The Romance of Zion Chapel | Page 8

found many new and wonderful prophets in
that little library,--poets and painters and musicians of whom hardly
anyone else in Coalchester had yet heard, and certainly no one above
the age of twenty-five.
Surely youth is in nothing more marvellous than in its mysterious
power of attracting to itself into the most out-of-the-way places the
sustenance and companionship it needs. In the unlikeliest wilderness
inspired youth is never without the mysteriously-brought food and the
company of angels. Powers of the air will sweep across continents to
rescue it from prison, soft gales travel from south to north to sow seeds
of beauty in its narrow ways, and little songs will flutter like butterflies
for hundreds of miles to cheer its heart.
The Time-Spirit had given its angels charge concerning these young
people, and, remote as they were from all the fiery centres of thought
and the dreaming schools of art, Zion Place, no less than the Rue de
Rivoli, took its thought of the newest and its beauty of the best.
CHAPTER VII
THE LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OF
COALCHESTER

I have said that Coalchester was a very ignorant old town. I did not
mean to imply that there were no M.A.'s there. In fact, there were quite
a number. You may be sure that if spiritual and intellectual life had its
representatives, as we have seen, spiritual and intellectual death had its
representatives, too--by which I don't mean either to imply that the
M.A.'s were dead M.A.'s, dead and buried with Latin over them in the
old brassed and effigied church, which was so old and large that it was
hardly less conceited than a cathedral. Spiritual and intellectual death in
Coalchester, as elsewhere, was officially represented by the Literary
and Philosophical Society, which still unblushingly went on retaining
its adjectives, even in the face of its "Transactions," which seemed
mainly composed of treasurer's reports, with an occasional paper on
fossils.
Indeed the one spark of life in the pathetic old society was its real
interest in the antediluvian and prehistoric. For the life that was dead it
had a perfect passion, and it sometimes held conversaziones to gaze at
it through microscopes. Occasionally it would waken up to literature
with a paper on Akenside. In everything that didn't in the least matter
some of these mild old gentlemen were genuinely learned. Not that
they hadn't read the great poets, even in the original Greek, Latin, and
Italian. Poets in dead and foreign languages were a form of fossils, and
English poets--with that divine bloom upon them!--they had a way of
fossilising by spectacles, so that they never read them alive. Thus they
had never read Shakespeare even in the original.
Once, long ago in Coalchester, a hundred years ago, there had been a
little circle of elegant literati, connoisseurs of literature and art,--men,
so far as men of that age might be, genuinely, if timidly and
old-maidishly, affectionate towards belles-lettres; men who had got so
far as to appreciate the freshness of an Elizabethan song; minor Bishops
Percy; and such lavender is the true love of anything that their
memories still hung about the walls of the old Lyceum along with their
portraits; while so necessary are great names for little towns to boast of,
that the compiler of the local gazetteer implied that Coalchester glowed
at night with quite a lustre from their names. Besides, they proved very
useful in damping young men. And yet you wouldn't know their names

if I were to write them--as I would rather like to do.
The learned Dr. Sibley, he wrote a pleasant little essay on "Taste," you
know, with a few additional notes on chiaroscuro; and then there was
the learned Dr. Ambrose, who wrote quite a pretty little treatise on
Song-writing.
No! Of course you won't know any of them. Yet they were all once,
and are still, "The Learned." You'll never hear Theophilus Londonderry
spoken of as that, I'm afraid.
As it is the property of fame to grow with time, and the way of a great
name to begin with brains and end with lords, a great man's
descendants are not unnaturally found persons of much greater
consequence than the original great one. In like manner the dignity and
importance of the members of the Literary and Philosophical Society
had grown, in direct ratio to their distance from the original founders of
it; and the learned Doctors Sibley and Ambrose, who really did know
something about art and poetry and certainly loved them, can never
have been persons of such consequence as one or two of their
descendants who are nameless, and who certainly knew nothing about
either.
One of the real objects of this sad little Society was passionately to
ignore what they contemptuously called local talent.