“Some of the old writers write about Knowledge with passion, as lovers speak of a mistress. She is ‘divine’; to ‘woo’ her is rapture; to win her is joy past words. That is the tone, and to the common run of our middle-class young to-day it must seem to be mere tall talking or gush. For they are out of it all; it belongs to a lost world which they are not even able to miss, they are so far from having ever entered it. Checked in their mental growth by dead mechanical teaching, bound over for life to remain overgrown dunces, tied down to second-rateness by many impressionable years of intimacy with mean valuations, what are the poor things to do? Some of them are brought, perhaps, by the more virile kinds of sport as near as they are likely ever to come to the thrill of the high adventures of the human spirit. Some others put up with such simulacra as dissipation affords of the most puissant emotions attainable by men. Some just eddy about in the eddying dust all their days, blown round and round by adventitious gusts of sentimentalism or of fashion.
“But some do escape. Hardy souls, they face with a will the risk of taking a way of their own; they make a break for the freedom that comes to the bold wooer of knowledge as well as to the true lover in Lovelace’s poem; they go blithely on with the task that was set them long before they were born — to re-live for themselves the whole life of man, re-explore his world and re-discover his arts. Happy those of them who had their youth — as many had who were not to have much more — in those unhampered years before the war came to chill and constrict what it did not destroy. The covers of their Murrays and their Baedekers have faded, rather like Ophelia’s violets that withered all when her father died. But the redolence stays. It is that of a time when a view of the whole of the larger life of our race, the life in which the greatest things are felt or found or made, had come to be almost any one’s for the asking. For the moment the key of the garden hung by the gate: you had only to reach for it.” (C. E. Montague, 1925, The Right Place).