How to Read/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I
Learning to Read
I
A few months ago I happened to be present at a dinner where a chance question led to an interesting talk. Some phase of primary education was under discussion; and in the course of it the host, turning to one of the guests, asked, "When did you learn to read?"
"At three," was the prompt reply, given with a touch of pride.
"And you?" said the host to the next guest.
"Oh, I don't know. About five, I suppose."
"And you?" to a lady beyond.
There was a moment's embarrassed hesitation. And then, with something about scarlet fever, came the confession that she had not learned her letters till she was nine.
And thus it went, halfway round the table.
Now these replies were direct and pertinent. They were categorical answers to a technical question. Taken separately, they gave the exact information asked for.
And yet, as they piled up, one after the other, there seemed to be something about them that I found myself vaguely resenting.
It was not what they said. It was, rather, a discernable common denominator of implication in their manner of saying it.
It seemed as though these people were leaving out of account all the other-than-technical meanings of the phrase with which they dealt, not because they were consciously excluding these deeper meanings for the moment, but because they unconsciously ignored them at all times.
There was a cumulative inflection of finality in their declarations. It almost sounded as though, in dealing with the primary-school meaning of "learning to read," they felt that they had dealt with the whole meaning of that expression. And while it never entered my head at the moment that this was really true, the fact that it was somehow being made to appear true struck me as amusing. It struck me as amusing enough to call attention to. And so, presently, when the host asked me when I had learned to read, I answered with a smile that I was still learning.
And to my utter astonishment it developed, in the chaffing and talk that followed, that no single member of that largely literary and more or less intellectual company had ever thought of the expression "learning to read" as having any other meaning than the technical, primary-school meaning; that, namely, of learning the alphabet, learning to recognize words made out of the alphabet, learning the dictionary meanings of more, and more, and still more words, and thus learning to receive messages sent by print or handwriting.
No one of them, it turned out, had ever asked himself what it is, exactly, that we do when we read. No one of them had ever watched himself in the act of reading. And all of them, in consequence, had retained intact the careless assumption that reading is essentially a receptive process. They all looked upon it, let us say, as though print were a sort of silent telephone, into one end of which an author delivers a message, and from the other end of which (by simply "knowing how to read") his audience receives it.
Now, as a matter of fact, and as we shall see presently, this is not true at all. It is not even an inadequate statement of the facts; it is a misstatement of them. And when I had pointed out something of this,—when I had, hurriedly, and to the poor best of my surprised unpreparedness, mobilized a few arguments and illustrations in defense of what I had regarded as a neutralized axiom,—we began, in the course of the give-and-take of the talk that followed, to make discoveries. And we continued, excitedly and joyously, to make them until 1 a.m.
We discovered that the common-school definition of "learning to read" is so universally accepted as the whole definition, that, while almost every newspaper and magazine publishes regular articles on what to read, none of them, so far as any of us knew, ever publishes articles on how to read. We discovered that, while there is a whole literature of books about books,—about what books it behooves us to read, and why it behooves us to read them, and what (according to the author) it behooves us to read into them,—there is little or nothing in the whole literature about literature that tells us anything at all about how we have to read books and what it is that we have to read into them. We discovered—But, enough! What we are here concerned with is the last discovery that we made; the discovery upon which, so to say, the inquiry culminated and broke up; the discovery that I have tried to summarize in a sentence on the title-page of this book.
We discovered that reading, so far from being a merely receptive act, is a creative process. That it is "creative," not simply in the more or less cant-sodden "artistic" sense, but in a biological sense as well. That it is an active, largely automatic, purely personal, constructive functioning. That it is, indeed, a species of anabolism. In short, that it is a form of living. And as this last expression will be found, as we proceed, progressively to absorb and adequately to sum up the essence of our successive conclusions, I will put it that it is this last "discovery"—the discovery of reading as a form of living—that I propose to examine and hope to elucidate in the following pages.
And now, having said this much by way of introduction; having, as it were, established a mental take-off; let us, like sensible swimmers, dive at once into the deepest pool that our preliminary subject affords.
ii
Until ten or twelve years ago, no man who ever lived could tell another man a story.
I am sorry to begin by making so obviously idiotic a statement. But I have two excuses for doing so. One (which I merely mention in passing) is that the statement is literally true. The other (upon which I want to lay all possible emphasis) is that the trueness of this truth is of the essence of our inquiry.
