What can we call our own in this world, but our energy, strength and will power? If I could count up all I owe to my great predecessors and contemporaries, there would not be much over.
Strictly speaking, one should tell only of one's life that which is symbolic and therefore of universal interest; but it is extremely difficult to draw the line with any precision, and now and then the seemingly trivial accidents of life have a certain deeper meaning of their own; for instance, adventures come to the adventurous, riches to the greedy. I am treating the happenings of my existence as freely as Rousseau treated his: taking memory, for the most part, as artist-but the first pages of his Confessions startle me with the extraordinary difference of character between us.
He is full of affection and sentiment even in childhood. As a boy, I certainly loved no one. I liked my eldest brother because when I was about thirteen he began to treat me as an equal and showed me kindness. But the first person I really cared for was Professor Smith of Lawrence, Kansas.
How he managed to discover that there was something more than the ordinary in me the very first time we met, I am at a loss to imagine; it may have been a certain fluency of speech, or an uncommon choice of words.
I remember, on my way up from Texas once, the malarial fever having left me, I was hungry and glad to get down from the stage-coach. Dinner had been laid in a little roadside inn for half a dozen people-but I was the only passenger, and I practically ate the half-dozen dinners!
The motherly woman of the place came in and held up her hands in astonishment. I said, "Of course I will pay you for the six dinners."
"Indeed you won't!" she cried. "You have a right to eat all you can; won't you have another pie?"
I could not help accepting, and took another apple pie. When I was pulling out six dollars to pay, "No, no," she exclaimed, "it is a dollar a head — I know'd at once you was a foreigner!"
"Why do you think I'm a foreigner?" I asked.
"You speak such broken United States!" she replied. I gasped, for already I prided myself on my English speech. Professor Smith was the first to praise me for it.
All my boyhood was informed with a consuming passion to win in life, and to enjoy as much as possible. By living for three years beside Professor Smith, there came to me a passionate desire for growth, a view of the possibility, not of perfection, but of trained and lofty intelligence. From that time on, I read and thought and lived with a purpose, to develop every faculty I had to the uttermost.
A gifted woman writes to me that my first love must have modified my character profoundly. It did nothing of the sort. I never felt what is called love, that is, sexual desire and admiration plus affection, until I was nearly thirty, though desire possessed me incessantly from fourteen on.
In some respects Rousseau was very like me and again very unlike. For instance, he tells us that the true meaning of a scene did not come to him at the time, but hours afterwards he recalled each intonation, each look, each gesture, and realized exactly what each person had thought and felt in his heart. This has been true to me all my life, and I attribute its magic to my excellent memory. How one with a bad memory can reproduce a scene, I am at a loss to imagine. But always, thanks to my exact remembrance, friends and enemies and the indifferent reveal themselves to me in their true colors when I recall their words and looks afterwards.
On another occasion, Rousseau tells us how girls appeal to him according to their fine dress and manners; chambermaids, he says, and shop-girls never attracted him at all: he wanted ladies-cared-for hands, exquisitely dressed hair, pretty shoes, ribbons and laces always won him more than beauty. He knew this preference to be ridiculous, but he could not help feeling it. In my case, the exact reverse was true: it was beauty and youth that attracted me and the dress had absolutely nothing to do with it; even the beauty of face did not affect me as much as a beautiful figure, and while still a youth, I was as conscious as a Frenchman of the charm of small wrists and ankles and the deeper significance thereof. I must confess here and now that beauty of line and perfection in form were the soul of my desire from youth to age.
Up to forty, my life was one long effort at self-development. Thanks to the competition in English schools, I wanted, as a boy and youth, to be an extraordinary athlete more than anything else and labored to develop my muscles in every possible way. I read everything I could find on athletics, and questioned my elders every chance I got, while developing myself systematically. With my eldest brother, in the Belfast gymnasium, I practiced assiduously. At fifteen I could pull myself up and chin the bar fifty tunes; and I shall never forget my joy when I found I could draw myself up with one hand. After prolonged practice with clubs and dumb-bells I could hold out fifty pounds at arms' length, and put up a hundred pounds above my head: I could also walk under a bar and then with a short run, jump it.
But again and again I met someone stronger than myself, or more agile, and at eighteen I put the gloves on with a second-rate professional and got a bad beating. He taught me the most important truth in boxing, that one can hit down very much harder than one can hit up; and that height and length of reach give an enormous advantage. From that day on I realized that I was too small to be a great athlete. My eyes, too, were astigmatic and I was shortsighted; in every physical respect I seemed "cribbed and coffined" to mediocrity. Nature had denied me the crown!
Thanks to this continual exercise, even now, though only five feet six in height, I am broad and strong; nearly forty inches round the chest with fourteen-inch biceps and twelve-inch forearms; stripped I look more like a prize fighter than anything else.
