How Marvellous It Seems That There
Should Be Found Communities Furnished With The Printing-Press And Fully
Convinced They Are More Intelligent Than Ants, And Yet Deliberately
Refusing By A Solid 'popular' Vote To Accept Free Libraries!
They look
with scorn on the mediaeval times, when volumes were chained in the
college library or to the desk at church.
Ignorant times those! A good
thing it would be if only three books were chained to a desk, open and
free in every parish throughout the kingdom now. So might the wish to
unlearn be at last started in the inert mind of the mass. Almost the only
books left to me to read, and not to unlearn very much, are my first
books - the graven classics of Greece and Rome, cut with a stylus so
deeply into the tablet they cannot be erased. Little of the monograph or
of classification, no bushel baskets full of facts, no minute dissection
of nature, no attempt to find the soul under the scalpel. Thoughts which
do not exactly deal with nature direct in a mechanical way, as the
chemist labels all his gums and spices and earths in small boxes - I
wonder if anybody at Athens ever made a collection of the coleoptera? Yet
in some way they had got the spirit of the earth and sea, the soul of the
sun. This never dies; this I wish not to unlearn; this is ever fresh and
beautiful as a summer morning: -
Such the golden crocus,
Fair flower of early spring; the gopher white,
And fragrant thyme, and all the unsown beauty
Which in moist grounds the verdant meadows bear;
The ox-eye, the sweet-smelling flower of love,
The chalca, and the much-sung hyacinth,
And the low-growing violet, to which
Dark Proserpine a darker hue has given.
They come nearest to our own violets and cowslips - the unsown beauty of
our meadows - to the hawthorn leaf and the high pinewood. I can forget all
else that I have read, but it is difficult to forget these even when I
will. I read them in English. I had the usual Latin and Greek
instruction, but I read them in English deliberately. For the inflexion
of the vowel I care nothing; I prize the idea. Scholars may regard me
with scorn. I reply with equal scorn. I say that a great classic thought
is greater to an English mind in English words than in any other form,
and therein fits best to this our life and day. I read them in English
first, and intend to do so to the end. I do not know what set me on these
books, but I began them when about eighteen. The first of all was
Diogenes Laertius's 'Lives of the Philosophers.' It was a happy choice;
my good genius, I suppose, for you see I was already fairly well read in
modern science, and these old Greek philosophies set me thinking
backwards, unwinding and unlearning, and getting at that eidolon which is
not to be found in the mechanical heavens of this age.
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