a
finer; I shall be very sorry for the man who is so much of a
pedant in morals that he cannot learn from the Captain of
Musketeers. Lastly, I must name the PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, a
book that breathes of every beautiful and valuable emotion.
But of works of art little can be said; their influence is
profound and silent, like the influence of nature; they mould
by contact; we drink them up like water, and are bettered,
yet know not how. It is in books more specifically didactic
that we can follow out the effect, and distinguish and weigh
and compare. A book which has been very influential upon me
fell early into my hands, and so may stand first, though I
think its influence was only sensible later on, and perhaps
still keeps growing, for it is a book not easily outlived:
the ESSAIS of Montaigne. That temperate and genial picture
of life is a great gift to place in the hands of persons of
to-day; they will find in these smiling pages a magazine of
heroism and wisdom, all of an antique strain; they will have
their 'linen decencies' and excited orthodoxies fluttered,
and will (if they have any gift of reading) perceive that
these have not been fluttered without some excuse and ground
of reason; and (again if they have any gift of reading) they
will end by seeing that this old gentleman was in a dozen
ways a finer fellow, and held in a dozen ways a nobler view
of life, than they or their contemporaries.
The next book, in order of time, to influence me, was the New
Testament, and in particular the Gospel according to St.
Matthew. I believe it would startle and move any one if they
could make a certain effort of imagination and read it
freshly like a book, not droningly and dully like a portion
of the Bible. Any one would then be able to see in it those
truths which we are all courteously supposed to know and all
modestly refrain from applying. But upon this subject it is
perhaps better to be silent.
I come next to Whitman's LEAVES OF GRASS, a book of singular
service, a book which tumbled the world upside down for me,
blew into space a thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical
illusion, and, having thus shaken my tabernacle of lies, set
me back again upon a strong foundation of all the original
and manly virtues. But it is, once more, only a book for
those who have the gift of reading. I will be very frank - I
believe it is so with all good books except, perhaps,
fiction. The average man lives, and must live, so wholly in
convention, that gunpowder charges of the truth are more apt
to discompose than to invigorate his creed. Either he cries
out upon blasphemy and indecency, and crouches the closer
round that little idol of part-truths and part-conveniences
which is the contemporary deity, or he is convinced by what
is new, forgets what is old, and becomes truly blasphemous
and indecent himself. New truth is only useful to supplement
the old; rough truth is only wanted to expand, not to
destroy, our civil and often elegant conventions. He who
cannot judge had better stick to fiction and the daily
papers. There he will get little harm, and, in the first at
least, some good.
Close upon the back of my discovery of Whitman, I came under
the influence of Herbert Spencer. No more persuasive rabbi
exists, and few better. How much of his vast structure will
bear the touch of time, how much is clay and how much brass,
it were too curious to inquire. But his words, if dry, are
always manly and honest; there dwells in his pages a spirit
of highly abstract joy, plucked naked like an algebraic
symbol but still joyful; and the reader will find there a
CAPUT MORTUUM of piety, with little indeed of its loveliness,
but with most of its essentials; and these two qualities make
him a wholesome, as his intellectual vigour makes him a
bracing, writer. I should be much of a hound if I lost my
gratitude to Herbert Spencer.
GOETHE'S LIFE, by Lewes, had a great importance for me when
it first fell into my hands - a strange instance of the
partiality of man's good and man's evil. I know no one whom
I less admire than Goethe; he seems a very epitome of the
sins of genius, breaking open the doors of private life, and
wantonly wounding friends, in that crowning offence of
WERTHER, and in his own character a mere pen-and-ink
Napoleon, conscious of the rights and duties of superior
talents as a Spanish inquisitor was conscious of the rights
and duties of his office. And yet in his fine devotion to
his art, in his honest and serviceable friendship for
Schiller, what lessons are contained! Biography, usually so
false to its office, does here for once perform for us some
of the work of fiction, reminding us, that is, of the truly
mingled tissue of man's nature, and how huge faults and
shining virtues cohabit and persevere in the same character.
History serves us well to this effect, but in the originals,
not in the pages of the popular epitomiser, who is bound, by
the very nature of his task, to make us feel the difference
of epochs instead of the essential identity of man, and even
in the originals only to those who can recognise their own
human virtues and defects in strange forms, often inverted
and under strange names, often interchanged. Martial is a
poet of no good repute, and it gives a man new thoughts to
read his works dispassionately, and find in this unseemly
jester's serious passages the image of a kind, wise, and
self-respecting gentleman. It is customary, I suppose, in
reading Martial, to leave out these pleasant verses; I never
heard of them, at least, until I found them for myself; and
this partiality is one among a thousand things that help to
build up our distorted and hysterical conception of the great
Roman Empire.
