You can try this on almost anybody. It will work in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred; for, of course, there is a great deal to be said in favor of the views of anybody who is not an absolute fool, and most reasoning is open to attack at least for being inconclusive. It is also inevitable that your cultured friend--or acquaintance--should feel the same way--somehow. Most people do--in a way.
The real truth of the matter is, all I know about Bergson is that he is a Frenchman--is he actually by birth a Frenchman or a Belgian?--who as a philosopher has a great reputation on the Continent, and who recently visited America to deliver some lectures. I have not the faintest idea what his theories are, and I should not if I heard him explain them. Moreover, I cannot discuss philosophy or metaphysics intelligently, because I have not to-day the rudimentary knowledge necessary to understand what it is all about.
It is the same with art. On the one or two isolated varnishing days when we go to a gallery we criticize the pictures quite fiercely. "We know what we like." Yes, perhaps we do. I am not sure even of that. But in eighty-five cases out of a hundred none of us have any knowledge of the history of painting or any intelligent idea of why Velasquez is regarded as a master; yet we acquire a glib familiarity with the names of half a dozen cubists or futurists, and bandy them about much as my office boy does the names of his favorite pugilists or baseball players.
It is even worse with history and biography. We cannot afford or have not the decency to admit that we are uninformed. We speak casually of, say, Henry of Navarre, or Beatrice D'Este, or Charles the Fifth. I select my names intentionally from among the most celebrated in history; yet how many of us know within two hundred years of when any one of them lived--or much about them? How much definite historical information have we, even about matters of genuine importance?
Let us take a shot at a few dates. I will make it childishly easy. Give me, if you can, _even approximately_, the year of Caesar's Conquest of Gaul; the Invasion of Europe by the Huns; the Sack of Rome; the Battle of Châlons-sur-Marne; the Battle of Tours; the Crowning of Charlemagne; the Great Crusade; the Fall of Constantinople; Magna Charta; the Battle of Crécy; the Field of the Cloth of Gold; the Massacre of St. Bartholomew; the Spanish Armada; the Execution of King Charles I; the Fall of the Bastile; the Inauguration of George Washington; the Battle of Waterloo; the Louisiana Purchase; the Indian Mutiny; the Siege of Paris.