Allow me, therefore, to repeat the statement.
From the beginning of time, right down until about ten years ago, no man ever lived who could tell another man a story. Moses could n't. Homer could n't. Chaucer could n't. The minstrels and minnesingers could n't. Dante could n't. Dickens could n't. Even Conan Doyle could n't.
The best that the very best of them ever succeeded in doing was to trick, or to coax, or to compel their readers or their hearers into telling stories to themselves.
"Pshaw!" you are very likely going to exclaim at this point. "Here is a man pretending to explain one idiotic statement by making another." And perhaps it does look that way. But, before we continue the discussion, let us take a few minutes off and go to the movies.
iii
That stirring photo-play, "The Two Rattlesnakes," is on the bill.
We scuttle down the darkened aisle and slip into some vacant seats near the front.
There is a little hissing splutter overhead. A flickering green frame, with "Jim meets a Rattler" inside it, springs into view on the dim curtain. And a moment later the entire audience, and we with them, have settled down into an eager, yet perfectly passive, receptivity, and are looking (through a hole in the darkness) at the arid slope of an Arizona sheep-ranch, where a cowboy with a lamb in his arms and an old ewe at his heels is picking his way down the rocky and cactus-grown hillside. On he comes, twisting and turning; near enough now for us to see the litheness of his limbs and his cheery eyes. Then, suddenly, there is a blur of motion at his feet. A snaky something launches its length and strikes for a second at his knee. Bewilderment, horror, realization, chase each other across his face. We see him drop the lamb; snatch out a knife; rip away the cloth; slash the naked flesh; bend to suck the poison from the wound. We watch him make a tortion bandage from the kerchief at his neck. We watch him start, limping, down the hill. We watch him waver, and stumble, and stop to rest with his hand on a boulder. We watch him press on; and fall; and get up; and struggle on again. We see him fall, and fail to rise. We see him, with a last spurt of strength, pull his six-shooter from its holster; fire three slow shots in the air; and drop back into unconsciousness. And we see a little cloud of distant dust turn into the mounted figures of his friends; see them ride furiously up; leap to the ground; gather round him; examine his hurt; lift his insert body to a horse's back, and ride away—just as the hole in the darkness disappears and we find ourselves back again in the dim-lit, crowded hall.
Now it would be nice to sit on the show. To see how "Mollie gets the News"—Mollie in her Harlem flat; with her sleeves rolled up above her plump forearms; interrupted in the act of touching a moist finger to a hot iron by the coming of a telegram—"Jim bitten by a rattler. Come at once." To see her drag a chair to the corner cupboard; take down the old teapot; empty its contents on the ironing-board; stuff the money into her purse; put on her wraps and go. To see her, in the next reel, poring over time-tables in an emigrant sleeper; while the other rattlesnake—a human one—watches her from across the aisle. To see him scrape acquaintance with her; learn her story; get out maps; offer suggestions; finally send a telegram of his own—"Meet me at Dry Gulch with the buckboard." To see her whisked behind fast horses to the cattle-thieves' camp. To see the cowboy raid; the timely rescue; the ride to the ranch; the reunited lovers. To see the human rattler tied hand and foot and tossed (on the same hillside that Jim came down in the beginning) into the center of a grim-faced circle and within reach of a coiled something that writhes, and springs, and dashes obscene fangs against his contorted face.
But we have n't time for that. We must get back to our discussion. Let us slip out quietly while the hall is dark.
iv
They begin, like any other piece of fiction, in the mind of a man who has told himself a story. Having done so, he undertakes, by means of a short piece of descriptive writing (called a scenario) to guide the imagination of his readers along the road his own imagination has followed. And this scenario is submitted to a movie-manager, who, if he likes it, buys it and turns it over to his producing department.
Now the producing department of a moving-picture concern is a remarkable establishment. It has a long list of actors at its beck and call. It has a storehouses full of stage properties. It has clothes-presses full of costumes. It has a card index of "likely places." It has a corps of mechanics to do its bidding. And when the scenario of an author's story is turned over to the directing intelligence of this establishment, he chooses actors for it from his troupe. He supplies them with costumes from his cupboards. He draws stage properties from his stores. He selects scenes from his card index. He has his mechanics provide effects that are not in stock. And finally, before the recording eye of the camera, he proceeds—well or ill according to his ability and his resources—to re-tell the author's story in the concrete terms of his own equipment.
