The Lost Art of Reading

by Gerald Stanley Lee

This criticism, as a part of an estimate of Thomas Carlyle, is not only a criticism on itself and an autobiography besides, but it sums up, in a more or less characteristic fashion perhaps, what might be called the ultra-academic attitude in reading. The ultra-academic attitude may be defined as the attitude of sitting down and being told things, and of expecting all other persons to sit down and be told things, and of judging all authors, principles, men, and methods accordingly.

If the universe were what in most libraries and clubs to-day it is made to seem, a kind of infinite Institution of Learning, a Lecture Room on a larger scale, and if all the men in it, instead of doing and singing in it, had spent their days in delivering lectures to it, there would be every reason, in a universe arranged for lectures, why we should exact of those who give them, that they should make the truth plain to us—so plain that there would be nothing left for us to do, with truth, but to read it in the printed book, and then analyse the best analysis of it—and die.

It seems to be quite generally true of those who have been the great masters of literature, however, that in proportion as they have been great they have proved to be as ungracious and as tantalisingly elusive as the universe itself. They have refused, without exception, to bear down on the word “how.” They have almost never told men what to do, and have confined themselves to saying something that would make them do it, and make them find a way to do it. This something that they have said, like the something that they have lived, has come to them they know not how, and it has gone from them they know not how, sometimes not even when. It has been incommunicable, incalculable, infinite, the subconscious self of each of them, the voice beneath the voice, calling down the corridors of the world.

If a boy from the country were to stand in a city street before the window of a shop, gazing into it with open mouth, he would do more in five or six minutes to measure the power and calibre of the passing men and women than almost any device that could be arranged. Ninety-five out of a hundred of them, probably, would smile a superior smile at him and hurry on. Out of the remaining five, four would look again and pity him. One, perhaps, would honour and envy him.

The boy who, in a day like the present one, is still vital enough to forget how he looks in enjoying something, is not only a rare and refreshing spectacle, but he is master of the most important intellectual and moral superiority a boy can be master of, and if, in spite of teachers and surroundings, he can keep this superiority long enough, or until he comes to be a man, he shall be the kind of man whose very faults shall be remembered better and cherished more by a doting world than the virtues of the rest of us.

The most important fact—perhaps the only important fact—about James Boswell—the country boy of literature—is that, whatever may have been his limitations, he had the most important gift that life can give to a man—the gift of forgetting himself in it. In the Fleet Street of letters, smiling at him and jeering by him, who does not always see James Boswell, completely lost to the street, gaping at the soul of Samuel Johnson as if it were the show window of the world, as if to be allowed to look at a soul like this were almost to have a soul one’s self?

Boswell’s Life of Johnson is a classic because James Boswell had the classic power in him of unconsciousness. To book-labourers, college employees, analysis-hands of whatever kind, his book is a standing notice that the prerogative of being immortal is granted by men, even to a fool, if he has the grace not to know it. For that matter, even if the fool knows he is a fool, if he cares more about his subject than he cares about not letting any one else know it, he is never forgotten. The world cannot afford to leave such a fool out. Is it not a world in which there is not a man living of us who does not cherish in his heart a little secret like this of his own? We are bound to admit that the main difference between James Boswell and the rest, consists in the fact that James Boswell found something in the world so much more worth living for, than not letting the common secret out, that he lived for it, and like all the other great naïves he will never get over living for it.

Even allowing that Boswell’s consistent and unfailing motive in cultivating Samuel Johnson was vanity, this very vanity of Boswell’s has more genius in it than Johnson’s vocabulary, and the important and inspiring fact remains, that James Boswell, a flagrantly commonplace man in every single respect, by the law of letting himself go, has taken his stand forever in English literature, as the one commonplace man in it who has produced a work of genius. The main quality of a man of genius, his power of sacrificing everything to his main purpose, belonged to him. He was not only willing to seem the kind of fool he was, but he did not hesitate to seem several kinds that he was not, to fulfil his main purpose. That Samuel Johnson might be given the ponderous and gigantic and looming look that a Samuel Johnson ought to have, Boswell painted himself into his picture with more relentlessness than any other author that can be called to mind, except three or four similarly commonplace and similarly inspired and self-forgetful persons in the New Testament. There has never been any other biography in England with the single exception of Pepys, in which the author has so completely lost himself in his subject. If the author of Johnson’s life had written his book with the inspiration of not being laughed at (which is the inspiration that nine out of ten who love to laugh are likely to write with), James Boswell would never have been heard of, and the burly figure of Samuel Johnson would be a blur behind a dictionary.

It may be set down as one of the necessary principles of the reading habit that no true and vital reading is possible except as the reader possesses and employs the gift of letting himself go. It is a gift that William Shakespeare and James Boswell and Elijah and Charles Lamb and a great many other happy but unimportant people have had in common. No man of genius—a man who puts his best and his most unconscious self into his utterance—can be read or listened to or interpreted for one moment without it. Except from those who bring to him the greeting of their own unconscious selves, he hides himself. He gives himself only to those with whom unconsciousness is a daily habit, with whom the joy of letting one’s self go is one of the great resources of life. This joy is back of every great act and every deep appreciation in the world, and it is the charm and delight of the smaller ones. On its higher levels, it is called genius and inspiration. In religion it is called faith. It is the primal energy both of art and religion.

Probably only the man who has very little would be able to tell what faith is, as a basis of art or religion, but we have learned some things that it is not. We know that faith is not a dead-lift of the brain, a supreme effort either for God or for ourselves. It is the soul giving itself up, finding itself, feeling itself drawn to its own, into infinite space, face to face with strength. It is the supreme swinging-free of the spirit, the becoming a part of the running-gear of things. Faith is not an act of the imagination—to the man who knows it. It is infinite fact, the infinite crowding of facts, the drawing of the man-self upward and outward, where he is surrounded with the infinite man-self. Perhaps a man can make himself not believe. He can not make himself believe. He can only believe by letting himself go, by trusting the force of gravity and the law of space around him. Faith is the universe flowing silently, implacably, through his soul. He has given himself up to it. In the tiniest, noisiest noon his spirit is flooded with the stars. He is let out to the boundaries of heaven and the night-sky bears him up in the heat of the day.