nd that he
had fallen among savages. I am sure that his conclusion was that
authors of popular novels were very shallow, ill-informed people, and I
am sure I wholly agreed with him. Good heavens, what a mind the man
had, how stored with knowledge! how admirably equipped! Nothing that he
had ever put away in his memory seemed to have lost its colour or
outline; and he knew, moreover, how to lay his hand upon everything.
Indeed, it seemed to me that his mind was like an emporium, with
everything in the world arranged on shelves, all new and varnished and
bright, and that he knew precisely the place of everything. I became
the prey of hopeless depression; when I tried to join in, I confused
writers and dates; he set me right, not patronisingly but paternally.
"Ah, but you will remember," he said, and "Yes, but we must not
overlook the fact that"--adding, with admirable humility, "Of course
these are small points, but it is my business to know them." Now I find
myself wondering why I disliked knowledge, communicated thus, so much
as I did. It may be envy and jealousy, it may be humiliation and
despair. But I do not honestly think that it is. I am quite sure I do
not want to possess that kind of knowledge. It is the very sharpness
and clearness of outline about it all that I dislike. The things that
he knows have not become part of his mind in any way: they are stored
away there, like walnuts; and I feel that I have been pelted with
walnuts, deluged and buried in walnuts. The things which my visitor
knows have undergone no change, they have not been fused and blended by
his personality; they have not affected his mind, nor has his mind
affected them. I don't wish to despise or to decry his knowledge; as a
lecturer, he must be invaluable; but he treats literature as a purveyor
might--it has not been food to him, but material and stock-in-trade.
Some of the poetry we talked about--Elizabethan lyrics--grow in my mind
like flowers in a copse; in his mind they are planted in rows, with
their botanical names on tickets. The worst of it is that I do not even
feel encouraged to fill up my gaps of knowledge, or to master the
history of tendency. I feel as if he had rather trampled down the
hyacinths and anemones in my wild and uncultivated woodlands. I should
like, in a dim way, to have his knowledge as well as my own
appreciation, but I would not exchange my knowledge for his. The value
of a lyric or a beautiful sentence, for me, is