I CREATIVE READING AN INTRODUCTION In Books lies the soul of the whole Past Greater than any individual business, or any corporation or industry, is the coöperative business of human life. It is not a matter for one nation or race alone; it affects all races and every nation. It is not a matter of tariffs or international commerce or great navies or territorial possessions. Congresses and Parliaments cannot determine it by the laws they pass or the constitutions they adopt. The business cannot be closed up or sold; it must continue as long as there is any civilization on the earth. The partners in the business are the men and women of every portion of the civilized world. From generation to generation the responsibility for conducting it is transmitted. One day you must do your part in carrying it on or must prove unworthy of a share in the greatest of human enterprises. In the two sentences from Carlyle printed at the head of this Introduction you find a statement of what literature may contribute to your understanding of what past generations have contributed to make the present what it is. Through books, the past speaks to us. Thirty centuries ago a highly civilized people lived in Egypt. We knew some things about them: the names of their monarchs, the extent of their territories, their wealth, the terror they inspired among subject peoples. But with the discovery, not long ago, of the tomb of one of their kings, the life of that far away time became a new thing to us. The clothes they wore, their surpassing skill in certain forms of art, the marvels of their household furniture, details about their life and ideals-these things had been hidden or only partly guessed. The discoveries of the Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter, however, brought that old life back into human consciousness. It became the subject of conversation in every household. Preserved during ages of oblivion, it was suddenly brought to light. Such a re-creation of the past is available also through books. "A good book," said John Milton, "is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life." Let us read a little farther: "Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them." The essence, that is, of a civilization, the contribution it has made to the business of human living, is preserved in books, like a precious elixir in a vial. In order for us to understand this business in which we shall all be partners, we shall need to know these vials and their use. II In Books we find the dead as it were living; in Books we foresee things to come. These are the masters who instruct us without rods and ferules, without hard words and anger. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if investigating you interrogate them, they conceal nothing; if you mistake them, they never grumble; if you are ignorant, they cannot laugh at you. -RICHARD DE BURY This volume of Literature and Life is so planned as to show the service of books as a means for re-creating the past. We are to be concerned chiefly with what literature reveals of the life and ideals of certain great periods that still influence the modern world. There is, first, the Age of Chivalry, with which we associate certain virtues: loyalty, regard for women, attention to grave, sweet, formal courtesy, and the search for fame through exploits involving great personal danger. A later period was marked by eagerness for exploration and discovery. Daring navigators encircled the earth, bringing back strange stories of lands previously unknown. In Parts I and II of this book you will find many selections that illustrate those stirring old times, so that you will be able to live, in imagination, amid scenes unfamiliar today. Part III is devoted to a series of selections that illustrate the growth of the spirit of nationalism from Shakespeare's time to the present. Love of country is one of the sincerest of human emotions, and great writers in all times have given expression to this emotion or have defined it in various ways. Part IV represents the service of literature in describing and interpreting social customs and manners in an advanced civilization. Pioneering and the hardships of establishing a government have given place to settled conditions. Wealth and leisure are more generally enjoyed than ever before. Men study their fellows and their own minds, sometimes seriously, at other times humorously or satirically. In Part IV, essays, letters, and dramas are chosen to reflect some of these uses of literature. You see, then, how literature helps to re-create the past. "In Books we find the dead as it were living." The romance of chivalry and of the age of discovery, the love of country that intensifies the great scenes of Shakespeare, the absurdities as well as the virtues of Sir Roger de Coverley and his time-these become alive again through the magic that is in books. Books also make the present live for us; that is, they piece out our fragmentary individual experiences, show us what is interesting and what is perplexing in our own day, and how that day grows out of what went before and stretches out its hand to shape what is to come. So Part V of this book is called TODAY. In it we find material which enables us to compare our age with former periods; we find proof that literature may be produced today as well as in King Arthur's time or Shakespeare's; and we find statements of some of the problems and ideals of our time. III Give a man this taste [for good books], and the means of gratifying it, and you can hardly fail of making a happy man. You place him in contact with the best society in every period of history-with the wisest, the wittiest, the tenderest, the bravest, and the purest characters who have adorned humanity. You make him a denizen of all nations, a contemporary of all ages. -SIR JOHN HERSCHEL If literature is a means for re-creating the past and creating our present and future, if he who reads good books becomes through their magic an inhabitant of all nations and a contemporary of all ages, how may we secure these benefits? The answer is through creative reading. Reading, in the true sense, is not just pronouncing and defining words. It is not even "gathering thought from the printed page." It is a form of experience. It enlarges our sympathies, broadens the range of our interests, fills the mind with pictures. To have this experience, it