“but it appears that Mr. Hamilton and his industrious band see far off upon the horizon a circle of superior enlightenment to which, if only they can keep on reading long enough, they may attain. Every book demolished is a milestone passed. Books in foreign languages count twice over. And a book like this is of the nature of a dissertation to be sent up to the supreme examiner, who may be, for anything we know, the ghost of Matthew Arnold. Will Mr. Hamilton be admitted? Can they have the heart to reject anyone so ardent, so dusty, so worthy, so out of breath? Alas! look at his quotations; consider his comments upon them:
‘The murmuring of innumerable bees.’… The word innumerable, which denotes to the intellect merely ‘incapable of being numbered,’ is, in this connection, made to suggest to the senses the murmuring of bees.
The credulous ploughboy could have told him more than that. (...) No; Mr. Hamilton will never be admitted; he and his disciples must toil for ever in the desert sand, and the circle of illumination will, we fear, grow fainter and farther upon their horizon. It is curious to find, after writing the above sentence, how little one is ashamed of being, where literature is concerned, an unmitigated snob.”
Virginia Woolf, “The Anatomy of Fiction” em 48 Ensaios
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