Frank Harris: My life and loves Vol. 3

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.