Latest / The H. G. Wells Library / The Dream Chapter the Fifth - Fanny Discovers Herself Parts 7 and 8
Transcript
- 0:01Speaker 1: Section fifteen of The Dream A Novel. This says the
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- 0:18Speaker 1: The dream A Novel by H. G. Wells, Chapter the
- 0:23Speaker 1: fifth Fanny discovers herself parts seven and eight. Part seven,
- 0:31Speaker 1: But said Sarnak, my second visit to Fanny, like my first,
- 0:36Speaker 1: was full of unexpected experiences and unrehearsed effects. The carpet
- 0:44Speaker 1: on the pleasant staircase seemed to deaden down my moral tramplings.
- 0:49Speaker 1: And when the door opened and I saw my dear
- 0:51Speaker 1: Fanny again friendly and glad, I forgot altogether the stern
- 0:56Speaker 1: interrogations with which that second interview was to have opened.
- 1:01Speaker 1: She pulled my hair and kissed me, took my hat
- 1:04Speaker 1: and coat, said I had grown to tremendously, measured herself
- 1:08Speaker 1: against me, pushed me into her bright little sitting room,
- 1:12Speaker 1: where she had prepared such a tea as I'd never
- 1:15Speaker 1: seen before. Little ham sandwiches, sandwiches of a delightful stuff
- 1:20Speaker 1: called Gentleman's relish, strawberry jam, two sorts of cake, and
- 1:25Speaker 1: little biscuits to fill in any odd corners. You are
- 1:29Speaker 1: a dear to come and see me, Harry. But I
- 1:32Speaker 1: had a sort of feeling that whatever happened, you would
- 1:35Speaker 1: come along. We two always sort of hung together, I
- 1:40Speaker 1: said always. She agreed. I think mother and Ernie might
- 1:45Speaker 1: have written me a line. Perhaps they will later. Ever
- 1:48Speaker 1: seen an electric kettle, Harry, this is one, And you
- 1:52Speaker 1: put that plug in there? I know, I said, and
- 1:56Speaker 1: did as I was told. There's resistances embedded in the coating.
- 2:01Speaker 1: I've been doing some electricity in chemistry council classes, six
- 2:06Speaker 1: or seven subjects altogether, and there's a shop window in
- 2:10Speaker 1: Tothel Street full of such things. I expect you know
- 2:15Speaker 1: all about them, she said, I expect you've learnt all
- 2:19Speaker 1: sorts of sciences. And so we came to the great
- 2:22Speaker 1: topic of what I was learning and what I was
- 2:24Speaker 1: going to do. It was delightful to talk to someone
- 2:29Speaker 1: who really understood the thirst for knowledge that possessed me.
- 2:33Speaker 1: I talked of myself and my dreams and ambitions, and meanwhile,
- 2:37Speaker 1: being a growing youth, my arms swept like a swarm
- 2:39Speaker 1: of locustsover Fanny's wonderful tea. Fanny watched me with a
- 2:43Speaker 1: smile on her face and steered me with questions towards
- 2:46Speaker 1: the things she most wanted to know. And when we
- 2:49Speaker 1: had talked enough for a time, she showed me how
- 2:51Speaker 1: to play her pianola, and I got a role of
- 2:54Speaker 1: Schumann that mister Place had long ago made familiar to me,
- 2:58Speaker 1: and had the exquisite delight of playing it over for myself.
- 3:01Speaker 1: These pianolas were quite easy things to manage, I found
- 3:05Speaker 1: in a little while I was already playing with conscious expression.
- 3:11Speaker 1: Fanny praised me for my quickness, cleared her teeth things
- 3:14Speaker 1: away while I played, and then came and sat beside
- 3:17Speaker 1: me and listened and talked, and we found we had
- 3:19Speaker 1: learned quite a lot about music since our party. We
- 3:22Speaker 1: both thought great things of Bach, whom I found I
- 3:25Speaker 1: was calling quite incorrectly Batch, and Mozart, who also had
- 3:29Speaker 1: to be pronounced a little differently. And then Fanny began
- 3:32Speaker 1: to question me about the work I wanted to do
- 3:35Speaker 1: in the world. You mustn't stay with that old chemist
- 3:38Speaker 1: much longer, she declared, How would I like to do
- 3:41Speaker 1: some sort of work that had to do with books,
- 3:43Speaker 1: book selling, or helping in a library, or printing and
- 3:46Speaker 1: publishing books and magazines. You've never thought of writing things,
- 3:51Speaker 1: asked Fanny, people do I made some verses once or twice,
- 3:56Speaker 1: I confessed, and wrote a letter to the Daily News
- 3:58Speaker 1: about temperance, but they didn't put it in. Have you
- 4:01Speaker 1: ever wanted to write what books? Like Arnold Bennett? Rather?
