I walked to my study window to look out and ponder. I had the sudden sense of being caught in the swift current of a river. Time, however, in a busy life is apt to pass imperceptibly, and I confess that it was with a good deal of a shock that I happened to note the other day, when engaged in the scholar’s equivalent of big-game hunting, the glancing over of secondhand-book catalogues, that Matthew Arnold’s most influential work, Culture and Anarchy, was published just sixty years ago. Just as a man who knows only one country cannot be considered to know even that, so a man who knows only one era cannot savor its peculiarities with the same biting relish as one who has been a wider traveler in time. A straddle is generally considered to be neither a dignified nor a determined position, but if it entails certain discomforts it also offers certain advantages, certain piquancies of comparison. The life, however, which has embraced both Darwin and Einstein, Thomas and Aldous Huxley, has straddled, as it were, two eras in thought and civilization. In my boyhood, however, when I was keen on every new intellectual trail, their works were not classics or ‘ required reading,’ but living voices to which I listened with the same sense of contemporaneity with which to-day we read Eddington or Harvey Robinson, Einstein, O’Neill, or Aldous Huxley.

I have barely to-day touched my half-century, yet these names sound like a long-bygone age. Dickens was but eight years gone when I was born, and Thomas Huxley and John Ruskin were writing when I was in college. Carlyle died when I was three, Darwin when I was four, John Richard Green and Karl Marx when I was five, Matthew Arnold and Sir Henry Maine when I was ten, Browning when I was eleven, and Cardinal Newman and Tennyson a few years later. In America the Civil War was scarcely less recent, in Europe the pregnant Franco-Prussian War was more so, than is the Great War to-day. As it chanced, my own first decade was that which is generally accepted as the turning point between the old and the new worlds of thought.

No later work, however influential or revolutionary in our thought, ever attains to quite the same intensity of reality as those which helped to stir our minds in boyhood, when the whole world was opening before us, when thought was the great adventure, and when prophets commanded whole-souled homage. THROUGHOUT life we always, I think, maintain a peculiar interest in the men and books that deeply influenced our earliest and most formative years.

Sweetness and light by matthew arnold