This brings us by a natural transition to a very noble book -
the MEDITATIONS of Marcus Aurelius. The dispassionate
gravity, the noble forgetfulness of self, the tenderness of
others, that are there expressed and were practised on so
great a scale in the life of its writer, make this book a
book quite by itself. No one can read it and not be moved.
Yet it scarcely or rarely appeals to the feelings - those
very mobile, those not very trusty parts of man. Its address
lies further back: its lesson comes more deeply home; when
you have read, you carry away with you a memory of the man
himself; it is as though you had touched a loyal hand, looked
into brave eyes, and made a noble friend; there is another
bond on you thenceforward, binding you to life and to the
love of virtue.
Wordsworth should perhaps come next. Every one has been
influenced by Wordsworth, and it is hard to tell precisely
how. A certain innocence, a rugged austerity of joy, a sight
of the stars, 'the silence that is in the lonely hills,'
something of the cold thrill of dawn, cling to his work and
give it a particular address to what is best in us. I do not
know that you learn a lesson; you need not - Mill did not -
agree with any one of his beliefs; and yet the spell is cast.
Such are the best teachers; a dogma learned is only a new
error - the old one was perhaps as good; but a spirit
communicated is a perpetual possession. These best teachers
climb beyond teaching to the plane of art; it is themselves,
and what is best in themselves, that they communicate.
I should never forgive myself if I forgot THE EGOIST. It is
art, if you like, but it belongs purely to didactic art, and
from all the novels I have read (and I have read thousands)
stands in a place by itself. Here is a Nathan for the modern
David; here is a book to send the blood into men's faces.
Satire, the angry picture of human faults, is not great art;
we can all be angry with our neighbour; what we want is to be
shown, not his defects, of which we are too conscious, but
his merits, to which we are too blind. And THE EGOIST is a
satire; so much must be allowed; but it is a satire of a
singular quality, which tells you nothing of that obvious
mote, which is engaged from first to last with that invisible
beam. It is yourself that is hunted down; these are your own
faults that are dragged into the day and numbered, with
lingering relish, with cruel cunning and precision. A young
friend of Mr. Meredith's (as I have the story) came to him in
an agony. 'This is too bad of you,' he cried. 'Willoughby
is me!' 'No, my dear fellow,' said the author; 'he is all of
us.'
I have read THE EGOIST five or six times myself, and I mean
to read it again; for I am like the young friend of the
anecdote - I think Willoughby an unmanly but a very
serviceable exposure of myself.
I suppose, when I am done, I shall find that I have forgotten
much that was most influential, as I see already I have
forgotten Thoreau, and Hazlitt, whose paper 'On the Spirit of
Obligations' was a turning-point in my life, and Penn, whose
little book of aphorisms had a brief but strong effect on me,
and Mitford's TALES OF OLD JAPAN, wherein I learned for the
first time the proper attitude of any rational man to his
country's laws - a secret found, and kept, in the Asiatic
islands. That I should commemorate all is more than I can
hope or the Editor could ask. It will be more to the point,
after having said so much upon improving books, to say a word
or two about the improvable reader. The gift of reading, as
I have called it, is not very common, nor very generally
understood. It consists, first of all, in a vast
intellectual endowment - a free grace, I find I must call it
- by which a man rises to understand that he is not
punctually right, nor those from whom he differs absolutely
wrong. He may hold dogmas; he may hold them passionately;
and he may know that others hold them but coldly, or hold
them differently, or hold them not at all. Well, if he has
the gift of reading, these others will be full of meat for
him. They will see the other side of propositions and the
other side of virtues. He need not change his dogma for
that, but he may change his reading of that dogma, and he
must supplement and correct his deductions from it. A human
truth, which is always very much a lie, hides as much of life
as it displays. It is men who hold another truth, or, as it
seems to us, perhaps, a dangerous lie, who can extend our
restricted field of knowledge, and rouse our drowsy
consciences. Something that seems quite new, or that seems
insolently false or very dangerous, is the test of a reader.
If he tries to see what it means, what truth excuses it, he
has the gift, and let him read. If he is merely hurt, or
offended, or exclaims upon his author's folly, he had better
take to the daily papers; he will never be a reader.
And here, with the aptest illustrative force, after I have
laid down my part-truth, I must step in with its opposite.
For, after all, we are vessels of a very limited content.
Not all men can read all books; it is only in a chosen few
that any man will find his appointed food; and the fittest
lessons are the most palatable, and make themselves welcome
to the mind. A writer learns this early, and it is his chief
support; he goes on unafraid, laying down the law; and he is
sure at heart that most of what he says is demonstrably
false, and much of a mingled strain, and some hurtful, and
very little good for service; but he is sure besides that
when his words fall into the hands of any genuine reader,
they will be weighed and winnowed, and only that which suits
will be assimilated; and when they fall into the hands of one
who cannot intelligently read, they come there quite silent
and inarticulate, falling upon deaf ears, and his secret is
kept as if he had not written.
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