- 4:06Speaker 1: But you didn't quite know how to set about it.
- 4:09Speaker 1: It's difficult to begin, I said, as though that was
- 4:12Speaker 1: the only barrier you ought to leave that old chemist's shop,
- 4:17Speaker 1: She repeated. If I were to ask people I know
- 4:20Speaker 1: and found out some better sort of job for you, Harry,
- 4:23Speaker 1: would you take it? Rather? Said I? Why not? Altogether?
- 4:28Speaker 1: Interrupted firefly? Oh, we used to say rather, said Sarnak.
- 4:33Speaker 1: It was artistic understatement, But you realize how dreadfully I
- 4:37Speaker 1: lapsed from all my preconceived notions about Fanny and myself.
- 4:41Speaker 1: We talked the whole evening away. We had a delightful
- 4:43Speaker 1: cold picnic supper in a pretty little dining room with
- 4:46Speaker 1: a dresser, and Fanny showed me how to make a
- 4:48Speaker 1: wonderful salad with onions very finely chopped, and white wine
- 4:52Speaker 1: and sugar in the dressing. And afterwards came some more
- 4:55Speaker 1: of that marvel the pianola, and then very reluctantly I
- 4:59Speaker 1: took my leave, and when I found myself in the
- 5:01Speaker 1: streets again, I had once more my former sense of
- 5:04Speaker 1: having dropped abruptly from one world into another, colder, bleaker, harder,
- 5:09Speaker 1: and with entirely different moral values. Again I felt the
- 5:13Speaker 1: same reluctance to go straight home and have my evening
- 5:16Speaker 1: dimmed and destroyed by a score of pitiless questions. And
- 5:19Speaker 1: when at last I did go home, I told a lie,
- 5:22Speaker 1: Fanny's got a pretty place, and she's as happy as
- 5:24Speaker 1: can be. I said, I'm not quite sure, but from
- 5:28Speaker 1: what she said, I believe that man's going to marry her.
- 5:31Speaker 1: Before very long, my cheeks and ears grew hot under
- 5:35Speaker 1: my mother's hostile stare. Did she tell you that? Practically?
- 5:40Speaker 1: I lied, I kind of got it out of her.
- 5:43Speaker 1: But he's married already, said my mother. I believe there
- 5:47Speaker 1: is something. I said something, said my mother, scornfully. She's
- 5:52Speaker 1: stolen another woman's man. He belongs to er forever, no
- 5:56Speaker 1: matter what there is against her, whomsoever God hath joined,
- 6:00Speaker 1: let no man put asunder. That's what I was taught
- 6:03Speaker 1: in what I believe. E may be older, E may
- 6:06Speaker 1: have led her astray. But while she and e harbor
- 6:09Speaker 1: together the sin is hers as much as isded you
- 6:14Speaker 1: see him, he wasn't there, adn't the face that's so
- 6:19Speaker 1: much to their credit? And are you going there again?
- 6:22Speaker 1: I've kind of promised it's against my wishes. Ery, every
- 6:26Speaker 1: time you go near Fanny Rry you disobey me. Mark
- 6:29Speaker 1: that let's be plain about that once and for all.
- 6:32Speaker 1: I've felt mulish. She's my sister, I said, and I'm
- 6:37Speaker 1: your mother, though nowadays mothers are no more than dirt
- 6:40Speaker 1: under their children's feet. Marry Er, indeed, why should he
- 6:44Speaker 1: likely eel Mary the next one? Come, Prue, take that
- 6:48Speaker 1: bit of coal off the fire and wheel go up
- 6:50Speaker 1: to bed. Part eight. And now said Sarnak, I must
- 6:56Speaker 1: tell you of the queer business organization Thunderstone House, and
- 7:01Speaker 1: the great firm of Crane and Newbery, for whom, at
- 7:05Speaker 1: Fanny's instance, I abandoned mister Humburg and his gold labeled
- 7:10Speaker 1: bottles of nothingness. Green and Newberry were publishers of newspapers, magazines,
- 7:16Speaker 1: and books, and Thunderstone House was a sort of fountain
- 7:19Speaker 1: of printed paper, spouting an unending wash of reading matter.
