THERE are two ways of knowing the world; one way is to go about it and the other is to allow the world to revolve around a fixed point. In either case we look upon the world through the window afforded by a science or an art, fully mastered or otherwise; and whether we travel or not, we see only what is revealed to us through this window. If we sit still we do so by a tangible opening through which, as well as through the other, we may watch the passing show. Both the plein-air method and the cloistral offer advantages. An academic position, involving as it does more or less lengthy vacations, enables the occupant to adopt each of these methods alternately. Since my particular vocation has been the study of economics and especially the comparison of the economical development of different peoples, this is naturally the principal window through which it has been my fortune to look upon the world, although from time to time I have been able, after a fashion, to look through other media. As for my tangible gateway to knowledge, I have been singularly lucky. For many years I lived in a house some of whose windows looked upon a road along which there passed nearly all tourists who visited the New World as well as nearly every inhabitant who travelled about it. Such travellers find their way to Niagara Falls, and most of them cross Lake Ontario or go round the head of it, and thus arrive at the city of Toronto. All who do so are taken as matter of course to the park in which the University is situated, and so soon as they entered the precincts of that dispenser of learning they had to pass my window. Not long ago they had to pass within a few yards of it; but later, owing to the pertinacious advance of modern science in the shape of chemical and physical laboratories, my window was thrust somewhat back from the passing human stream. Yet the tourist was still visible and audible, for he usually came in a huge sight-seeing automobile equipped with guide and megaphone. By means of this offensive instrument, the guide imparted his ignorance by attributions more or less at variance with the truth. Thus, with unconscious humour, he indicated the Library as the Department of Hydraulics (hortus siccus would be a sounder description), or the building of the Medical Faculty as the Physics Department. Not the misguided globe-trotters who consigned themselves to such a cicerone, but the more discriminating who not rarely, by painful search and many wrong turnings into neighbouring culs de sac, found their way to my door, shrouded by summer foliage or concealed behind snow banks, are worthy to be counted, for they really desired to find that which they sought. Some of these hardy adventurers did not readily meet with success. For example, my good friends, William Poel, who was the first in recent times to put Everyman on the stage, and Cecil Reddie, the founder of Abbotsholme School in Derbyshire-one known for research in mediæval drama, and the other for research in medieval alchemywere both unsuccessful in their search for my gate. They were brought in by scouts sent out to look for them. Dr. Shadwell, the Provost of Oriel, was found wandering in a totally wrong direction, and even so acute and experienced explorers in obscure byways as Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb achieved only the garden and failed to find the door. Others have been even less successful, probably some of them are still prowling about looking for a gate they can now never find. From this secluded observation post, for a full quarter of a century, I surveyed the world, save when I sought closer views of some parts of it, obeying an irresistible impulse towards movement. It is true, as Peacock observes, that "intellectual progress does not consist in whisking the body about"; but a body which always remains in its accustomed place can only be regarded as a log or a mineral in situ. Such a body has its interest, but this interest is not of a moving character. It has seemed advisable to explain the double motive of my title as well as to give in the following pages an account of part of the process by which I came to look out of my windows. My general object has been to reproduce such views of life as these windows have afforded over a period of nearly seventy years. I am fully aware that what follows may fairly be described as an olla podrida. Those who do not like a dish of that kind may pass it by, it is not for them. The publication of this book is not of my own volition. Certain friends of mine suggested that it should be written, and other friends were kind enough to take upon themselves the task of sending it to the press. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO, Easter 1923. JAMES MAVOR. |