Chapter XVII: Among His Books

“_I put the duty of being read invariably on the author. If he is not read, whose fault is it?_”

--EMERSON’S JOURNAL, 1854.

Living as he did in the midst of the New England colleges, one may wonder why Emerson did not find a place in some chair of literature. Longfellow, Lowell and Holmes were professors. Why was not Emerson sought for as a teacher of youth?

The question occurred to him more than once, but he answers it in a characteristic fashion. The reason why he was not asked, he says, was because those in authority thought he was not fitted for such a position, and he had a suspicion that they were right.

I am ready to concur in this judgment. Professor Emerson, I am sure, would have been embarrassed by a row of students conscientiously taking notes and giving docile assent to his challenging sentences with a keen eye to the marks that were to be the reward of their attention.

Emerson’s attempts to be didactic were uniformly unfortunate. He could not command his moods for any systematic exposition. He confesses that the ways of the academic scholar were always an astonishment to him. His thoughts would not “stay put.” In the course of a year he managed to get through with a respectable amount of work, but it came occasionally. When he knew that he ought to write a lecture, it quickened his wits to write a poem for the _Dial_, and when the editor of the _Dial_ demanded a poem, it stirred his mind to a new effort at prose composition. Having found that this method answered best for his own constitution, he became reconciled to it, but it could not be recommended by a professor to his students. Neither could his favorite method of reading, beginning at the end of the book and reading backward, with wide intervals between the acts, be recommended, although it has its advantages as a method of testing. If there is a suspicion that the apples in a basket have been “deaconed,” the skeptical buyer will reverse the order in which they appear. The fruit looks different bottom side up.

But the chief disability of Emerson as a formal teacher of literature takes us back to the consideration to which attention was drawn in the first chapter. His mind has its real affinity to the thinkers of antiquity, to whom books were not an object of special interest. The proper study of mankind was man and nature. The book was only the record of some fellow-student, useful as stimulating his own thought.

“It seems meritorious to read; but from every thing but history or the works of the old commanding authors I come back with the conviction that the slightest _wood thought_, the least significant native emotion of my own, is more to me.”

Bibliolatry, in the wide sense of book worship, had no more uncompromising enemy. “We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.”

One can imagine Emerson’s intonation as he expressed his wonder that we would actually read four or five hundred pages for the sake of a golden sentence which might be concealed in them. The great art of the reader was to pass quickly over the desert place in order to linger long in the green oasis.

“The colleges, whilst they provide us with libraries, furnish no professor of books; and, I think, no chair is so much wanted. In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends, but they are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and leathern boxes; and, though they know us, and have been waiting two, ten, or twenty centuries for us,--some of them,--and are eager to give us a sign, and unbosom themselves, it is the law of their limbo that they must not speak until spoken to; and as the enchanter has dressed them, like battalions of infantry, in coat and jacket of one cut, by the thousand and ten thousand, your chance of hitting on the right one is to be computed by the arithmetical rule of Permutation and Combination,--not a choice out of three caskets, but out of half a million caskets all alike. But it happens in our experience, that in this lottery there are at least fifty or a hundred blanks to a prize. It seems, then, as if some charitable soul, after losing a great deal of time among the false books, and alighting upon a few true ones which made him happy and wise, would do a right act in naming those which have been bridges or ships to carry him safely over dark morasses and barren oceans, into the heart of sacred cities, into palaces and temples. This would be best done by those great masters of books who from time to time appear,--the Fabricii, the Seldens, Magliabechis, Scaligers, Mirandolas, Bayles, Johnsons, whose eyes sweep the whole horizon of learning. But private readers, reading purely for love of the book, would serve us by leaving each the shortest note of what he found.

