but we get nearer it by loving the familiar scene, the old homestead, the tiny valley, the wayside copse, than we do by racing over Europe on the track of Giorgione, or over Asia in pursuit of local colour.  After all, everything has its appointed time.  It is good to range in youth, to rub elbows with humanity, and then, as the days go on, to take stock, to remember, to wonder, “To be content with little, to serve beauty well.”

VI

SPECIALISM

It is a very curious thing to reflect how often an old platitude or axiom retains its vitality, long after the conditions which gave it birth have altered, and it no longer represents a truth.  It would not matter if such platitudes only lived on dustily in vapid and ill-furnished minds, like the vases of milky-green opaque glass decorated with golden stars, that were the joy of Early Victorian chimney-pieces, and now hold spills in the second-best spare bedroom.  But like the psalmist’s enemies, platitudes live and are mighty.  They remain, and, alas! they have the force of arguments in the minds of sturdy unreflective men, who describe themselves as plain, straightforward people, and whose opinions carry weight in a community whose feelings are swayed by the statements of successful men rather than by the conclusions of reasonable men.

One of these pernicious platitudes is the statement that every one ought to know something about everything and everything about something.  It has a speciously epigrammatic air about it, dazzling enough to persuade the common-sense person that it is an intellectual judgment.

As a matter of fact, under present conditions, it represents an impossible and even undesirable ideal.  A man who tried to know something about everything would end in knowing very little about anything; and the most exhaustive programme that could be laid down for the most erudite of savants nowadays would be that he should know anything about anything, while the most resolute of specialists must be content with knowing something about something.

A well-informed friend told me, the other day, the name and date of a man who, he said, could be described as the last person who knew practically everything at his date that was worth knowing.  I have forgotten both the name and the date and the friend who told me, but I believe that the learned man in question was a cardinal in the sixteenth century.  At the present time, the problem of the accumulation of knowledge and the multiplication of books is a very serious one indeed.  It is, however, morbid to allow it to trouble the mind.  Like all insoluble problems, it will settle itself in a way so obvious that the people who solve it will wonder that any one could ever have doubted what the solution would be, just as the problem of the depletion of the world’s stock of coal will no doubt be solved in some perfectly simple fashion.