Part 14

In like manner, the shepherd with his flocks, the seaman with his compass and rudder, the potter with his clay, the weaver with his warp and woof, the sculptor with his marble, the painter with his canvas and pigments, the builder with his plans and scaffoldings, the chemist with his solvents and precipitants, the surgeon with his scalpel and antiseptics, the lawyer with his briefs, the preacher with his text, the fisherman with his nets,--all are more or less symbolical and appeal to the imagination.

In both prose and poetry, there is the suggestiveness of language used in a vivid, imaginative way, and the suggestiveness of words redolent of human association, words of deep import, as friend, home, love, marriage.

To me Shakespeare’s sonnets are the most suggestive sonnets in the language, because they so abound in words, images, allusions drawn from real life; they are the product of a mind vividly acted upon by near-by things, that uses language steeped in the common experience of mankind. The poet drew his material not from the strange and the remote, but, as it were, from the gardens and thoroughfares of life. Does not that poetry or prose work touch us the most nearly that deals with that with which we are most familiar? One thing that separates the minor poet from the major is that the thoughts and words of the minor poet are more of the nature of asides, or of the exceptional; he does not take in the common and universal; we are not familiar with the points of view that so agitate him; and he has not the power to make them real to us. I read poems every day that provoke the thought, “Well, that is all news to me. I do not know that heaven or that earth, those men or those women,”--all is so shadowy, fantastic, and unreal. But when you enter the world of the great poets you find yourself upon solid ground; the sky and the earth, and the things in them and upon them, are what you have always known, and not for a moment are you called upon to breathe in a vacuum, or to reverse your upright position to see the landscape. Dante even makes hell as tangible and real as the objects of our senses, if not more so.

Then there is the suggestiveness or kindling power of pregnant, compact sentences,--type thoughts, compendious phrases,--vital distinctions or generalizations, such as we find scattered through literature, as when De Quincey says of the Roman that he was great in the presence of man, never in the presence of nature; or his distinction between the literature of power and the literature of knowledge, or similar illuminating distinctions in the prose of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, Arnold, Goethe, Lessing. Arnold’s dictum that poetry is a criticism of life, is suggestive, because it sets you thinking to verify or to disprove it. John Stuart Mill was not what one would call a suggestive writer, yet the following sentence, which Mr. Augustine Birrell has lately made use of, makes a decided ripple in one’s mind: “I have learnt from experience that many false opinions may be exchanged for true ones without in the least altering the habits of mind of which false opinions are the result.” In a new home writer whose first books are but a year or two old, I find deeply suggestive sentences on nearly every page. Here are two or three of them: “In your inmost soul you are as well suited to the whole cosmical order and every part of it as to your own body. You belong here. Did you suppose that you belonged to some other world than this, or that you belonged nowhere at all, just a waif on the bosom of the eternities?... Conceivably He might have flung you into a world that was unrelated to you, and might have left you to be acclimated at your own risk; but you happen to know that this is not the case. You have lived here always; this is the ancestral demesne; for ages and ages you have looked out of these same windows upon the celestial landscape and the star-deeps. You are at home.” “How perverse and pathetic the desires of the animals! But they all get what they ask for,--long necks and trunks, flapping ears and branching horns and corrugated hides, anything, if only they will believe in life and try.”[1]

[1] _The Religion of Democracy._ By Charles Ferguson.

The intuitional and affirmative writers, to which class our new author belongs, and the most notable example of which, in this country, was Emerson, are, as a rule, more suggestive than the clearly demonstrating and logical writers. A challenge to the soul seems to mean more than an appeal to the reason; an audacious affirmation often irradiates the mind in a way that a logical sequence of thought does not. Science rarely suggests more than it says; but in the hands of an imaginative man like Maeterlinck a certain order of facts in natural history becomes fraught with deepest meaning, as may be witnessed in his wonderful “Life of the Bee,”--one of the most enchanting and poetic contributions to natural history ever made. Darwin’s work upon the earthworm, and upon the cross fertilization of flowers, in the same way seems to convey more truth to the reader than is warranted by the subject.

The writer who can touch the imagination has the key, at least one key, to suggestiveness. This power often goes with a certain vagueness and indefiniteness, as in the oft-quoted lines from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets:--

“the prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,”

a very suggestive, but not a clearly intelligible passage.