As soon as I learned as a boy of twelve wherein beauty really consisted, I saw that I could have no claim to it; my features were irregular, my eyes only ordinary in size and grey-blue in color, and even my father's sailors always called me "lug-sails" because of my over-large ears. The chief thing about my mug, as Rodin said, was that it had a certain life and energy.
Perhaps the one thing that might be praised in my appearance was my dress: my father, as a naval officer, always advised me to dress as well as possible at all cost. "It is of supreme importance in life," he said, "to be always well dressed; nobody cares where you live or what you eat, but everyone notices your dress." I took his advice to heart, and the public school life taught me the rest. The English of the best class are the best dressed men in the world-they have a supreme sense of the value of appearance.
Strangely enough, Pierre Loti told me that he had been plagued as a boy with the very same athletic ambition. I met him first in the Palace at Monaco; he was a great friend of the Princess Alice, who often talked of him. One day I was introduced to him there. He was very small and slight and certainly wore stays, if indeed, he didn't rouge as well; so his confession that he had wanted above all things to be big and an athlete astounded me. We went into the garden together; he was tiny and fully forty, yet to my amazement he insisted on throwing a somersault backwards, and he did it quite perfectly, like a clown, and then went on to show me that the muscles of his arms and legs were like bands of steel. He was of astonishing physical vigor.
"I always wished to be very strong," he said, "till I found out, at about seventeen, that I was too small. It was my admiration of size and strength in a man that made me take a big sailor about with me, even in Paris society, at first, and so gave occasion for much cheap sneering."
Disappointed in my ambition to shine physically, I turned with redoubled energy to the things of the mind; my memory I always knew was very good, indeed: I could read a page of a book slowly and then repeat it almost exactly. I had already learned at school the Paradise Lost of Milton in the leisure hours of a school week; later, at about twenty-four, I learned half a dozen Shakespeare plays by heart without any trouble; and mainly to show off, in Athens I learned Demosthenes' oration "On the Crown" in the original Greek from beginning to end.
I had no idea then that one should select with the greatest care everything that one learns by heart in youth; for whatever one learns then sticks in the memory and prevents one from recalling with ease words or passages learned later. Memory has its limitations. I hate to think now that I was fool enough to waste my time and pack some memory drawers with Demosthenes' rhetoric instead of Russian vocables.
My father did even worse for me. He used to give me chapters of the Bible to learn by heart and was delighted to make me spout them before visitors.
Often, now, trying to think of something more valuable, I recall some page of the Psalms or even of Chronicles that merely annoys me. One blunders in this world for want of knowledge, and often blunders irretrievably.
I soon found too that a good memory was a handicap to the thinker: to know the thoughts of others prevents one from thinking-to think is a special accomplishment, and has to be specially cultivated.
But no one has shown the way, or indicated, even, the first steps. I found out, however, that denying a thesis and trying to elaborate arguments against it was one way of exercising the mind; so at once I began, in Goethe's phrase, to be the spirit that always denied-der Geist der stets verneint.
This practice helped me a good deal, and one trick I discovered which was of even more avail. Before reading a chapter in some book that interested me, I'd write down all my thoughts on the subject, then read the chapter and see how much the author had added to my stock of ideas. This soon taught me many things and above all, made the personalities of the great thinkers plain to me. I found, for instance, that Kant and Schopenhauer were fine minds, as good even as my whilom favorite, Bacon.
Let me give one example of this way of reading. We take up Schopenhauer on The Art of Literature. If an intelligent, well read man reads it through, the odds are that he finds nothing wonderful ha it, nothing with which he does not agree, and that's the end of the business. But there's a better way to read. I take up a sheet of paper and ask myself what I could write on "Authorship."
Because I know Schopenhauer is a first-rate man, I take care to put down on the paper all that life and thought have taught me about the author's work. I revise and revise what I have written, all the while letting my thoughts play about this question, just as if Schopenhauer and I were two competitors and this was the theme given to us by the examiners, which was to determine our respective places in the crucial examination. When you have done this once and then read Schopenhauer's essay, you will appreciate his distinction between those who write for money and those who write because they have thought deeply on some subject and have something original to say. You will probably end where he begins, that writing for money is the mortal disease of literature. You may even share the great pessimist's opinion that "Vermin is the rule everywhere," which is a funny comment on our American belief in democracy.
This way of testing yourself by comparing your ideas with those of a master will not only make you think; but will impress upon you any new thought the author gives you in an extraordinary way. One hour's work of this sort each week will make an incredible difference in your thinking powers and in your knowledge in one short year.
For years I did everything I could think of to better my mind; but whereas the proper exercises for the body and its muscles are fairly well known and classified, there are no such handbooks dealing with the intellect, I just jot down, therefore, the practices I have found most helpful, and among them, this of setting forth what you know of a subject, and then comparing it with what a master has written on the same theme, is the most educative.
Very early in my development I found that travel and the learning of a new language did more for me than even books: each new language, I soon realized, was like a new window opening new views of the world, while enlarging one's conception of life.