- 7:24Speaker 1: In the two The Lives of the English people, I'm
- 7:28Speaker 1: talking of the world two thousand years ago, said Sarnak.
- 7:32Speaker 1: No doubt you have all been good children and have
- 7:34Speaker 1: read your histories duly. But at this distance in time,
- 7:38Speaker 1: things appear very much foreshortened, and changes that occupied lifetimes
- 7:43Speaker 1: and went on amidst dense clouds of doubt, misunderstanding and
- 7:47Speaker 1: opposition seemed to be the easiest and most natural transitions.
- 7:52Speaker 1: We were all taught that the scientific method came into
- 7:55Speaker 1: human affairs, first of all in the world of material things,
- 7:58Speaker 1: and later on in the matter of psychology and human relationship,
- 8:02Speaker 1: so that the large scale handling of steel in railways, automobiles, telegraphs,
- 8:08Speaker 1: flying machines, and all the broad material foundations of the
- 8:12Speaker 1: New Age were in existence two or three generations before social, political,
- 8:17Speaker 1: and educational ideas and methods were modified in correspondence with
- 8:22Speaker 1: the new necessities these things had created. There was a
- 8:28Speaker 1: great unanticipated increase in the trade and population of the world,
- 8:32Speaker 1: in much confusion and conflict, violent social stresses, and very
- 8:36Speaker 1: revolutions in great wars, before even the need of a
- 8:40Speaker 1: scientific adjustment of human relationships was recognized. It is easy
- 8:44Speaker 1: enough to learn of such things in general terms, but
- 8:47Speaker 1: hard to explain just what these processes of blind readjustment
- 8:51Speaker 1: meant in anxiety, suffering, in distress to the countless millions
- 8:55Speaker 1: who found themselves born into the swirl of this phase
- 8:58Speaker 1: of change. As I look back to that time in
- 9:01Speaker 1: which I lived my other life, I am reminded of
- 9:04Speaker 1: a crowd of people in one of my old Pimlico fogs.
- 9:08Speaker 1: No one had any vision of things as a whole.
- 9:10Speaker 1: Everybody was feeling his way slowly and clumsily from one
- 9:13Speaker 1: just perceptible thing to another, and nearly everybody was uneasy
- 9:17Speaker 1: and disposed to be angry. It is clear beyond question
- 9:22Speaker 1: to us now that the days of illiterate drudges were
- 9:25Speaker 1: already passed in the distant nineteenth century, for power machinery
- 9:29Speaker 1: had superseded them. The new world, so much more complicated
- 9:33Speaker 1: and danger so much richer and ampler, was a world
- 9:35Speaker 1: insisting upon an educated population, educated intellectually and morally. But
- 9:41Speaker 1: in those days these things were not at all clear,
- 9:44Speaker 1: and it was grudgingly and insufficiently that access to knowledge
- 9:48Speaker 1: and enlightenment was given by the learned and prosperous classes
- 9:51Speaker 1: to the rapidly accumulating masses of the population. They insisted
- 9:56Speaker 1: that it should be done by special channels and in
- 9:58Speaker 1: a new and different class of schools. I've told you
- 10:01Speaker 1: of what passed for my education, reading and writing, rudimentary computations,
- 10:06Speaker 1: jog free, and so forth. That sort of process truncated
- 10:09Speaker 1: by employment. At thirteen or fourteen, when curiosity and interests
- 10:13Speaker 1: were just beginning to awaken, was as far as education
- 10:16Speaker 1: had gone for the bulk of the common men and women.
- 10:19Speaker 1: In the opening years of the twentieth century, it had
- 10:22Speaker 1: produced a vast multitude of people just able to read,
- 10:25Speaker 1: credulous and uncritical, and pitifully curious to learn about life
- 10:29Speaker 1: and things, pitifully wanting to see and know. As a whole,
- 10:32Speaker 1: the community did nothing to satisfy the vague aspirations of
- 10:35Speaker 1: those half awakened swarms. It was left to private enterprise
- 10:39Speaker 1: to find what profits it could in their dim desires.
