There could be no better method of doing this (no method open to everybody) than the method,—outside of one’s specialty,—of reading for persons and with persons. It makes all one’s life a series of spiritual revelations. It is like having regular habits of being born again, of having new experiences at will. It mobilises all love and passion and delight in the world and sends it flowing past one’s door.
In this day of immeasurable exercises, why does not some one put in a word for the good old-fashioned exercise of being born again? It is an exercise which few men seem to believe in, not even once in a lifetime, but it is easily the best all-around drill for living, and even for reading, that can be arranged. And it is not a very difficult exercise if one knows how, does it regularly enough. It is not at all necessary to go off to another world to believe in reincarnations, if one practises on them every day. Women have always seemed to be more generally in the way of being born again than men, but they have less scope and sometimes there is a certain feverish smallness about it, and when men once get started (like Robert Browning in distinction from Mrs. Browning) they make the method of being born again seem a great triumphant one. They seem to have a larger repertoire to be born to, and they go through it more rapidly and justly. At the same time it is true that nearly all women are more or less familiar with the exercise of being born again—living pro tem. and at will—in others, and only a few men do it—merely the greatest ones, statesmen, diplomats, editors, poets, great financiers, and other prophets—all men who live by seeing more than others have time for. They are found to do their seeing rather easily on the whole. They do it by the perfectly normal exercise of being born into other men, looking out of their eyes a minute, whenever they like. All great power in its first stage is essentially dramatic, a man-judging, man-illuminating power, the power of guessing what other people are going to think and do.
When the world points out to the young man, as it is very fond of doing, that he must learn from experience, what it really means is, that he must learn from his dramatic drill in human life, his contact with real persons, his slow, compulsory scrupulous going the rounds of his heart, putting himself in the place of real persons.
Probably every man who lives, in proportion as he covets power or knowledge, would like to be (at will at least) a kind of focused everybody. It is true that in his earlier stages, and in his lesser moods afterward, he would probably seem to most people a somewhat teetering person, diffused, chaotic, or contradictory. It could hardly be helped—with the raw materials of a great man all scattered around in him, great unaccounted-for insights, idle-looking powers all as yet unfused. But a man in the long run (and longer the better) is always worth while, no matter how he looks in the making, and it certainly does seem reasonable, however bad it may look, that this is the way he is made, that in proportion as he does his knowing spiritually and powerfully, he will have to do it dramatically. It sometimes seems as if knowing, in the best sense, were a kind of rotary-person process, a being everybody in a row, a state of living symposium. The interpenetrating, blending-in, digesting period comes in due course, the time of settling down into himself, and behold the man is made, a unified, concentrated, individual, universal man—a focused everybody.
This is not quite being a god perhaps, but it is as near to it, on the whole, as a man can conveniently get.
IV
Spiritual Thrift
But perhaps one of the most interesting things about doing up one’s knowing in persons is that it is not only the most alive, but the most economical knowledge that can be obtained. On the whole, eleven or twelve people do very well to know the world with, if one can get a complete set, if they are different enough, and one knows them down through. The rest of the people that one sees about, from the point of view of stretching one’s comprehension, one’s essential sympathy or knowledge, do not count very much. They are duplicates—to be respected and to be loved, of course, but to be kept in the cellar of actual consciousness. There is no other way to do. Everybody was not intended to be used by everybody. It is because we think that they were, mostly, that we have come to our present, modern, heartlessly-cordial fashion of knowing people—knowing people by parlourfuls—whole parlourfuls at a time. “Is thy servant a whale?” said my not unsociable soul to me. “Is one to be fed with one’s kind as if they were animalculæ, as if they had to be taken in the bulk if one were really to get something?” It is heartless and shallow enough. Who is not weary of it? No one knows anybody nowadays. He merely knows everybody. He falls before The Reception Room. A reception room is a place where we set people up in rows like pickets on a fence to know them. Then like the small boy with a stick, one tap per picket, we run along knowing people. No one comes in touch with any one. It is getting so that there is hardly any possible way left in our modern life for knowing people except by marrying them. One cannot even be sure of that, when one thinks how married people are being driven about by books and by other people. Society is a crowd of crowds mutually destroying each other and literature is a crowd of books all shutting each other up, and the law seems to be either selection or annihilation, whether in reading or living. The only way to love everybody in this world seems to be to pick out a few in it, delegates of everybody, and use these few to read with, and to love and understand the world with, and to keep close to it, all one’s days.
The higher form one’s facts are put in in this world the fewer one needs. To know twelve extremely different souls utterly, to be able to borrow them at will, turn them on all knowledge, bring them to bear at a moment’s notice on anything one likes, is to be an educated, masterful man in the most literal possible sense. Except in mere matters of physical fact, things which are small enough to be put in encyclopedias and looked up there, a man with twelve deeply loved or deeply pitied souls woven into the texture of his being can flash down into almost any knowledge that he needs, or go out around almost any ignorance that is in his way, through all the earth. The shortest way for an immortal soul to read a book is to know and absorb enough other immortal souls, and get them to help. Any system of education which like our present prevailing one is so vulgar, so unpsychological, as to overlook the soul as the organ and method of knowledge, which fails to see that the knowledge of human souls is itself the method of acquiring all other knowledge and of combining and utilising it, makes narrow and trivial and impotent scholars as a matter of course.
Knowledge of human nature and of one’s self is the nervous system of knowledge, the flash and culmination, the final thoroughness of all the knowledge that is worth knowing and of all ways of knowing it.
It is all a theory, I suppose. I cannot prove anything with it. I dare say it is true that neither I nor any one else can get, by reading in this way, what I like to think I am getting, slowly, a cross-section of the universe. But it is something to get as time goes on a cross-section of all the human life that is being lived in it. It is something to take each knowledge that comes, strike all the keys of one’s friends on it—clear the keyboard of space on it. When one really does this, nothing can happen to one which does not or cannot happen to one in the way one likes. Events and topics in this world are determined to a large degree by circumstances—dandelions, stars, politics, bob-whites, acids, Kant, and domestic science—but personalities, a man’s means of seeing things, are determined only by the limits of his imagination. One’s knowledge of pictures, or of Kant, of bob-whites or acids, cannot be applied to every conceivable occasion, but nothing can happen in all the world that one cannot see or feel or delight in, or suffer in, through Charles Lamb’s soul if one has really acquired it. One can be a Charles Lamb almost anywhere toward almost anything that happens along, or a Robert Burns or a Socrates or a Heine, or an Amiel or a Dickens or Hugo or any one, or one can hush one’s soul one eternal moment and be the Son of God. To know a few men, to turn them into one’s books, to turn them into one another, into one’s self, to study history with their hearts, to know all men that live with them, to put them all together and guess at God with them—it seems to me that knowledge that is as convenient and penetrating, as easily turned on and off, as much like a light as this, is well worth having. It would be like taking away a whole world, if it were taken away from me—the little row of people I do my reading with. And some of them are supposed to be dead—hundreds of years.