The Lost Art of Reading. Gerald Stanley Lee

relation of the nearest, most sympathetic part of it to himself.

      After the usual first successful experiment a child makes in making connection with the universe, the next thing he learns is how much of the universe there is that is not good to eat. He does not quite understand it at first—the unswallowableness of things. He soon comes to the conclusion that, although it is worth while as a general principle, in dealing with a universe, to try to make the connection, as a rule, with one’s mouth, it cannot be expected to succeed except part of the time. He looks for another connection. He learns that some things in this world are merely made to feel, and drop on the floor. He discovers each of his senses by trying to make some other sense work. If his mouth waters for the moon, and he tries to smack his lips on a lullaby, who shall smile at him, poor little fellow, making his sturdy lunges at this huge, impenetrable world? He is making his connection and getting his hold on his world of colour and sense and sound, with infinitely more truth and patience and precision and delight than nine out of ten of his elders are doing or have ever been able to do, in the world of books.

      The books that were written to be breathed—gravely chewed upon by the literary infants of this modern day—who can number them?—books that were made to live in—vast, open clearings in the thicket of life—chapters like tents to dwell in under the wide heaven, visited like railway stations by excursion trains of readers—books that were made to look down from—serene mountain heights criticised because factories are not founded on them—in every reading-room hundreds of people (who has not seen them?), looking up inspirations in encyclopædias, poring over poems for facts, looking in the clouds for seeds, digging in the ground for sunsets; and everywhere through all the world, the whole huddling, crowding mob of those who read, hastening on its endless paper-paved streets, from the pyramids of Egypt and the gates of Greece, to Pater Noster Row and the Old Corner Book Store—nearly all of them trying to make the wrong connections with the right things or the right connections with things they have no connection with, and only now and then a straggler lagging behind perhaps, at some left-over bookstall, who truly knows how to read, or some beautiful, over-grown child let loose in a library—making connections for himself, who knows the uttermost joy of a book.

      In seeking for a fundamental principle to proceed upon in the reading of books, it seems only reasonable to assert that the printed universe is governed by the same laws as the real one. If a child is to have his senses about him—his five reading senses—he must learn them in exactly the way he learns his five living senses. The most significant fact about the way a child learns the five senses he has to live with is, that no one can teach them to him. We do not even try to. There are still—thanks to a most merciful Heaven—five things left in the poor, experimented-on, battered, modern child, that a board of education cannot get at. For the first few months of his life, at least, it is generally conceded, the modern infant has his education—that is, his making connection with things—entirely in his own hands. That he learns more these first few months of his life when his education is in his own hands, than he learns in all the later days when he is surrounded by those who hope they are teaching him something, it may not be fair to say; but while it cannot be said that he learns more perhaps, what he does learn, he learns better, and more scientifically, than he is ever allowed to learn with ordinary parents and ordinary teachers and text-books in the years that come afterward. With most of us, this first year or so, we are obliged to confess, was the chance of our lives. Some of us have lived long enough to suspect that if we have ever really learned anything at all we must have learned it then.

      The whole problem of bringing to pass in others and of maintaining in ourselves a vital and beautiful relation to the world of books, turns entirely upon such success as we may have in calling back or keeping up in our attitude toward books, the attitude of the new-born child when he wakes in the sunshine of the earth, and little by little on the edge of the infinite, groping and slow, begins to make his connections with the universe. It cannot be over-emphasised that this new-born child makes these connections for himself, that the entire value of having these connections made is in the fact that he makes them for himself. As between the books in a library that ought to be read, and a new life standing in it, that ought to read them, the sacred thing is not the books the child ought to read. The sacred thing is the way the child feels about the books; and unless the new life, like the needle of a magnet trembling there under the whole wide heaven of them all, is allowed to turn and poise itself by laws of attraction and repulsion forever left out of our hands, the magnet is ruined. It is made a dead thing. It makes no difference how many similar books may be placed within range of the dead thing afterward, nor how many good reasons there may be for the dead thing’s being attracted to them, the poise of the magnet toward a book, which is the sole secret of any power that a book can have, is trained and disciplined out of it. The poise of the magnet, the magnet’s poising itself, is inspiration, and inspiration is what a book is for.

      If John Milton had had any idea when he wrote the little book called Paradise Lost that it was going to be used mostly during the nineteenth century to batter children’s minds with, it is doubtful if he would ever have had the heart to write it. It does not damage a book very much to let it lie on a wooden shelf little longer than it ought to. But to come crashing down into the exquisite filaments of a human brain with it, to use it to keep a brain from continuing to be a brain—that is, an organ with all its reading senses acting and reacting warm and living in it, is a very serious matter. It always ends in the same way, this modern brutality with books. Even Bibles cannot stand it. Human nature stands it least of all. That books of all things in this world, made to open men’s instincts with, should be so generally used to shut them up with, is one of the saddest signs we have of the caricature of culture that is having its way in our modern world. It is getting so that the only way the average dinned-at, educated modern boy, shut in with masterpieces, can really get to read is in some still overlooked moment when people are too tired of him to do him good. Then softly, perhaps guiltily, left all by himself with a book, he stumbles all of a sudden on his soul—steals out and loves something. It may not be the best, but listening to the singing of the crickets is more worth while than seeming to listen to the music of the spheres. It leads to the music of the spheres. All agencies, persons, institutions, or customs that interfere with this sensitive, self-discovering moment when a human spirit makes its connection in life with its ideal, that interfere with its being a genuine, instinctive, free and beautiful connection, living and growing daily of itself—all influences that tend to make it a formal connection or a merely decorous or borrowed one, whether they act in the name of culture or religion or the state, are the profoundest, most subtle, and most unconquerable enemies of culture in the world.

      It is not necessary to contend for the doctrine of reading as one likes—using the word “likes” in the sense of direction and temperament—in its larger and more permanent sense. It is but necessary to call attention to the fact that the universe of books is such a very large and various universe, a universe in which so much that one likes can be brought to bear at any given point, that reading as one likes is almost always safe in it. There is always more of what one likes than one can possibly read. It is impossible to like any one thing deeply without discovering a hundred other things to like with it. One is infallibly led out. If one touches the universe vitally at one point, all the rest of the universe flocks to it. It is the way a universe is made.

      Almost anything can be accomplished with a child who has a habit of being eager with books, who respects them enough, and who respects himself enough, to leave books alone when he cannot be eager with them. Eagerness in reading counts as much as it does in living. A live reader who reads the wrong books is more promising than a dead one who reads the right ones. Being alive is the point. Anything can be done with life. It is the Seed of Infinity.

      While much might be said for the topical or purely scientific method in learning how to read, it certainly is not claiming too much for the human, artistic, or personal point of view in reading, that it comes first in the order of time in a developing life and first in the order of strategic importance. Topical or scientific reading cannot be fruitful; it cannot even be scientific, in the larger sense, except as, in its own time and in its own way, it selects itself in due time in a boy’s life, buds out, and is allowed to branch out, from his own inner personal reading.

      As the first and most important and most far-reaching of the arts