is necessary to see, to feel, and to know. 1. It is necessary to see. This means that the imagination, which is the eye of the mind, must be alert and intelligent. In King Henry the Fifth, a play by Shakespeare that you are to read in this book, the dramatist speaks of the difficulty of compressing the events of a long and brilliant reign into the limits of a two hours' play, and of the impossibility of giving any adequate picture of great battles and mighty actions on the narrow compass of a London stage. So, he says, one must piece out what is presented by the use of the imagination. At the beginning of each act, of this play, Chorus reminds us of the necessity of coöperation with the dramatist and actors by the use of our imagination. We are to Sit and see, Minding true things by what their mockeries be. When Henry sets sail for France, Chorus urges us: Play with your fancies, and in them behold Upon the hempen tackle ship-boys climbing; Hear the shrill whistle which doth order give To sounds confused; behold the threaden sails, Borne with the invisible and creeping wind, Draw the huge bottoms through the furrowed sea We are to stand upon the shore, And behold A city on the inconstant billows dancing; It is something of the poet's imagination, then, that Shakespeare asks the spectators of his play to bring as a supplement to the action that takes place upon the stage. The great dramatist wrote often of the imagination. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, you remember, he speaks of the poet thus: The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. In this same comedy, some rustics present a rude play in honor of the wedding. The bride speaks scornfully of their efforts: "This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard." But Theseus replies: "The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.” This means that to Shakespeare the best efforts of the poet or dramatist to express the beauty that he conceives, are but as shadows of that beauty, and that the imagination of the reader or the spectator must come in to amend the imperfections of language or action. In this is the first great step toward creative reading. Such reading is active, not passive. You have a part to perform; the whole responsibility does not rest on the novelist or the author of the poem or the drama. His work must be amended or supplemented by your own picture-making power. It follows, therefore, that of two people who read Shakespeare's play or see it acted, one may get far more than the other. He who reads merely for the story, to know the names of the characters and the deeds which they performed, may know the plot, and may be able to pronounce and define every word that is used. But he who adds to these things his own power of imagination sees a greater significance than the words convey to an inactive intelligence. Such a power is born in all of us. Little children, with their make-believe, possess it in a high degree. As we grow older we must keep it active through constant use. With it, book and study, the room in which we sit, those by whom we are surrounded, fade into a dim background or altogether disappear, and on the stage of imagination the picture-making power bodies forth the forms of things unknown. What you or I may experience in the flesh is little compared with what we may add to our experience through creative reading. 2. It is necessary to feel. Literature expresses the emotion or feeling of the writer and seeks to call forth the same emotion in the reader. When the psalmist says: "The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth His handiwork," he is not merely stating what he believes to be the fact about the universe, like an astronomer, but is expressing a deeply felt emotion. The botanist gives you a scientific description of a flower; to the poet the same flower may symbolize the swift passing of all earthly beauty. The one deals with fact; the other with feeling. Reading aloud passages of poetry or of rhythmical prose will help you to re-create the feeling which inspired the writer. It is the music of language, of words so chosen and so arranged as to produce an effect that is higher than the mere conveying of information. Even in silent reading, if you give attention to the matter, something of this effect may be gained. It must also be remembered that literature is characterized by its perception of beauty. Beauty is not merely seen; it also inspires feeling. It is the beauty of the star-sown heavens that leads to the feeling of the presence of God: "The heavens declare the glory of God." Another Old Testament writer exclaims: "They that be wise shall shine as the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars, forever and ever." Here the beauty of the skies at night brings the conception of something that is permanent amid all earthly change. Since the time of that old Egyptian monarch whose burial place has been recently discovered, countless generations have lived and died, empires have risen and have crumbled into dust, but the same stars that shone over the city in which he dwelt appear nightly in the sky. Ages ago, this permanence of the stars suggested to one who loved their beauty the way in which human ideals and actions live on for centuries after the passing of the men and women who embodied them: "They that be wise shall shine as the firmament, as the stars, forever and ever." And these words, like the stars, still remain. Beauty of the heavens, beauty of noble human action, beauty of language in which such action is immortalized, these live on to find response in us. Great literature seizes upon and clothes in the garb of language the myriad forms of beauty that fill the world. To read such literature is to open gateways through which we may explore that beauty. Finally, to vision, feeling, and the perception of beauty must be added vividness and power of expression. Sight, emotion, beauty must be intensely realized. This does not mean the use of noisy or sensational forms of expression. The opening stanza of Gray's "Elegy”— The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea, The plowman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me is as quiet as the scene which it depicts, yet this very quiet renders the picture clear-cut and charged with feeling. You will find many illustrations of this quality of literature in this