Books and Culture | Page 8

the prose, turned them back again. I also
sometimes jumbled my collections of hints into confusion, and after
some weeks endeavoured to reduce them into the best order before I
began to form the full sentences and compleat the paper." Such a
patient recasting of material for the ends of verbal exactness and
accuracy suggests ways in which the imagination may deal with
characters and scenes in order to stimulate and foster its own activity. It
is well to recall at frequent intervals the story we read in some
dramatist, poet, or novelist, in order that the imagination may set it
before us again in all its rich vitality. It is well also as we read to insist
on seeing the picture as well as the words. It is as easy to see the
bloodless duke before the portrait of "My Last Duchess," in Browning's
little masterpiece, to take in all the accessories and carry away with us a
vivid and lasting impression, as it is to follow with the eye the
succession of words. In this way we possess the poem, and make it
serve the ends of culture.

Chapter IV.
The First Delight.
"We were reading Plato's Apology in the Sixth Form," says Mr.
Symonds in his account of his school life at Harrow. "I bought Cary's
crib, and took it with me to London on an exeat in March. My hostess,
a Mrs. Bain, who lived in Regent's Park, treated me to a comedy one
evening at the Haymarket. I forget what the play was. When we
returned from the play I went to bed and began to read my Cary's Plato.
It so happened that I stumbled on the 'Phædrus.' I read on and on, till I
reached the end. Then I began the 'Symposium;' and the sun was
shining on the shrubs outside the ground floor on which I slept before I
shut the book up. I have related these unimportant details because that
night was one of the most important nights of my life.... Here in the
'Phædrus' and the 'Symposium,' in the 'Myth of the Soul,' I discovered
the revelation I had been waiting for, the consecration of a
long-cherished idealism. It was just as though the voice of my own soul
spoke to me through Plato. Harrow vanished into unreality. I had
touched solid ground. Here was the poetry, the philosophy of my own
enthusiasm, expressed with all the magic of unrivalled style." The
experience recorded in these words is typical; it comes to every one
who has the capacity for the highest form of enjoyment and the highest
kind of growth. It was an experience which was both emotional and
spiritual; delight and expansion were involved in it; the joy of contact
with something beautiful, and the sudden enlargement which comes
from touch with a great nature dealing with fundamental truth. In every
experience of this kind there comes an access of life, as if one had
drunk at a fountain of vitality.
A thrilling chapter in the spiritual history of the race might be written
by bringing together the reports of such experiences which are to be
found in almost all literatures,--experiences which vary greatly in depth
and significance, which have in common the unfailing interest of
discovery and growth. If this collocation of vital contacts could be
expanded so as to include the history of the intellectual commerce of
races, we should be able to read the story of humanity in a new and

searching light. For the transmission of Greek thought and beauty to the
Oriental world, the wide diffusion of Hebrew ideas of man and his life,
the contact of the modern with the antique world in the Renaissance,
for instance, effected changes in the spiritual constitution of man more
subtle, pervasive, and radical than we are yet in a position to
understand. The spiritual history of men is largely a history of
discovery,--the record of those fruitful moments when we come upon
new things, and our ideas are swiftly or slowly expanded to include
them. That process is generally both rapid and continuous; the
discovery of this continent made an instant and striking impression on
the older world, but that older world has not yet entirely adjusted itself
to the changes in the social order which were to follow close upon the
rising of the new world above the once mysterious line of the western
horizon.
Now, this process of discovery goes on continuously in the experience
of every human soul which has capacity for growth; and it is the
peculiar joy of the lover of books. Literature is a continual revelation to
every genuine reader; a revelation of that quality which we call art, and
a revelation of that mysterious vital force which we call life. In