Читать книгу The Art of Thinking - Ernest Dimnet - Страница 8
Оглавление4. POSSIBILITY OF AN ART OF THINKING
What is our reaction in the presence of a thinker? The same that we experience in the presence of beauty: we are surprised at first, but immediately after, we admire. Only, with some people admiration is accompanied by discouragement, with others it creates emulation. Purely literary people who think too much of brilliance are early dazzled by it into inertness. Average people react differently. The more confident almost invariably think: “What a shame that I should not talk like that! I might have. If only I had had this man’s chances, his education, his experience of travel, his connection with people accustomed to a higher kind of conversation, or only even to a better vocabulary, I should not be the dumb, dull creature I must appear to be.” In their hearts, they think distinction is found, not gained, and they blame destiny. Others suspect under it all a recipe which they do not know but might learn. “Tell me how!” they seem to say, and entertain not a doubt that, if they were given the formula, results would immediately follow. Apart from the stupid listeners who regard a brilliant conversationalist much as a miserly old French farmer regards a generous American, that is to say, as a freak, people feel a kinship between themselves and the more gifted specimens of mankind. The only difference they see between the latter and themselves is accidental and likely to be effaced in an instant: in other words, they believe in an Art of Thinking.
Why do they? Simply because the most ordinary of us know moments during which we glimpse the very states of mind which brilliant conversation mirrors. Anybody familiar with country people, even of the most uncultivated sort, realises that they appreciate natural beauty, a landscape, the last smile of autumn on a wood, a sunset, the flash of a wild bird, quite as much as a professional artist or versifier. All they lack is words or oftener confidence; many of them are as loath to speak of their innermost loves as to change their accent.
Humdrum people cease to be humdrum when they hear a fine speech or read the kind of book likely to act on their dormant possibilities. Perhaps one human being in a thousand is absolutely impervious to the charm of music: the rest, no matter how crude, cannot hear Taps or le Chant du Départ, or a good organ, or a girl’s song on a warm evening, without a beginning of intoxication which differs only in degree from the mental condition in which Shelley produced The Skylark. A tumult of seldom experienced and consequently more valued intellectual impressions, with the sensation of an unwonted warmth round the heart, are known to all men and women. We all treasure the recollection of such moments, and we never become quite so ossified by what is called life and its hardening influence as not to wish for their return.
Everybody too is conscious of spells during which his mind is at its best, works swiftly and infallibly. Insomnia, before ending in exhaustion, generally produces a lucidity which no amount of normal meditation will replace, and the vigils of literary men testify to the fact. Prolonged solitude accompanied by a little fasting acts in the same way. This too is known to all literary people. Dickens used to walk and walk through the streets of London in the small hours of the night when he could meet only sleepy policemen or stray cats. Most writers realise that their books are only written, not lived, when they cannot separate themselves from their families and seek the quiet of an old town or remote country inn where nobody speaks to them. Let anybody try the experiment of crossing the ocean on one of the quieter boats without making anybody’s acquaintance. He will find, after three or four days, that his mind is not the same. The ten days’, or even thirty days’ silent retreats, in use in some religious orders, are the outcome of such experiences.
Were it even without the comparatively frequent recurrence of exalted moments breaking our routine, we could, all of us, be conscious of what is going on in the thinker’s mind by recalling our childhood. All children under nine or ten years of age are poets and philosophers. They pretend to live with the rest of us, and the rest of us imagine that we influence them so that their lives are only a reflection of our own. But, as a matter of fact, they are as self-contained as cats and as continuously attentive to the magical charm of what they see inwardly. Their mental wealth is extraordinary; only the greatest artists or poets, whose resemblance to children is a banal certainty, can give us some idea of it. A golden-haired little fellow playing with his blocks in the garden may be conscious all the time of the sunset while pretending not to look at it. “Come along!” the nurse said to Félicité de la Mennais, eight years old, “you have looked long enough at those waves and everybody is going away.” The answer: “Ils regardent ce que je regarde, mais ils ne voient pas ce que je vois,”[2] was no brag, but merely a plea to stay on. Who can tell what the four Brontë tots saw or did not see in the moors through which, day after day, they rambled holding hands? Cannot you remember looking for long spells at a mere patch of red on a sheet of paper or in your little paint-box? Most intelligent children, as was the case with Newman, have the philosopher’s doubts about the existence of the world. You see them looking curiously at a stone; you think “children are so funny” and all the time they are wondering if the stone may not be eternal, and what it is to be eternal. Have I not heard a little girl of nine interrupt a conversation of professors who were talking about nothing to ask the astounding question: “Father, what is beauty? What makes it?”