book. Thus far we have discussed the imaginative and the emotional qualities of literature and the relation of these qualities to creative reading. Literature differs from ordinary written language in proportion as it possesses these characteristics. But the chief thing for us to remember is that no matter how high in imaginative and emotional power a certain piece of literature may be, it avails us nothing unless we bring to our reading of it similar powers. We re-create the picture, the passion, the beauty felt by the author or characteristic of the persons or actions or places created by him. It is a reciprocal process. We receive but as we give. 3. It is necessary to know. We have to determine what the writer is saying as well as surrender ourselves to the pictures or the emotions that his writing call forth. Therefore a fundamental principle in learning the art of creative reading is the development of power to determine the writer's thought. Sometimes this is easy to do; sometimes it is difficult. A poem, for example, may express a mood, a feeling, in musical language, without any particular difficulty of thought. It may, on the other hand, contain thoughts that are hard to grasp because of their depth, or the compressed form in which they appear, or because of the metrical form. of the poem. A light, chatty essay is no. more difficult to follow than good conversation. But another essay may treat of some aspect of science or religion or criticism; or define some principle of govern-ment or some epoch in history, in such a way as to necessitate careful study if we are to make the thought which it contains our own. It follows from this that we do not read all printed matter at the same rate of speed or with the same ease. Learning to read involves all the powers of our minds. In order to assist you in gaining reading-power, the next section is made up of suggestions that you may apply to your reading of this book. IV Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. -LORD BACON The first step in reading is getting the thought-learning what the writer actually says. How fully and minutely you should attend to this will depend on your purpose. Never read anything without a purpose. Indeed, you would do well to think out pretty definitely what your purpose is. Otherwise, you may waste a great deal of time and fall into habits that will hamper you all your life. The quotation from Lord Bacon above mentions three purposes that are distinct. In all the reading of this volume, and in all your later reading you should know which one of the three you are actually pursuing. For example, on page 103 you are told of some volumes dealing with medieval life and customs. It is suggested that you will find in A History of Everyday Things in England a number of passages that will light up the background of the Idylls of the King. With the purpose of finding these for a report to your classmates or for enriching your own pleasure in Tennyson's poems, you would not read page after page. On the contrary, you would glance rapidly at the titles at the top of each page or at the illustrations until you found the really pertinent matter. When the treatment of that topic was completed, you would again turn the pages rapidly until you came to another discussion bearing on knighthood or chivalry. You will of course have in mind the features of the Idylls about which you wish information, for otherwise you would not know when to stop for careful reading. You have to judge at every pause whether the matter is important for your purpose. The second kind of reading, in which you "swallow" the book, requires a somewhat different attitude on your part. Here you ought, more than elsewhere, to read rapidly. Never pronounce the words to yourself, much less read aloud. Run your eye along the line, picking up the phrases and sentences speedily. For your purpose in such reading is not to master details but to grasp the general outlines. For example, on the same page, 103, you are referred to books by Lanier, Pollard, or Pyle for accounts of Arthurian romance parallel in several ways to Tennyson's poetic version. These should not be read "curiously," or as we should say, carefully. A rapid reading will reveal all the differences in the outline of the story or the way in which the characters are treated that you will need to know. In your personally selected reading for entertainment you should follow the same procedure; you should keep your eye on the drift of thought or the relations of the characters or on some other general feature until you come to passages that merit closer attention. In reading such material, of which there is much recommended to you throughout the volume, you ought to try to increase your speed week by week. You can do this best by keeping a record of how many pages or words you can read in a minute. Of course, you should also watch whether you have caught the essentials. For in all reading you have to judge about what is important and what is of less significance, and you must be sure of getting from the chapter or book what is essential to your purpose. The most profitable reading is of books "to be chewed and digested." Here your purpose is usually to grasp the exact mean ing of the author. Some aids in accomplishing this purpose are here set down because they have been found extremely useful. 1. Review rapidly in your mind any notions you may have in the field in which the reading lies. For example, on page 107 you come upon a poem "Miniver Cheevy." You have just completed a reading of the Idylls. Swiftly you think of the high ideals of Gareth, of the pathetic devotion of Elaine, of the destruction of the kingdom by the selfishness and disloyalty of the knights. You look to see what there was in that world that interested Miniver Cheevy. 2. Make a rapid preliminary survey of the chapter or section you are next to cover. It is to help you in such a survey that the introductions in this volume are provided by men who have read very widely for long years and who from their experience may quickly set your feet in the right path. But whether you have this guidance or not, you should always briefly take stock of your ideas and make the rapid preliminary survey. 3. In a careful rereading, judge of what is important in accomplishing the writer's purpose or developing what seems to be his controlling idea. These important |