Читать книгу The South Country онлайн

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And so I travel, armed only with myself, an avaricious and often libertine and fickle eye and ear, in pursuit, not of knowledge, not of wisdom, but of one whom to pursue is never to capture. Politics, the drama, science, racing, reforms and preservations, divorces, book clubs—nearly everything which the average (oh! mysterious average man, always to be met but never met) and the superior and the intelligent man is thinking of, I cannot grasp; my mind refuses to deal with them; and when they are discussed I am given to making answers like, “In Kilve there is no weathercock.” I expect there are others as unfortunate, superfluous men such as the sanitation, improved housing, police, charities, medicine of our wonderful civilization saves from the fate of the cuckoo’s foster-brothers. They will perhaps follow my meanders and understand. The critics also will help. They will misunderstand—it is their trade. How well they know what I ought, or at least ought not, to do. I must, they have said, avoid “the manner of the worst oleographs”; must not be “affected,” though the recipe is not to be had; must beware of “over-excitation of the colour sense.” In slow course of years we acquire a way of expression, hopelessly inadequate, as we plainly see when looking at the methods of great poets, of beautiful women, of athletes, of politicians, but still gradually as fitted to the mind as an old walking-stick to the hand that has worn and been worn by it, full of our weakness as of our strength, of our blindness as of our vision—the man himself, the poor man it may be. And I live by writing, since it is impossible to live by not writing in an age not of gold but of brass.