thing but a barren special pleading for
pleasure, excitement, and knowledge when he is young, and for
contemplative tranquillity when he is old and satiated. Romance and
Asceticism, Amorism and Puritanism are equally unreal in the great
Philistine world. The world shown us in books, whether the books be
confessed epics or professed gospels, or in codes, or in political
orations, or in philosophic systems, is not the main world at all: it
is only the self-consciousness of certain abnormal people who have the
specific artistic talent and temperament. A serious matter this for you
and me, because the man whose consciousness does not correspond to that
of the majority is a madman; and the old habit of worshipping madmen is
giving way to the new habit of locking them up. And since what we call
education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution
of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete
fictitious for the contemporary real, education, as you no doubt
observed at Oxford, destroys, by supplantation, every mind that is not
strong enough to see through the imposture and to use the great Masters
of Arts as what they really are and no more: that is, patentees of
highly questionable methods of thinking, and manufacturers of highly
questionable, and for the majority but half valid representations of
life. The schoolboy who uses his Homer to throw at his fellow's head
makes perhaps the safest and most rational use of him; and I observe
with reassurance that you occasionally do the same, in your prime, with
your Aristotle.

Fortunately for us, whose minds have been so overwhelmingly
sophisticated by literature, what produces all these treatises and poems
and scriptures of one sort or another is the struggle of Life to become
divinely conscious of itself instead of blindly stumbling hither and
thither in the line of least resistance. Hence there is a driving
towards truth in all books on matters where the writer, though
exceptionally gifted is normally constituted, and has no private axe to
grind. Copernicus had no motive for misleading his fellowmen as to the
place of the sun in the solar system: he looked for it as honestly as a
shepherd seeks his path in a mist. But Copernicus would not have written
love stories scientifically. When it comes to sex relations, the man of
genius does not share the common man's danger of capture, nor the woman
of genius the common woman's overwhelming special