study small things and live in a large world. It is inspiriting
without doubt to whizz in a motor-car round the earth, to feel Arabia
as a whirl of sand or China as a flash of rice-fields. But Arabia
is not a whirl of sand and China is not a flash of rice-fields. They
are ancient civilizations with strange virtues buried like treasures.
If we wish to understand them it must not be as tourists or inquirers,
it must be with the loyalty of children and the great patience of poets.
To conquer these places is to lose them. The man standing
in his own kitchen-garden, with fairyland opening at the gate,
is the man with large ideas. His mind creates distance; the motor-car
stupidly destroys it. Moderns think of the earth as a globe,
as something one can easily get round, the spirit of a schoolmistress.
This is shown in the odd mistake perpetually made about Cecil Rhodes.
His enemies say that he may have had large ideas, but he was a bad man.
His friends say that he may have been a bad man, but he certainly
had large ideas. The truth is that he was not a man essentially bad,
he was a man of much geniality and many good intentions, but a man
with singularly small views. There is nothing large about painting
the map red; it is an innocent game for children. It is just as easy
to think in continents as to think in cobble-stones. The difficulty
comes in when we seek to know the substance of either of them.
Rhodes' prophecies about the Boer resistance are an admirable
comment on how the "large ideas" prosper when it is not a question
of thinking in continents but of understanding a few two-legged men.
And under all this vast illusion of the cosmopolitan planet,
with its empires and its Reuter's agency, the real life of man
goes on concerned with this tree or that temple, with this harvest
or that drinking-song, totally uncomprehended, totally untouched.
And it watches from its splendid parochialism, possibly with a smile
of amusement, motor-car civilization going its triumphant way,