VII—Reading the World Together
I
Focusing
There are only a few square inches—of cells and things, no one quite knows what—on a human face, but a man can see more of the world in those few inches, and understand more of the meaning of the world in them, put the world together better there, than in any other few inches that God has made. Even one or two faces do it, for a man, for most of us, when we have seen them through and through. Not a face anywhere—no one has ever seen one that was not a mirror of a whole world, a poor and twisted one perhaps, but a great one. The man that goes with it may not know it, may not have much to do with it. While he is waiting to die, God writes on him; but however it is, every man’s face (I cannot help feeling it when I really look at it) is helplessly great. It is one man’s portrait of the universe as he has found it—his portrait of a Whole. I have caught myself looking at crowds of faces as if they were rows of worlds. Is not everything I can know or guess or cry or sing written on faces? An audience is a kind of universe by itself. I could pray to one—when once the soul is hushed before it. If there were any necessity to select one place rather than another, any particular place to address a God in, I think I would choose an audience. Praying for it instead of to it is a mere matter of form. I cannot find a face in it that does not lead to a God, that does not gather a God in for me out of all space, that is not one of His assembling places. Many and many a time when heads were being bowed have I caught a face in a congregation and prayed to it and with it. Every man’s face is a kind of prayer he carries around with him. One can hardly help joining in it. It is sacrament to look at his face, if only to take sides in it, join with the God-self in it and help against the others. Whoever or Whatever He is, up there across all heaven, He is a God to me because He can be infinitely small or infinitely great as He likes. I will not have a God that can be shut up into any horizon or shut out of any face. When I have stood before audiences, have really realised faces, felt the still and awful thronging of them through my soul, it has seemed to me as if some great miracle were happening. It’s as if—but who shall say it?—Have you never stood, Gentle Reader, alone at night on the frail rim of the earth—spread your heart out wide upon the dark, and let it lie there,—let it be flocked on by stars? It is like that when Something is lifted and one sees faces. Faces are worlds to me. However hard I try, I cannot get a man, somehow, any smaller than a world. He is a world to himself, and God helping me, when I deal with him, he shall be a world to me. The dignity of a world rests upon him. His face is a sum-total of the universe. It is made by the passing of the infinite through his body. It is the mark of all things that are, upon his flesh.
What I like to believe is, that if there is an organic principle of unity like this in a little human life, if there is some way of summing up a universe in a man’s face, there must be some way of summing it up, of putting it together in his education. It is this summing a universe up for one’s self, and putting it together for one’s self, and for one’s own use, which makes an education in a universe worth while.
In other words, with a symbol as convenient, as near to him as his own face, a man need not go far in seeking for a principle of unity in focusing education. A man’s face makes it seem not unreasonable to claim that the principle of unity in all education is the man, that the single human soul is created to be its own dome of all knowledge. A man’s education may be said to be properly laid out in proportion as it is laid out the way he lays out his countenance. The method or process by which a man’s countenance is laid out is a kind of daily organic process of world-swallowing. What a man undertakes in living is the making over of all phenomena, outer sights and sounds into his own inner ones, the passing of all outside knowledge through himself. In proportion as he is being educated he is making all things that are, into his own flesh and spirit.
When one looks at it in this way it is not too much to say that every man is a world. He makes the tiny platform of his soul in infinite space, a stage for worlds to come to, to play their parts on. His soul is a little All-show, a kind of dainty pantomime of the universe.