In 1877 just after the Turco-Russian war had begun we found him one
evening in a smoking-car on the railway, surrounded by a crowd of young
men who were listening eagerly to his account of the various wars which
had already taken place between Russia and Turkey, and the political
significance of the present one. "A man who possesses such a fund within
has need of little from without." He cannot be called poor so long as he
has a roof to shelter him and a single suit of clothes. Yet the
acquisition of knowledge was never with Wasson for its own sake, though
a good deal of adventitious knowledge came to him incidentally, but
always for the attainment of wisdom. He did not believe in the
Emersonian doctrine of obtaining inspiration through nature. "That was
not the way," he would say, "in which the great minds of history became
what they were. If we are to do lasting work we must know what the world
is made of. Emerson himself does not work in that way." He quoted
Schiller as saying, "He who would do benefit to the age in which he
lives must bathe deep in the spirit of classical antiquity and then
return to his own time to be in it, but not of it." That is, if we are
to move the world with Archimedes' lever, we must have an historical
basis to rest on. If a man ever had this it was Wasson. He went back to
the Vedas in his study of religion; to the German forests and the
pyramids in his investigation of politics and history.
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