The Lost Art of Reading

by Gerald Stanley Lee

In the presence of a great work of art—a work of inspiration or faith, there is no such thing as appreciation, without letting one’s self go.

II
The Subconscious Self

The criticism of Carlyle’s remark, “Editors are not here to say ‘How,’”—that it is “ungracious and tantalisingly elusive,” is a fair illustration of the mood to which the habit of analysis leads its victims. The explainer cannot let himself go. The puttering love of explaining and the need of explaining dog his soul at every turn of thought or thought of having a thought. He not only puts a microscope to his eyes to know with, but his eyes have ingrown microscopes. The microscope has become a part of his eyes. He cannot see anything without putting it on a slide, and when his microscope will not focus it, and it cannot be reduced and explained, he explains that it is not there.

The man of genius, on the other hand, with whom truth is an experience instead of a specimen, has learned that the probabilities are that the more impossible it is to explain a truth the more truth there is in it. In so far as the truth is an experience to him, he is not looking for slides. He will not mount it as a specimen and he is not interested in seeing it explained or focussed. He lives with it in his own heart in so far as he possesses it, and he looks at it with a telescope for that greater part which he cannot possess. The microscope is perpetually mislaid. He has the experience itself and the one thing he wants to do with it is to convey it to others. He does this by giving himself up to it. The truth having become a part of him by his thus giving himself up, it becomes a part of his reader, by his reader’s giving himself up.

Reading a work of genius is one man’s unconsciousness greeting another man’s. No author of the higher class can possibly be read without this mutual exchange of unconsciousness. He cannot be explained. He cannot explain himself. And he cannot be enjoyed, appreciated, or criticised by those who expect him to. Spiritual things are spiritually discerned, that is, experienced things are discerned by experience. They are “ungracious and tantalisingly elusive.”

When the man who has a little talent tells a truth he tells the truth so ill that he is obliged to tell how to do it. The artist, on the other hand, having given himself up to the truth, almost always tells it as if he were listening to it, as if he were being borne up by it, as by some great delight, even while he speaks to us. It is the power of the artist’s truth when he writes like this that it shall haunt his reader as it has haunted him. He lives with it and is haunted by it day after day whether he wants to be or not, and when a human being is obliged to live with a burning truth inside of him every day of his life, he will find a how for it, he will find some way of saying it, of getting it outside of him, of doing it, if only for the common and obvious reason that it burns the heart out of a man who does not. If the truth is really in a man—a truth to be done,—he finds out how to do it as a matter of self-preservation.

The average man no doubt will continue now as always to consider Carlyle’s “Editors are not here to say ‘How’” ungracious and tantalisingly elusive. He demands of every writer not only that he shall write the truth for every man but that he shall—practically—read it for him—that is, tell him how to read it—the best part of reading it. It is by this explaining the truth too much, by making it small enough for small people that so many lies have been made out of it. The gist of the matter seems to be that if the spirit of the truth does not inspire a man to some more eager way of finding out how to do a truth than asking some other man how to do it, it must be some other spirit. The way out for the explotterating or weak man does not consist in the scientist’s or the commentator’s how, or the artist’s how, or in any other strain of helping the ground to hold one up. It consists in the power of letting one’s self go.

To say nothing of appreciation of power, criticism of power is impossible, without letting one’s self go. Criticism which is not the faithful remembering and reporting of an unconscious mood is not worthy of being called criticism at all. A critic cannot find even the faults of a book who does not let himself go in it, and there is not a man living who can expect to write a criticism of a book until he has given himself a chance to have an experience with it, to write his criticism with. The larger part of the professional criticism of the ages that are past has proved worthless to us, because the typical professional critic has generally been a man who professes not to let himself go and who is proud of it. If it were not for the occasional possibility of his being stunned by a book—made unconscious by it,—the professional critic of the lesser sort would never say anything of interest to us at all, and even if he did, being a maimed and defective conscious person, the evidence that he was stunned is likely to be of more significance than anything he may say about the book that stunned him, or about the way he felt when he was being stunned. Having had very little practice in being unconscious, the bare fact is all that he can remember about it. The unconsciousness of a person who has long lost the habit of unconsciousness is apt to be a kind of groping stupor or deadness at its best, and not, as with the artist, a state of being, a way of being incalculably alive, and of letting in infinite life. It is a small joy that is not unconscious. The man who knows he is reading when he has a book in his hands, does not know very much about books.

People who always know what time it is, who always know exactly where they are, and exactly how they look, have it not in their power to read a great book. The book that comes to the reader as a great book is always one that shares with him the infinite and the eternal in himself.

There is a time to know what time it is, and there is a time not to, and there are many places small enough to know where they are. The book that knows what time it is, in every sentence, will always be read by the clock, but the great book, the book with infinite vistas in it, shall not be read by men with a rim of time around it. The place of it is unmeasured, and there is no sound that men can make which shall tick in that place.