【英文原著类】The Flower of the Mind(脑之花).pdf

THE FLOWER OF THE MIND
THE FLOWER OF THE
MIND
Alice Meynell
1
THE FLOWER OF THE MIND
INTRODUCTION
Partial collections of English poems, decided by mon subject or
bounded by narrow dates and periods of literary history, are made at very
short intervals, and the makers are safe from the reproach of proposing
their own personal taste as a guide for the reading of others. But a general
Anthology gathered from the whole of English literature--the whole from
Chaucer to Wordsworth--by a gatherer intent upon nothing except the
quality of poetry, is a more rare enterprise. It is hardly to be made without
tempting the suspicion--nay, hardly without seeming to hazard the
confession--of some measure of self-confidence. Nor can even the desire
to enter upon that labour be a frequent one--the desire of the heart of one
for whom poetry is veritably "plementary life" to set up a pale for
inclusion and exclusion, to add honours, to multiply homage, to cherish, to
restore, to protest, to proclaim, to depose; and to gain the consent of a
multitude of readers to all those acts. Many years, then--some part of a
century--may easily pass between the publication of one general anthology
and the making of another.
The enterprise would be a sorry one if it were really arbitrary, and if an
anthologist should give effect to passionate preferences without authority.
An anthology that shall have any value must be made on the responsibility
of one but on the authority of many. There is no caprice; the mind of the
maker has been formed for decision by the wisdom of many instructors. It
is the very study of criticism, and the grateful and profitable study, that
gives the justification to work done upon the strongest personal impulse,
and done, finally, in the mental solitude that cannot be escaped at the last.
In another order, moral education would be best crowned if it proved to
have quick and profound control over the first impulses; its finished work
would