Tenth, those who are performers of music in other arts.
Eleventh, those who are creators of music with their own lives.
Twelfth, those who perform and interpret in their own lives the music they hear in other lives.
Thirteenth, those who create anything whatever and who love perfection in it.
Fourteenth, “The Public.”
Fifteenth, the Professional Critic—almost inevitably at the fifteenth remove from the heart of things because he is the least creative, unless he is a man of genius, or has pluck and talent enough to work his way through the other fourteen moods and sum them up before he ventures to criticise.
The principles that have been employed in putting life into literature must be employed on drawing life out of it. These principles are the creative principles—principles of joy. All influences in education, family training, and a man’s life that tend to overawe, crowd out, and make impossible his own private, personal, daily habit of creative joy are the enemies of books.
II
Private Road: Dangerous
The impotence of the study of literature as practised in the schools and colleges of the present day turns largely on the fact that the principle of creative joy—of knowing through creative joy—is overlooked. The field of vision is the book and not the world. In the average course in literature the field is not even the book. It is still farther from the creative point of view. It is the book about the book.
It is written generally in the laborious unreadable, well-read style—the book about the book. You are as one (when you are in the book about the book) thrust into the shadow of the endless aisles of Other Books—not that they are referred to baldly, or vulgarly, or in the text. It is worse than this (for this could be skipped). But you are surrounded helplessly. Invisible lexicons are on every page. Grammars and rhetorics, piled up in paragraphs and between the lines thrust at you everywhere. Hardly a chapter that does not convey its sense of struggling faithfulness, of infinite forlorn and empty plodding—and all for something a man might have known anyway. “I have toted a thousand books,” each chapter seems to say. “This one paragraph [page 1993—you feel it in the paragraph] has had to have forty-seven books carried to it.” Not once, except in loopholes in his reading which come now and then, does the face of the man’s soul peep forth. One does not expect to meet any one in the book about the book—not one’s self, not even the man who writes it, nor the man who writes the book that the book is about. One is confronted with a mob.