We resent, in our inarticulate way, these sneers at
our Philistinism, commercialism, athleticism, materialism, from
dim-eyed pedants on the one hand and superior persons on the other,
who have evidently forgotten, if they ever saw, the whole purport of
that Greek literature the name of which they take in vain. No! _La
litterature est une chose qui touche a toutes choses_; but if we are
to shut our eyes to all the "things" which evoke it, it becomes what
it is to so many, whose education has been in name predominantly
literary, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying
nothing."
(2) The argument has already insensibly led us to treat by implication
the second, and indeed the third of our assumed objects. But in our
modern insistence upon social relations and citizenship--a very proper
insistence, still too much warped and hampered by selfishness and
prejudice--there is a real danger of our forgetting how much of our
conscious existence is passed, in a true sense, at leisure and alone.
It is our ideal on the one side to be "all things to all men": and for
any approach to this ideal, as we have seen, the knowledge and
sympathy born of literature are indispensable. But on the other side
no man or woman is completely fitted out without provision for the
blank spaces, the passages and waiting rooms, as it were, to say
nothing of the actual "recreation rooms" of the house of life.
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