- 10:43Speaker 1: A number of great publishing businesses arose to trade upon
- 10:46Speaker 1: the new reading public that this elementary education, as we
- 10:50Speaker 1: called it, had accumulated. In all ages, people have wanted
- 10:54Speaker 1: stories about life. The young have always wanted to be
- 10:57Speaker 1: told about the stage on which they are beginning to
- 10:59Speaker 1: play their part, arts to be shown the chances and
- 11:02Speaker 1: possibilities of existence vividly and dramatically, so that they may
- 11:05Speaker 1: imagine and anticipate their own reactions. And even those who
- 11:09Speaker 1: are no longer youthful have always been eager to supplement
- 11:12Speaker 1: their experiences and widen their judgment by tales and histories
- 11:17Speaker 1: and discussions. There has been literature since there has been writing,
- 11:20Speaker 1: since indeed there was enough language for storytelling and reciting.
- 11:24Speaker 1: And always literature has told people what their minds were
- 11:27Speaker 1: prepared to receive, searching for what it should tell, rather
- 11:30Speaker 1: in the mind and expectation of the hear or reader,
- 11:33Speaker 1: who was the person who paid, than in the unendowed
- 11:36Speaker 1: wilderness of reality, so that the greater part of literature
- 11:40Speaker 1: of every age has been a vulgar and ephemeral thing,
- 11:42Speaker 1: interesting only to the historian and psychologists of later times
- 11:46Speaker 1: because of the light it threw upon the desires and
- 11:48Speaker 1: imaginative limitations of its generation. But the popular literature of
- 11:53Speaker 1: the age in which Harry Mortimer Smith was living was
- 11:55Speaker 1: more abundant, more cynically insincere, lazy, cheap and empty than
- 12:00Speaker 1: anything that the world had ever seen before. You would
- 12:04Speaker 1: accuse me of burlesque if I were to tell you
- 12:06Speaker 1: the stories of the various people who built up immense
- 12:09Speaker 1: fortunes by catering for the vague needs of the new
- 12:12Speaker 1: reading crowds that filled the hypertrophied cities of the Atlantic world.
- 12:17Speaker 1: There was a certain news of whom legend related that,
- 12:20Speaker 1: one day, after reading allowed some item of interest to
- 12:23Speaker 1: his family, he remarked, I call that a regular titbit.
- 12:26Speaker 1: From that feet of nomenclature, he went on to the
- 12:30Speaker 1: idea of a weekly periodical full of scraps of interest,
- 12:33Speaker 1: cuttings from books and newspapers and the like. Angry multitude,
- 12:37Speaker 1: eager and curious, was ready to feed greedily on such orders.
- 12:41Speaker 1: So titbits came into existence, whittled from a thousand sources
- 12:44Speaker 1: by an industrious and not too expensive staff, and noons
- 12:48Speaker 1: became a man of wealth and a baronet. His first
- 12:52Speaker 1: experiment upon the new public encouraged him to make a
- 12:55Speaker 1: number of others. He gave it a monthly magazine full
- 12:58Speaker 1: of short stories drawn from foreign sources. At first that
- 13:01Speaker 1: success was uncertain and done a certain doctor, Conan Doyle
- 13:04Speaker 1: rose to fame in it and carried it to success
- 13:07Speaker 1: with stories about crime and the detection of crime. Every
- 13:10Speaker 1: intelligent person in those days, everyone indeed intelligent or not,
- 13:14Speaker 1: was curious about the murders and such like crimes which
- 13:16Speaker 1: still abounded. Indeed, there could have been no more fascinating
- 13:20Speaker 1: and desirable subject for us. Properly treated, such cases illuminated
- 13:24Speaker 1: the problems of law, training and control in our social welter,
- 13:27Speaker 1: as nothing else could have done. The poorest people bought
- 13:30Speaker 1: at least a weekly paper in order to quicken their
- 13:33Speaker 1: wits over murder, mysteries and divorces, driven by an almost
- 13:36Speaker 1: instinctive need to probe motives and judge restraints. But Conan
- 13:40Speaker 1: Doyle's stories had little of psychology in them. He tangled
- 13:43Speaker 1: scheme of clues in order to disentangle it again, and
- 13:47Speaker 1: his readers forgot the interest of the problem. In the
- 13:49Speaker 1: interest of the puzzle hard upon the heels of Noon's
- 13:53Speaker 1: came a host of other competitors, among others, of certain
- 13:57Speaker 1: Arthur Pearson and a group of brothers Heart Humsworth, who
- 14:00Speaker 1: rose to great power and wealth from the beginning of
- 14:03Speaker 1: a small weekly paper called Answers, inspired originally by the
- 14:06Speaker 1: notion that people like to read other people's letters. You
- 14:10Speaker 1: will find in the histories how two of these harms Worths,
- 14:13Speaker 1: men of great thrust and energy, became lords of England
- 14:16Speaker 1: and prominent figures in politics. But I have to take
- 14:19Speaker 1: of them now simply to tell you of the multitude
- 14:21Speaker 1: of papers and magazines they created to win the eron
- 14:24Speaker 1: boys gifle, the heart of the factory girl, the respect
- 14:28Speaker 1: to the aristocracy, and the confidence of the neu vau rige.
