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The Influences Of The Mind Of The Past
The Influences Of The Mind Of The Past
The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar is the mind of
the Past - in whatever form, whether of literature, of art, of institutions,
that mind is inscribed. Books are the best type of the influence of the past,
and perhaps we shall get at the truth - learn the amount of this influence
more conveniently - by considering their value alone.
The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received into
him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his own
mind, and uttered it again. It came into him life; it went out from him truth.
It came to him short-lived actions; it went out from him immortal thoughts.
It came to him business; it went from him poetry. It was dead fact; now it is
quick thought. It can stand and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it
now inspires. Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it
issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing.
Or, I might say, it depends on how far the process had gone of
transmuting life into truth. In proportion to the completeness of the
distillation, so will the purity and imperishableness of the product be. But
none is quite perfect. As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect
vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the
local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought that
shall be as efficient in all respects to a remote posterity, as to
contemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, it is found, must write
its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books
of an older period will not fit this.
Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which attaches to the
act of creation - the act of thought - is transferred to the record. The poet
chanting was felt to be a divine man: henceforth the chant is divine also. The
writer was a just and wise spirit: hence-forward it is settled, the book is
perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly
the book becomes noxious; the guide is a tyrant. The sluggish and perverted
mind of the multitude, slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once
so opened, having once received this book, stands upon it and makes an outcry
if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by
thinkers, not by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who
set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. Meek
young men grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views
which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero,
Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.
Hence, instead of Man Thinking we have the bookworm. Hence, the
book-learned class who value books as such; not as related to Nature and the
human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and
the soul. Hence, the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs
of all degrees.
Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is
the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect? They are for
nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book, than to be warped by
its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a
system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. This every
man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although, in almost
all men, obstructed, and as yet unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth;
and utters truth, or creates. In this action it is genius; not the privilege
of here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man. In its
essence it is progressive. The book, the college, the school or art, the
institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. This is
good, say they, - let us hold by this. They pin me down. They look backward
and not forward. But genius looks forward; the eyes of man are set in his
forehead, not in his hindhead; man hopes; genius creates. Whatever talents may
be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his; cinders
and smoke there may be, but not yet flame. There are creative manners, there
are creative actions, and creative words; manners, actions, words, that is,
indicative of no custom or authority, but springing spontaneous from the
mind`s own sense of good and fair.
On the other part, instead of being its own seer, let is receive from
another mind its truth, though it were in torrents of light, without periods
of solitude, inquest, and self-recovery, and a fatal disservice is done.
Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over-influence. The
literature of every nation bears me witness. The English dramatic poets have
Shakespearized now for two hundred years.
Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly
subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are
for the scholar`s idle times. When we can read God directly, the hour is too
precious to be wasted in other men`s transcripts of their readings. But when
the intervals of darkness come, as come they must, - when the sun is hid, and
the stars withdraw their shining, - we repair to the lamps which were kindled
by their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is. We
hear, that we may speak. The Arabian proverb says, "A fig-tree, looking on a
fig-tree, becometh fruitful."
It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best
books. They impress us with the conviction that one nature wrote and the same
reads. We read the verses of one of the great English poets, of Chaucer, of
Marvell, of Dryden, with the most modern joy, - with a pleasure, I mean, which
is in great part caused by the abstraction of all time from their verses.
There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise when this poet, who lived
in some past world two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close
to my own soul, that which I also had well-nigh thought and said. But for
the evidence thence afforded to the philosophical doctrine of the identity of
all minds, we should suppose some pre-established harmony, some foresight of
souls that were to be, and some preparation of stores for their future wants,
like the fact observed in insects, who lay up food before death for the young
grub they shall never see.
I would not be hurried by any love of system, by any exaggeration of
instincts, to underrate the Book. We all know that as the human body can be
nourished on any food, though it were boiled grass and the broth of shoes, so
the human mind can be fed by any knowledge. And great and heroic men have
existed who had almost no other information than by the printed page. I only
would say, that it needs a strong head to bear that diet. One must be an
inventor to read well. As the proverb says, "He that would bring home the
wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the Indies." There is then
creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor
and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with
manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our
author is as broad as the world. We then see, what is always true, that, as
the seer`s hour of vision is short and rare among heavy days and months, so is
its record, perchance, the least part of his volume. The discerning will read,
in his Plato or Shakespeare, only that least part, - only the authentic
utterances of the oracle; all the rest he rejects, were it never so many times
Plato`s and Shakespeare`s.
Of course, there is a portion of reading quite indispensable to a wise
man. History and exact science he must learn by laborious reading. Colleges,
in like manner, have their indispensable office, - to teach elements. But they
can only highly serve us when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they
gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by
the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and
knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns,
and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the
least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and our American colleges will
recede in their public importance, whilst they grow richer every year.
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