Recreation | Page 3

other day who did not care for poetry at all; it gave her no pleasure, no satisfaction, and only caused her to reflect how much better the thought, so it seemed to her, could be expressed in prose. In the same way there are people who care nothing for music. I knew one Englishman of whom it was said that he knew only two tunes: one was the national anthem, "God Save the King," and the other wasn't. We cannot help these people if they do not care for poetry or music, but I may offer you one or two suggestions founded on my own experience with regard to poetry. There is much poetry for which most of us do not care, but with a little trouble when we are young we may find one or two poets whose poetry, if we get to know it well, will mean very much to us and become part of ourselves. Poetry does not become intimate to us through the intellect alone; it comes to us through temperament, one might almost say enters us through the pores of the skin, and it is as if when we get older our skin becomes dry and our temperament hard and we can read only with the head. It is when we are young, before we reach the age of thirty-five, that we must find out the great poet or poets who have really written specially for us; and if we are happy enough to find one poet who seems to express things which we have consciously felt in our own personal experience, or to have revealed to us things within ourselves of which we were unconscious until we found them expressed in poetry, we have indeed got a great possession. The love for such poetry which comes to us when we are young will not disappear as we get older; it will remain in us, becoming an intimate part of our own being, and will be an assured source of strength, consolation, and delight.
There is another branch of literature to which I must make a passing reference: it is that of philosophy. I am bound to refer to it here because I know two men, both of them distinguished in public life, who find real recreation and spend leisure time when they have it in reading and writing philosophy. They are both living and I have not their permission to mention their names, but as I admire them I mention their recreation, though with an admiration entirely untinged by envy. An Oxford professor is alleged to have said that every one should know enough philosophy to find that he can do without it. I do not go quite so far as that. When I was an undergraduate at Oxford I read Plato because I was made to read it. After I left Oxford I read Plato again to see if I liked it. I did like it so much that I have never found the same pleasure in other philosophical writers. I hope you will not think that I am talking flippantly. I am talking very seriously--about recreation, and I feel bound to mention philosophy in connection with it out of respect to my friends, but I do not lay much stress upon it as a means of recreation.
I come now to the main source of literary recreation in reading: the great books of all time on which one generation after another has set the seal of excellence so that we know them certainly to be worth reading. There is a wide and varied choice, and it is amongst the old books that the surest and most lasting recreation is to be found. Some one has said, "Whenever a new book comes out read an old one." We need not take that too literally, but we should give the old and proved books the preference. Some one, I think it was Isaac Disraeli, said that he who did not make himself acquainted with the best thoughts of the greatest writers would one day be mortified to observe that his best thoughts are their indifferent ones, and it is from the great books that have stood the test of time that we shall get, not only the most lasting pleasure, but a standard by which to measure our own thoughts, the thoughts of others, and the excellence of the literature of our own day. Some years ago, when I was Secretary for Foreign Affairs in England, when holidays were often long in coming, short and precious when they did come, when work was hard and exhausting and disagreeable, I found it a good plan when I got home to my library in the country to have three books on hand for recreation. One of them used