n the
telescopists and the microscopists. The first study large things and
live in a small world; the second study small things and live in a
large world. It is inspiriting without doubt to whizz in a motor-car
round the earth, to feel Arabia as a whirl of sand or China as a flash
of rice-fields. But Arabia is not a whirl of sand and China is not a
flash of rice-fields. They are ancient civilizations with strange
virtues buried like treasures. If we wish to understand them it must
not be as tourists or inquirers, it must be with the loyalty of
children and the great patience of poets. To conquer these places is to
lose them. The man standing in his own kitchen-garden, with fairyland
opening at the gate, is the man with large ideas. His mind creates
distance; the motor-car stupidly destroys it. Moderns think of the
earth as a globe, as something one can easily get round, the spirit of
a schoolmistress. This is shown in the odd mistake perpetually made
about Cecil Rhodes. His enemies say that he may have had large ideas,
but he was a bad man. His friends say that he may have been a bad man,
but he certainly had large ideas. The truth is that he was not a man
essentially bad, he was a man of much geniality and many good
intentions, but a man with singularly small views. There is nothing
large about painting the map red; it is an innocent game for children.
It is just as easy to think in continents as to think in cobble-stones.
The difficulty comes in when we seek to know the substance of either of
them. Rhodes' prophecies about the Boer resistance are an admirable
comment on how the "large ideas" prosper when it is not a question of
thinking in continents but of understanding a few two-legged men. And
under all this vast illusion of the cosmopolitan planet, with its
empires and its Reuter's agency, the real life of man goes on concerned
with this tree or that temple, with this harvest or that drinking-song,
totally uncomprehended, totally untouched. And it watches from its
splendid parochialism, possibly with a smile of amusement, motor-car
civilization going its triumphant way, outstripping time, consuming
space, seeing all and seeing nothing, roaring on at last to the capture
of the solar system, only to find the sun cockney and the stars
suburban.

IV. Mr. Bernard Shaw

In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities, when
genial old Ibsen filled the world with wholesome joy, and the kindly
tal