But it is excessively dangerous for a writer to learn another language really well. Carlyle told me that he had always regretted that he did not know German as well as English, and advised me to make myself a master of it. So when I went to Germany I studied it assiduously, and not only learnt to speak it as well as I spoke English, but studied its development, learnt Gothic and Old High German and Middle High German, as well as modern German.
Besides, I really learnt Latin and Greek through German. The consequence was, when I returned to England my friend Verschoyle pointed out to me that my English style was spoilt by German idioms. I used to say afterwards that it took me three years to learn German and six more years to wash my mind free of it. For I was quite six years in England as a journalist, writing a good deal every day, before I got back to my sure boyish feeling of what was the true English idiom, or the best way to express a new thought in English; and all these years I was afraid to read a German book, nor would I speak a word of German if I could help it. For the characteristic of German is abstract thought, while our English speech is fundamentally poetic.
But a little knowledge of languages does one good. It's like travel: it excites the mind and provokes thought by showing you new views and new limitations of men. Even more than travel, I found that meeting and getting to 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."
"Give and forgive," I said, "is the true gospel"; and from this time on, with many lapses, due for the most part to selfishness or temper, I tried, in my own life, to realize this striving.
This was my "conversion" to a better life, and it occurred about my fortieth year as a result partly of complete success in material strivings; but more, I am fain to believe, as a natural incident of growth. I came to see that if I would be with the great ones in the future, I too must lead a life of generosity and kindness. It was and is my most profound conviction that all progress in this life comes from gifted individuals, and if we desire the bettering of things or think of this earthly pilgrimage as a slow journeying upward to perfection, we must do our little best to help all the abler men of our time to selfrealization and achievement.
Like chooses like in this world, and the natural affinity of the noble is a stronger tie than can easily be imagined. Now, for the first time, I began to live the higher life, as I understood it. And soon new lessons from it began to drift in upon me. I found almost immediately, that certain persons, whom I felt to be among the best, now began to seek me out and show me affection. Lord Grimthorpe became a close friend, and charming people in every walk of life began to show me kindness.
"He came to His own, and His own received Him not," is one of the few sayings in the New Testament which must be construed in a narrow way: in this world, our own, in the large sense of those like us or on our level, always receive us and treat us with loving-kindness beyond our deserts. If "the way of the transgressor is hard," the way of the heavenly pilgrim becomes the primrose path to the divine life.
It must not be understood that I became a saint, or that ideal strivings dominated me; far from it, alas! Now and then I was hatefully selfish and once, at least, to a woman detestable: she is still living and I cannot confess my meanness without exposing her, but my treatment of her still brings a hot flush of shame to my cheeks. Even wounded vanity, though it may explain, cannot excuse my paltry, detestable conduct. I was as self-centered as ever, and as confirmed an epicurean: a Hellene always, as Heine would have said, and not a Jew, and still less a Saxon; for the Saxons love to accept promissory notes of ecstatic happiness in eternity, whereas the Hellenes are intent on making the best of this present life, and enjoying themselves here below as much as possible.
My worst fault, I think, has always been my impatience: it often gave the impression of bad temper, or cynicism, or worse, for it was backed by an excellent tongue that translated most feelings into words of some piquancy.
Consequently, this man spoke of me as truculent and the other as callous and the third as domineering, when in reality I wished to be kind, but was unable to suffer fools gladly. This impatience has grown on me with the years, and as soon as I gave up conducting journals, I limited my intercourse to friends who were always men of brains, and so managed to avoid a myriad occasions of giving offense unnecessarily.
This sharp-tongued impatience was allied to a genuine reverence for greatness of mind or character; but again this reverence brought with it an illimitable disdain for the second-rate or merely popular. I was more than amiable to Huxley or Wallace, to Davidson or Dowson, and correspondingly contemptuous of the numerous mediocrities who are the heroes of the popular press. So I got a reputation for extraordinary conceit and abrupt bad manners.
All the early part of this period I was in love and therefore did not run after new experiences in what the French call le pays du tendre. I had an excellent home and troops of friends: I had brought living to a science; I rode every morning in the park, ate and drank in moderation, watched my weight, and by hard exercise kept myself in good condition.
About 1895 I began, little by little, to alter my purpose in life, trying, as far as vanity would let me, to live to the best in me; and when I took control of the Saturday Review in that year, I modified the general method of criticism, as I shall tell; I found it better to praise than to condemn.
Even in this world, loving-kindness is a key to most of the great doors. And though it was in England that I learned this good lesson, strange to say, all the while I worked and thought, England grew smaller to me and more provincial, while America seemed to expand with undreamed of possibilities.
But now and again some law case or some presidential or public announcement shamed me to the soul by flaunting some outworn brainless prejudice.
Little by little I turned to France as the motherland of my spirit, though there were Germans, too, and Italians and Spaniards that quickened and inspired me with enthusiasm similar to my own; cosmopolitan, I called myself from this time on, or perhaps it would suit English and American prejudice better if I invented a new French word and called myself cosmopolisson.