There are works of art, it is true. Grown men understand them; adolescents hate them, for works of art reveal always the fulfilment of passion; they begin to flower at the point to which passion has raised the soul; they are the record and the landmarks of its after-journeyings, its own free traveling. To the soul in bondage all that is but babble and foolish talk, just as, to the adolescent, the simplicity of the grown man is folly. That a man should believe in human nature--as he must if he believes in himself--is, in adolescent eyes, suspect. . . . Have you not heard intelligent Englishmen say contemptuously of a man that he is an idealist, as who should say idiot? Passion leads to idealism, to belief that there is a wisdom greater than the wisdom of men, a knowledge of which the knowledge of men is but a part, a pulse in the universe by which they may set the beat of their own. What do the English do with their passion? They strangle it. What did I do with my own? I let it ooze and trickle away. I accepted my part in the common life, and of my own life preserved only certain mild delights and dull passive joys, which became milder and duller as the years went by. I was engaged in educating the young. I shudder to think of it now. When I think of the effect those years, and that curriculum, had upon my own mind I turn sick to imagine the harm it must have done to the young, eager minds--(the dullest child's mind is eager)--entrusted to my care by their confiding, worthy, and adolescent parents. It is a horror to me to look back on it, and I look back as little as may be. But to-day, in the security of glorious weather, the impregnable peace of my island slung between blue sea and sky, I can look back with amused curiosity, setting my infallible puppets against the blustering half-men whom I remember to have inhabited those portions of England that I knew. I do not count myself a freeman, but one who has escaped from prison and still bears the marks of it in his mind; it is to rid myself of those marks that I am thus wrapt in criticism, and not to condemn the lives of those who are left incarcerated. Impossible to condemn without self-condemnation. No doubt they are making the best of it. . . . I find that I cannot now think of anything in the world as separate from myself; the world embraces all things, and so must I; but to do so comfortably I must first understand everything that is sufficiently imaged to be within the range of my apprehension. Neither more nor less can I attempt. If more, then I am plunged in error and confusion; if less, then am I the captive of my own indolence, and such for the greater part of my life I have been.