Truth at the centre, straightly put, excites the mind in one way, and truth at the surface, or at the periphery of the circle, indirectly put, excites it in another way and for other reasons; just as a light in a dark place, which illuminates, appeals to the eye in a different way from the light of day falling through vapors or colored glass, wherein objects become softened and illusory.

A common word may be so used as to have an unexpected richness of meaning, as when Coleridge speaks of those books that “find” us; or Shakespeare of the “marriage of true minds,” or Whitman of the autumn apple hanging “indolent-ripe” on the tree. Probably that language is the most suggestive that is the most concrete, that is drawn most largely from the experience of life, that savors of real things. The Saxon English of Walton or Barrow is more suggestive than the latinized English of Johnson or Gibbon.

Indeed, the quality I am speaking of is quite exceptional in the eighteenth-century writers. It is much more abundant in the writers of the seventeenth century. It goes much more with the vernacular style, the homely style, than with the polished academic style.

With the stream of English literature of the nineteenth century has mingled a current of German thought and mysticism, and this has greatly heightened its power of suggestiveness both in poetry and in prose. It is not in Byron or Scott or Campbell or Moore or Macaulay or Irving, but it is in Wordsworth and Coleridge and Landor and Carlyle and Ruskin and Blake and Tennyson and Browning and Emerson and Whitman,--a depth and richness of spiritual and emotional background that the wits of Pope’s and Johnson’s times knew not of. It seems as if the subconscious self played a much greater part in the literature of the nineteenth century than of the eighteenth, probably because this term has been recently added to our psychology.

As a rule it may be said that the more a writer condenses, the more suggestive his work will be. There is a sort of mechanical equivalent between the force expended in compacting a sentence and the force or stimulus it imparts again to the reader’s mind. A diffuse writer is rarely or never a suggestive one. Poetry is, or should be, more suggestive than prose, because it is the result of a more compendious and sublimating process. The mind of the poet is more tense, he uses language under greater pressure of emotion than the prose writer, whose medium of expression gives his mind more playroom. The poet often succeeds in focusing his meaning or emotion in a single epithet, and he alone gives us the resounding, unforgettable line. There are pregnant sentences in all the great prose writers; there are immortal lines only in the poets.

Whitman said the word he would himself use as most truly descriptive of his “Leaves of Grass” was the word suggestiveness. “I round and finish little, if anything; and could not consistently with my scheme. The reader will always have his or her part to do, just as much as I have had mine. I seek less to state or display my theme or thought, and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of the theme or thought--there to pursue your own flight.” These sentences themselves are suggestive, because they bring before the mind a variety of definite actions, as finishing a thing, displaying a thing, doing your part, pursuing your own flight, and yet the idea conveyed has a certain subtlety and elusiveness. The suggestiveness of his work as a whole probably lies in its blending of realism and mysticism, and in the art of it running parallel to or in some way tallying with the laws and processes of nature. It stimulates thought and criticism as few modern works do.

Of course the suggestiveness of any work--poem, picture, novel, essay--depends largely upon what we bring to it; whether we bring a kindred spirit or an alien one, a full mind or an empty one, an alert sense or a dull one. If you have been there, so to speak, if you have passed through the experience described, if you have known the people portrayed, if you have thought, or tried to think, the thoughts the author exploits, the work will have a deeper meaning to you than to one who is a stranger to these things. The best books make us acquainted with our own,--they help us to find ourselves. No book calls forth the same responses from two different types of mind. The wind does not awaken æolian-harp tones from cornstalks. No man is a hero to his valet. It is the deep hollows and passes of the mountains that give back your voice in prolonged reverberations. The tides are in the sea, not in the lakes and ponds. Words of deep import do not mean much to a child. The world of books is under the same law as these things. What any given work yields us depends largely upon what we bring to it.

