The island that has been
promised him always floats before him like the air-drawn dagger before
Macbeth, and beckons him on. The whole character is exquisite. And,
fitly enough, when he at last becomes governor of his imaginary island
of Barataria, he makes an excellent magistrate--because statesmanship
depends for its success so much less on abstract principle than on
precisely that traditional wisdom in which Sancho was rich.
THE FIVE INDISPENSABLE AUTHORS
(HOMER, DANTE, CERVANTES, GOETHE SHAKESPEARE)
The study of literature, that it may be fruitful, that it may not result
in a mere gathering of names and dates and phrases, must be a study of
ideas and not of words, of periods rather than of men, or only of such
men as are great enough or individual enough to reflect as much light
upon their age as they in turn receive from it. To know literature as
the elder Disraeli knew it is at best only an amusement, an
accomplishment, great, indeed, for the dilettante, but valueless for the
scholar. Detached facts are nothing in themselves, and become of worth
only in their relation to one another. It is little, for example, to
know the date of Shakespeare: something more that he and Cervantes were
contemporaries; and a great deal that he grew up in a time fermenting
with reformation in Church and State, when the intellectual impulse from
the invention of printing had scarcely reached its climax, and while the
New World stung the imaginations of men with its immeasurable promise
and its temptations to daring adventure.
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