Comfort Found in Good Old Books. Fitch George Hamlin

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СКАЧАТЬ ingenious mosaic of Greek, Latin, Persian, Hindoo and Arabic quotations. These extracts are always apt and they always point some shrewd observation or conclusion of the Sage of Concord; but that Emerson should quote them as a novelty reveals the provincial character of New England culture in his day as strongly as the lectures of Margaret Fuller.

      The question that always arises in my mind when reading a new list of the hundred or the fifty best books by some recognized literary authority is: Does the ordinary business or professional man, who has had no special literary training, take any keen interest in the great masterpieces of the Greeks and Romans? Does it not require some special aptitude or some special preparation for one to appreciate Plato's Dialogues or Sophocles' Œdipus, Homer's Iliad or Horace's Odes, even in the best translations? In most cases, I think the reading of the Greek and Latin classics in translations is barren of any good results. Unless one has a passionate sympathy with Greek or Roman life, it is impossible, without a study of the languages and an intimate knowledge of the life and ideals of the people, to get any grasp of their best literary work. The things which the scholar admires seem to the great public flat and commonplace; the divine simplicity, the lack of everything modern, seems to narrow the intellectual horizon. This, I think, is the general result.

      But over against this must be placed the exceptions among men of literary genius like Keats and Richard Jefferies, both Englishmen of scanty school education, who rank, to my mind, among the greatest interpreters of the real spirit of the classical age. Keats, like Shakespeare, knew "small Latin and less Greek"; yet in his Ode on a Grecian Urn and his Endymion he has succeeded in bringing over into the alien English tongue the very essence of Greek life and thought. Matthew Arnold, with all his scholarship and culture, never succeeded in doing this, even in such fine work as A Strayed Reveler or Empedocles on Etna. In the same way Jefferies, who is neglected by readers of today, in The Story of My Heart has reproduced ancient Rome and made Julius Cæsar more real than we find him in his own Commentaries.

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