XVI

ON THE RE-READING OF BOOKS

After one has passed the middle period of life, or even long before that, it is interesting to note what books he spontaneously recurs to and re-reads. Do his old favorites retain anything of their first freshness and stimulus for him, or have they become stale and trite, or completely outgrown? On taking down for the third or fourth time a favorite author the present winter, I said to myself, “There is no test of a book like that: can we, and do we, go back to it?” If not, is it at all probable that future generations will go back to it? One’s own experience may be looked upon as the experience of the race in miniature. If one cannot return to an author again and again, is it not pretty good evidence that his work has not the keeping qualities? One brings a different self, a different experience, to each re-reading, and thus in a measure brings the test of time and humanity. Yet there is always some difficulty in going back. It is difficult to go back, after some years, to live in a place from which one has once flitted. Somehow things look stale to us. Is it our dead selves that we encounter at every turn? Even the old homestead has a certain empty, pathetic, forlorn look. In the journey of life there is always more or less pain in going back; and I suppose it is partly because in every place in which we have lived we have had pain, and partly because there is some innate dislike in us to going back; the watchword of the soul is onward. If the book has given us pain, we cannot return to it; and our second or third or fourth pleasure in it will be in proportion to the depth and genuineness of our first. If our pleasure was in the novelty or strangeness or unexpectedness of the thing, it will not return, or only in small measure. Stories of exciting plots, I find, one can seldom re-read. One can go back to the “Vicar of Wakefield;” but can he read a second time “The Woman in White”? In such books there can be only one first time. Pluck out the heart of a mystery once, and it never grows again. Curiosity and astonishment make a poor foundation to build upon. The boy tires of his jumping-jack much sooner than of his top or ball. Only the normal, the sane, the simple, have the gift of long life; the strained, the intemperate, the violent will not live out half their days. We never outgrow our pleasure in simple, common things; if we do, so much the worse for us; and I think it will be found that those books to which we return and that stand the test of time have just this quality of simple, universal, every-day objects and experiences, with, of course, some glint of that light that never was on sea or land,--the light of the spirit. How many times does a reading man return to Montaigne, not to make a dead set at him, but to dip into him here and there, as one takes a cup of water from a spring! Human nature is essentially the same in all ages; and Montaigne put so much of his genuine, unaffected self into his pages, and put it with such vivacity of style, that all men find their own in his book; it is forever modern. We return to Bacon for a different reason,--the breadth and excellence of his wisdom, and his masterly phrases. The excellent is always modern; only, what is excellent?

A man of my own tastes re-reads Gilbert White two or three times, and dips into him many times more. It is easy to see why such a book lasts. So much writing there is that is like half-live coals buried in ashes; but here there are no ashes, no dead verbiage at all; we are in immediate contact with a live, simple, unaffected mind and personality. But this general description applies to all books that last; they all have at least one quality in common, living reality. What is special to White is his fine, scholarly style, busied with the common, homely things of everyday country life. The facts are just enough heightened and related to the life of this man to make them of perennial interest.

We probably go back to books from two motives: one, because we want to recover some past mood or experience to which the book may be the key; and the other from the perennial sources of pleasure and profit which a good book holds; in other words for association and inspiration.

I suppose it was with some such motives as these that I recently opened the “Autocrat” after the pages had been closed to me for over a quarter of a century. To recover as far as possible the spirit of the old days, I got out the identical numbers of the “Atlantic” in which I had first read those sparkling sentences. Life to me had the freshness and buoyancy of the morning hours in those first years of the great Boston magazine. I recall how impatiently I waited for each number to appear, and how, on one occasion at least, I ran all the way home from the post-office with the new issue in my hand, so eager was I to be alone with it in my room. I remember, too, how I resented the criticism of a schoolmate, then at Harvard College, who said that Holmes was not the great writer I fancied him to be, but only a _Boston_ great writer.

Well, I found places in the “Autocrat” that would not bear much pressure,--thin places where a lively rhetoric alone carried the mind over. And I found much that was sound and solid, that would not give way beneath one under any pressure he could bring.

When Dr. Holmes got hold of a real idea, as he often did, he could exploit it in as taking a way as any man who has lived; but frequently, I think, he got hold of sham or counterfeit ideas; and these, with all his skill in managing them, will not stand the pressure of time. (His classing poems with meerschaum pipes, as two things that improve with use, is an instance of what I mean by his sham ideas.)

As a writer Dr. Holmes always reminded me of certain of our bird songsters, such as the brown thrasher or the catbird, whose performances always seem to imply a spectator and to challenge his admiration. The vivacious doctor always seemed to write with his eye upon his reader, and to calculate in advance upon his reader’s surprise and pleasure. If the world finally neglects his work, it will probably be because it lacks the deep seriousness of the enduring productions.

