No one can feel any reasonable doubt that we have heard about Christ and
Socrates and Buddha and St. Francis a mere chaos of excerpts, a mere
book of quotations. But from those fragmentary epigrams we can deduce
greatness as clearly as we can deduce Venus from the torso of Venus or
Hercules _ex pede Herculem_. If we knew nothing else about the Founder
of Christianity, for example, beyond the fact that a religious teacher
lived in a remote country, and in the course of his peregrinations and
proclamations consistently called Himself "the Son of Man," we should
know by that alone that he was a man of almost immeasurable greatness.
If future ages happened to record nothing else about Socrates except
that he owned his title to be the wisest of men because he knew that he
knew nothing, they would be able to deduce from that the height and
energy of his civilisation, the glory that was Greece. The credit of
such random compilations as that which "E.S.S." and Mr. George Allen
have just effected is quite secure. It is the pure, pedantic, literal
editions, the complete works of this author or that author which are
forgotten. It is such books as this that have revolutionised the destiny
of the world. Great things like Christianity or Platonism have never
been founded upon consistent editions; all of them have been founded
upon scrap-books.
The position of Maeterlinck in modern life is a thing too obvious to be
easily determined in words.
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