- 14:31Speaker 1: It was a roaring factory of hasty printing. Our own
- 14:35Speaker 1: firm at Thunderstone House was of an older standing than
- 14:38Speaker 1: these noons Pearson Harmsworth concerns. As early as the eighteenth century,
- 14:44Speaker 1: the hunger for knowledge had been apparent, and a certain
- 14:46Speaker 1: footman turned publisher named Dodsley had produced a book of
- 14:50Speaker 1: wisdom called The young Man's Companion. Our founder, Crane had
- 14:53Speaker 1: done the same sort of thing in early Victorian times.
- 14:56Speaker 1: He had won his way to considerable success with a
- 14:59Speaker 1: home teacher monthly Parts, and with Train's Circle of the
- 15:02Speaker 1: Sciences and a weekly magazine, and so forth. His chief
- 15:05Speaker 1: rivals had been two firms, Callcastles and Routledges, and for years,
- 15:09Speaker 1: though he worked upon a smaller capitial, he kept well
- 15:12Speaker 1: abreast of them. For a time. The On rush of
- 15:15Speaker 1: the newer popular publishers had thrust Grain in his contemporaries
- 15:18Speaker 1: into the background, and then reconstructed and reinvigorated by a
- 15:22Speaker 1: certain Sir Peter Newberry. The old business had won its
- 15:25Speaker 1: way back to prosperity, publishing a shoal of novelette magazines
- 15:29Speaker 1: and cheap domestic newspapers for women, young girls and children.
- 15:32Speaker 1: Reviving the home teacher on modern lines with a memory
- 15:35Speaker 1: training system and a guide to success by Sir Peter Newberry,
- 15:39Speaker 1: thrown in and even launching out into scientific handbooks of
- 15:42Speaker 1: a not too onerous sort. It is difficult for you
- 15:45Speaker 1: to realize, said Sarnak, what a frightful lot of printed
- 15:48Speaker 1: stuff there was in that old world. He was joked
- 15:51Speaker 1: with printed rubbish, just as it was joked with human rubbish,
- 15:54Speaker 1: and a rubbish of furniture and clothing, and every sort
- 15:56Speaker 1: of rubbish. There was too much of the inferior grades
- 15:59Speaker 1: of everything, and good things incredibly rare. You cannot imagine
- 16:03Speaker 1: how delightful it is for me to sit here again,
- 16:05Speaker 1: naked and simple, talking plainly and nakedly, in a clear
- 16:07Speaker 1: and beautiful room. The sense of escape, of being cleansed
- 16:10Speaker 1: of unnecessary adhesions of any sort is exquisite. We read
- 16:14Speaker 1: a book now and then, and talk and make love
- 16:16Speaker 1: naturally and honestly, and do our work in thought and
- 16:19Speaker 1: research with well aired, well fed brains. That we lived
- 16:21Speaker 1: with all our senses and abilities, taking a firm and
- 16:24Speaker 1: easy grip upon life. But stress was in the air
- 16:27Speaker 1: of the twentieth century. Those who had enough courage fought
- 16:29Speaker 1: hard for knowledge and existence, and to them we sold
- 16:32Speaker 1: our not very lucid or helpful home teacher and our
- 16:35Speaker 1: entirely base guide to success. But great multitudes relaxed their
- 16:39Speaker 1: hold upon life in a way that is known now
- 16:41Speaker 1: only to our morbid psychologists. They averted their attention from
- 16:45Speaker 1: reality and gave themselves up to reverie. They went about
- 16:48Speaker 1: the world distraught in a day dream, a day dream
- 16:50Speaker 1: that they were not really themselves but beings far nobler
- 16:54Speaker 1: and more romantic, or that presently things would change about
- 16:57Speaker 1: them into a dramatic scene centering about themselves. These novel
- 17:00Speaker 1: at magazines and popular novels that supplied the chief part
- 17:03Speaker 1: of the income of Crane and Newberry. Where really helps
- 17:06Speaker 1: to reverie? Mental drugs? Sunray, Have you ever read any
- 17:10Speaker 1: twentieth century novelettes one or two, said Sunray. It's as
- 17:14Speaker 1: you say. I suppose I have a dozen or so.
