It is impossible not to see in contemporary journalism a slaughter-house for mind. Here we have a great whale that browses on the young and eats them by thousands. This is the seamy side of popular education. The low level of the class at the dame’s school keeps the bright boys back and makes dunces of them.
We have been dealing in all this matter with one of the deepest facts of life, to wit, the influence that society at large has in cutting down and narrowing the development of the individual. The newspaper business displays the whole operation very vividly; but we may see the same thing happening in the other walks of life. There arrives a time in the career of most men when their powers become fixed. Men seem to expand to definite shapes, like those Japanese cuttings that open out into flowers and plants when you drop them into warm water. After reaching his saturation point each man fills his niche in society and changes little. He goes on doing whatever he was engaged upon at the time he touched his limit.
We almost believe that every man has his predestinate size and shape, and that some obscure law of growth arrests one man at thirty and the next at forty years of age. This is partly true; but the law is not obscure. It is not because the men stop growing that they repeat themselves, but they stop growing because they repeat themselves. They cease to experiment; they cease to search. The lawyer adopts routine methods; the painter follows up his success with an imitation of his success; the writer finds a recipe for style or plot. Every one saves himself the trouble of re-examining the contents of his own mind. He has the best possible reason for doing this. The public will not pay for his experiments as well as it will for his routine work. But the laws of nature are deaf to his reasons. Research is the price of intellectual growth. If you face the problems of life freshly and squarely each morning, you march. If you accept any solution as good enough, you drop.
For there is no finality and ending place to intellect. Examine any bit of politics, any law-case, or domestic complication, until you understand your own reasons for feeling as you do about it. Then write the matter down carefully and conclusively, and you will find that you have done no more than restate the problem in a new form. The more complete your exposition, the more loudly it calls for new solution. The masterly analysis of Tolstoi, his accurate explanations, his diagnosis and dissection of human life, leave us with a picture of society that for unsolved mystery competes with the original. But the point lies here. You must lay bare your whole soul in the statement you make. You must resolutely set down everything that touches the matter. Until you do this, the question refuses to assume its next shape. You cannot flinch and qualify in your first book, and speak plainly in your second.
It is the act of utterance that draws out the powers in a man and makes him a master of his own mind. Without the actual experience of writing Lohengrin, Wagner could not have discovered Parsifal. The works of men who are great enough to get their whole thought uttered at each deliverance, form a progression like the deductions of a mathematician. These men are never satisfied with a past accomplishment. Their eyes are on questions that beckon to them from the horizon. Their faculties are replenished with new energy because they seek. They are driving their ploughs through a sea of thought, intent, unresting, resourceful, creative. They are discoverers, and just to the extent that lesser men are worth anything they are discoverers too.
Beauty and elevation flash from the currents set up by intense speculation. Beauty is not the aim of the writer. His aim must be truth. But beauty and elevation shine out of him while he is on the quest. His mind is on the problem; and as he unravels it and displays it, he communicates his own spirit, as it were incidentally, as it were unwittingly, and this is the part that goes out from him and does his work in the world.
V
PRINCIPLES
Speech is a very small part of human intercourse. Indeed speech is often not connected with the real currents of intercourse. A comic actor has made you happy before he has uttered a word. This is by the responsive vibration of your apparatus to his. The external speech and gesture help the transfer of power, and that is all they do. The communion, upon whatever plane of being it takes place, is a contagion, and goes forward by leaps and darts, like the action of frost on a window-pane. An angry friend comes into my room, and before he has uttered a word I am in a blaze of anger. A baby too young to speak does some naughty thing. I remonstrate with him in a rational way. Perhaps I repeat to him Kant’s maxim from the Critique of Practical Reason. The child understands at once and is grateful for the treatment. Now, observe this, that if I said the same thing to a grown man in the same tone, it would be to the tone and not to the argument that he would respond.
The exchange of energy between man and man is so rapid that language becomes a bystander. It is like the passage of the electrical current,—we receive an impression or a message, or twenty messages at once. All this is the result of suggestion and inference. No strange phenomenon is here alluded to. The situation is the normal and constant situation whenever two human beings meet. The only mystery about it is that our senses should be so much more acute than we knew. Ask a man to dinner and talk to him about the Suez Canal, and the next morning your wife will be apt to give a truer account of him than you can give. She has been knitting in the corner and thinking about the best place to buy children’s shoes, but she knows which coils in her brain have been played upon by the brain of the stranger. The reason your wife knows that your Suez friend is no saint, is that she feels that certain strings of the benevolent harp that is sounding in herself are not being reinforced. There are dead notes in him.
The sensitiveness of children is so common a thing that we forget its explanation. It is just because the child cannot follow the argument, that he is free from the illusion that the argument is the main point. The lobes of his brain get a shock and respond to it ingenuously.