Yet this test of re-reading is, of course, only an approximate one. So great an authority as Hume said it was sufficient to read Cowley once, but that Parnell after the fiftieth reading was as fresh as at the first. Now, for my part, I have to go to the encyclopædia to find out who Parnell was, but of Cowley even desultory readers like myself know something. His essays one can not only read, but re-read. They make one of the unpretentious minor books that one can put in his pocket and take with him on a walk to the woods, and nibble at under a tree or by a waterfall. Solitude seems to bring out its quality, as it does that of some people.

In our intellectual experience there can probably be but one first time. We go back to an author again and again; yet in all save a few exceptional cases, the pleasure of the second or third reading is only a lesser degree of the first. On the other hand, a favorite piece of music one may hear with the same keen delight any number of times. Is it because music is so largely made up of the sensuous, at least to a greater extent than is any other phase of art? It is the same with perfumes, flavors, colors: they never lose their first freshness to us. But a book or a poem we absorb and exhaust more or less,--that is, as to its intellectual content; and if we return to it, it is probably for some charm or quality that is to the spirit what music or perfume or color is to the senses, or what a congenial companion is to our social instincts. We shall not go back to a book that does not in some way, apart from its mere intellectual service, relate itself to our lives.

Time tries all things, and surely does it sift out the false and fugitive in books. Contemporary judgment is usually unreliable. It is like trial by jury, the local and accidental play so large a part in the verdict. The next age, or the next, forms the higher court of appeal. In the same way a man’s future self corrects or sets aside his verdict of to-day. If in later life he reaffirms his first opinion, the chances are that time is on his side. There is, of course, a sense or a degree in which any book that one has once read becomes a sucked orange; but some books become much more so than others. I doubt if many of us find books that, like a few people, become dearer to us as time passes, and to which we always return with increasing interest. And the reason is that one’s mental and spiritual outlook is not uniformly the same, while his social and human wants, such as his need of food and warmth, do remain about the same. One in a measure absorbs the book and puts it behind him. It is like a place he has visited: he has had the view, and until the impression is more or less obliterated he does not care to repeat it. But one’s friend is always a fresh stimulus: he keeps the past alive for him (which the book can also do in a measure), and he consecrates the present (which the book cannot do). Indeed, the sense of companionship which one can have in a book is but a faint echo or shadow of the companionship he has with persons. Yet this sense of companionship does adhere to some books much more vividly than to others. They are our books; they were written for us; they become a part of our lives, and they do not drop away from us with the lapse of time, as do others. Different readers have felt this way about such writers as Emerson, Carlyle, Wordsworth, and Whitman; but it may be a question how writers who make the intense personal appeal that these men make will wear. Are they too special and individual for future generations to recognize close kinship with? Will each age have its own doctors and saviors, and go back only for lovers and for the touch of nature that makes all the world kin? I know not; yet it is apparent that he who stands upon the common ground where all men stand, and by the magic of his genius makes poetry and romance out of that, has the best chance to endure. Only so far as the writers named, or any writers, represent states of mind and spirit that are likely to return again and again, and not to be outgrown in the progress of the race, are we likely to come back to them, or is the future likely to feel an interest in them. A path or a road becomes obsolete when there are no more travelers going that way; and an author becomes obsolete when there are no more readers going _his_ way.

For my part, I find myself returning again and again to the works of the men named, but, of course, with the cooled ardor that years bring to every man. I feel that I am less near the end with Whitman than with any of the others; he is the most stimulating to my intellect, because he suggests the most far-reaching problems. I re-read Wordsworth as I walk again along familiar paths that lead to the sequestered and the idyllic. I climb the Whitman mountain when I want a big view, and a wide horizon, and a glimpse of the unknown.

I think the service most of us get from Carlyle is a moral rather than an intellectual one. He was to his generation more like a much-needed drastic tonic remedy than like a simple hygienic regimen; we get the virtue of him now in a thousand ways without re-reading him. Hence there are more chances of our outgrowing him than of our outgrowing some lesser but more normal men. In a measure, I think, this is true of Emerson, but not entirely so. Emerson has charm; he has illusion; he has the witchery of the ideal. He is like the wise doctor whose presence, whose reassuring smile, and whose cheerful prognosis do more for the patient than anything else. We want him to come again and again. To re-read his first essays, his “Representative Men,” his “English Traits,” and many of his poems, is again to hear music, to breathe perfume, or to walk in a spring twilight when the evening star throbs above the hill.