WATCH Hottest Scene of Elisha Cuthbert  CLICK HERE for Instant Access Elisha Cuthbert Photos |
Elisha Cuthbert Photos Books: Martin Eden The Pickwick Papers The Sea Wolf |
always look at things with such dreadfully practical eyes?"
she interrupted.
"Because Ive been studying evolution, I guess. Its only recently that
I got my eyesight, if the truth were told."
"But it seems to me you lose sight of beauty by being so practical, that
you destroy beauty like the boys who catch butterflies and rub the down
off their beautiful wings."
He shook his head.
"Beauty has significance, but I never knew its significance before. I
just accepted beauty as something meaningless, as something that was just
beautiful without rhyme or reason. I did not know anything about beauty.
But now I know, or, rather, am just beginning to know. This grass is
more beautiful to me now that I know why it is grass, and all the hidden
chemistry of sun and rain and earth that makes it become grass. Why,
there is romance in the life-history of any grass, yes, and adventure,
too. The very thought of it stirs me. When I think of the play of force
and matter, and all the tremendous struggle of it, I feel as if I could
write an epic on the grass.
"How well you talk," she said absently, and he noted that she was looking
at him in a searching way.
He was all confusion and embarrassment on the instant, the blood flushing
red on his neck and brow.
"I hope I am learning to talk," he stammered. "There seems to be so much
in me I want to say. But it is all so big. I cant find ways to say
what is really in me. Sometimes it seems to me that all the world, all
life, everything, had taken up residence inside of me and was clamoring
for me to be the spokesman. I feel--oh, I cant describe it--I feel the
bigness of it, but when I speak, I babble like a little child. It is a
great task to transmute feeling and sensation into speech, written or
spoken, that will, in turn, in him who reads or listens, transmute itself
back into the selfsame feeling and sensation. It is a lordly task. See,
I bury my face in the grass, and the breath I draw in through my nostrils
sets me quivering with a thousand thoughts and fancies. It is a breath
of the universe I have breathed. I know song and laughter, and success
and pain, and struggle and death; and I see visions that arise in my
brain somehow out of the scent of the grass, and I would like to tell
them to you, to the world. But how can I? My tongue is tied. I have
tried, by the spoken word, just now, to describe to you the effect on me
of the scent of the grass. But I have not succeeded. I have no more
than hinted in awkward speech. My words seem gibberish to me. And yet I
am stifled with desire to tell. Oh!--" he threw up his hands with a
despairing gesture--"it is impossible! It is not understandable! It is
incommunicable!"
"But you do talk well," she insisted. "Just think how you have improved
in the short time I have known you. Mr. Butler is a noted public
speaker. He is always asked by the State Committee to go out on stump
during campaign. Yet you talked just as well as he the other night at
dinner. Only he was more controlled. You get too excited; but you will
get over that with practice. Why, you would make a good public speaker.
You can go far--if you want to. You are masterly. You can lead men, I
am sure, and there is no reason why you should not succeed at anything
you set your hand to, just as you have succeeded with grammar. You would
make a good lawyer. You should shine in politics. There is nothing to
prevent you from making as great a success as Mr. Butler has made. And
minus the dyspepsia," she added with a smile.
They talked on; she, in her gently persistent way, returning always to
the need of thorough grounding in education and to the advantages of
Latin as part of the foundation for any career. She drew her ideal of
the successful man, and it was Martin Eden page 57 Martin Eden page 59 |