Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/731

Rh to the young heart the wonderful secret that some books are alive. Never shall I forget the "Open Sesame" which I first heard in the reading of Milton's Comus by my father, and of Cicero's Letters by my old Latin professor.

The Greeks learned the alphabet from the Phœnicians. But the Phœnicians used it for contracts, bills of lading, and accounts; the Greeks for poetry and philosophy. Contracts and accounts of all kinds are for filing. Literature is of one kind only: the interpretation of life and nature, through the imagination, in clear and personal words of power and charm; and this is for reading.

To get the good of the library in the School of Life you must bring into it something better than a mere taste for reading. You must bring the power to read, between the lines, behind the words, beyond the horizon of the printed page. St. Philip's question to the Chamberlain of Ethiopia was crucial: "Understandest thou what thou readest?"

I want books not to pass the time, but to fill it with beautiful thoughts and images, to enlarge my world, to give me new friends in the spirit, to purify my ideals and make them clear, to show me the local color of unknown regions and the bright stars of immortal truth.

Time is wasted if we read too much looking-glass fiction, books about our own class and place and period, stories of American college life, society novels, tales in which our own conversation is repeated and our own prejudices are embodied,—kodak prints, gramophone cylinders. I prefer the real voice, the visible face, things which I can see and hear for myself without waiting for Miss Arabella Tompkins's report of them. I wish to go abroad, to hear new messages, to meet new people, to get a fresh point of view, to revisit other ages, to listen to the oracles of Delphi and drink deep of the springs of Pieria. The only writer who can tell me anything of real value about my familiar environment is the genius who shows me that, after all, it is not familiar, but strange, wonderful, crowded with secrets unguessed and possibilities unrealized.

The two things best worth writing about in poetry and fiction are the symbols of nature and the passions of the human heart. I want also an esaayist who will clarify life by gentle illumination and lambent humor; a philosopher who will help me see the reason of things apparently unreasonable; a historian who will show me how peoples have risen and fallen; and a biographer who will let me touch the hand of the great and the good. This is the magic of literature. This is how real books help to educate us in the School of Life.

There is no less virtue, but rather more, in events, tasks, duties, obligations, to unfold and develop our nature. The difference is not between working people and thinking people, but between people who work without thinking and people who think while they work. What is it that you have to do? To weave cloth, to grow fruit, to sell bread, to make a fire, to prepare food, to nurse the sick, to keep house? It matters not. Your task brings you the first lesson of reason,—that you must deal with things as they are, not as you imagine them or desire them to be. Wet wood will not burn. Fruit-trees must have sunshine. Heavy bread will not sell. Sick people have whims. Empty cupboards yield no dinner. The house will not keep itself. Platitudes, no doubt; but worth more for education than many a metaphysical theory or romantic dream. For when we face these things and realize their meaning, they lead us out of the folly of trying to live in such a world as we would like it to be, and make us live in the world which is.

"Let us follow the argument whithersoever it leads us," said Plato. That was the spirit that made Greek philosophy triumphant. Let us deal with the facts in their unmistakable verity. That is the spirit that makes a reasonable, fearless, temperate, serviceable manhood and womanhood. Orchids feed on air: apple-trees, on earth. Men and women grow when they are rooted in reality.

The mystic visions of the Orient are a splendid pageant. But for guidance I follow Socrates, whose gods were too noble to deceive or masquerade, whose world was a substantial embodiment of divine ideals, and whose men and women were not playthings of Chance or Fate, but living souls, working, struggling, fighting their way towards