“There are books; and it is practicable to read them, because they are so few. We look over with a sigh the monumental libraries of Paris, of the Vatican and the British Museum. In 1858 the number of printed books in the Imperial Library at Paris was estimated at eight hundred thousand volumes, with an annual increase of twelve thousand volumes; so that the number of printed books extant to-day may easily exceed a million. It is easy to count the number of pages which a diligent man can read in a day, and the number of years which human life in favourable circumstances allows to reading; and to demonstrate that, though he should read from dawn till dark, for sixty years, he must die in the first alcoves. But nothing can be more deceptive than this arithmetic, where none but a natural method is really pertinent. I visit occasionally the Cambridge Library, and I can seldom go there without renewing the conviction that the best of it all is already within the four walls of my study at home. The inspection of the catalogue brings me continually back to the few standard writers who are on every private shelf; and to these it can afford only the most slight and casual additions. The crowds and centuries of books are only commentary and elucidation, echoes and weakeners of these few great voices of Time.”

For the mere book worm he had little respect.

“And yet--and yet--I hesitate to denounce reading as aught inferior and mean. When visions of my books come over me, as I sit writing, when the remembrance of some poet comes, I accept it with pure joy, and quit my thinking as sad, lumbering work, and hasten to my little heaven.”

There were not many authors who were admitted to his little heaven. They were so congenial to his own mind that there was no question of mine and thine. It did not matter what the subject was so that it was treated in a suggestive way. The great purpose of literature is to stimulate the faculty of thinking.

“You say, ‘Your reading is irrelevant.’ Yes, for you, not for me. It makes no difference what I read. If it is irrelevant, I read it deeper. I read it till it is pertinent to Nature and the hour that now passes. A good scholar will find Aristophanes and Hafiz and Rabelais full of American history.”

His ambition for his own books was that they might be treated in the same fashion. “I would have my books read as I read my favorite books, not with explosion and astonishment, a marvel and a rocket, but as a friendly and agreeable influence.”

In his incursions into Book-land he followed the same method, or lack of method. He read what pleased him. The best guide to such books he thought was common fame. Certain books had pleased generations of readers. This proved that they were readable.

“The best rule of reading will be a method from nature, and not a mechanical one of hours and pages. It holds each student to a pursuit of his native aim, instead of a desultory miscellany. Let him read what is proper to him, and not waste his memory on a crowd of mediocrities. As whole nations have derived their culture from a single book,--as the Bible has been the literature as well as the religion of large portions of Europe,--as Hafiz was the eminent genius of the Persians, Confucius of the Chinese, Cervantes of the Spaniards; so, perhaps, the human mind would be a gainer if all the secondary writers were lost,--say, in England, all but Shakespeare, Milton and Bacon,--through the profounder study so drawn to those wonderful minds. With this pilot of his own genius, let the student read one, or let him read many, he will read advantageously. Doctor Johnson said: ‘Whilst you stand deliberating which book your son shall read first, another boy has read both; read anything five hours a day and you will soon be learned.’

“Nature is much our friend in this matter. Nature is always clarifying her water and her wine. No filtration can be so perfect. She does the same thing by books as by her gases and plants. There is always a selection in writers, and then a selection from the selection. All books that get fairly into the vital air of the world were written by the successful class, by the affirming and advancing class, who utter what tens of thousands feel though they cannot say.”

Emerson’s advice is that we should read famous books, but that we should not approach them as “classics,” but with the same familiarity with which we read the daily newspaper. Plato’s Socrates was not a dignified literary person. We can know him just as we know a shrewd Yankee farmer. He may be to the reader a character whose oddity delights us.

“He was plain as a Quaker in habit and speech, affected low phrases and illustrations from cocks and quails, soup-pans, and sycamore-spoons, grooms and farriers, and unnamable offices,--especially if he talked with any superfine person. He had a Franklin-like wisdom. Thus, he showed one who was afraid to go on foot to Olympia, that it was no more than his daily walk within doors, if continuously extended would easily reach.