- 17:16Speaker 1: Some day you shall see my little collection. Very likely
- 17:20Speaker 1: ours half of them Crane and Newberries. I mean, it
- 17:23Speaker 1: would be amusing to see them again. The great bulk
- 17:26Speaker 1: of this reverie material was written for Crane and Newberry
- 17:28Speaker 1: by girls and women, and by a type of slack
- 17:31Speaker 1: imaginative men. These authors, as we called them, lived scattered
- 17:35Speaker 1: about London or in houses on the countryside, and they
- 17:38Speaker 1: sent their writings by post to Thunderstone House, where we
- 17:41Speaker 1: edited them in various ways and put the stuff into
- 17:44Speaker 1: our magazines and books. Thunderstone House was a great rambling
- 17:47Speaker 1: warren of a place, opening out of Tottenham Court, wrote
- 17:51Speaker 1: with a yard into which huge lorries brought rolls of paper,
- 17:53Speaker 1: and from which vans departed with our finished products. It
- 17:57Speaker 1: was all equivered with the roar and flooding of the
- 17:59Speaker 1: printing machinery. I remember very vividly to this day how
- 18:02Speaker 1: I went there. First, down a narrow roadway out of
- 18:04Speaker 1: the main thoroughfare, passed a dingy public house and the
- 18:07Speaker 1: stage door of a theater. What were you going to do?
- 18:10Speaker 1: Pack up? Books or ron Aaron's, asked Radiant, I was
- 18:14Speaker 1: to do what I could. Very soon I was on
- 18:16Speaker 1: the general editorial staff, editing popular knowledge. Yes, but why
- 18:22Speaker 1: did they want an illiterate youngster like yourself at Thunderstone House?
- 18:26Speaker 1: Asked Radiant. I can understand that this work of instructing
- 18:29Speaker 1: and answering the first greup questions of the new reading
- 18:31Speaker 1: classes was necessarily a wholesale, improvised affair. But surely there
- 18:36Speaker 1: were enough learned men at the ancient universities to do
- 18:39Speaker 1: all the editing and instructing that was needed. Sarnax Stricis said.
- 18:44Speaker 1: The amazing thing is that there weren't. He said, they
- 18:46Speaker 1: produced men enough of a sort, but they weren't the
- 18:49Speaker 1: right sort. His auditors looked puzzled. The rank and file
- 18:54Speaker 1: of the men they sent out, labeled MA and so
- 18:57Speaker 1: forth from Oxford and Cambridge were exactly like those guilt
- 19:00Speaker 1: letter jars in mister Hamburg's shop that had nothing in
- 19:03Speaker 1: them but stale water. The pseudo educated men of the
- 19:07Speaker 1: older order couldn't teach, couldn't write, couldn't explain. He was
- 19:10Speaker 1: pompous and patronizing, a prosy, timid and indistinct in statement,
- 19:14Speaker 1: with no sense of the common need or the common quality.
- 19:17Speaker 1: The promoted office boy, these new magazine and newspaper people discovered,
- 19:21Speaker 1: was brighter and better at the job, comparatively modest and industrious,
- 19:25Speaker 1: eager to note things and in part things. The editors
- 19:27Speaker 1: of our period articles, the managers of our part publications,
- 19:31Speaker 1: and so forth, were nearly all of the office boy class.