And for us who sit in the audience his re-telling—his reading of the story—is final. You may know a hillside far more picturesque than the one Jim comes down. But you cannot substitute it, in your mind, for the movie-man's hillside. I may know a girl a dozen times more Molly-ish than the Mollie of the film. But I cannot cast her for Mollie's part in "The Two Rattlesnakes." The movie-man is reading the author's story, not we. For the moment he stands, like St. Peter, at the gates of our imaginations. What he chooses is chosen. What he puts in is in. What he leaves out is out.
He is the first man who has told another man a story since the world began.
"But," you are perhaps exclaiming, "how then about the others? How about Virgil? And Cervantes? And Balzac? And—Marie Corelli?"
Every one of them, from the least to the greatest, has but written for the movies.
Not for the movies of the photo-theater, but for the movies of our minds.
For a novel is nothing but an elaborate scenario. And each of us is a moving-picture concern.
When we examine a book at a bookstore; when we look at the opening sentences, and read a snatch of conversation on page 247, and turn back to the last page to see how it ends,—a scenario has been submitted to the manager. When we pay down our $1.35, or present our library card to be stamped,—we have purchased the local rights in it. And when we switch on our electric reading-lamp, and stretch out in our favorite chair, and open the book at the first chapter,—we turn the tale over to our producing department.
And the producing department of a human moving-picture concern is also a remarkable establishment.
All the people we have ever known, plus thousands we have spoken to, or crossed eyes with in a crowd, or watched in public places, or merely glimpsed in passing, are actors at its beck and call. And it can, moreover, pick and choose, not only among these actors, but among their attributes. It can, and that in the twinkling of an eye, take a chance expression on the face of one's best friend, the body of a blacksmith seen years since at a country crossroad, the mustache of yesterday's organ-grinder, and the eyes of last year's cotillion leader, and cast the composite of them (together with the composite suggestion of personality that results) as the villain of a piece.
It, too, has memory storehouses full of stage properties; mental cupboards crammed with costumes; a brain-cell index of likely places. It, too, has a marvelous mechanic, called Imagination, that contrives effects that are not in stock out of odds and ends of raw material.
And when a story-teller's scenario is submitted to it, the directing mind of this establishment—contriving, as they are needed, actors from this troupe; stage properties from these stores; costumes from these cupboards; scenes from this cell catalogue—proceeds, paragraph by paragraph and page by page, before the estimating eye of our intelligence, and well or ill according to its ability and its resources, to re-tell the author's story in the recollective and imaginative and emotional terms of its own equipment.
V
Do you, by any chance, doubt this?
If so, I have a confession to make. I have, deliberately and with malice aforethought, deceived you. The photo-play performance of "The Two Rattlesnakes" never took place. There never has been such a photo-play.
I made that all up "as I went along," as the children say. And I placed before you, not a story, but only the skeleton of a story—the merest dry bones of a half-finished scenario.
Yet I'll warrant that in reading it you pictured to yourself a Jim of your own fancying, walking down a hillside of your own invention. That you contrived a Mollie to your own liking and placed her in a flat of your own furnishing. That at the last you invested the horrid death of the villain with emotions dictated by your own temperament. That you either exulted in a punishment that so poetically fitted the crime, or shuddered to see men, made in God's image, capable of such horrors.
Is it not so?
Moreover, when you stop to consider it, you will see that this cannot be otherwise.
The terms of one's own equipment are the only terms in which a story can reach us.
For the heroine that the author imagined is forever invisible to us, no matter how minutely he describes her. And though his scene for the moment be Chicago, and though we chance to live there, it is in our Chicago, and not in his, that we stage that chapter of his tale. Indeed, if he describes a character too minutely,—if he keeps our minds too long from imagining their own protagonists in the effort to imagine his,—our minds end by shrugging their shoulders, going on strike, and refusing to imagine any. And it is for the same reason that we so often skip elaborate descriptions of scenery, and that meticulously word-painted landscapes commonly prove invisible to the eyes of our imaginations.
Nor is it alone to the things of the senses that this inexorable law applies. It is the same with less tangible stage properties. When we are called upon to "register" horror, we have only our own brands of that emotion to register. When a mental attitude is asked of us, we can but place our own minds, like lay figures, in, or somewhere near, the posture demanded. And if the specifications of our author's scenario include a spiritual reaction, we must either supply it, or a substitute for it, from the laboratory of our own spirit, or else pass on, saying in effect (as the motion-picture man would say in the vernacular), "Kill that soul stuff!"
