I have been dull to-day, haunted by the thought of how much there is that
I would fain know, and how little I can hope to learn. The scope of
knowledge has become so vast. I put aside nearly all physical
investigation; to me it is naught, or only, at moments, a matter of idle
curiosity. This would seem to be a considerable clearing of the field;
but it leaves what is practically the infinite. To run over a list of
only my favourite subjects, those to which, all my life long, I have more
or less applied myself, studies which hold in my mind the place of
hobbies, is to open vistas of intellectual despair. In an old note-book
I jotted down such a list--"things I hope to know, and to know well." I
was then four and twenty. Reading it with the eyes of fifty-four, I must
needs laugh. There appear such modest items as "The history of the
Christian Church up to the Reformation"--"all Greek poetry"--"The field
of Mediaeval Romance"--"German literature from Lessing to Heine"--"Dante!"
Not one of these shall I ever "know, and know well"; not any one of them.
Yet here I am buying books which lead me into endless paths of new
temptation. What have I to do with Egypt? Yet I have been beguiled by
Flinders Petrie and by Maspero. How can I pretend to meddle with the
ancient geography of Asia Minor? Yet here have I bought Prof. Ramsay's
astonishing book, and have even read with a sort of troubled enjoyment a
good many pages of it; troubled, because I have but to reflect a moment,
and I see that all this kind of thing is mere futile effort of the
intellect when the time for serious intellectual effort is over.
It all means, of course, that, owing to defective opportunity, owing,
still more perhaps, to lack of method and persistence, a possibility that
was in me has been wasted, lost. My life has been merely tentative, a
broken series of false starts and hopeless new beginnings. If I allowed
myself to indulge that mood, I could revolt against the ordinance which
allows me no second chance. _O mihi praeteritos referat si Jupiter
annos_! If I could but start again, with only the experience there
gained! I mean, make a new beginning of my intellectual life; nothing
else, O heaven! nothing else. Even amid poverty, I could do so much
better; keeping before my eyes some definite, some not unattainable,
good; sternly dismissing the impracticable, the wasteful.
And, in doing so, become perhaps an owl-eyed pedant, to whom would be for
ever dead the possibility of such enjoyment as I know in these final
years. Who can say? Perhaps the sole condition of my progress to this
state of mind and heart which make my happiness was that very stumbling
and erring which I so regret.