Page:Americans (1922).djvu/351

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lose your footing over "the law of autarkeia, the perception of the veritable infinite within harmonious self-completeness which was the great gift of the Greeks to civilization"; and down you go whirling headlong into the bottomless pitfall and abyss of a discussion of the difference between the Oriental and the Occidental sentiment towards the infinite and towards personality, while Hinduism, Semitism, Alexandrianism, Platonism, and the Gnostic and Manichean heresies rush past you with the flash and roar of the wheels within wheels that dazzled Ezekiel when the heavens were opened and he saw "visions of God"—and "my word," as Mr. Drinkwater's Lincoln would say, what a God! You are, it is true, brought out of that headlong plunge into the unfathomable, as a skilful sky-pilot brings you out of a "nose spin," or as a dentist brings you out of the gyrations of a nitrous oxid trance; and you hear Mr. More at your side quietly, suavely assuring you that now you understand "why Goethe curtly called romanticism disease and classicism health." Maybe you do; but it is not by reason of your ride behind him on the Gnostic nightmare. What passed in that flight is only a shade more intelligible to you than a Chinese incantation. Your education was imperfect: you are neither a Coleridge nor a Cudworth.

"Perverse as it seems to say so," remarked Matthew Arnold in reply to Professor Newman's charge that he was ignorant, "I sometimes find my-