Here is part of the trouble. For majorities are always wrong--except when they are right for the wrong reasons. (Not a maxim of my own, but of Time’s). It is invariably a minority that is right. But there are many minorities, with as many varying minds, and most of them prove in the long run as hopelessly wrong as the majority itself. There was once a minority that considered Oscar Wilde a very great author, and another that thought Rossetti a very great painter. True, there is always a minority that turns out to have been right--I mean, what the centuries simmer down to approximate ‘right’--on whatever subject was in question; but how to recognize it--the more as it is a heterogeneous minority? Fortunately, one does not have to. Even a minority is too much. There is one, and only one, judge of true success: the man who has succeeded--or failed. He is corrupted by vanity, he may desire avidly the acclaim of the multitude, he is full of falsities and pretences, but, all alone by himself, he has moments of clairvoyance when he knows, as no one else ever can, whether he has succeeded or failed in what he tried to do, and just how significant his success was, or how wretched his failure. In this lies the difference between the Renaissance (or any other period of fine quality--I have no special brief for the Renaissance) and our own period. Then it was the individual who finally decided what was worth while. True, in the arts (to which one turns because after so many centuries they are what chiefly remains to us of the period) there was, perhaps, an unusually sensitive, intelligent and powerful minority opinion; but did the artists very much heed that opinion? Not they! It was not good enough. Throughout all his life Leonardo experimented. What did he care for the judgment of the minority? We have come a long way from that point of view to-day. Success is no longer success without the sanction of the majority. More than that, at bottom, success _is_ that sanction. It is difficult to feel this condition of affairs as other than harmful. For while standardization of dress and behaviour are negligible evils, standardisation of thought comes pretty close to being the end, the abject death, of thought.