“Plain old uncle as he was, with his great ears,--an immense talker,--the rumour ran, that on one or two occasions, in the war with Bœotia, he had shown a determination which had covered the retreat of a troupe; and there was some story that, under cover of folly, he had, in the city government, when one day he chanced to hold a seat there, evinced a courage in opposing singly the popular voice, which had well-nigh ruined him. He is very poor, but then he is hardy as a soldier, and can live on a few olives; usually, in the strictest sense, on bread and water, except when entertained by his friends. His necessary expenses were exceedingly small, and no one else could live as he did. He wore no under garment; his upper garment was the same for summer and winter; and he went barefooted; and it is said that, to procure the pleasure, which he loves, of talking at his ease all day with the most elegant and cultivated young men, he will now and then return to his shop and carve statues, good or bad, for sale. However that be, it is certain that he had grown to delight in nothing else than this conversation; and that, under his hypocritical pretense of knowing nothing, he attacks and brings down all the fine speakers, all the fine philosophers of Athens, whether natives, or strangers from Asia Minor and the islands. Nobody can refuse to talk with him, he is so honest, and really curious to know; a man who was willingly confuted if he did not speak the truth, and who willingly confuted others asserting what was false; and not less pleased when confuted than when confuting; for he thought not any evil happened to men of such magnitude as false opinion respecting the just and unjust. A pitiless disputant, who knows nothing, but the bounds of whose conquering intelligence no man had ever reached; whose temper was imperturbable; whose dreadful logic was always leisurely and sportive; so careless and ignorant as to disarm the wariest and draw them in the pleasantest manner into horrible doubts and confusion. But he always knew the way out; knew it, yet would not tell it. No escape; he drives them to terrible choices by his dilemmas, and tosses the Hippiases and Gorgiases, with their grand reputations, as a boy tosses his balls. The tyrannous realist!--Meno has discoursed a thousand times at length on virtue before many companies and very well, as it appeared to him; but, at this moment, he cannot even tell what it is,--this cramp-fish of a Socrates has so bewitched him.

“This hard-headed humourist, whose strange conceits, drollery and _bonhommie_ diverted the young patricians, whilst the rumour of his sayings and quibbles gets abroad every day, turns out, in the sequel, to have a probity as invincible as his logic, and to be either insane, or, at least, under cover of this play, enthusiastic in his religion.”

In like manner Shakespeare is not to be thought of in terms of mere literature. We forget the technicalities of his art. “He was a full man who liked to talk.”

“Some able and appreciating critics think no criticism on Shakespeare valuable that does not rest purely on the dramatic merit; that he is falsely judged as poet and philosopher. I think as highly as these critics of his dramatic merit, but still think it secondary. He was a full man who liked to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and images, which, seeking vent, found the drama next at hand. Had he been less we should have had to consider how well he filled his place, how good a dramatist he was,--and he is the best in the world. But it turns out that what he has to say is of that weight as to withdraw some attention from the vehicle; and he is like some saint whose history is to be rendered into all languages, into verse and prose, into songs and pictures, and cut up into proverbs, so that the occasion which gave the saint’s meaning the form of a conversation, or of a prayer, or of a code of laws, is immaterial compared with the universality of its application. So it fares with the wise Shakespeare and his book of life. He wrote the airs for all our modern music; he wrote the text of modern life; the text of manners; he drew the man of England and Europe; the father of the man in America; he drew the man, and described the day, and what is done in it; he read the hearts of men and women, their probity and their second thought and wiles; the wiles of innocence, and the transitions by which virtues and vices slide into their contraries; he could divide the mother’s part from the father’s part in the face of the child, or draw the fine demarcations of freedom and of fate; he knew the laws of repression which make the police of nature; and all the sweets and all the terrors of human lot lay in his mind as truly but as softly as the landscape lies on the eye. And the importance of this wisdom of life sinks the form, as of Drama or Epic, out of notice. ’Tis like making a question concerning the paper on which a king’s message is written.

“Shakespeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as he is out of the crowd.”

With this conception of literature Emerson did not accept the doctrine of those realists who think that the highest praise of a literary work is that it gives an exact transcript of actual life. We all are surrounded by actuality, we do not need to have some one reproduce for us what we have every day an opportunity to see for ourselves. What the man of genius does is to allow us to become acquainted with the working of his own mind. And the reader must make sure that it is the kind of mind that is worth knowing.