This superiority of intellect persists until the child’s imitativeness begins to work from the outside in. When Jack begins to copy Daddy’s way of shaking his head or shrugging his shoulders, his poor little soul also begins to be satisfied with dismissing questions. Pretty soon this magnificent tide of interest which fills the child’s soul will ebb away to leave it dry and arid. There may be occasional returns of it. All school-boys, writing an essay for their teacher, are visited by thoughts which they realize would be what is called literature, but they do not dare to write them down, and ill-treated inspiration, in its turn, does not dare to return. It is to those moments that such of us whose vocation turns out to be literary look back with despair, wondering what brought a crop of platitudes where distinction used to spring naturally. Only in a Blake or a Whitman is the passage from the child to the artist imperceptible.
People forget their childhood, no doubt, and it is a loss which, no matter how lightly they take it, is irreparable. But, for a long time, they remember it, and, more or less consciously, they try to relive it. It does not occur to one in a thousand, of course, that he was more intelligent when he was eight than now when he is fifty, but it is no less true that the relationship we feel between ourselves and even the man who dazzles us is founded on recollections of great hours or on recollections of childhood; “I have deteriorated” we rightly think; or “I am a victim, I have had no luck.” Pretty often, too, we hear the inward admission immediately followed by a more hopeful feeling: “I am in a rut, I know, but if I would make the least effort, move only one line, say: ‘henceforth I will talk no more nonsense,’ in an instant I could be outside of the herd of the unthinking to become one of the few leading it.” A trifle, a mere nothing, the buzz of a fly or the bang of a door may be enough to disturb this mood and bring back commonplace thoughts in full force; but it is no less true that, during a few moments, we have been separated from a higher mental life only by a vision which we realized was within reach and by an effort which did not seem to be an exertion.
All this amounts to saying that we have a natural belief in the existence of an ART OF THINKING. Some men possess it, others not; but those who do not possess it must blame themselves.
Is this a real intuition? Must we really believe that the constant surging of thought and feeling in myriads of souls is as much of a waste as the useless effort of the waves? Was Gray right in thinking that:
Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear;
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Who can doubt it? Was not Robert Burns separated from illiteracy by the merest accident? Who does not see the element of luck in Shakespeare’s life? Does not the life of Rimbaud demonstrate that a man can be two men? People who knew only M. Rimbaud, the East African dealer, in his counting-house, must have been astounded when told that this was Rimbaud, Rimbaud the genius, Rimbaud, who, before he was nineteen, had written immortal poems, but who despised literature ever after. What happened to Balzac? Here was a man who, between his twentieth and his twenty-ninth year, consistently wrote trash and, after that, produced nothing but masterpieces. Is it not evident to even a casual student of his development that the healthy working of his mind was hampered at first by the imitation of English novelists who had little in common with him, and only began to act freely when dealing with the data in his own experience? How can the historian of art or literature account for the marvellous growth of such epochs as the age of Pericles or the thirteenth century without exceptionally favorable circumstances preventing the waste of talent? Such periods testify to the existence, not of superhuman capacities in a few hundred individuals, but to that of a happy atmosphere helping the growth of the many. Medieval anonymity is another evidence of the diffusion of talent in those fortunate ages. Russians are supposed to have rare facilities for the acquisition of languages. Would it not be better to say that most nations look upon the acquisition of languages with a dread paralyzing the individual’s possibilities? I have seen at least two French people, born in Russia, show the so-called Russian genius for languages, and an Englishman who never manages to learn more than a hundred words of Hindustani will not be surprised to see his children pick up three or four Hindoo dialects in the bazaars of Rangoon. Produce certain favorable conditions and you produce the Art of Thinking. The question is, how to produce those conditions, but it is not, by any means, a disheartening one.
| [2] | “They watch what I am watching, but they do not see what I see.” |