VI
But let us go back for a moment to that beginning which we have skipped. Let us go back to the nursery and to our own "learning to read."
Let us suppose that you have just mastered your letters (or, if you happen to belong to the later order, that you have not mastered them) and that you are about to receive your first lesson in reading.
A book is placed before you, open at the first page.
On this page is the woodcut of an animal. And below that are the mystic hieroglyphics, See the Cat.
Do you see what has happened?
Do you perceive the significance—the practical symbolism—of this performance? Do you see that at the very threshold of "learning to read," even in the restricted, common-school sense of learning to interpret an arbitrary code of black marks on white paper, there has been placed before you, as a symbol of what you are to do, the moving picture reduced to its simplest form? Do you see that in effect, and by the silent pantomime of that juxtaposition, they are saying to you, "Visualize, darn you!"?
But perhaps you will balk at this interpretation.
Let us, therefore, suppose again.
Let us suppose that there is no house cat in your home.
Let us suppose that the weeks have gone by and that you have learned to read many pages in your picture primer; and that one fine morning, on a pictureless page in another book, you come across again those now familiar characters, See the Cat.
What happens now?
Why, instantly and inevitably you visualize the woodcut.
Why? Because it is the only cat you have in stock; and so, willy-nilly, you cast it for the hero of the sentence. You have, in short, on a ridiculously inadequate capital, begun your own career as a moving-picture concern.
Let us pursue the inquiry.
Let us suppose that you go for a few weeks' visit to some cousins in the country, and that one of them has a Maltese kitten.
And let us suppose that on your return, fearing perhaps that you had forgotten your lessons, they put that old primer in your hand, open at the first page.
What happens this time?
Do you accept the woodcut?
Not you. As you take in the words See the Cat, your mind presents you, unasked, the picture of a blue-gray kitten, the extreme tip of its tail twitching back and forth above the grass, and one curved paw tapping a red apple just fallen in the orchard. And with this picture comes a swift sense of soft winds; and just a taste of cider.
You have, you see, increased the capital of your moving-picture establishment and are already exercising your prerogatives as a producing manager. You have just rejected with scorn the illustrator's offer to supply your equipment. You are telling the author's story yourself.
VII
And now I think that we are ready to sum up.
Or , shall we put it that we have now acquired the equipment necessary to read what follows? For that, after all, is what we really mean.
We read, then, quite literally, with our own experience. We read with what we have seen and heard and smelled and tasted and felt. We read with the emotions we have had—with the love we have loved, the fear we have feared, the hate we have hated. We read with the observations we have made and the deductions we have drawn from them; with the ideas we have evolved and the ideals we have built into them; with the sympathies we have developed and the prejudices we have failed to rid ourselves of.
"Learning to read" in the common-school sense—learning, let us put it, to read print and learning to read handwriting—has exactly as much (and exactly as little) to do with our reading of a novel as it has with Forbes-Robertson's "reading" of Shakespeare.
Learning to read, in the real sense, means enlarging our equipment, and learning, creatively, to use it.
We receive in reading; but we receive, not directly by what the author tells us, but indirectly, by the new uses that he stimulates as into putting our experience to.
For reading consists of our making—with the aid of the pattern and the hints supplied by the author, but out of our mental stock, which we have produced by living—something that never existed before; something that only exists at all in so far as we make it; something that can never be duplicated by any other reader; something that we ourselves can never wholly reproduce.
Reading is a copartnership. What we receive from it is in the nature of dividends on a joint investment.
VIII
"Yes," I seem to hear some one saying, "this is very interesting and quite true—about fiction. But how about a philosophic treatise? How about an abstract sociological argument? How about a discussion of scientific principles?"
It is all quite as true of these kinds of reading as it is of a novel, or of a magazine story, or of a newspaper account of a fire.
You can no more put a new idea into a person's head than you can tell him a story. All that you can do is to stimulate him into making new combinations out of the ideas already there.
"But how, then," I seem to hear the same objector saying, "do new ideas get into people's heads, if you cannot put them there?"
The answer to this is Topsy's: They grow.
