Creative Reading
As surely as there is such a thing as creative writing there is such a thing as creative reading. That it is not very common appears from the universal demand for fiction, in which the creative process has already been applied to the material in hand, so that the reader is called upon to contribute very little himself. Indeed, if the writer of fiction is strong enough he can carry his more compliant readers to almost any distance from the world of their experience and can persuade them to accept as its equal or as its superior some merely invented region. To go so far with a romancer is not, as is often thought, a necessary sign that the reader is imaginative: he may be only limp or uncritical, unable to hold his own in the presence of a more powerful fancy. Children are regularly beguiled in this fashion, as are the credulous of all ages by travellers and politicians and priests who have a romantic turn of mind. The creative reader, however, begins to build the minute he begins to read. In varying degrees, of course, he leans upon his writer, but he takes profit from his book in proportion to the amount of creative energy he puts into it. Perhaps the simplest illustration of this is to be noted in the fact that one reads a book with different results at different times. A reader, for instance, who has never been in love cannot find in a play or poem, a novel or biography portraying the effects of love, more than a fraction of what he would find there if he had genuinely known the passion. Another who has thought the history of some foreign country dull may discover that it is fascinating after he has visited that country. And still another may suddenly perceive a large pertinence in ideas or speculations which heretofore have left him cold: he has in his own person caught up with them, and now greets them heartily for the first time though they have been there in the book all the time.
The notion that unhappy men and women employ reading as an anodyne is not quite accurate. With them reading furnishes more than a substitute for thought; it furnishes them the occasion to set going in their minds a dance of images, a sequence of ideas, a march of memories which run parallel to the matter of the book, and to which the book, indeed, may be but the exciting cause. Neither is it quite accurate to say that inveterate readers, happy or unhappy, lead their lives within the pages of this volume or that for want of the more robust outlet which action affords those who do not care to read, or at least to read so much. Rather, such readers may be full of creative impulses which they prefer to exercise in a purer and more plastic universe than they have found elsewhere. There happens to be no standard by which to measure the relative value of the forces which are released by action and of those which are released by contemplation. If the man of action is associated in his career with other active persons, why may not the man of contemplation be equally associated in his with others whose society he enjoys through the medium of printed words? As there are men of action who drive blindly forward, without thought, to some goal which they hardly see though their instincts urge them in that general direction, so there are men of contemplation who drift with the tide of some—or any—poet or historian or philosopher without critical resistance; but the creative reader challenges, disputes, denies, fights his way through his book, and he emerges to some extent always another person. He has been a creator while he seemed to be merely passive and recipient.
To take another easy illustration, a scholar engaged in actual research may wade through rivers and climb mountains of books while in the pursuit of proofs for his thesis, and may yet at every step be full of creative fire, throwing aside what he does not need and choosing what he does as emphatically as if he were a soldier on the most difficult campaign. The researcher is but a common type of creative reader, his process and his aim being more readily comprehensible than those of the other types but not essentially unlike them. All creative readers have at any given moment some conscious or unconscious thesis which they are seeking to prove, some conscious or unconscious picture they desire to complete, some conscious or unconscious point they mean to reach if they can. By it they are sustained through what would be unendurable labour to another, or even to them at an earlier or a later day. It gives them resoluteness, it gives them form. More potent than has been ordinarily recognized, it belongs with that faculty whereby the mind arranges its impressions in some sort of order and comes to some kind of conclusion without always consulting the will or even inviting the consciousness to be aware of what is going on.
The token by which the creative reader can best be known is his lack of the pedantic expectation with which many readers of considerable taste begin to read. For instance, there was that professorial critic, for whom no pillory can be too high or naked or windy, who declared he could not approve of The Playboy of the Western World because it was neither tragedy nor comedy nor tragi-comedy. He did not create as he read; he could not even follow a free representation of human life; he was tied brain and mood to a prejudice which shut him in from any liberation by novel wit or beauty. Like many better men, he was a victim of an obsession for the classics into which creative readers never allow themselves to fall. They may have formed their literary principles upon the strictest canon and they may be richly responsive to the great traditions of style and structure; but they have not been made timid by their training and they know that the heartiest reader, like the heartiest spectator of human affairs, must occasionally have his fling outside narrow circles or must begin to stifle. It is as snobbish to feel at home only among the “best” books as to feel at home only among the “best” people. After all, the best books have been made up out of diverse elements, transmuted by some creative spirit from the raw materials which lay around. The reader who in some degree can share that spirit’s vision can share also its delight in the same sort of original stuff. Imagine, for example, the state of mind of a person who can argue that it is a weakness, if not a literary impropriety, to prefer Goethe’s conversations with Eckermann at times to Faust.
There are very proper moods which the noblest work of art cannot satisfy as well as some casual memoir, some quaint history or book of travel, some halting speculation, some mere array of facts. Who has not preferred the nasturtiums or turnips of his own garden to more sumptuous flowers or vegetables from the open market? The pleasant odours of many mornings and the colour of many fine sunsets cling about the blossoms which he has tended; the plain roots from his soil have in them the savour of honest sweat and the contour of agreeable hopes. So the creative reader likes frequently to shape his own designs and make his own conclusions out of raw materials which no other hand—however better he may know it is—has worked with. In fact, it is now and then hard for a reader in the full strength of some creative impulse to keep himself as aware of the positive aesthetic merit of what he is reading as perhaps he should. If the matter of life is there in large abundance he may overlook the lack of form and proportion and interpretation because he is himself able to supply them. It is for this reason that generous spirits like Sir Walter Scott, and even more rigid critics, seem often to have gone too far in their praise of this or that book which has not survived or pleased as much as they expected; they were misled by finding in the book an element of creation which they had contributed but which colder readers do not find there. If criticism, professional or amateur, were an exact science, practised in a vacuum, the creative reader by his vagaries might deserve the accusation of being a sort of astrologer among the scientists; but it is not, and so his more creative vagaries must be classed less with the winds of bad doctrine than with the breath of life.