Books and Culture | Page 7

Hamilton Wright Mabie
work it may concern itself with the highest
things as readily as with those which are insignificant and paltry.
Whoever can command his meditations in the streets, along the country
roads, on the train, in the hours of relaxation, can enrich himself for all
time without effort or fatigue; for it is as easy and restful to think about
great things as about small ones. A certain lover of books made this
discovery years ago, and has turned it to account with great profit to
himself. He thought he discovered in the faces of certain great writers a
meditative quality full of repose and suggestive of a constant

companionship with the highest themes. It seemed to him that these
thinkers, who had done so much to liberate his own thought, must have
dwelt habitually with noble ideas; that in every leisure hour they must
have turned instinctively to those deep things which concern most
closely the life of men. The vast majority of men are so absorbed in
dealing with material that they appear to be untouched by the general
questions of life; but these general questions are the habitual concern of
the men who think. In such men the mind, released from specific tasks,
turns at once and by preference to these great themes, and by quiet
meditation feeds and enriches the very soul of the thinker. And the
quality of this meditation determines whether the nature shall be
productive or sterile; whether a man shall be merely a logician, or a
creative force in the world. Following this hint, this lover of books
persistently trained himself, in his leisure hours, to think over the books
he was reading; to meditate on particular passages, and, in the case of
dramas and novels, to look at characters from different sides. It was not
easy at first, and it was distinctively work; but it became instinctive at
last, and consequently it became play. The stream of thought, once set
in a given direction, flows now of its own gravitation and reverie,
instead of being idle and meaningless, has become rich and fruitful. If
one subjects "The Tempest," for instance, to this process, he soon
learns it by heart; first he feels its beauty; then he gets whatever definite
information there is in it; as he reflects, its constructive unity grows
dear to him, and he sees its quality as a piece of art; and finally its rich
and noble disclosure of the poet's conception of life grows upon him
until the play belongs to him almost as much as it belonged to
Shakespeare. This process of meditation habitually brought to bear on
one's reading lays bare the very heart of the book in hand, and puts one
in complete possession of it.
This process of meditation, if it is to bear its richest fruit, must be
accompanied by a constant play of the imagination, than which there is
no faculty more readily cultivated or more constantly neglected. Some
readers see only a flat surface as they read; others find the book a door
into a real world, and forget that they are dealing with a book. The real
readers get beyond the book, into the life which it describes. They see
the island in "The Tempest;" they hear the tumult of the storm; they

mingle with the little company who, on that magical stage, reflect all
the passions of men and are brought under the spell of the highest
powers of man's spirit. It is a significant fact that in the lives of men of
genius the reading of two or three books has often provoked an
immediate and striking expansion of thought and power. Samuel
Johnson, a clumsy boy in his father's bookshop, searching for apples,
came upon Petrarch, and was destined henceforth to be a man of letters.
John Keats, apprenticed to an apothecary, read Spenser's
"Epithalamium" one golden afternoon in company with his friend,
Cowden Clarke, and from that hour was a poet by the grace of God. In
both cases the readers read with the imagination, or their own natures
would not have kindled with so sudden a flash. The torch is passed on
to those only whose hands are outstretched to receive it. To read with
the imagination, one must take time to let the figures reform in his own
mind; he must see them with great distinctness and realise them with
great definiteness. Benjamin Franklin tells us, in that Autobiography
which was one of our earliest and remains one of our most genuine
pieces of writing, that when he discovered his need of a larger
vocabulary he took some of the tales which he found in an odd volume
of the "Spectator" and turned them into verse; "and after a time, when I
had pretty well forgotten
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