November 26, 1888.
Another visitor! I am not sure that his visit is not a more distinguished testimonial than any I have yet received. He is a young Don with a very brilliant record indeed. He wrote to ask if he might have the honour of calling, and renewing a very slight acquaintance. He came and conquered. I am still crushed and battered by his visit. I feel like a land that has been harried by an invading army. Let me see if, dizzy and unmanned as I am, I call recall some of the incidents of his visit. He has only been gone an hour, yet I feel as though a month had elapsed since he entered the room, since I was a moderately happy man. He is a very pleasant fellow to look at, small, trim, well-appointed, courteous, friendly, with a deferential air. His eyes gleam brightly through his glasses, and he has brisk dexterous gestures. He was genial enough till he settled down upon literature, and since then what waves and storms have gone over me! I have or had a grovelling taste for books; I possess a large number, and I thought I had read them. But I feel now, not so much as if I had read the wrong ones, but as if those I had read were only, so to speak, the anterooms and corridors which led to the really important books—and of them, it seems, I know nothing. Epigrams flowed from his tongue, brilliant characterisations, admirable judgments. He had "placed" every one, and literature to him seemed like a great mosaic in which he knew the position of every cube. He knew all the movements and tendencies of literature, and books seemed to him to be important, not because they had a message for the mind and heart, but because they illustrated a tendency, or were a connecting link in a chain. He quoted poems I had never heard of, he named authors I had never read. He did it all modestly and quietly enough, with no parade, (I want to do him full justice) but with an evidently growing disappointment to find 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 its melody, its charm, its mysterious thrill; and there are many books and poems, which I know to be excellent of their kind, but which have no meaning or message for me. He seems to think that it is important to have complete texts of old authors, and I do not think that he makes much distinction between first-rate and second-rate work. In fact, I think that his view of literature is the sociological view, and he seems to care more about tendencies and influences than about the beauty and appeal of literature. I do not go so far as to say or to think that literature cannot be treated scientifically; but I feel as I feel about the doctor in Balzac, I think, who, when his wife cried upon his shoulder, said, "Hold, I have analysed tears," adding that they contained so much chlorate of sodium and so much mucus. The truth is that he is a philosopher, and that I am an individualist; but it leaves me with an intense desire to be left alone in my woodland, or, at all events, not to walk there with a ruthless botanist!