Absolute,” as the Oxford Spectator said, had really been “got into a corner.”  The Absolute has too often been apparently cornered, too often has escaped from that situation.  Somewhere in an old notebook I believe I have a portrait in pencil of Mr. Green as he wrestled at lecture with Aristotle, with the Notion, with his chair and table.  Perhaps he was the last of that remarkable series of men, who may have begun with Wycliffe, among whom Newman’s is a famous name, that were successively accepted at Oxford as knowing something esoteric, as possessing a shrewd guess at the secret.

      “None the less
   I still came out no wiser than I went.”

All of these masters and teachers made their mark, probably won their hold, in the first place, by dint of character, not of some peculiar views of theology and philosophy.  Doubtless it was the same with Socrates, with Buddha.  To be like them, not to believe with them, is the thing needful.  But the younger we are, the less, perhaps, we see this clearly, and we persuade ourselves that there is some mystery in these men’s possession, some piece of knowledge, some method of thinking which will lead us to certainty and to peace.  Alas, their secret is incommunicable, and there is no more a philosophic than there is a royal road to the City.

This may seem a digression from Adventures among Books into the Book of Human Life.  But while much of education is still orally communicated by lectures and conversations, many thoughts which are to be found in books, Greek or German, reach us through the hearing.  There are many pupils who can best be taught in this way; but, for one, if there be aught that is desirable in a book, I then, as now, preferred, if I could, to go to the book for it.

Yet it is odd that one remembers so little of one’s undergraduate readings, apart from the constant study of the ancient classics, which might not be escaped.  Of these the calm wisdom of Aristotle, in moral thought and in politics, made perhaps the deepest impression.  Probably politicians are the last people who read Aristotle’s “Politics.”  The work is, indeed, apt to disenchant one with political life.  It is melancholy to see the little Greek states running the regular round—­monarchy, oligarchy, tyranny, democracy in all its degrees, the “ultimate democracy” of plunder, lawlessness, license of women, children, and slaves, and then tyranny again, or subjection to some foreign power.  In politics, too, there is no secret of success, of the happy life for all.  There is no such road to the City, either democratic or royal.  This is the lesson which Aristotle’s “Polities” impresses on us, this and the impossibility of imposing ideal constitutions on mankind.