- 19:34Speaker 1: Hardly any of them in the academic sense educated. The
- 19:37Speaker 1: many of them had a sort of educational enthusiasm, and
- 19:40Speaker 1: all of them a boldness that the men of the
- 19:41Speaker 1: old learning blacked. Sarnak reflected. In Britain at the time
- 19:46Speaker 1: I'm speaking about, and in America also, there were practically
- 19:49Speaker 1: two educational worlds and two traditions of intellectual culture side
- 19:53Speaker 1: by side. There was all this vast fermenting hullabaloo of
- 19:57Speaker 1: the new publishing, the new press, the cinema, theaters, and
- 20:00Speaker 1: so forth, a crude mental uproar rising out of the
- 20:03Speaker 1: new elementary schools of the nineteenth century. And there was
- 20:06Speaker 1: the old aristocratic education of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
- 20:10Speaker 1: which had picked up its tradition from the Augustine age
- 20:12Speaker 1: of Rome. On the one hand, were these office boy
- 20:16Speaker 1: fellas with the intellectual courage and vigor oh of Aristotle
- 20:19Speaker 1: and Plato, whatever the quality of their intellectual equipment might be.
- 20:23Speaker 1: And on the other academic man affectedly Grecian liked the
- 20:26Speaker 1: thought and so learned men of the days of Roman slavery.
- 20:30Speaker 1: He had the gentility of the household slave. He had
- 20:32Speaker 1: the same abject respect for patron, prince and patrician. He
- 20:36Speaker 1: had the same mecculous care in minor matters, and the
- 20:39Speaker 1: same fear of uncharted reality. He criticized like a slave,
- 20:42Speaker 1: sneering and hinting. He quarreled like a slave, despised all
- 20:45Speaker 1: he dared, despise with the eagerness of a slave. He
- 20:48Speaker 1: was incapable of serving the multitude, the new reading crowd,
- 20:51Speaker 1: the working masses, the democracy, as we used to call it,
- 20:54Speaker 1: how to get its knowledge and its wisdom without him Green,
- 20:58Speaker 1: our founder, had had in his day some inkling of
- 21:01Speaker 1: the educational function such businesses as his were bound to
- 21:04Speaker 1: serve in the world. But Sir Peter Newberry had been
- 21:07Speaker 1: a hard tradesman, intent only on recovering the prosperity that
- 21:10Speaker 1: the newer popular publishers had filtered away from our firm.
- 21:14Speaker 1: He was a hard driving man. He drove hard, he
- 21:16Speaker 1: paid in niggardly fashioned, and he succeeded. He had been
- 21:19Speaker 1: dead now for some years, and the chief shareholder and
- 21:22Speaker 1: director of the firm was his son, Richard. He was
- 21:25Speaker 1: nicknamed the Sun, I think because someone had quoted Shakespeare
- 21:28Speaker 1: about the winter of our discontent being made summer by
- 21:31Speaker 1: this son of York. He was, by contrast, a very
- 21:34Speaker 1: genial and warming person. He was acutely alive to the
- 21:37Speaker 1: moral responsibilities that lay behind the practical irresponsibility of a
- 21:41Speaker 1: popular publisher. If anything, he drove harder than his father,
- 21:44Speaker 1: but he paid generously. He tried to keep a little
- 21:47Speaker 1: ahead of the new public instead of a little behind.
- 21:50Speaker 1: The times moved in his favor, and he succeeded even
- 21:52Speaker 1: more than his father had done. I'd been employed by
- 21:55Speaker 1: Crane and Newberry for many weeks before I saw him.
- 21:57Speaker 1: But in the first office I entered in Thunderstone House,
- 22:00Speaker 1: I saw the evidences of his personality, and certain notices
- 22:03Speaker 1: upon the wall. They were printed in clear black letters
- 22:06Speaker 1: on cards and hung up. It was his device for
- 22:08Speaker 1: giving the house a tone of its own. I remember,
- 22:13Speaker 1: we lead, the others imitate, and if you are in
- 22:16Speaker 1: any doubt about it's being too good. Put it in
- 22:19Speaker 1: A third was if a man doesn't know what you know,
- 22:22Speaker 1: that's no reason for writing as if he was an
- 22:24Speaker 1: all round fool. Rest assured there is something he knows
- 22:27Speaker 1: better than you do. End of Section fifteen.