nd he belongs to me. To know a
man is to know what he knows in its best form--the things that have made
the man possible.

A great portrait painter, it has always seemed to me, is a kind of god
in his way--knows everything his sitters know. He knows what every man's
knowledge has done with the man--the best part of it--and makes it
speak. I have never yet found myself looking at great walls of faces
(one painter's faces), found myself walking up and down in Sargent's
soul, without thinking what a great inhabited, trooped-through man he
was--all knowledges flocking to him, showing their faces to him, from
the ends of the earth, emptying their secrets silently out to his brush.
If a man like Sargent has for one of his sitters a great astronomer, an
astronomer who is really great, who knows and absorbs stars, Sargent
absorbs the man, and as a last result the stars in the man, and the man
in Sargent, and the man's stars in Sargent, all look out of the canvas.

It is the spirit that sums up and unifies knowledge. It is a fact to be
reckoned with, in education, that knowledge can be summed up, and that
the best summing up of it is a human face.

III

The Higher Cannibalism

It is not unnatural to claim, therefore, that the most immediate and
important short-cut in knowledge that the comprehensive or educated man
can take comes to him through his human and personal relations. There is
no better way of getting at the spirits of facts, of tracing out
valuable and practical laws or generalisations, than the habit of trying
things on to people in one's mind.

I have always thought that if I ever got discouraged and had to be an
editor, I would do this more practically. As it is, I merely do it with
books. I find no more satisfactory way of reading most books--the way
one has to--through their backs, than reading the few books that one
does read, through persons and for persons and with persons. It is a
great waste of time to read a book alone. One needs room for rows of
one's friends in a book. One book read through the eyes of ten people
has more reading matter in it than ten books read in a common, lazy,
lonesome fashion. One likes to do it, not only because one finds one's
self enjoying a book ten times over, getting ten people's worth out of
it, but because it makes a kind of sitting-room of one's mind, puts a
fire-place in it, and one watches the ten people enjoying one another.

It may be for better and it may be f