know men of light and reading was exhilarating, and in the truest sense, inspiring. But I soon found that really great men were extraordinarily rare, and even famous names often covered commonplace natures.
The chief delights of life have come to me from books. I remember reading once of the death of a princess of the Visconti in the early Renaissance, 1420 or thereabouts. She left great possessions in lands, vineyards and jewelry: she did not even trouble to enumerate them, but willed them away in blocks.
When she came to her books, however, she bequeathed them one by one to her dearest, adding a word of description or affection to each volume, for they had been her 'most treasured possessions'; she had four books in all and she had read every one of them hundreds of times.
That is how books ought to be regarded, but now they are so cheap that we have lost the sense of their inestimable value.
There is a subtle compensation in everything, and the cheapening of books, the vulgarization of knowledge, has a great deal to answer for. We have forgotten how to use books, and they revenge themselves on us.
First of all, reading usually prevents thinking. You want to know how light is transmitted from the sun, let us say. Instead of thinking over the matter, you pick up a book on physics to learn that light is transmitted by the ether at the rate of some fourteen million miles a second. The ordinary man is satisfied with this farrago of futilities. But the man who has taught himself to think pauses and asks: 'What is this ether?' He then learns that the ether is but a name invented to conceal our ignorance. We know nothing about the ether; we take it for granted that light cannot be transmitted through a vacuum.
Consequently we have to assume some attenuated form of atmosphere gifted with the power of transmitting light and heat. The whole hypothesis is just as imaginary as that of a personal God and not nearly so uplifting and comforting.
The whole theory of light must be reconsidered. Newton's theory has been accepted on insufficient grounds. We all know that Goethe rejected it and spent fourteen years in evolving a theory of his own. Physicists and men of science rejected Goethe's explanation and most men thought of it as the aberration of a man of genius; but a generation later Schopenhauer, who was certainly an intellect of the first order, examined the whole question and declared that Goethe was right and Newton wrong. But even now our textbooks have hardly done more than fill us to contentment with our ignorance on this important subject.
And so it is with almost everything else; we read a dozen novels hastily, carelessly, for the story alone. We might as well drink quarts of a Tisane sweetened to please the palate. We get nothing out of our traveling in a foreign country but what we bring with us. It is certain that the more we bring to our reading, the more we get from it.
Schopenhauer saw that there is 'no quality of style to be gained by reading writers who possess it. We must have the gifts before we can learn how to use them. And without the gifts, reading teaches us nothing but cold, dry mannerisms, and makes us shallow imitators.' Another word of his is better still.
'Be careful,' he advises, 'to limit your time for reading and devote it exclusively to the works of those great men of all times and countries who overtop the rest of humanity. These alone educate and instruct.'
There should be 'a tragical history of literature,' he adds, 'which should tell of the martyrdom of almost all those who really enlightened humanity, of almost all the really great masters of every kind of art: it would show us how, with few exceptions, they were tormented to death without recognition, without followers; how they lived in poverty and misery, while fame, honor, and riches were the lot of the unworthy.'
Yet, from intimacy with the greatest, one gets a certain strength and a certain courage, like Browning's here:
Careless and unperplexed
When I wage battle next What weapon to select, what armour to endue.
You should find thoughts, too, that Schopenhauer has not found, get outside his mind, so to speak. For example, he does not tell you the chief advantage of authorship. Bacon says that writing makes 'an exact man', but neither Bacon nor Schopenhauer seems to see that writing should teach you how to think, and that no other business is so favorable to mental growth as authorship properly understood: teaching is the best way of learning. Even Schopenhauer is sometimes uninspired. It is not enough to have new things to say, as he believes; you should also say them in the best and most original way, and that is something the German in Schopenhauer prevented him from understanding.
I have praised Schopenhauer so freely that I feel compelled to state one or two of the important points in which I differ from him. For instance, he sneers at those who study personalities; he says, 'It is as though the audience in a theatre were to admire a fine scene, and then rush upon the stage to look at the scaffolding that supports it.' In this he is mistaken: we should study the development of a great man, if for nothing else, in order to see what helped him in his growth. What was it, for instance, about mid-way in his life, say from 1600 or so on, that set Shakespeare to the writing of his great tragedies?
He tells you the whole story in his sonnets and in his plays of this period, as I have shown in my book on him.
And this knowledge is of supreme importance for any complete realization of Shakespeare, but Schopenhauer did not understand the creative intellect.
Whenever he talks about novels he is not so sure a guide as when he is talking of philosophies. 'Good novelists,' he says, 'take the general outline of a character from some real person of their acquaintance, and then idealize and complete it to suit their purpose.' This is not true of the novelists or dramatists: the creative artist goes differently to work, I believe.
It is perfectly clear, for instance, that Cervantes painted himself in Don Quixote, idealized, if you like, a little, but rather by omission of faults than by heightening of idealistic touches. Nor do I imagine that Sancho Panza was taken from any real person of Cervantes' acquaintances; it is to me a generalized portrait of ordinary Spanish characteristics.
And if we go to an even greater imagination, to Shakespeare's, we shall find that he wrote in much the same way. His Hamlet is a portrait of himself, with the omission of his worst fault, which was an overpowering sensuality. His Falstaff, as I have shown elsewhere, is indeed a portrait taken from life, probably from Chettle, the fat man, half-poet, half-wit, a friend of his early days in London. I have proved this, I think, by showing that when the Queen ordered him to picture Falstaff over again and show 'the fat Knight' in love, he was unable to find a single new characteristic of his hero; he had to copy his previous work almost word for word. If he had invented the new character, he would have been able to add some new traits at will.
But then I may be asked about the multitude of his other characters, and in order to answer it properly, I should have to take them seriatim. But the main truth can be put shortly. Nearly all of the fine lovable characters are partial portraits of himself, and his villains, such as Iago, are really his view of life, as it acts on inferior intelligences. 'Put money in your purse… Drown cats and blind puppies'-all Iago's chief sayings might have been put in the mouth of Sancho Panza. They are from the heart of the common Englishman, who is very like the common Spaniard. Shakespeare's expressions are more pregnant, for he was a greater master of language than even Cervantes: but the wicked and hateful purpose of Iago was not sufficiently and so he does not live for us as effectively as Sancho.
It was my love of Shakespeare and my study of him that gave me most of what I know, for my study of him taught me to read all other great men, taught me how they grow and how their peculiarities often dwarf them. From this passionate study of Shakespeare I came to see how the high lights of noble feeling and high endeavor were continually shadowed by little snobbisms and pitiful shortcomings.
A better lesson, still, I learnt from Shakespeare. As I have told in my book on him, the greatest disappointment in his life came when his beloved Mary Fitton married and left London for good in 1608; and when, in the same year, he got the news of his mother's death. He went back to Stratford and there got to know his daughter Judith. The dramas he wrote afterwards show an astounding growth in beauty of character. He not only forgives his lost love, Mary Fitton, but acknowledges with perfect comprehension all she had taught him, and meant to him. The modesty of his daughter, Judith, too, adds a new tinge of Puritan morality to his judgments of life. It was Shakespeare's sovereign fairness of mind and nobility of soul first taught me that I ought to modify my native selfishness and pugnacity. Through studying him I came to see gradually that the greater natures and wiser minds owe a certain duty to themselves: we must forgive, he taught me, for little people cannot; and so I came to that modification of the prayer of Jesus, which has been condemned as blasphemous. 'Give us this day our daily bread,' he says, 'and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us.'
