Random Thoughts

This matter of other people’ s learning and accomplishments has been worrying me for some time. I never read the life of any imporTant person without discovering that he knew more and could do nore than I could ever hope to know or to do in half a dozen life-:imes.To begin with,unless these people chance to be obvious inva-ids like Stevenson or Tchehov , they are always tremendous ath-etes, with surprising strength, powers of endurance, and so forth. They could all walk and run and climb our heads o// ,even when :hey were seventy. Then they all have the gift of tongues. You never :atch a glimpse of them sitting down to learn a new language, not :ven running an eye over its irregular verbs, yet it is admitted that :hey speak any number with an astonishing fluency and purity of iccent. They never confine themselves to one science, but are inevitaly masters of several. The big book of Nature they know by heart. 3nly the other day I was reading an account of a great novelist, a nost sophisticated and subtle person,and was told that he knew the lame and habits and history of every wild flower and plant and tree ind bird in the country. Nor is that all. There is not one of these big-vigs who is not (I quote the customary phrases) a sensitive and acomplished musician, or an extraordinarily fine amateur water-co-ourist.or the possessor of a magnificent prose style. We are always old that, had circumstance been different, their talents were such hat they need only have given their serious attention to one or other if these arts to have procured for themselves lasting and perhaps vorld-wide reputations. So runs the legend of the eulogists.