DOI Artikel:
Noble, James Ashcroft: Mr. Stevenson's Forerunner
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.21805#0132
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Mr. Stevenson’s Forerunner
dangerous luxury or an article of orthodox faith, but one of those
uninteresting commonplaces which applied in one way is a truism,
in another a fatuous absurdity. So does fortune turn her wheel
for theories as well as for men and women.
In the passage just quoted Smith deals with the essay mainly as
simple literature, but he loves and praises it not as literature only,
but as autobiography ; not merely as something that is in itself
interesting and attractive, but as a window through which he can
peer in upon something more interesting still—the master who
built the house after his own design and made it an architectural
projection of himself.
“ You like to walk round peculiar or important men as you like to
walk round a building, toviewit from different points and in different
lights. Of the essayist, when his mood is communicative, you obtain
a full picture. You are made his Contemporary and familiär friend.
You enter into his humours and his seriousness. You are made heir
of his whims, prejudices, and playfulness. You walk through the
whole nature of him as you walk through the streets of Pompeii,
looking into the interior of stately mansions, reading the satirical
scribblings on the walls. And the essayist’s habit of not only giving
you his thoughts, but telling you how he came by them, is interesting,
because it shows you by what alchemy the rüder world becomes
transmuted into the finer. We like to know the lineage of ideas,
just as we like to know the lineage of great earls and swift race-
horses. We like to know that the discovery of the law of gravitation
was born of the fall of an apple in an English garden on a summer
afternoon. Essays written after this fashion are racy of the soil in
which they grow, as you taste the lava in the vines grown on the
slopes of Etna, they say. There is a healthy Gascon flavour in
Montaigne’s Essays ; and Charles Lamb’s are scented with the prim-
roses of Covent Garden.”
Mr. Stevenson’s Forerunner
dangerous luxury or an article of orthodox faith, but one of those
uninteresting commonplaces which applied in one way is a truism,
in another a fatuous absurdity. So does fortune turn her wheel
for theories as well as for men and women.
In the passage just quoted Smith deals with the essay mainly as
simple literature, but he loves and praises it not as literature only,
but as autobiography ; not merely as something that is in itself
interesting and attractive, but as a window through which he can
peer in upon something more interesting still—the master who
built the house after his own design and made it an architectural
projection of himself.
“ You like to walk round peculiar or important men as you like to
walk round a building, toviewit from different points and in different
lights. Of the essayist, when his mood is communicative, you obtain
a full picture. You are made his Contemporary and familiär friend.
You enter into his humours and his seriousness. You are made heir
of his whims, prejudices, and playfulness. You walk through the
whole nature of him as you walk through the streets of Pompeii,
looking into the interior of stately mansions, reading the satirical
scribblings on the walls. And the essayist’s habit of not only giving
you his thoughts, but telling you how he came by them, is interesting,
because it shows you by what alchemy the rüder world becomes
transmuted into the finer. We like to know the lineage of ideas,
just as we like to know the lineage of great earls and swift race-
horses. We like to know that the discovery of the law of gravitation
was born of the fall of an apple in an English garden on a summer
afternoon. Essays written after this fashion are racy of the soil in
which they grow, as you taste the lava in the vines grown on the
slopes of Etna, they say. There is a healthy Gascon flavour in
Montaigne’s Essays ; and Charles Lamb’s are scented with the prim-
roses of Covent Garden.”