It is not altogether our fault, all this. The conditions in which we live do not favour the breeding of titans. Mr Dreiser's 'titan,' Cowperwood, his 'genius,' Witla, are fairly good instances of the modern view of genius. They are blatant, stupid, acquisitive, full of the vulgar strength which would have made of them successful saloon keepers. They cannot help it; they dwell in a world like an international exhibition, between a machine that can turn out seventeen thousand sausages an hour and the most expensive Velasquez on record; they thrive on the sweet draught of the soda fountain rather than on the honey of Hymettus, while the sun sees his horses unharnessed from his chariot and set to grinding out units of caloric power by the something or other company. This does not suit genius. Genius needs solitude, true solitude, not only a place where you cannot buy newspapers, but a place where there are none _in the consciousness_. Genius needs to retreat upon itself, to fecundate itself until from the nightmare of one life is born the dream of another. Genius cannot find this solitude, because the round globe hums as it spins, because it is alive with haste, with deeds crowding into the fleet hour that is no slower nor more rapid however crowded it may be, but only more hectic. We have come to a point where noise is natural, where we cannot sleep unless trains roar past our windows and newsboys cry murders to the unmoved night. Literature has felt this of late years, and has retired into the country to find silence, but it is so nervous that silence stuns it. That will not last; many men of genius, Rembrandt, Whitman, Bach, Racine, felt this need to withdraw, even though most of them, in the country or in tiny towns, could well afford to mix with their fellows, because there were not enough of them to make a mob. They had their opportunity and could take it, and so they produced art which some thought to be an unhealthy secretion of the intellect. Their followers will not be so fortunate, and I have a growing vision of the world in the year 2500, when there may be but one State, one language, one race, when railways will have pushed their heads over the Himalaya at regular five-mile intervals, when there will be city councils on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, and Patagonia will stand first for technology. First? Perhaps not--it may be worse. I feel there may be no first, but a uniform level of mediocre excellence from which there will be no escape.