I recall the tale of a servant who was a most dependable agent for doing anything that she had once been shown how to do, but who (or so her bachelor employer thought) had never had an original idea in her head since she was born. But it happened that one of her acquired accomplishments was the making of ice-cream. And one hot day in summer, when a thunderstorm had unexpectedly sent the mercury tumbling down into the sixties, he was suddenly confronted, not only with a squat figure standing in his study door, but with the complete destruction of his theory.
"Say!" his servant was saying, "if I turn the handle backward will it unfreeze the cream?"
IX
Here the raw materials of crude experience—like, say, the jerking of a burned finger out of the flame—are treated by a secret process and "ideas"—like the idea that fire is hot—are extracted from them. You cannot, as most of us know from experience, put the idea that fire is hot into a child's head. The best that you can do is to supervise the delivery of the raw experience at the gate of the distillery.
But we are more than distillers of low-grade ideas—of these comparatively crude, first-hand realizations.
We are blenders and rectifiers of these as well.
We combine two or more of them and from the mixture we distill a sublimated extract—the idea, say, of a resemblance. We combine a number of these ideas of resemblance and from the blend distill a still more rarefied essence—the idea, say, of a generalization. And each of these ideas—each of these homemade products of our distillery—becomes a permanent item of our stock in trade. Each of them is, so to say, stored away in its own bottle, ready for use in our further experiments.
And these further experiments—these combinings of ideas that we have in stock—are by no means always made on our own initiative. They are often—more often than otherwise—made on order, or by suggestion.
Smith meets Jones in the subway and they have a little chat.
Later, Smith says to his wife, "Keen chap, that Jones. He gave me a new idea to-day."
But of course he did n't.
What Jones gave him was a formula.
He suggested that if Smith would take some of the Idea in Bottle 68, and some of the Idea in Bottle 7042, and mix them, he'd get such and such a result. And Smith did. And he got it.
But, suppose Smith had n't had the ingredients in stock?
X
Let us take our own case.
When you began this chapter, you quite definitely did n't have in your head several ideas that are now there.
You did n't, for instance, have in your head the idea that authors do not tell us stories; that they only issue instructions to us for telling ourselves stories; that they only write "scenarios" for us to "produce."
How, then, did this idea get into your head?
Not, certainly, by my putting it there.
If you are inclined, for the moment, to think that I did this, you have only to turn back to section II of this chapter in order to see how you felt toward it, and what you thought of me, when I pretended to think that I could put this idea into your head.
No. I did n't put it there. I could n't.
All that I could do was to furnish you, in the proper order, the various formulæ needed for distilling it; to see that you were supplied, on occasion, with certain necessary raw materials; and to stimulate you, from time to time, to make certain combinations out of these ingredients.
I knew, for instance, that you were going to need the idea that there were two meanings to the expression "learning to read"; and I was afraid that you might not have this idea in stock. So I suggested that you take a number of ideas that I knew you could supply from stock—the ideas of an inquisitorial host; of a series of guests, each of whom thought in his own way that he had learned to read, once for all, when he was a child; and of one guest who thought that he had n't—I suggested that you take these simple ideas and mix them in a certain way. And you did as I suggested and got the desired result—the more complex idea.
And I took pains to "stimulate you into making this new combination of ideas that were already on hand."
That was a part of my job as author.
I did it, in this case, by inducing you to dramatize the ideas; by inducing you to imagine people holding these ideas, or enacting them. In fine, I did it by inventing this dinner party; which, like the photo-play of "The Two Rattlesnakes," never took place.
But the dinner party and the photo-play were invented for entirely different reasons. In the latter case I knew that you were going to need the idea that we read in terms of our own equipment and not in terms of the author's equipment; and I was also afraid that you did not have this idea in stock.
But this is an idea that is not easily derivable from the mixing of other, simpler ideas. This is an idea that we get best first-hand, from experience—by actually doing the thing and watching ourselves do it. It is practically one of those realization-ideas, like the idea that fire is hot. Its extreme complexity is due to the extreme complexity of the experience itself.
So I took measures to supply you with the experience.
I wrote a scenario and I tricked you into "producing" it.
And then, while the experience was fresh in your mind, I called your attention to what you had done.
XI
Philosophy or fiction, then, it is all one.
Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" is as much a scenario as is Stevenson's "Treasure Island." They merely call for different equipments to "produce" them.
Reading either of them is a partnership transaction between the author and ourselves.
And in either case our dividends will depend upon (1) the amount of our contributed capital; and (2) upon the number and the nature of the "turn-overs" we are stimulated into making with it.