LORD MORLEY ON LIFE AND BOOKS.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1539, 7 September 1912, Page 9

LORD MORLEY ON LIFE AND BOOKS.

Writing of a recent speech by Lord Morley, at Blackburn, the "Manchester Guardian" says:—

Lord Morley pooh-poohed the idea that men can bo no good at life if they know many books or are able to write them. And yet the idea sticks fast in the minds, above all, of people who feel themselves wholly free from both these taints, or disabilities. Tailless foxes are thought to have always doubted the value of fails. Their doubts would be deepened if any'; large number of tailed foxes were seen to; be wagged by their tails; and so this old cry against books is kept going, and made to seem as if it were right by tho way in which books get the better sometimes of the brains of people who read them without knowing how. For there is a wrong kind of reading in which written words are' not used as an aid to experience, a means to direct vital contact with that about which they are written, but rather become a substitute for full experience or a screen against it, so that the mind is 'like , ''a fly crawling on 'the inside of a tinted pone through which there penetrate only illusive impressions of frees and the sun:- "Childreri'will-tfften'read that way, and. education must, bo pretty good' 'and go pretty far before- you : cau learn to get out of a book jiist whatever of life and authentic human,experience has gone to the making of it, and to- let fall the husks and wasto fibres and sheathings the way the wise monkeys expoditiously deal with a nut. Bookishness, with its disablements, conies when a reader has not learnt, what to reject, but silts up his mind with the refuse of letters, the valueless wrappings of things that may have been, good in themselves, all the old string and brown paper _ in which treasure was done up for carriage. But bookishness is not peculiar to ; rhose who read much. Indeed,' it is seen'more often in peoplo half-lettered, almost unlottered, whoso speech is sometimes a poor lifeless mess of dead phrases from hackneyed books, known at third-hand. And wlio more unbookish in speech than Lord Morley himself, that best-read-of men, from whose lips the sentences come like knowledge of life and mankind made articulate, so that tho chosen words scarcely" seem to. be symbols at all, so redolent of human sympathy, allowance, intimacy is the imparted* confidence? That comes of learning to read the right way, and even to write. For nothing makes people quite so impatient of large words used with small meanings, of ardent words used in cold blood, of effects of elevation and beauty essayed witlvmt iiaisicn, of all the lifeless fraudulence of the perfunctory attempts of bad speakers to make a minute export from their ovn minds and hearts serve as a large impo-t into the minds and hearts of other people. That is bookishness—one sort of it— and books rightly used, in the right relation to life, are one of its antidotes.,

J. and N. Tait announce that they have engaged the "smart set" entertainers to undertake a season at the Follies Al Fresco Theatre at St. Kildn, Victoria,, during the forthcoming summer. • The' "smart set" entertainers aud English organisation, comprising several talented ladies aud gentlemen, have appeared in Great Britain, America, and South Africa with success. Their South African season was apparently a good one. The lltv. the Hon. Edward Lyttelton, who has been headmaster of Eton CoUogo sines 1905, ' celebrated his fifty-seventh birthdov in July. . - : '