Читать книгу On The Art of Reading - Arthur Quiller-Couch - Страница 15

What Does, What Knows, What Is. … I have happily left myself no time to-day to speak of What Is: happily, because I would not have you even approach it towards the end of an hour when your attention must be languishing. But I leave you with two promises, and with two sayings from which as this lecture took its start its successors will proceed.

The first promise is, that What Is, being the spiritual element in man, is the highest object of his study.

The second promise is that, nine-tenths of what is worthy to be called Literature being concerned with this spiritual element, for that it should be studied, from firstly up to ninthly, before anything else.

And my two quotations are for you to ponder:

(1) This, first:

That all spirit is mutually attractive, as all matter is mutually attractive, is an ultimate fact beyond which we cannot go. … Spirit to spirit—as in water face answereth to face, so the heart of man to man.

(2) And this other, from the writings of an obscure Welsh clergyman of the 17th century:

You will never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars.

[Footnote 1: The reader will kindly turn back to p.1, and observe the date at the head of this lecture. At that time I was engaged against a system of English teaching which I believed to be thoroughly bad. That system has since given place to another, which I am prepared to defend as a better.]