SHERIDAN The Rivals The School for Scandal
=Twenty-one and After.= During these years, through respect for wisdom and experience, maturity rapidly quickens into being. Once we get a few hard knocks in the battle of life, our regard for the learning and understanding of our elders soon increases. We likewise can enter more thoroughly into the work of such thinkers as Carlyle, Galton, Emerson, Ruskin, Shaler, or of such poets as Chaucer and Goethe. For these men have spent the best of their lives in studying and probing into the causes and developments of our moods and characters. Carlyle has given us the most terrific and stirring account ever written of the battle that is waged in every man's soul between the forces of good and evil. Goethe has dramatized this same problem, revealing the wretchedness of him who only thinks of self, who drags his nearest and dearest down to ruin simply to gratify his lusts or his whims. Ruskin searches architecture, painting, or even the workmanship of everyday trades in order to discover their true merit--their greatness and their weakness. From such writings we can learn more and yet more each time we peruse them. There is no end to the richness and wealth of thought and experience to be gained from these alone.
Apart from the power to appreciate the thought itself, the reader by this time is surely ready to take pleasure in the style of such writers as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, Herrick, and Spenser. And with respect to the matter, he surely will profit in the company of Sir Thomas Browne, Thomas à Kempis, Mill, and Plato, presenting four remarkably valuable points of view in their studies of what is most worth man's consideration. Further reading of interest in style and in matter will be found under the headings of "Essay," "Travel," "Drama," "Oratory," "Philosophy," etc., on pages 46-53 of this Handbook.
One of the chief problems of the reader deals with the question of foreign authors. Perhaps one man in a hundred thousand can find time to learn to read more than four languages fluently. If he is to get in touch with the great writers of other tongues than those which he knows, he must perforce read translations. And for most of us translations are the only resource. The modern writers have been translated with but slight difficulty, mainly because their views of life are so closely akin to ours that their thoughts may be put into English with slight trouble. But the ancients, the masters of Greek and Roman Literature, regarded life from other standpoints than ours. They were mainly interested in interpreting fate and the mysteries of life. Their work, then, is for the most part philosophic, even when presented in the form of drama or of poetry. It is so great, so lofty in tone and so profound in its perception of everlasting truths that we cannot afford to neglect it. But it can only be grasped by a mature mind and by calm and patient meditation. The tragedies of Æschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, the poetry of Lucretius and Cleanthes, and the meditations of Marcus Aurelius rank among the grandest and most sublime works that mortal mind has ever achieved. For complete lists of foreign authors, see the classified entries on pages 28-35 of this Handbook.