A race educated in this way never advances, save as it is jolted out of its notions by men with either a sublime ignorance of, or an indifference to, what has been done and said.  These men are always called barbarians by their contemporaries:  they are jeered and hooted.  They supply much mirth by their eccentricities.  After they are dead the world sometimes canonizes them and carves on their tombs the word “Savior.”

Do I then plead the cause of ignorance?  Well, yes, rather so.  A little ignorance is not a dangerous thing.  A man who reads too much—­who accumulates too many facts-gets his mind filled to the point of saturation; matters then crystallize and his head becomes a solid thing that refuses to let anything either in or out.  In his soul there is no guest-chamber.  His only hope for progress lies in another incarnation.

And so a certain ignorance seems a necessary equipment for the doing of a great work.  To live in a big city and know what others are doing and saying; to meet the learned and powerful, and hear their sermons and lectures; to view the unending shelves of vast libraries is to be discouraged at the start.  And thus we find that genius is essentially rural—­a country product.  Salons, soirees, theaters, concerts, lectures, libraries, produce a fine mediocrity that smiles at the right time and bows when ’t is proper, but it is well to bear in mind that George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett, Charlotte Bronte and Jane Austen were all country girls, with little companionship, nourished on picked-up classics, having a healthy ignorance of what the world was saying and doing.

* * * * *

It is over a hundred years since Jane Austen lived.  But when you tramp that five miles from Overton, where the railroad-station is, to Steventon, where she was born, it doesn’t seem like it.  Rural England does not change much.  Great fleecy clouds roll lazily across the blue, overhead, and the hedgerows are full of twittering birds that you hear but seldom see; and the pastures contain mild-faced cows that look at you with wide-open eyes over the stone walls; and in the towering elm-trees that sway their branches in the breeze crows hold a noisy caucus.  And it comes to you that the clouds and the blue sky and the hedgerows and the birds and the cows and the crows are all just as Jane Austen knew them—­no change.  These stone walls stood here then, and so did the low slate-roofed barns and the whitewashed cottages where the roses clamber over the doors.

I paused in front of one of these snug, homely, handsome, pretty little cottages and looked at the two exact rows of flowers that lined the little walk leading from gate to cottage-door.  The pathway was made from coal-ashes and the flowerbeds were marked off with pieces of broken crockery set on edge.  ’T was an absent-minded, impolite thing to do—­to stand leaning on a gate and critically examine the landscape-gardening, evidently an overworked woman’s gardening, at that.